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Terminator Sequel: Fox Makes Mid-season Noise
Lena Headey and Thomas Dekker in The Sarah Connor Chronicles by Joe Viles/Fox
With the Fox network, it's often all about the mid-season, the time when shows like American Idol and 24 come along to rescue the network from its fall doldrums. Not that it's impossible for any of Fox's September newcomers to catch on. The Kelsey Grammer/Patricia Heaton sitcom Back to You looks very commercial. The situation is admittedly tougher for the downbeat New Orleans crime drama K-Ville or the murky supernatural crime drama New Amsterdam (about an immortal detective) to buck the odds and be a factor come January. While it's possible one or both may hit its mark, you can't help but feel that they might as well be titled "Placeholder 1" and "Placeholder 2" (shades of last fall's Vanished, Justice and Standoff).
Once again, Fox is holding back one of its biggest guns (literally) for January. Easily the most anticipated show on the network's lineup is The Sarah Connor Chronicles (look for the word Terminator to be added to the title before it premieres): a high-octane, big-budget, special-effects-laden action thriller picking up roughly two years after Terminator 2 left off. It's a fugitive chase thriller pitting Sarah Connor (300's Lena Headey) and her adolescent son and future freedom fighter John (Heroes' Thomas Dekker) against those seemingly unstoppable Terminator robots from the future. (Possible spoiler alert: Helping them in their battle is an advanced-model female Terminator, played by Firefly's Summer Glau, who describes her character Cameron as "the most human Terminator so far.")
At a TCA session Monday morning, the audience was peppered with the usual sci-fi obsessives (how can I refrain from calling them geeks?), who tried desperately to figure out the show's new timeline. "As far as I'm concerned, this is T3," says executive producer/writer Josh Friedman (cowriter of the recent War of the Worlds movie). "This is the continuation of what I call, 'the Sarah Connor trilogy.' Anything that happens after T2 is fair game for us." Consulting producer James Middleton, who helped develop the T3: Rise of the Machine movie, adds: "We're taking a phrase that's very important in T2: ‘No fate but what we make.' This is a new fate for Sarah Connor, so we are creating an entirely new timeline."
OK, moving on.... What really matters here is that this series is going to be catnip for genre fans. Not only are stars from 300, Firefly, Heroes in the cast, but the behind-the-scenes crew also includes executive producer/director David Nutter (The X-Files), co-executive producer Toni Graphia (Battlestar Galactica), and BSG composer Bear McCreary doing the score. I'm sure there are more connections to be made, so have at it, Terminator fans.
Nutter took great pains to promise skeptics in the audience that the action and special-effects components, so prominent in the explosive pilot episode, will continue through the series. At the same time, the show is going to have to be sensitive to the concerns of critics (including government watchdogs, no doubt) and studio/network execs over the show's relentlessly violent intensity. Already, a scene in the pilot involving a Terminator's attack on John Connor at his high school is being modified, in light of the Virginia Tech horrors.
Friedman says he wrote that scene not so much for shock value but to underscore the series' themes "about this woman who is very much a control freak letting this child go out into the world. For all of us as parents, it's a very scary world.... [And school] is one of the last places you would like to feel is safe." Still, the scene's being changed, though no one would elaborate just how.
Nutter adds, "The most important part of this was really to add a sense of an action element to the show, that Terminator fans are expecting and want from the series, and to let the audience know that this Terminator is not going to be, in a sense, a ‘TV version.'" In other words, if there's no bang for the buck, why even do it?
Addressing the violence issue, Friedman says, "Because of the context of what the show is about, the apocalypse and the scary robots coming to try to end mankind, this gives us a great opportunity to explore human value and humankind. I think a lot of the show is about how you [wage] a war against a force that doesn't value you or value themselves at all. How do you do that and still maintain your own humanity?.... I take it very seriously, because that's thematically what it's about. How does Sarah raise a son to be the leader of the free world? You can't do it by just teaching him to shoot guns. You have to teach him how to be a man from a moral place."
Which is all fine and dandy, but you also have to teach him how to shoot, how to fight, how to run, how to survive. Because without that, where's the show?
At the moment, Fox still lists The Sarah Connor Chronicles as airing Sundays at 9 pm/ET (the old X-Files time period) on an undetermined mid-season date. As usual, though, let's see how the fall shakes out before we start worrying where the show will air and what it will displace. Suffice it to say that Fox will put all of its promotional and scheduling muscle behind this one.
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Jul 23, 2007 3:53 PM
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it makes so much sense giving this the post SuperBowl-spot,but House got that
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Jul 23, 2007 5:10 PM
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Sorry! Fox has blown it for ANY chance with their so called genre shows! We all know the level of contempt that Fox treats fans of their shows!
No one in my family OR college will even watch fox anymore - preferring to wait until the show shows up on DVD or another network/cable channel. Viewer loyalty counts for NOTHIN with these guys! They only care about advertizine dollar results - yesterday and will yank a show and replace it with cr*p yesterday if they lose a dollar on it!
