Skyrocket Studios announced on 30 September, in a press release, that it is producing a pilot for a science-fiction series called Manhattan Transfer made entirely with generative AI, with Lee Majors and the late Nichelle Nichols in the leading roles. The company describes it as the first scripted television pilot built this way; that claim is its own.
The show adapts John E. Stith's novel, in which Manhattan is sliced off the Earth, sealed under a dome and taken aboard an alien ship already holding thousands of captured cities. Sky Conway created it and directs and co-writes, with the Manhattan Transfer Film Fund co-producing. Majors plays a character named Matt Sheehan and, through AI and what the studio calls authorised digital recreation, appears as a younger version of himself. Nichols is cast as an astrophysicist, Nova Taylor; Herbert Jefferson Jr., Jason Faunt and Chalet Brannan are also listed.
Kyle Johnson, Nichols's son and the executor of her estate, says in the release that she and Conway were friends and business partners for years, that Conway discussed a role with her before she died, and that she wanted to be part of it. The release does not explain how her performance is being produced. Skyrocket says more than a third of the pilot is finished and that it will offer the episode to networks, streamers and distributors as a possible series.
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