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Battlestar's Final Season: Will They Commit Frak-ricide?

CLICK HERE for my review of tomorrow night's (April 4@10p) fourth season premiere of Battlestar Galactica

The Best & Worst of '07: Bionic Woman Meets Riptide

Per Marshall Herskovitz's (Quarterlife, thirty-something) concerns about media consolidation and executive suite meddling in scripted series, Bionic Woman might be a case study. The series is one of the big, broadcast net meldowns of the '07 fall season.

“A butt-kicking new hit!” exclaimed TV Guide.

Bionic premiered with close to 14 million viewers but by the eighth episode the number had dwindled by more than half, to just under six million.

Because of the David Eick pedigree, Bionic was assumed to have potential because Eick (together with Ron Moore) successfully reconstituted another campy 70’s series, Battlestar Galactica.

Uneasy about Bionic's morose pilot, newly-minted NBC co-chair Ben Silverman decided to put the fun back in Bionic. (Silverman wasn't necessarily wrong in his assessment. The pilot was intense, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette critic Rob Owen pointed out that audiences rejected dark last season.)

CLICK HERE for more.

SCI FI Channel To Air GLAAD PSA During Battlestar:Razor Premiere

Well, this is refreshing! Kudos to SCI FI.

On Saturday, Nov. 24, during one of the biggest premiere events of the year for the channel - the two-hour extended episode of Battlestar Galactica: Razor - the network will unveil a new public service announcement (PSA) from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).

Battlestar Galactica star Jamie Bamber (Lee “Apollo” Adama) appears in the 20-second "Be an Ally & a Friend" spot, along with Jerry O'Connell (Carpoolers, Sliders), Jason Lewis (Brothers & Sisters) and Eric Mabius (Ugly Betty).

READ MORE HERE.

NO BATTLESTAR FINALE UNTIL 2009?

Chicago Tribune's Maureen ("Mo") Ryan (via Ain't It Cool News) reports that SCI FI Channel may be planning to spool out those final Battlestar Galactica episodes - all the way to 2009.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE!

ComicCon:Lucy Lawless Returns to Battlestar

Lucy Lawless made an appearance at today's Battlestar panel. She returns for the fourth and final season of the acclaimed series. Lawless reprises her role as the Anna, the disruptive Cylon. Her model was deemed defective and "boxed" last season after she sowed dissent among the Cylon ranks. Lawless will appear in a minimum of two episodes.

ComicCon: Stargate Panels

MGM and SCI FI Channel kicked off their ComicCon presentations this afternoon. MGM was promoting their straight to DVD Stargate SG-1 movie Continuum. SCI FI was there to support the SG-1 spin-off, Stargate Atlantis, soon to enter its fourth season on the network.

The back-to-back panels were held in one of the largest convention center rooms available - at least 5,000 seats. The hall was filled to capacity for Stargate SG-1 but there were a few empty seats in the back during the Atlantis panel (but not many).

[Sunday, July 29. Correction: I double-checked w/ the ComicCon folks today. The official capacity of Ballroom 20, where the Stargate panels were held, is 4,500.]

That said, ComicCon itself doesn't feel quite as manic as last year. Crowd control is better. I was told that a decision was made to sell fewer tickets, although this is unconfirmed. (ComicCon 2006 was chaotic.)

Some of this afternoon's Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis panels might have been rehearsed or even choreographed. (It's hard to say just how much.) But who fraking cares. Everyone had a rockin' good time anyway.

How can you not with Pied Pipers Chris Judge (Teal'C) and Gary Jones, SG-1's loveable, ever-present GateGuy, Walter Harriman.

UPDATE: my Multichannel blog is up and running again, so everything - the audio files etc. and the rest of this post - have been migrated. Click here to go directly to my Multichannel post about the Stargate panel. Apologies for the hassle. Technology is hell sometimes.

P.S. Comments are now closed here. But thanks for all the nice feedback. Much appreciated!

ComicCon: SCI FI Coverage Competes w/ G4

SCI FI Channel is competing head-to-head, toe-to-toe w/ G4's Attack of The Show this year. For several years, Attack of the Show has broadcast extensive live ComicCon coverage. This year G4 will be competing w/ SCI FI Channel and SCI FI.com for eye-balls.

SCIFI.com’s coverage allows fans to “virtually attend” the convention through daily news summaries, video coverage, updated photo galleries and more. The channel has five camera crews on site and six reporters positioned throughout the convention. Coverage will include:

Live web updates and broadband video uploads throughout each day.

Special video coverage of star-studded panels and events featuring SCI FI Channel’s Original Series Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, Flash Gordon, Stargate Atlantis, Who Wants To Be A Superhero?, and the upcoming mini-series Tin Man.

