Battlestar Galactica

• 1. An Interrupted Debut

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  Battlestar Galactica made its American television debut on the 17th of September 1978, and the first broadcast did not run smoothly. About 30 minutes before the scheduled end, the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David Accords interrupted the episode. The break lasted nearly an hour. Afterward, the story resumed exactly where it had stopped.

  That stop-and-start debut turned out to be fitting. Glen A. Larson's science fiction franchise would be cancelled, revived, rebooted and reimagined over the decades that followed. What was the story that kept drawing people back? Where did its ideas come from? Why did the first television run end so quickly, and how did a reboot in 2003 find the success the original never had? And why have so many promised revivals disappeared before reaching the screen?

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• 2. Fleeing the Cylons

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  Humanity in this story lives on a group of planets called the Twelve Colonies, far from the ancestral homeworld its people once left. For a long time the colonies have been at war with the Cylons, a cybernetic race whose goal is the extermination of the human species. Then the Cylons offer peace. The offer proves to be a ruse.

  A human named Baltar helps the Cylons carry out a massive nuclear attack on the Colonies and on the Colonial Fleet of starships that guard them. The fleet is devastated and the Colonies are laid waste. Only a small remnant of the population is left alive.

  Those survivors flee into outer space aboard a motley collection of spaceworthy ships. Of the military fleet, only the Battlestar Galactica seems to have survived. It is a gigantic battleship that also serves as a spacecraft carrier. Commander Adama leads it, and its pilots fly fighters called Vipers. Together they guide the fugitive fleet in search of a fabled thirteenth colony known as Earth.

  Every production in the franchise shares this setup, including the 1978 original and the 2004 series that came after it.

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• 3. Adam's Ark

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  Glen A. Larson said that he had conceived the premise in the late 1960s, and he called it Adam's Ark. For a number of years he could not find anyone to pay for a television series based on it.

  The ideas inside the story had a religious source. Larson was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the scholar James E. Ford detailed how the series drew on Mormon theology. Ford read his paper at a joint conference of the American Culture and Popular Culture Associations on the 17th of April 1980. He pointed to marriage for "time and eternity", a "council of twelve", a lost thirteenth tribe of humans, and a planet called Kobol, which is an anagram of Kolob. A version of the paper appeared in the Journal of Popular Culture in 1983.

  The money finally came after the success of the 1977 film Star Wars, which made a space adventure on television look like a safer bet.

  The villains had literary ancestors too. The original Cylons, robotic enemies bent on destroying all humankind, borrowed heavily from the berserker stories of Fred Saberhagen. Saberhagen's fictional race, the Builders, had a "sliding single red eye", and that eye became the signature design element of the Cylons.

  When backing did arrive, the format Larson had pictured was not the one the network chose.

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• 4. Cancelled Twice

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  Larson had imagined Battlestar Galactica as a run of made-for-TV movies for the American Broadcasting Company, or ABC. He planned a three-hour pilot followed by two two-hour films. ABC wanted a weekly series of one-hour episodes instead. A shortened cut of the pilot, titled Saga of a Star World, played in Canadian theaters before the series aired, and later in American, European and Australian theaters.

  At the sixth annual People's Choice Awards in 1979, the series was named Best New TV Drama Series. In the eight months after the pilot, the team made 17 original episodes, five of them two-parters. That output equaled a standard 24-episode season. Even so, ABC canceled the show in April 1979, citing declining ratings and cost overruns. The final episode, "The Hand of God", aired on the 29th of April 1979.

  In the autumn of 1979, ABC executives met Larson again to talk about restarting the story. They decided the hook would be the Colonial Fleet arriving at present-day Earth. A new TV movie called Galactica 1980 launched another weekly series. The premiere did well, but the program never matched the original and was canceled after just ten episodes.

  The budget for Galactica 1980 was low, and one Cylon attack sequence reused footage from the 1974 Universal Studios movie Earthquake. Critics panned the writing. The Sunday evening time slot was normally reserved for family programming, and for the newsmagazine 60 Minutes. Strict content rules limited acts of violence and required educational lessons to be worked into the dialogue. To save money, the show was set mostly on contemporary Earth, which dismayed fans.

  Lorne Greene returned as Adama, but most of the original cast was gone. Herb Jefferson Jr. played "Colonel" Boomer in about half the episodes, with little screen time. Dirk Benedict came back as Starbuck for only the abrupt final episode. Richard Hatch, who had played Apollo, was sent a script and turned it down, unsure what his part would be now that all the characters had changed.

  Some syndication packages of the original series still include the episodes of this failed sequel.

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• 5. The Reimagined Series

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  In 2003, after years of attempts that never came to fruition, Universal Television rebooted the franchise for the Sci-Fi Channel as a three-hour miniseries. Screenwriter Ronald D. Moore and producer David Eick were the creative forces behind it. In this version, a long-standing armistice after a war between humans and Cylons collapses when the machines launch a sneak attack that wipes out virtually all of humanity.

  Edward James Olmos, an Academy Award nominee, was cast as Commander Adama. Two-time Academy Award nominee Mary McDonnell played President Laura Roslin. Starbuck and Boomer became female characters, played by Katee Sackhoff and Grace Park. Jamie Bamber played Captain Lee "Apollo" Adama, James Callis played Dr. Gaius Baltar, and Tricia Helfer played a humanoid Cylon known as Number Six.

  The miniseries was a ratings success, and the Sci-Fi Channel ordered a weekly series. The UK's Sky Television co-funded it, and it premiered on the Sky1 satellite channel in October 2004. North American viewers saw it on the Sci-Fi Channel in January 2005. On the 9th of January 2005, five days before that premiere, NBC aired an edited version of the miniseries. NBC later showed three selected first-season episodes to promote the second-season premiere in July 2005.

  Richard Hatch, who had played Captain Apollo in the 1970s series, appeared in several episodes as Tom Zarek. Zarek is a former political terrorist who later becomes part of the new Colonial government.

  The series ran for four seasons between 2004 and 2009, though not smoothly. The second season was split into two halves shown several months apart. The 2007-2008 Writers Guild strike caused production delays that split the fourth season as well, with a seven-month hiatus in between.

  In 2005, Time and New York Newsday each named it the best show on television. Mainstream outlets far from the science fiction world, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, National Review and Rolling Stone, also gave it positive reviews. The series received a Peabody Award for overall excellence and several Emmy Awards for Visual Effects. It also earned Emmy nominations for Writing and Directing. Time magazine placed it among the 100 best TV shows of all time.

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• 6. Spinoffs and Webisodes

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  Caprica premiered on Syfy, the renamed Sci-Fi Channel, on the 22nd of January 2010. It was described as television's first science fiction family saga. The story is set on the planet Caprica, 58 years before the events of the main series, and follows two families, the Adamas and the Graystones, as the Cylons are created. It began as a two-hour back door pilot, directed by Jeffrey Reiner. On the 2nd of December 2008, Syfy approved a full series of 20 episodes. On the 27th of October 2010, Syfy canceled Caprica because of low ratings. The final five episodes aired in the United States on the 4th of January 2011.

  Shorter stories filled the gaps between seasons. In 2006, ten webisodes called The Resistance, each about three minutes long, were released twice a week ahead of the American premiere of season three. They covered events between seasons two and three, and viewing them was optional.

  Battlestar Galactica: Razor aired as a television movie on the 24th of November 2007 in the United States and Canada. It fell in the gap between seasons three and four and doubles as the first two episodes of season four. Its story moves between two periods aboard the battlestar Pegasus. One follows Lee Adama's command in the latter half of season two. The other shows Helena Cain's command after the Cylon attack. Seven Razor Flashbacks webisodes, set some 40 years earlier during the First Cylon War, showed William Adama as a fighter pilot and led up to the release.

  Ten more webisodes, titled The Face of the Enemy, premiered on SciFi.com on the 12th of December 2008. They arrived during the seven-month hiatus in season four.

  The Plan was a two-hour movie written by Jane Espenson and directed by Edward James Olmos, who also reprised Adama. Production began on the 8th of September 2008. The story starts before the attack on the Twelve Colonies and follows events mainly from the Cylons' point of view. Ten of the eleven actors who played Cylons appeared. Lucy Lawless was the exception, though earlier footage of her was included. It premiered on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download on the 27th of October 2009 and aired on Sci Fi on the 10th of January 2010.

  In 2012, Syfy asked Ronald D. Moore about another spin-off, Blood & Chrome. It was meant to begin as a two-hour pilot about William "Husker" Adama, played by Luke Pasqualino, during the First Cylon War. Syfy decided against a full series. Instead it aired a 10-part webseries over four weeks through Machinima.com, starting on the 9th of November 2012. The webseries then aired as a two-hour movie on Syfy on the 10th of February 2013.

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• 7. Revivals That Never Aired

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  Between 1998 and 1999, Richard Hatch produced a demonstration video called Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming. It paired several actors from the original series with state-of-the-art special effects. It was screened at some science fiction conventions but never led to a new series. The original series had kept a cult fandom, and that fandom supported several separate revival efforts.

  In 1999, Todd Moyer, the producer of Wing Commander, and Glen Larson planned a motion picture that would have featured Battlestar Pegasus.

  In 2000, Bryan Singer, the director of the X-Men movie, and executive producer Tom DeSanto began developing a miniseries for the Fox network under Studios USA. It would have continued the original series 25 years later, with several original cast members returning alongside newer characters. It was meant to air as a backdoor pilot in May 2002. Pre-production began, and sets were partially built for filming to start in November 2001. Then the 11th of September 2001 attacks caused production delays, and Singer had to drop out because of his commitment to direct X-Men 2. Fox executives canceled the project.

  A movie adaptation kept returning. In February 2009, Larson entered negotiations with Universal Pictures, and Singer signed on as director that August. He was obliged to direct Jack the Giant Slayer instead. John Orloff was hired in October 2011 to write the script. "I have wanted to write this movie since I was 12 years old, and built a Galactica model from scratch out of balsa wood, cardboard, old model parts and LEDs", Orloff told Deadline Hollywood. By August 2012 the script was being rewritten, and Singer said, "It will exist, I think, quite well between the Glen Larson and Ron Moore universes".

  Writers and producers continued to change. Jack Paglen was hired to write on the 7th of April 2014. On the 12th of February 2016, Universal signed Michael De Luca, Scott Stuber and Dylan Clark to produce. In June 2016, Lisa Joy was reportedly writing, with Francis Lawrence in talks to direct. Jay Basu was hired to rewrite her script in December 2018. In October 2020, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Simon Kinberg would write and co-produce with Dylan Clark.

  In September 2019, NBCUniversal was planning a series for its Peacock streaming service, set in the continuity of the 2004 show and produced by Sam Esmail. By March 2021, writer and producer Michael Lesslie had reportedly left. In July 2024, Variety reported that Peacock was no longer developing the series, though the project was to be shopped to other networks.

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• 8. Beyond the Screen

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  The first novelizations of the original series, written by Glen A. Larson with co-authors including Robert Thurston, were critically disparaged but popular. The first novel sold over a million copies within its first year. The episodic novels expanded the ragtag fleet to almost 22,000 ships, compared with 220 in the TV series, and included excerpts from "The Adama Journals".

  Richard Hatch began a separate series of novels in the 1990s, continuing the original story from his revival attempt and ignoring Galactica 1980. It picked up several years after the TV series ended. Apollo commands Galactica after Adama's death, a grown-up Boxey is a Viper pilot, and Commander Cain and the battlestar Pegasus are found again, having started a new colony. The reimagined series later had novels from Tor Science Fiction, along with academic studies such as Cylons in America and Battlestar Galactica and International Relations.

  Marvel Comics published a 23-issue comic series between 1978 and 1981. Walt Simonson, who later wrote and drew Thor, was the artist at its conclusion. Dynamite Entertainment later released a four-issue Galactica 1980 miniseries written by Marc Guggenheim. It ended with a second, smaller battlestar named Galactica, strongly resembling the ship in the Sci-Fi Channel series.

  In 1978, Mattel Electronics released a handheld LED game in which the player defends Galactica from kamikaze Cylon Raiders with a switch and a red button. In November 2003, Sierra released a 3D space combat game for the original Xbox, PlayStation 2 and PC, developed by Warthog. It was set 40 years before the original series and featured an ensign Adama flying a Viper. Battlestar Galactica Deadlock, a turn-based strategy game about the First Cylon War, came out in 2017. A roguelike called Scattered Hopes, developed by Alt Shift and published by Dotemu, followed in 2026.

  Fantasy Flight Games produced Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game in 2008. It is a semi-cooperative game for three to six players, and some players are Cylon agents, either aware from the start or sleeper agents who learn it later. Fuel shortages, food contaminations and political unrest threaten the fleet while players try to expose the traitor. It received three expansions, named Pegasus, Exodus and Daybreak. Wiz Kids launched a collectible card game in May 2006, then canceled it on the 13th of March 2007 after a single expansion set.

  The franchise also reached theme parks. Battle of Galactica opened on the 9th of June 1979 on the Studio Tour at Universal Studios Hollywood. It cost $1 million, the most expensive special effects attraction the park had built at that point. Animatronics and live actors staged a laser battle around a 200-foot long spaceship that "swallowed" the passengers. It was the first themed attraction with Audio-Animatronics characters outside Disney Parks, and the first dark ride to combine animatronics and lasers with live actors. In 1992, the foundations of Back to the Future: The Ride replaced it.

  A roller coaster called Battlestar Galactica: Human vs. Cylon opened at Universal Studios Singapore on the 18th of March 2010.

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