Invasion of the TV alien invasions -- an extra credit opportunity

As I said in class today, the new TV season provides us with some evidence that the X-Files style of conspiracy show is not going away. There are at least 3 new shows premiering this month involving alien invasions or conspiracies. I won't have time to watch them myself, but if someone in the class wants to report on them here on the blog, I would be happy to dole out some extra credit. The point to focus on would not be so much whether the shows are any good, as how they deploy various conspiracy motifs, how they compare and contrast in their use of conspiracy & paranoia with other shows and other conspiracy stories in other media.

The three shows are:

• Invasion (ABC, Wednesdays)
  
• Threshold (CBS, Fridays)
• Surface (NBC, Mondays) -- this seems to involve a sea monster that may be extraterrestrial, an idea stolen from James Cameron's The Abyss and doubtless other places
  

There is another set of ghost-hunting shows that might be relevant, too. One of them is a super-lame looking revival of one of my childhood favorites, The Night Stalker, about a reporter tracking down vampires, satanists, crazed computers, and such. Compare the two versions here.

Please post a comment here or email me if you would like to participate in this. If someone wants to do this over several weeks of a show or do a thorough a job of it, I would probably let you post directly on the blog ran than just through the comments.