NYPost is reporting, in a rather ignorantly enthusiastic fashion it has to be said, that the first scripts for Caprica arrived at SCI FI this week.
October 30, 2006 — SCI FI channel is pushing ahead with plans to de velop a spin-off to “Battlestar Galactica,” the network’s most buzzed about show ever.
The first drafts of “Caprica” scripts – a series that would take place about 50 years before the war between machines and man at the heart of “Galactica” – arrived at the network this week.
“It’s not a war show; it’s not even a space show or an action-adventure show,” “Battlestar” executive producer Ronald Moore said in a recent interview. “It’s a family drama and a political drama about corporations and politics. It’s almost [more] like a sci-fi soap than it is an action-adventure series.”
Galactica, now in its third season, has become the most eagerly followed science fiction series since “Star Trek.”
On the epic space drama, a small community of humans are pursued across the galaxy by a race of machines called Cylons. The machines were originally created by the humans decades earlier on their home-world of Caprica.
But since then, they have taken on a life of their own and rebelled against their creators – wiping out most of the people on Caprica in a nuclear holocaust.
Fleeing through space, the war against the Cylons is fought mostly from the bridge of a tremendous battleship, the Galactica, commanded by it’s captain, Commander William Adama (Edward James Olmos).
“Galactica” took a big gamble by pushing on the borders of traditional sci fi , incorporating such hot-button, contemporary issues as terrorism, torture and ethnic politics into its storlines.
And it has worked.
The first two seasons on DVD right now rank among the top selling box-sets on Amazon and at other retailers. The ratings for the show hover around 2 million viewers a week – very good for cable.
“Caprica” would aim to build on that success.
“It’s the story of the creation of the Cylons,” says Moore. “We’re trying to do something different within the genre and give a different flavor to the material than Battlestar Galactica does.”
The story, Moore says, “centers around two families, one of whom owns an enormous corporation, Ã la Microsoft, and it builds the first Cylons; then the other family is Adama’s father, who’s a lawyer at the time and starts to become an opponent of what they’re trying to do.”
Even if the show receives the green light, it could be some time before it lands on the schedule due to the length of production time needed to create a new shows.