Mr. Robot‘s Sam Esmail says his new Battlestar Galactica show is in “great shape”
Esmail has been working on a Peacock follow-up to the sci-fi (and Syfy) classic for more than four years at this point
Aux News Sam Esmail
One of the weird little upshots of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike is that we’ve been hearing a lot more from producers, directors, and (now that the WGA has wrapped up its own labor actions) writers when it comes time to give projects a promotional push. Hence Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail taking pride of place at the red carpet for his new Mahershala Ali and Julia Roberts movie Leave The World Behind at AFI tonight, where he fielded questions about the Obamas, his old pal Rami Malek, and, most interesting for all us mega-nerds, that Battlestar Galactica show he’s been developing for Peacock for more than four years at this point.
(Do you hear that, Sam? We’re not calling it a “reboot,” even though it remains wild to us that you’re apparently trying to get the revived version of the show going again 13 years after spin-off prequel Caprica dissolved in a final fizzle of cancellation.)
Anyway, Esmail would like everyone to know that the new Peacock show is currently in “great shape” in the aftermath of the writers strike, noting that he’s just recently been handed an outline for the series that is also “great.” (Esmail didn’t go into details about what the show would actually entail, of course, or, more crucially, when it might go from “great shape” into actual production; he’s developing the series with The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes writer Michael Lesslie, who will serve as a showrunner for the series.)
Of course, having to handle pretty much the whole red carpet himself, Esmail didn’t stick merely to this future show; he also talked about working with the Obamas, who produced Leave The World Behind—“They’re some of the most brilliant minds on the planet”—and on highter-ups deciding to pull the plug on his and Rami Malek’s latest team-up, an ambitious TV adaptation of classic sci-fi film Metropolis: “It was heartbreaking,” Esmail admitted, but “I got to work with a lot of really talented people out in Australia, where we were mounting the production. I don’t regret it for a second.”
48 Comments
Can I just say what we’re all thinking? His last name is “email” with a typo.
It’s an anagram of “a smile.”
Or just the word “smile” with a Latin American accent.
And also “is lame”.
My cat’s breath smells like catfood.
And he’s married to Emmy Rossum, whose last name is Possum with an extra kick. How deep does this go?!
The plural of e-mail is Esmail.
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On the one hand BSG doesn’t need a reboot , on the other hand if anyone can handle the sneaky and often meta ‘enemy hiding among us’ aspect of BSG , assuming they keep it , its Esmail.
Which leads me to wonder which version he is rebooting. All that “hidden among us” stuff is from the reboot and not the original Maybe his plans is to make a show closer to the groovy 70s Space Mormons show
I think he’ll split the difference and take his inspiration from Galactica 1980.
Finally, my dream of a gritty Star Scouts miniseries is coming to fruition!
The Last Star Scout
(Kids) Defying GravityDoofs Ex MachinaBattlestar OveracticaLethal (But Still Cute!) Weapons
Holy FlyingMotorbikeDiscoNaziFighters Batman!!
Hey, if there were no 70s Space Mormons, then you wouldn’t get a reboot or this gem of music:or this from Blood and Chrome:And the 150,000 year old version of All Along The Watchtower: “My name is Saul Tigh. I’m an officer in the Colonial Fleet. Whatever else I am, whatever else it means … that’s the man I want to be. And if I die today? That’s the man I’ll be.”
On the other hand, the Syfy show started so so good and ended so so bad. Like a nice piece of fruit going rancid. That’s why I rank the Battlestar Galactica revival as last of all television shows ever made and why Ronald D. Moore is on my permanent ban list.Counterpart comes in second last for similar reasons but at least gets credit for going off as badly as it did in its first season so I didn’t waste any time on the second season though I guess I have to see it one day because I promised someone here I would because they assured me it got better.
Yeah Cylons had a plan , writers might have had one as well, but theirs was only like 4 episodes ahead , and they wrote themselves into a corner.I kind of liked the “it was (nu)earth all along” ending but a LOT of it didnt make sense .I mean A LOT.Although an awful lot of the goodwill was down to Bear Mcrearys soundtrack in the last episode ..especially stuff like this :and this
Whatever anyone says about the show, it still has the single coolest spaceship sequence I’ve ever seen.
Lost my damned shit the first time I saw that.
So did I. I haven’t gone back and rewatched the show since we finished it (although I do want to), but I do go back and rewatch that clip every so often.
That is one of my favourite things ever!
