DAVID EICK
Ron and I got drunk the other night. It’s not like any of it was bridge-burning. You have to remember, those were the days of twenty episodes a year. That’s a lot of episodes. That’s a lot of pressure.
On a more personal level, there had been some pressure stemming from the fact that during the show’s run and particularly afterward, Ron Moore was heralded the one true guiding force of the show, with David Eick’s name frequently being left out of the mix.
DAVID EICK
I’d be lying if I said it tickled, but I also don’t obsess over it, because occasionally when I see a blogger write something or I catch something in an entertainment magazine where it says, “Ron Moore is Battlestar,” I think, “Ah, well they didn’t do their homework.” But when the big shots—The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone—came along and wrote about the show, it was fair and I was in there. There was a New York Times Magazine thing where Ron was on the cover and that bruised a little bit, too. Not so much the cover, but the fact they called it Ron Moore’s show.
RONALD D. MOORE
I was aware of it and I felt uncomfortable about it. There were moments when I felt bad. At the same time, it was a tremendous ego boost, frankly, in that people regarded it that way and still do to this day. I don’t deny that I accept those accolades, but there definitely are moments when I feel like, “Oh, shit,” and it’s not fair if he really was my partner in the whole thing, which he was.
DAVID EICK
The reason I didn’t obsess and I don’t obsess now is because of two things. One, the people who get the show and who know the show and write about the show, I’ve never felt shirked by. I’ve always felt very much evenly and fairly represented. The other reason is that Ron’s always been really sensitive about it. He’s said to me a number of times, “I think I get more credit for this than you do, and I don’t think that’s always fair.” So I think the fact that he’s always been sensitive to it and understands that might be a little more difficult, has also allowed it to not be the kind of thing that will be a rock in my shoe or something like that.
RONALD D. MOORE
The New York Times Magazine did a profile, and it was originally going to be a profile piece of David and I, so the writer spent a lot of time with me and a lot of time with David. Terry and I came to the set and dinner, and he picked our brains early in the run. Just before it was published, he sent me the article, or called me or something, and he had decided that he just thought that the story was me. The article became “Ron Moore’s Deep Space Journey” or something. There was a big picture of me and I felt really bad. I sent him an email and was like, “I don’t think this is right. David’s a big part of it and I don’t feel good about this.” He was understanding: “I get it, but this is just the journalistic decision I’ve made.” I made a point of sending David a copy of the email to make sure he knew that I didn’t angle for that, and that I objected to it. David said he appreciated it, but it was hard. Part of it does have to do with the fact that I came from Star Trek, so there was an easy thing for a lot of journalists to latch on to. To connect from Star Trek to Battlestar. It was in the time before people were really using the term “showrunner” per se. That word was out there, but it wasn’t really a thing like it is now.
DAVID EICK
Battlestar Galactica is going on my tombstone regardless of whether people thought it was mine or not. When I get annoyed is when it feels like it’s just a matter of someone being sloppy or not looking under the hood. I also know that in sci-fi there’s a tendency to kind of want the singular visionary like Chris Carter, George Lucas, George R. R. Martin, Joss Whedon, Gene Roddenberry. We don’t tend to think of them as partnerships like we are a little more willing to think of other types of creative endeavors. I remember saying, as a joke, when I got the call from a reporter warning me about the fact the headline wasn’t going to include me, I said, “Ask your editor, when he orders ice cream, does he order Ben’s? I bet he says Ben and Jerry’s.” It is possible for more than one person to be responsible for a creative endeavor.
Beyond all of that, some of the pressure facing Moore and Eick was built into the show from the fact that it was considered by its creators to be much more of a character drama than a story-driven vehicle, which, while common today, flew in the face of the medium at the time and oftentimes was reflected in the ratings.
MARK STERN
(former president of original content, Syfy)
Part of revisionist history is that Battlestar Galactica was always just a big blockbuster. It wasn’t. I’ve always believed if it had been on AMC instead, or any other network, including our sister network USA, it would’ve found a bigger audience. I do believe that having it be on Sci-Fi always kind of gave it a certain taint of being just for the fanboys, and obviously it wasn’t.
RONALD D. MOORE
At that point, it still required a push to do a show so focused on character. I mean, again, Sci-Fi Channel was coming off of Farscape. That was their other big space case sci-fi show that they were just ending. So that was kind of what everyone was still talking about. Quest had just been on the air. And then you had the Star Trek franchise. So it was a push to move it into this other territory that was really a character drama that happened to be in a sci-fi universe. It was a really big, perceptual shift. In the television environment in general, this is when The Sopranos was on the air, but it was just happening. The Sopranos was becoming a big deal, you know? And Sex in the City and Six Feet Under, these pieces that HBO was doing. But people were kind of writing them off, like, “Well, only HBO can do that kind of stuff.” And the rest of the work in cable wasn’t going there yet.
There was still a mandate that everything had to be episodic. They did not want serialized storytelling, because they were afraid that if the audience missed episode three, they would be lost in episode four and they would never come back to the show. So there was a demand that any series you pitched had to have an episodic quality to it. They all had to be standalone stories. As we got on the air, then Lost broke through. But they were a true breakthrough. The television landscape was changing all around us, but the networks themselves were still kind of conservative. And even though there were these pockets of success in doing alternate kinds of storytelling, their instincts were still going much more toward, “Ah, that’s too risky. What do you mean, ‘It’s all about the characters’? There have to be ray guns, and things have to blow up every week. It’s too complicated, and we don’t want it to be dark.” There was still a conservatism just in terms of basic storytelling.
DAVID WEDDLE
(producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
On the last season of Deep Space Nine, Ira Behr, through just sheer force of will and audacity, started a continuing storyline even though we weren’t supposed to do it. That’s when I suddenly realized that science fiction and television shows have this potential for storytelling that is much bigger in scope and much more exciting than movies, because you can tell a story the way Tolstoy or Dickens did—a sprawling epic with many zigs and zags and ups and downs for the characters. That’s when I began to fall in love with science fiction as a genre. In science fiction you can tell any kind of story. You can tell a metaphysical story, a moral drama, a personal/psychological drama, a political story, religious theme—we did all of those in Battlestar. No other genre really offers so many story opportunities or dimensions, and serialized storytelling became an important tool, though back then no one wanted to hear it.
JAMIE BAMBER
(actor, “Captain Lee ‘Apollo’ Adama”)
We were really one of the first cable TV serialized shows. The Sopranos obviously set the mold and we weren’t long after that. But that also shot us in the foot, because I remember talking to Ron at the time and the networks and even cable channels at that time, and they really wanted something they could syndicate, that could be sold anywhere like an assortment of chocolates that didn’t matter which order
you ate the chocolate in. And we were before streaming and before all the models that really celebrate the binge. We were also, I think, one of the most pirated shows at that time, and people watched it through illegal downloads. They desperately wanted to watch it.
RONALD D. MOORE
To be fair, that’s also indicative of the technology, because before the DVR it was really hard for the audience to catch up on it. It was kind of impossible. Yes, with VHS you theoretically had the ability to tape episodes and watch them, but for whatever reason the VHS industry never quite cracked making it simple. Nobody could program their clocks, you know? The VHS recording just was always a joke. And then when DVDs came, you could catch up on last year, but that’s last year, so it didn’t help audience numbers week-to-week. It wasn’t until the DVR penetration started to become significant that you had an opportunity for the audience to record them as a season. You’d have networks broadcast them more than once and they could record the multiples and could actually bank them and watch them together and then get on board the show. Once that happened, the whole landscape kind of shifted into another style of storytelling. It’s like the networks were not completely unjustified in that philosophy that they had of making everything standalone, because the audience just wasn’t able to really catch up even if they wanted to back in the days of The Next Generation.
