Sci-Fi Storm

On a conference call Friday, producer David Eick talked about Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, where the first two webisodes went online Friday. And he wasn’t too happy about the characterization that it was a “failed pilot”.

“I feel like there’s a certain record to set straight which was a little bit frustrating to me a few months ago when I saw the headlines that the Blood & Chrome project had somehow been rejected or was a failed pilot or wasn’t going to make it on the air,” he said. “It was never intended to be a traditional pilot, so to speak, such that Syfy not picking it up in a traditional manner to an episodic series was some kind of a rejection or failure. It was always developed at least from my point of view as a project for an online environment. And there’s something that we would develop and structurally, narratively build as a ten-part sort of a series.

“Kind of like the Raiders of the Lost Ark style, adapted to the 1930s style movie serials where you have ten minutes of story and a cliffhanger followed by ten minutes of story and the cliffhanger. And then after ten of these episodes, it would all kind of resolve itself in a pre-act structure as a whole movie. And so when I set out to develop this, my thinking was to design a mission, so to speak.
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AMC looks to be expanding into genre programming after the success of The Walking Dead, as they’ve just purchased a new one-hour drama project called Thunderstruck, from the writing/directing team of Paul Boardman and Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism Of Emily Rose) and producer David Eick (Battlestar Galactica). The show is described as “about powerful and enigmatic entities that begin appearing all over the world. After one shows up in the town of Great Falls, Montana, the local citizens must grapple with the dramatic effects and growing mystery of repeated visitations.”