Here's the pilot episode for awarding-winning playwright and screenwriter Keith Josef Adkins' sci-fi series called The Abandon.

You may recall Keith's intro post over the summer, when he was trying to raise funds for the project… I thought I'd let him speak for himsef about The Abandon, as well as his motivation for making it; here's an excerpt:

Although shows like Battlestar Galactica and the short-lived The 4400 intrigue and entertain, the amount of black and brown representation [in sci-fi] are usually limited.

And no, side-kicks and color-blind casting are not sufficient representation. I love sci-fi. I particularly like sci-fi that explores alien invasions. Ridley Scott’s Alien is one of my favorite films and I can watch it every day and never get bored. In my opinion, the film has the perfect mix of a singular alien encounter and the expendability of human life, all played out in that final (and often claustrophobic) frontier of space.

I also love horror, not slash for the sake of slash, but horror as in terror, as in stories where people are literally (and legitimately) fighting for their lives. Neil Marshall’s 2005 horror film The Descent is a perfect example of that. A group of women go on a caving expedition and discover creatures from the unknown and must fight for their lives and each other.

My idea was to shape a sci-fi/horror series that’s part Alien and part The Descent, where a group of black men discover they may be the last people of earth after an alien invasion.

The Abandon is my effort to see a group of smart black men handle an alien invasion. It’s that simple.

And months later, The Abandon has debuted, with the pilot episode, which launched at midnight last, and is embedded below for you to watch: