Independence Day writer Dean Devlin is making a new sci-fi show for Syfy

Dean Devlin, the writer behind Universal Soldier, Stargate, and Independence Day (and some things since then that we don’t necessarily need to bring up), is heading back to television (he also worked on stuff like The Librarians) with a new project that doesn’t sound quite as zany as those movies but does at least have some of Stargate DNA in its veins. Called The Ark, the show is going to Syfy and will be written and showran by Devlin and Jonathan Glassner—who previously worked on Stargate SG-1, the long-running TV spin-off of the movie.

According to Collider, The Ark takes place 100 years in the future and involves groups of people going off into space to find other planets that could be colonized “in order to save the human race from extinction.” One ship, Ark One, “suffers critical damage” and gets knocked off course, leaving its surviving crew to figure out how to survive.

So it seems pretty straightforward, at least for a Syfy show. It’s the kind of bread and butter series that could just quietly run for years as the crew of Ark One drifts through the endless void of space and does whatever they’re going to be doing on a weekly basis. Maybe they’ll bump into strange and exciting new planets or other spaceships drifting through the endless void of space? Or maybe it’ll be very contained to the Ark One to set it apart from Stargate and each episode will be about something new going wrong on the ship.

We’re guessing at all of this because Syfy isn’t giving up any details just yet. Collider says it’s being filmed in Serbia and that casting hasn’t started, but Syfy has already ordered 12 episodes (based, presumably, on the value of having Devlin and Glassner working behind the scenes).