SDCC '13: Star-Crossed

Sophia Ritchie ’16 / Emertainment Monthly Writer
It was a busy day in Ballroom 20 at San Diego Comic Con, with coverage packed from 10 o’ clock in the morning all the way to 7 in the evening.  And to help get the ball rolling, the CW premiered the pilot episode of it’s new teen sci-fi show, Star-Crossed.
Star-Crossed tells the story of a slightly-in-the-future Earth, where in 2014, aliens called Atrians flee their dying planet and crash land on Earth.  Humans react accordingly, firing on the peaceful and wounded aliens, leading to an all-out battle.  One young Atrian boy escapes and meets a little girl named Emery who tries to protect him, but to no avail; the government finds him and drags him away, separating the two seemingly forever.
Ten years later, 16-year-old Emery (played by Friday Night Lights star Aimee Teegarden) is starting high school after a four-year-stint in the hospital, and so are a group called the Atrian Seven, seven Atrian teens who are being integrated into the human high school Emery is attending.  And of course, with them is Roman (Matt Lanter), the boy from the shed.  And he is, naturally, smoking hot.
The Atrians experience prejudice and hazing from the human teens around them, similar to the Little Rock Nine in real-life America in 1957 (the creators of the show explained after the pilot how the Little Rock Integration experiment was a direct inspiration for Star-Crossed.)  But Roman fights through all of this in attempts to make contact with his star-crossed lover from so long ago, Emery.
Star-Crossed is another CW attempt at a Romeo and Juliet style story, and while we seem to have seen it a million times, there’s something compelling about it.   Whether it be the obvious sci-fi elements, the inherently attractive cast, or the sizzling near-kiss we almost get in the pilot episode, something had people in Ballroom 20 salivating.  Only time will tell if we were staring at Twilight-by-another-name, or if aliens are the next hot ticket in teen-genre television.