This is going to be epic either way - epic awesome, or epic terribly terrible. Room 9 is either going to work like South Africa's sci-fi movie attempt District 9, or it will be an abysmal new television failure.
Room 9, by Dv8 Films and Urban Brew Studios is set to start on Thursday 8 November at 20:30 on SABC1 for a first season of 13 episodes and is billed by SABC1 as "the first of its kind for South African television".
Filled with many injokes from a reference to "Captain Harkness" to even a visual joke reminiscent of District 9, SABC1 proudly raises the bar and expectations super high by preselling Room 9 as "South Africa's answer to global television hits like The X-Files, Fringe, The Walking Dead and Lost".
Whether this will indeed be the case, remains to be seen. Neither SABC1 nor the production company has sent any advance screener episodes to South African TV critics for possible review for the show which will have, as SABC1 calls it, its "world premier" on 8 November. Tokoloshes everywhere will be watching.
Room 9, with Darrell Roodt as a writer and director (and whose movies include Number 10 and Dracula 3000) is set in the post-apocalyptic, futuristic New Azania (an alternative version of South Africa). It centres around an elite special team at the New Azanian Police Department who deals with the paranormal, the supernatural, the sacrilegious, the twisted and the unexplainable.
Detective Alice Kunene (played by Zethu Dlomo) is transferred to the division but has no idea what awaits (neither has TV critics). She is thrown into the deep-end in the first episode with her first case when a domestic worker is found savaged to death, thought to be the work of the Tokoloshe.
She meets detective "Darkness" Harkness (no, not Captain Harkness of the British sci-fi series Torchwood), played by David Butler. Hopefully "Darkness" Harkness, whose first name is Gabrielle, won't turn out to be omnisexual as well. Then it would be a rip-off.
Ruby Prins (played by Angela Ludek) is blind like Geordi on Star Trek: The Next Generation but has powers of prenatural foresight, and can probably already tell whether Room 9 will live up to South African viewers' expectations. The Nigerian expert on all things paranormal is the voodoo man Solomon Onyegu (played by Anthony Oseyemi).
Besides tackling the tokoloshe, Room 9 cases will involve the devil, Satanic cults, muti murders, demons, poltergeists, zombies, werewolves, aliens, vampires and even a mermaid.
"We have not seen this genre of television drama produced by South Africans before," says Room 9 producer Danie Ferreira, hoping that Room 9 will satisfy an appetite that South African audiences have built up for genre based television. "We see it in American programmes, but in Africa we have a limitless source of fabulous paranormal stories. Room 9 weaves these stories into compelling television."
Producer Jeremy Nathan is excited at the prospect of trying to create an iconic television series that South Africans can be proud of.
"Room 9 represents a different type of cutting-edge storytelling on local television," says Vukile Madlana, SABC1's publicity manager. "This type of programming has never been done before in South Africa and we are confident the series will keep our youthful audience captivated for its entire 13-weeks duration on SABC1."
[Editor: Set in a post-apocalyptic, futuristic, alternative version of South Africa, Charlie Jade touching on similar themes with a detective investigating paranormal events, was produced and shown in South Africa in 2005.]
