Season 4 to be split?

I'm a little behind on the news, working to catch up, and this seems to be one of the bigger stories of the last couple weeks...

From TV Week:

Sci Fi Executives Weigh 'Battlestar Galactica' Options
The Sci Fi Channel is wrestling with a pair of key decisions for its acclaimed “Battlestar Galactica” series: whether to break the highly anticipated final chapter into two 10-episode seasons, and deciding whether to greenlight a two-hour pilot for the long-gestating “Caprica” spinoff.

Sci Fi executives attending the NBC Universal pre-Emmy party at Spago in Beverly Hills Saturday said the decision whether to split the final season was an ongoing discussion, but at least one network programmer was firmly against the idea.

As is often the case with the lavishly produced series, the issue is “the money people,” as one executive put it. Since “Battlestar” eats a considerable portion of the Sci Fi programming budget, the network might be forced to spread the resulting product across two seasons.

Showrunner Ron Moore shrugged off the issue. “It doesn’t affect my job either way, since we’re shooting it straight through,” he says. “It might be better to get it all done [in the same year] for the fans so they don’t have to wait.”
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I have to agree with Moore here - splitting the show into two runs would be torture, and given that their midseason breaks are cliffhangers anyway, it'd be a pain to wait. In addition, last television season proved that it's not really a good idea for a show to be split, with LOST, Heroes, and a bunch of other shows suffering by dropping ratings like a rock when they returned. While Season 4's the last season, it's still not a good thing if no one watches it.

This is also in from the SyFyPortal:

SciFi Channel Stockpiling For Writers Strike
As if the world of entertainment wasn't confusing enough, try understanding the actual business side.

That's what fans of various SciFi Channel shows are trying to figure out as rumors continue to float about what the network intends to do in scheduling the fourth and final season of "Battlestar Galactica" and the resurrection of what seemed pretty cold and even buried projects.

But it all seems to tie back to one thing, and one thing only: the NBC Universal property is expecting all-out stoppage if script writers walk out Nov. 1, marking the first major stoppage since 1988 when shows like "Star Trek: The Next Generation" had to cut down their seasons and rely on previously-written scripts.

Even worse, the Screen Actors Guild is threatening to strike in June, and there is a good possibility that writers could hold off striking until then, to create a much more tenable situation with studios as they try and negotiate better collective bargaining agreements.
Networks have ordered practically marathon sessions of pre-production work, in an effort to make sure that everything that needs to be written for the upcoming television season is written just after Halloween. And a network source tells SyFy Portal that it's really the strike leading the charge for a spread out final season of "Battlestar Galactica" and the new life paid to by "Caprica."

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Rutrow - This isn't good news at all. Galactica's made it's name as an extremely well written show. We've all seen what happens when the writers get lazy, with episodes such as Black Market. Let's hope that if this is the case, we'll not run into that problem...