The series is based on ideas Gene Roddenberry originally developed in 1976 under the title Battleground: Earth, about aliens landing on Earth under a banner of peace, years before the similarly themed 1983 miniseries V.

20th Century Fox Television was interested in producing a pilot, but Roddenberry's busy schedule filming a TV movie and later working on Star Trek films and The Next Generation prevented it from being made before his death in 1991.

After Roddenberry's death, his widow Majel Barrett-Roddenberry developed the project in the mid-1990s using his notes, and it was produced by Atlantis Films hoping to capitalize on the blockbuster success of Independence Day.

The show was renamed from Battleground: Earth to Earth: Final Conflict to avoid confusion with L. Ron Hubbard's novel Battlefield Earth.

The success of Earth: Final Conflict led to the development of another posthumous Roddenberry project, the series Andromeda.

Designer Stephen Roloff based the humanoid appearance of the Taelons on religious and spiritual figures including Buddha, Bodhisattvas, Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, and Jesus Christ, while their true alien form was rendered entirely in CGI by Claibre Digital.

The show had an unusually high cast turnover, partly due to contractual disagreements between actors and producers, with almost every major character killed off or removed within a season or two; only Von Flores as Agent Sandoval appeared as a regular across all five seasons.

Season five radically departed from the previous storyline by replacing the Taelons with a new, more openly hostile alien race called the Atavus, described as energy vampires.

The series originally aired on CTV for two seasons before being cancelled due to low ratings, then was revived by Chum Limited and moved to their New Net network for the remainder of its run.