'Battlestar Galactica' Reboot Officially Dead At Peacock
It’s not moving forward after 5 years? So say we all.
There must be some kind of way out of the next Battlestar Galactica iteration, said the Peacock exec to the chief. There was too much development, and now the streamer has gotten its relief. Indeed, the series has stopped development at the NBCUniversal streamer.
It ends a journey of over five years, being announced in September 2019, as part of Peacock’s initial content slate with the Saved by the Bell and Punky Brewster continuations, Dr. Death, and Rutherford Falls, among other originals and many library titles. However, it had yet to leave development stages, never formally ordered to series. So much that this version’s story never surfaced, but apparently somewhere it was stated to be in the same continuity as the original Sci-Fi Channel-aired reboot. This new series was considered a passion project for executive producer Sam Esmail, best known as the creator of USA’s Mr. Robot, who was doing so through Esmail Corp. with Chad Hamilton thanks to its overall deal with studio Universal Content Productions. Michael Lesslie, who is now writing Marvel Studios’s X-Men movie, was the first writer to board the reboot in 2020, but left in 2021. Reports this past January improbably gave the show signs of life, that Derek Simonds had become writer, executive producer, and showrunner. While the series is reportedly being shopped elsewhere now, development for Peacock does end here.
The base premise of any iteration of the series, originally created tells of centered on the last group of humans on the verge of extinction in the one remaining battleship group, anchored by the Galactica. They fight to survive after a series of wars with a a cybernetic race, The Cylons, that rebelled, evolved, and destroyed the Twelve Colonies with a massive nuclear attack. Their one chance for survival is a desperate search for a fabled Thirteenth Colony known as Earth. The original series ran a single season from 1978-79 on ABC and starred Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, Lorne Greene, and Terry Carter, who unfortunately died in April. It was followed by lesser-received sequel Galactica 1980. Sci-Fi Channel’s reimagining, developed by Ronald D. Moore, began as a three-hour miniseries in 2003, before launching as a full series that ran from the next year until 2009 for 74 more episodes, starring Edward James Olmos, Tricia Helfer, James Callis, Mary McDonnell, Katee Sackoff and Grace Park. It was followed by the prequel series Caprica, which ran for a single season in 2010.
Source: Variety