The Cylons and Religion

5/10/2003 -- The discussion of Battlestar Galactica started with the production realities. Early on, we knew that while the original Cylons were iconic in pop culture, that they would need to be significantly updated to play for contemporary audiences as legitimate villains. The two choices are inevitably actors in suits or CGI, the former being bulky, costly to produce in mass quantity, and run the risk of being silly, while the later are still cost prohibitive for a TV series. We went round and round on the problems, before deciding to go with human looking Cylons. This presented its own problems, of course -- losing a key tie to the original series and covering familiar terrain in science fiction being the two biggest. First, we decided to try to maintain some presence of the original mechanoid Cylons to maintain a tie to the original. Then the challenge became to make the humanoid Cylons unique in the way they think, act, and emote so that they weren't the Borg or Replicants or any other familiar cybernetic characters. Then we realized that making them the creation of the Colonials opened up many more creative avenues and made the entire war and struggle much more complicated and ambiguous than a simple "Evil Robots vs. Good Humans" scenario. (source: Cylon Alliance)

Original Series Fans

9/25/2002 -- At this point, you can argue that the percentage of people who care to post messages on the Internet about Battlestar Galactica and who attend conventions are in favor of a continuation, but you can't say with any certainty that this somehow reflects the feelings of the larger potential fanbase battlestargalactica episodes itself, which remains overwhelmingly inactive (by which I mean they're fans of the original but aren't currently involved on the net or any other organized activity. Let's say that a potential "fan" of battlestargalactica is anyone who has a positive memory of the original and would like to see a new series based strictly on that positive association. I have to think we're talking about numbers in the millions. Those millions of potential fans have not and will not make their feelings known on the subject until the miniseries premieres and they either accept or reject it. If we start to talk about the general audience itself which has little to no memory of the original but probably has some recognition of the name, now we're talking about tens of millions of people and every argument about continuation vs. remake is essentially meaningless to them. All they'll care about is whether or not it's any good.

So the bottom line is, we're not going to know "what people want" until we show them the show. That's always the way it is. You never know until you're done. If you could test and poll and demographically analyze your way to success, believe me the studios and networks would do a lot better than they do. I'm not a big believer in demos and polls and marketing analysis as a way of doing a good TV show anyway and I'm not about to start. You have a creative vision and you work like hell to realize it -- that's how you do something good, not poring over the numbers some suit in market research has cooked up for you... I do not and will not run a show by marketing research. Not this one, not one, not any one. (source: Battlestar Galactica .com)

By reaching out to them in this forum and others and continuing to provide information as we go along in the hopes that even my harshest critic will at least give the new show a chance... They strike me as very similar to the Trek fans: passionate, knowledgeable about their show, committed to getting a good quality product, and unwilling to accept something they think won't be worthy of the name. I respect that and it's my job to give them something I believe is worthy of its lineage. (source: BSG.com)
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