SyFy Never Rejected Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome; Intended Online

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When Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome was first announced, it was thought by many that their favorite sci-fi series would be returning to SyFy.

Then it was said that SyFy had passed on the series, seemingly “rejecting” the pilot, and angering fans.

However, Blood and Chrome executive producer David Eick says that was not the case, and that Blood and Chrome was intended for an online distribution in 10 serialized episodes.

When asked if there is a 13-episode arc planned out, Eick responded as follows in a conference call with various members of the media.

You can watch the first two episodes right here on Cosmic Book News with more Battlestar: Galactica to be released in the weeks to come.

 

(Taken from a transcript as follows)

David Eick: No, there was an entire 10-episode arc planned out because this was originally developed as an online project.

And I’m so happy to have such a great and comprehensive cross-section of the press today because I feel like there’s a certain record to set straight which was a little bit frustrating to me a few months ago when I saw the headlines that the Blood & Chrome project had somehow been rejected or was a failed pilot or wasn’t going to make it on the air.

It was never intended to be a traditional pilot, so to speak, such that Syfy not picking it up in a traditional manner to an episodic series was some kind of a rejection or failure. It was always developed at least from my point of view as a project for an online environment. And there’s something that we would develop and structurally, narratively build as a ten-part sort of a series.

Kind of like the Raiders of the Lost Ark style, adapted to the 1930s style movie serials where you have ten minutes of story and a cliffhanger followed by ten minutes of story and the cliffhanger. And then after ten of these episodes, it would all kind of resolve itself in a pre-act structure as a whole movie. And so when I set out to develop this, my thinking was to design a mission, so to speak.

Of course, once the characters and the overall idea had been approved by the network, a mission that could be, as missions often are, in the military sense divided into ten smaller missions. And that’s really what we wound up with and what the audience is going to see. I think where the confusion in is that for a moment the network after seeing the script said, “Gee, we don’t want to rule out the possibility of just advocating the online venture altogether and throwing this up as a pilot for a traditional series to Syfy.”

And there were discussions about that, but for a variety of reasons I think not the least of which was because there was a genuine feeling that we had really designed something altogether of groundbreaking from a visual effects standpoint to stick with the original plan and its future may be online, may be on air, maybe DVD in terms of subsequent future episodes or stories—who knows? But it was never any kind of rejection or failure that this didn’t wind up as another Syfy pilot.

That was always designed to be something much more unique and special than that and I’m thrilled that it’s finally reached its distribution and it’s going to be seen by the people it was intended for.