Video coverage of selected major panels, as well as exclusive interviews with the panelists of popular programs including Heroes and Bionic Woman.

Video responses to fan questions for SCI FI Channel stars.

Image galleries direct from the convention floor.

Online voting for the day’s best costume.

Battlestar Sneak Peek Tonight, with Eureka

The second season of SCI FI Channel's Eureka, a dramedy about a village full of geniuses who get themselves into - how do you say? Situations - when they play with all sorts of top secret gadgets, premieres tonight at 9p.

Ads for the series are sitting a top the Internet's most popular technology blogs. "Bringing you amazing gadgets that are beyond the cutting edge!" said the banner on Gizmodo. Other ads were showing up on Engadget. Further inspection reveals a fun, smart viral campaign.

A roll-over option loads a compact but content rich pop-up with click-throughs for promo videos and a list of silly, wacky Eureka inventions like a "verminator" and "fat fizz."

The pop-up also lists a telephone number: "Call 1-866-40 Eureka for details."

"These are not real products" warns the fine print at the bottom.

The 800 phone number was irresistible. The recording: "Welcome to 'Made in Eureka' where we proudly bring the ground-breaking inventions of tomorrow to today's marketplace. We provide only the latest in essential consumer technology, all factory direct from America's smartest little town - Eureka."

Pressing on the various menus directs the caller to audio clips from the series.

As a further attractant to viewers, at some point during tonight's Eureka episode, Battlestar fans will get a 30 second morsel of the prequel Razor - the BsG mftv movie scheduled to air during upcoming November sweeps. The mftv movie precedes the acclaimed series' fourth and final season slated for kick-off in 2008.

Battlestar, You Will Be Missed (cont.)

This is a continuation of my blog post about the Battlestar Galactica cancellation. Click here to go to Multichannel News to read the first part.

The following is a raw, uncut excerpt from my December 2004 interview with Ron Moore.

“In the mini-series – at the end of the show, there’s a funeral scene – the priest is giving a prayer, the concluding line of a prayer ‘so say we all.’ The assembled officers then reply ‘so say we all.’ Well, the script was written as that Adama goes up to the podium and gives the speech and the speech talks about earth. He knows where earth is, we’re going to find it….but what Eddie did – and I think he did it in the moment, without telling anybody - is when the scene got to the point where the priest says ‘so say we all’ and the cast says ‘so say we all’ they all just kind of did it by rote. ‘So say we all’ - no energy - and Eddie just steps out of the ranks and looks back at them with this look on his face and starts challenging them. ‘so SAY we ALL.’ And the actors oh, we’re going back and then he did it again. ‘so say we ALL.’ And then they start yelling it back. And you can see in the reaction shots that they’re a little confused. Like ‘where the hell’s he going with this?’ It was exactly the intent of the scene, too and he just sort of created this different moment where he got pissed, he challenged them, he got them fired up and THEN he gives them the earth speech and then at the end he says ‘so say we all’ and they scream it back at the top of their lungs. He took what was essentially a speech scene and he gave it life. He gave it a whole emotional impact that wasn’t there on the page.”

When I was writing the series bible I started to get I into the backstories, started to sketch out the character bios, it kind of flowed from the performances. For Adama, it’s an archetypal role but this is not the man of action. He was getting ready to retire from a backwater assignment at the end of his career. Estranged from one son, lost another, gone thru a divorce. His best friend drinks too much. It’s a different kind of captain, who’s then suddenly thrust into this role and has to rise to the occasion. And is suddenly relevant again. As I went through his backstory I decided not to make him too heroic….there are some things that just flow from who the character is…the fact that he’s nearing retirement and he’s on the Galactica and he’s not an admiral also tells you that politically, in the career sense, he wasn’t at the top of his profession. Why is that? Maybe there’s a reason for that Maybe he’s unexpectedly not the man we think he is. Maybe he’s not just a right winger and a militarist. Maybe he’s a man who comes from a different background. Maybe his father was a lawyer. Maybe he got certain ideas about freedom and freedom of expression and civil liberties from his family and maybe he holds those values quite dear. And maybe he’s an idealist, not a pragmatist, maybe he’s not a guy who just espouses right wing ideology like you might expect, In this show, you kind of expect him to be the hawk and she’s the dove. And we don’t want to do that. Maybe he’s not the hawk. Maybe he’s a different kind of miliary officer. Maybe he’s an officer who believes very deeply in the flag, the constitution, the values he’s sworn to defend. Maybe he believes so deeply in those values that it gets him into trouble sometimes with his superiors.”

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