SPACE – CBS has announced it will be rebooting Gilligan’s Island, the popular 1960s television show about a motley crew of passengers aboard a charter ship becoming shipwrecked on an uncharted island in the Pacific Ocean.

The backdrop for the new show, however, won’t be a tropical island, but rather the International Space Station and the SS Minnow will be replaced with the Boeing Starliner—the troubled spacecraft that has stranded its crew aboard the orbiting satellite after what was supposed to only be a 192-hour tour.

“I think people are sick and tired of television and movie studios simply rebooting all their popular franchises in the effort to make an easy buck,” said Jonathan St. Pierre, a CBS executive. “So, we decided to take this reboot in a completely different direction and take this show about survival and friendship into the 21st century. And when I first heard about Wilmore and Williams, I knew we had a real, life imitates art situation going on.”

Astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams traveled to the ISS on June 5th of this year, expecting to return home in about a week. However, thanks to some technical difficulties with the Boeing Starliner capsule they arrived in, the duo is now expecting to remain on the space station until February 2025.

Upon hearing about the stranded test pilot’s indefinite stay on the orbiting science station, the top brass at CBS sprang into action to try and crank out an entire season’s worth of script and cast the remaining characters for what they say will be a “revolution in the way we record cinema.”

“Look, we’re on a tight deadline here so I’ll be honest, we’ll probably just take the script from the original series, make a few tweaks to make it sound more in line with modern dialect and jargon, and call it a day,” said Dominique Franco, lead writer for the reboot. “That should also give us enough tieback to the original series to make fans of the old show fall in love with this new series, or tear us to shreds on Reddit, either way.”

As for the cast, Franco said Wilmore is the perfect choice to play Jonas “The Skipper” Grumby and Williams will likely fill the billet for Mrs. Lovey Howell. As for the rest of the castaway crew, the series’ team is trying to tap into Hollywood elite to make this the most star-studded cast to ever shoot a television program amongst the actual stars.

“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, so we’re giving out blank checks like it’s candy in the hopes our dream castings will say ‘yes’,” said Franco. “Right now, we’ve got Adam Driver lined up to play Willy Gilligan, Anthony Hopkins as Thurston Howell III, and we’re in negotiations for Glen Powell to play Professor Roy Hinkley, Sydney Sweeney to play Ginger Grant, and Jenna Fischer to play Mary Ann Summers.”

CBS is also working with the world’s various space agencies, both commercial and federal, to find a way to get the cast and crew for the show up to the international space station before the Starliner crew is set to be rescued early next year. According to an inside source, China’s National Space Administration and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are the current top contenders for the contract.

Critics of CBS’s decision to shoot of the show on location said that the company should be using their resource to bring the stranded astronauts home and not use their situation for monetary gain.

“I can’t imagine what those poor people are going through right now,” said Rebecca Hall, a film student at UCLA. “They risk their lives in the name of science and space exploration, get stranded for almost a year after thinking they’d be away from the friends and family for only a week, and now a television studio wants to send more people up there and use them as characters in a reboot of a mediocre television program my grandma used to watch, rather than bring them home. I’d be pissed if I were them.”

Franco said he’s heard the criticism and wants everyone to rest assured that the astronauts will be handsomely compensated for their time.

“Are we going to bring them home early and miss out on this cash cow? No. Are we going to pay them as much as the Hollywood A-listers we’ve brought on for this project? Hell no,” said Franco. “They’re hot in the news right now, but you don’t dish out massive paychecks to untested talent who doesn’t come from the pedigree that warrants that kind of money. But we’re not these corporate shrills that the poors make us out to be. We’re offering Wilmore and Williams a very lucrative deal in residuals—rates unheard of in this business. Plus, if the show is as big a hit as we expect, we’ll invite them to all the award shows where they can cheer on their nominated cast members and give them lots of free press opportunities.”

If all goes according to plan, CBS is hoping to launch the debut episode of Gilligan’s Island: Stranded in Space this fall with the season finale aligning with the date Wilmore and Williams return to Earth early next year.

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