Retooling a 70's Sci-Fi Relic for the Age of Terror

New York Times Review:

Retooling a 70's Sci-Fi Relic for the Age of Terror
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
The Sci Fi Channel is trying to take the war on terror to the final frontier.
"Battlestar Galactica," a series that will have its premiere tomorrow night at 9 p.m., is not the first science-fiction program to explore contemporary themes in an imaginary world. But the show may resonate particularly well now.
"Star Trek" pioneered the approach nearly 40 years ago, offering a utopian view of humanity united across the artificial boundaries of race and sex, even as it explored those boundaries with each adventure of the Starship Enterprise.
The premise behind the new "Battlestar Galactica," refashioned from a short-lived, late-1970's television series that starred Lorne Greene, Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict, is far darker. The show's images of destruction are powerful, especially after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and its post-apocalyptic plot could appeal to viewers in this nervous new millennium, or turn them off.
"A lot of the emotional buttons, a lot of the plot elements, a lot of just how people react was definitely informed by the 9/11 experience and the war on terrorism," Ronald D. Moore, the show's executive producer, said.
A mini-series in December 2003 that tested the waters for the new show established the basics. Twelve planets happily inhabited by humans are also populated by robot servants they created called Cylons. The Cylons, perhaps after watching a rerun of "The Terminator," decided to rebel. War ensued, followed by an armistice and 40 years of no known contact between human and Cylon.
Then the Cylons attacked and nuked all 12 planets. The fewer than 50,000 human survivors escape in a random assortment of spaceships, with a single antique battlewagon, the Galactica, as escort.
This is what the original television show, which appeared on ABC in 1978, referred to as the "ragtag fugitive fleet." It is unusual that a show more than 25 years old, and lasting only a single season, has been remade for contemporary audiences. On Saturday, NBC ran a slightly compressed version of the 2003 mini-series - which starred Edward James Olmos as the Galactica commander, the same role he has in the new show - in an effort to build up interest in the new series on Sci Fi, its sister outlet (both networks are owned by NBC Universal). But the fact that the new series exists is testimony to the strength of the fan base the original show built up over its short lifespan, and perhaps even to the broad appeal of the story.
In the 1978 series, the Cylons were created by an alien race, and they were clumsy machines and poor shots. Their initial success in wiping out most of humanity, the result of treachery and sheer numbers, served only to provide an excuse for the escapist adventures that followed. There was a strange contradiction between the end of the world and the happy-go-lucky galaxy-hopping, as humanity's last survivors ostensibly looked for a new home.
The writers of the current show have eliminated the contradiction: "Battlestar Galactica" never ignores the fact that its characters have survived an apocalyptic event. Their sense of immediate crisis evokes the period after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; the frequent use of hand-held cameras gives the images a jumpy, documentary feel.
Perhaps the most significant change was making the Cylons capable of passing as human, a decision that grew out of production constraints. "It was initially a practical problem," Mr. Moore said, explaining that it was too expensive to create convincing robots for regular appearances.
That choice, along with character makeovers, like recasting two roles from the old television show as women, initially upset many fans, Mr. Moore said. But he added that vindication came in the ratings of the two-part mini-series: not only was "Galactica" the third-highest-rated mini-series in the history of the Sci Fi Channel, it also drew more viewers for the second installment than it did for the first. That meant word of mouth was positive, Mr. Moore said.
According to the Sci Fi Channel, the mini-series audience was 68 percent male, which is high for that channel; the usual percentage is 57 percent.
A predominantly male viewership is typical for science-fiction shows, said Vivian Sobchack, the author of "Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film" and a professor in the department of film, television and digital media at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"Unless they come up with something sophisticated, I don't think it's going to go much beyond its base," Professor Sobchack said, adding that the idea still had potential. "You have the grand and the small scale of being lost in space, as it were," she said, "along with the various kinds of unknown threats."
Professor Sobchack said ABC's current hit series "Lost," which follows plane crash survivors on a mysterious tropical island, creates a similar effect, with a fixed cast in a space that is finite but where anything can happen.
"Battlestar Galactica" does strive to be sophisticated. Asked what show he would like to compare it to, Mr. Moore mentioned HBO's "Sopranos," with its intricate character relationships and long-running plot developments. "There are complex story lines that will stretch across episodes in 'Galactica,' " Mr. Moore said, as well as a guest appearance by Mr. Hatch.
That approach is in marked contrast to the one taken by many traditional science-fiction shows, most notably the "Star Trek" series (Mr. Moore worked on "Star Trek: The Next Generation"), where characters are shuttled to a new world almost every week.
"Star Trek" had "a lot of magic and excitement," said David Gerrold, an award-winning science fiction writer and the author of a well-known "Star Trek" episode in the original series, "The Trouble With Tribbles."
Mr. Gerrold said he had a philosophical problem with the "Galactica" premise. "The original 'Star Trek' is, 'Let's see what's out there.' The original mistake of 'Battlestar Galactica' was, 'Run like hell, they're after us.' And I don't want to be part of a species of cowards."
The fact that "Galactica" presents a continuing story set aboard the same spaceships and does not involve visiting a new planet in nearly every episode (as was the case in "Star Trek") drew Allen Steele, the author of "Coyote," a science-fiction novel, and its sequel, "Coyote Rising." He said that once he had bought the DVD of the mini-series, he told his wife that as long as the new series runs on Friday nights, they would have to move social plans to Saturdays.
"I like the fact that they've got some things going on just underneath the skin that we're only beginning to see the edges of," he said.