USA’s Colony is set in Los Angeles in a very near future with a mysterious occupying force that the network really doesn’t want to refer to as an “alien invasion.”

When the show kicks off, red berets are already on the ground, and Josh Holloway and Sarah Wayne Callies play a couple whose sole focus is the safety of their family (though viewers will have larger mysteries to solve as the series goes on).

At NBCU’s TCA presentation Wednesday morning, similarities arose with Holloway’s Lost and Callies’ Walking Dead.

“It seems like the photo negative of the apocalyptic world that I just came from,” said Callies.

Holloway said his role in Lost is also very different than Colony.

“This time his family is first,” said Holloway. “He has to reunite his family, and THEN save the human race. In the tradition of working with Carlton Cuse, I don’t know anything that’s going on.”

Cuse calls the version of Los Angeles in Colony both “beautiful and terrifying,” saying that “is a reflection of how things really would be.”

Largely inspired by Nazi-occupied Paris, Executive Producers Carlton Cuse and Ryan Condal say that the show is about examining both sides of the colony and figuring out answers as the characters do.

“In Paris during Nazi occupation, people were sitting in cafes drinking espresso while Nazi troopers were walking by,” said Cuse. “We wanted to find a modern metaphor to tell that story.”

Condal added that he was fascinated with the idea of humans selling one another out for little gains – not only about the colonizers, but the residents who are now focused on surviving one day at a time.

“You don’t know anything more than what characters know,” said Cuse. “So it’s the mystery of ‘What is the occupying force, what do they want? What are they doing here?’”

According to Cuse, the story is also about the experience of colonization at a human level.

“We wanted to tell the story of colonization that’s really an espionage thriller with a sort of sci-fi backdrop,” said Cuse. “If you look at the history of the show, almost every counter has been a colony or a colonizer. We wanted to find a contemporary way to do that.”

Holloway addressed a question regarding if human nature is even capable of such cruelty by referencing the Stanford Prison Experiment.

“Are we capable of this? Absolutely, we’ve done it to each other since the beginning of time,” he said.

When one reporter asked the panel if it’s possible for Americans to even imagine being overwhelmed by anything except aliens, Cuse responded: “Netflix?”

Colony will premiere Jan. 14, 2016 at 10 pm with a lead-in of WWE Smackdown, which moves to USA next year.

Next up, season two of Playing House is bringing a lot of changes, namely that one character’s baby is now here, and the show’s stars are now playing double duty, also writing and performing custom ads for the show’s sponsors in a new VOD deal.

In a very upbeat (and very fast-talking) panel, Executive Producers, stars and real-life best friends Jessica St. Clair and Lennon Parham spoke about the second season of USA’s Playing House.

USA cut a VOD deal for season two that involves custom spots for sponsors including Samsung, Toyota and Xfinity.

“First of all you have to have cool sponsors,” said St. Clair. “They let us write the spots,” that the duo also stars in.

According to Parham, the model is that the sponsor tells the writers what they’d like to focus on (Xfinity’s voice remote, for example) and then the two of them write and improvise a spot putting everything into their own voices.

“Our priority is that the spots be as funny as our show,” said St. Clair.

The VOD plan also releases each episode a week early for VOD viewers. St. Clair and Parham, who are avidly interactive with their fans on Twitter, said they had several people find their show after binge watching then sticking with it on VOD. Devoted fans of the show, according to St. Clair, call themselves Jammers (an ode to a mention in a season one episode).

“To have that access to people, was better than we could have ever imagined,” said St. Clair.

This season also adds a stellar comic lineup with Jack McBrayer, Rob Riggle, Zach Woods, Darius Rucker and Matt Walsh, which was the result of a “dream board” the writers room created.

“This season we really decided to go for broke,” said St. Clair. “So in the writers room we put up a dream board with people who we’d love to work with.”

“We also follow the Julia Louis Dreyfus model in that she wants everybody around her to be the best because it only brings the show up,” said Parham.

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