That was pretty cool when I first saw it. But watching that clip reminds me this show came out at the height of the ‘shitty cinematography is really cool’ trend of the late 00s. They move the camera so much it’s barely watchable…I always wonder how they produce that effect. Does JJ Abrams visit the set and conk the trained camera operators over the head with a tennis racket? (And then attach a liquid caffeine drip to them while they recuperate in the medical tent?)
That all that was achieved on a mid-2000s SciFi Channel budget still stuns me.
This and the in-atmosphere battle in Serenity are the top contenders for the title.
Oh yeah, I love that one too.
I fell off Counterpart sometime during season 1. It seemed really cool and I love JK Simmons, shame it goes off the rails…
I’ll never get the BSG reboot hate. It was and still is one of the best sci-fi series out there from start to finish.
I didn’t mind the later parts of the show as much as a lot of people seem to, and I wonder if my view of it is affected by the fact that we didn’t start watching it until it was about to end, and so we binged the entire thing (avast, mateys) in a couple short months. We didn’t have long waits between seasons to let expectation build up in our minds, so it was easier to accept it for what it was. (That said, I do understand the complaints about them, ironically, not really having a plan and kind of winging it. But the show’s tone and the fantastic performances counted for a lot, for me.)
Yeah same. It was basically like that Portlandia sketch.
BSG was pretty famously a casualty of the 2007-08 writer’s strike. The show lost all its momentum and season 4 just pretty much sucked. RDM has tried to retcon it and say it was a good thing because they took the time to reconsider the season entirely, but it’s clear that they got in their heads and ultimately couldn’t figure out how to close it.
Moore was on the network’s shit list prior to the strike over him wanting the network to pay the writers for online episodes they created in fall 2006 between seasons 2 and 3. Apparently it was quite a war. The 2007-08 writer’s strike, which began about a year after, was about establishing payments for that exact thing. I’ve always been of the suspicion that the network was furious with him about that whole series of events, and had already decided to kill the show and get rid of him around the time Season 3 was airing.
if you want to get the bad taste out of your mouth just a little remember to watch “The Plan”–it fills in a lot of plot holes in a fun way and is all about dean stockwell.
You should take Ron Moore off your ban list so you can watch the excellent FOR ALL MANKIND!
This is basically where I am. Generally opposed to reboots of good things, but Sam Esmail might actually make a better version than the RDM version (on the whole, that first season would be hard to beat).
Is this a reboot though? Everything I’ve heard tells me that it’s a revival set in the same universe as RDM’s show.
Every time I hear about this I think it’s just way too soon. Then i realize that at this point it’s been 20 years since the SyFy one started, which means almost has much time has passed between now and that version as had passed between the original’s last season and the start of the reboot. Then I draw my shawl tighter as I glare through my shutters at a teenager walking by.
The distance between the years sure does shrink as you get older, huh? My wife has forbidden me from informing her anymore how old the stuff we used to watch is.
THIS HAS ALL HAPPENED BEFOREAND THIS WILL ALL HAPPEN AGAINRather then reboot or revive the BSG story expand the universeTell us the story of Kobol!
Battlestar Galactica, but without Cylons or…Battlestars. So, just regular science fiction, then?
Battlenot Galactawho?
This all happened before….Rebellious robots brought about the downfall of Kobol… the 13th tribe that became the Cylonsin the finale the planet they thought was Earth had suffered a similar fate
Nobody wants Galactica from this untalented douche.
The twist is that Sam Esmail is not a cylon.Didn’t see that coming!
Holy shit yes! Can’t wait
I mainly want this to be greenlit just so that Peacock will put the SyFy show back up.
It’ll start out hard-ish sci-fi and then KABOOM! Vampires!Buffystar Galactica. Because that would make every last bit as much sense as what we got with the remake.
I haven’t seen Caprica in like 10 years so maybe it doesn’t hold up, but I seem to remember it was cool and bummed they couldn’t be given an extra season to wrap it up.
I learned something that made me happy, which was that Ronald Moore is not a crazy mormon but he just retained that stuff because it was in the original. That said, the ending of the series was famously one of the worst of all time, some of the concept setups were interesting (our heroes are now terrorists) but were fumbled, and there were several times that the show lost its way (ghost). On the other hand, people often have not watched the related films like Razor, and I highly recommend everybody watch “The Plan” which makes up for the bad ending somewhat by filling in a bunch of plot holes from the show in a fun way and starring the great Dean Stockwell…it’s been a while not sure if it was good but I remember liking it.This show sure doesn’t need to be rebooted but what the hell why not…although when they could just make more of The Expanse I won’t understand why any other shows are still made.