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Jul 23, 2007 6:03 PM
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I have as much distrust of FOX as anyone. I still hate them for axing Firefly, Wonderfalls, The Inside and Drive. But, they do continually greenlight genre shows, and if fans refuse to watch them then it is a self-fulfilling prophesy that they will fail. What if they don't produce enough episodes to warrant a dvd release? How will you watch them then? I think it is best to watch and try to get as many others to watch as you possibly can, and if you happen to know a Nielsen family, so much the better.
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Jul 23, 2007 7:04 PM
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Kirimaku, give me a break. ABC and CBS cancel just as many low rated shows as Fox does. What do you expect the networks to do, keep a show on that's sucking up money? It's not Fox's fault that no one watches their shows.
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Jul 23, 2007 8:17 PM
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I'm looking forward to seeing how this show plays out. Like others, I'm a little scared about it being canceled (a la Dead Like Me, Firefly, John Doe), but I'll hold out hope. I'm particularly interested to see how Summer Glau plays a terminator.
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Jul 24, 2007 6:09 AM
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Firefly fans need to get over it. The show had bad ratings. Any network would have cancelled it with those ratings, not just FOX.
Fox does at least greenlight genre programs, and it did love the X-Files more than a little (perhaps too much, since IMHO they kept it around a bit too long).
It sounds like the Terminator series will fit in-line with 24. This might be a good (or perhaps a bad) thing. I will tune in to see whether it is worth watching. And, if I do happen to like it, if the ratings suck and it's cancelled, I won't still be whining about it years later.
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Jul 24, 2007 11:08 AM
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I wasn't a huge fan of the Terminator movies. Eventually I saw them all, but I wouldn't put them on any "favorites" list.
I've seen this pilot and I think it's got a pretty good chance of succeeding.
I'm a huge fan of some of the aforementioned canceled (and alive) genre shows. While this may not be a fresh new story, I still enjoyed it on several levels. The special effects are very good for TV, the pacing keeps your attention, and anything with Summer Glau is worth a watch. It struck me as quite commercial...something a mainstream audience could really get into, with just enough sci-fi to appeal to genre fans. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
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Jul 24, 2007 12:35 PM
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Firefly fans need to get over it. The show had bad ratings. Any network would have cancelled it with those ratings, not just FOX.
Maybe so, but they didn't even give wonderfalls a chance. they only aired 4 episodes and I don't think any of them aired in the same time slot. How can a show possibly find an audience when it's moved around or pre-empted every other week??? I was in college when wonderfalls was on, and I had a lot of free time, so I was able to find it. But today, I probably wouldn't and if my dvr didn't find it, I wouldn't have seen it.
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Jul 24, 2007 12:53 PM
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I'll give this one a shot but I have to tell you T3 doesn't sound interesting to me in the least. Now mind you I'm a HUGE Buffy/Angel/BSG/Lost/Smallville/Hero's fan but this one seem yawn worthy to me.
I've never been a fan of the "on the run" type of shows unless they can bring something different. BSG has so many layers it's enjoyable to me. T3 is going to have to do ALOT to get my interest.
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Jul 24, 2007 1:12 PM
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I am so looking forward to this show. There is a lot to be explored in this show - and I think that it will be a success!
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Jul 24, 2007 1:29 PM
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Sunday at 9pm? I am so frakking in. This show has the best chance of survival for a new series in a looong time. The dialogues in the pilot could have used some tweaking but it was alright. Leanna Headley is one hot mama. I wonder if they'll try to get Robert Patrick back as a T1000 since he's considered a tv actor now. I think Arnold should drop his asking price for the stuff he appeared in and just do just one more cameo for the fans. FOX should show Arnold the pilot for him to consider doing a cameo to bridge the movies to the tv show. He owed to us all.
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Jul 24, 2007 1:33 PM
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FOX should show Arnold the pilot for him to consider doing a cameo to bridge the movies to the tv show. He owed to us all.
why? I haven't seen those movies in forever and I don't think I'll need to to understand the tv show. They are 2 separate things, in my mind. (I wonder how the creators feel about this.)
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Jul 24, 2007 1:48 PM
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Love the name of Summer's character being Cameron. Of course this breaks tradition because no other Terminator (or reformed terminator) had a name.
I agree that Fox was justified in cancelling Firefly because of bad ratings. But I lay the blame for that at their own door for scheduling it on Fridays (nearly the worst night for the target audience). I think it would have done better in the 9:00 sunday slot. Lets hope they keep SCC on Sunday and don't preempt it or move it around a lot.
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Jul 24, 2007 3:02 PM
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i agree wit the posters that day some bloggers cry and moan too much about canceled shows.. Fox is one of the few channels, might b the only channel on th top 4 that give genre shows a chance.. all channels have past history of cancelling great shows.. remember invasion, daybreak on ABC...Michael (something) ashow wit david caruso, brooklyn south, and that superhero show "Now & Again" wit the guy on Withoug a trace. on CBS.. I could keep on and on.. All the shows like Drive Firefly, and other shows i loved but got cnacelled, and the only people I blmae are the fans... People now rather save it on Tivo, and that hurts current ratings.. Even though now people are looking at it, it is still better to watch it live.... Overall the Terminator series looks to be this years "Lost" I hope so...
Carlos
NYC
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Jul 24, 2007 7:09 PM
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