It premiered on 26 March 1995 on Showtime and features three generations of the Bridges acting family: Beau, his father Lloyd, and son Dylan.
Dr. Simon Kress' (Beau Bridges) research for the government on Martian life is aborted because one of his specimens escaped his lab and almost made it to the surface.
Kress comes to believe that he is a god to his sandkings when the white group builds a sand structure that resembles his face.
He kills his former supervisor Dave Stockley (Kim Coates) by tossing him into the enclosure, where the sandkings then devour him.
In the sixth-season episode "Final Appeal", we discover that the Sandkings plague has been eradicated, which took "the better part of a decade" to complete.