MARK STERN
I think the show was about three or four years too early in terms of the internet. If people had been able to catch up on Netflix or even iTunes, which at the time was still pretty nascent, it would have been a much bigger audience. Although it was always a hit on iTunes. I remember when you’d go on the site and see the top ten episodes that were being bought, it was always in the top ten. Sometimes number one. At the same time, iTunes made us nervous. In the beginning it was like, “iTunes is going to take our viewers away from us.” And what you quickly realized was the opposite: that iTunes allowed people to actually catch up. We got to the point where we went from “How do we not air this on iTunes?” to “When can we get this on iTunes?” Now you see those streaming services actually become part of a strategy for the way networks roll projects out, but at the time there was a lot of concern about cannibalizing the audience. So there was always a lot of appetite for it for people who were trying to catch up. But the serialized nature of it made it a bit difficult if you came in late.
DAVID WEDDLE
Back on Deep Space Nine, during the last season The Sopranos was airing and all of the writers on staff, Ron Moore included, were Sopranos fans. I didn’t have HBO in those days and they kept talking about it, and they were having a screening of the first-season finale. All the writers were going, so Brad and I went, too. When I saw that episode, my eyes opened because I realized that Star Trek was going through the door that The Sopranos had kind of opened with continuing storylines. I saw the genre changing in front of my eyes. And then, lo and behold, we got the opportunity to be on Battlestar Galactica, which was right in the red-hot center of that second Golden Age of Television. The real Golden Age of Television, actually.
BRADLEY THOMPSON
(producer, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
I think we were pretty successful in making it so that if you come in with a reasonable amount of intelligence, so to speak, you could figure out who were the good guys, who were the bad guys, and what was going on. Of course, the opening about the Cylons, that there was a war and all that good stuff at the beginning, sets you up with each episode. Kind of in the way that the old TV theme song set up the whole premise of the show so you could just pick it up.
RONALD D. MOORE
I sold Battlestar, in part, in saying we were doing a version of the structure of Hill Street Blues. I said, “Look, we’re going to do an old show in terms of story structure. It hasn’t been done in a while, but this is the idea: There’s an A-story every week that has a beginning, middle, and end. But there’s a B-story between characters that might run two, three, four episodes. And then there’s a C-story that’ll run throughout the whole season. So every week, even if you missed last week, there’s always a story you can hook into this week.” And if you look at Galactica, we really held on to that for quite a while. The whole first season in particularly always has an A-story that has a beginning, middle, and end, and then there’s runners and the bigger mythology story that’s going throughout and building it into the larger framework. But that was the way I sold it to them. They were structured and broken as individual episodes. In the writers’ room we wanted each episode to build on each one, but each of them had its own individual story. At least until the second year we started to really break that down. And by the time you get into the third and fourth years, it’s almost a straight-up serial.
The rise of DVRs eventually had one of the strongest impacts on the show, and the way that it would be able to unfold.
RONALD D. MOORE
The DVR penetration was growing and altered the ratings system by the third and fourth seasons. At the beginning they were collecting that data on season one and season two, where the ratings reports from the networks would have an addendum that said, “With DVR viewership, when you add that in, the show actually grew by almost twice as much over the course of the next week.” David and I would get really excited and adamant and say, “Look at the show! I mean, people are recording it and they’re watching it.” But Sci-Fi was saying, “None of that matters, because advertisers won’t give you a cent for it; we’re just collecting this data to have it. All that means anything to us is the live numbers. Nobody cares how many people watched it on DVR.” DVR Live Plus Seven hadn’t even been invented. But by the last year of the show, that was shifted and DVR penetration had gotten to the point where advertisers were having to take it seriously. Networks were demanding to get paid for some of it, and that data was starting to actually influence whether shows got picked up or not. It’s a whole different world now. That and streaming. Everything is different now. I mean, they’ll send me visual effects shots and I can watch them on my phone. That’s crazy.
The pace of technological change in the last twenty years is unbelievable. When I started on Star Trek, there was no internet. The computers weren’t even networked together in the same office. You had to take a big four-and-a-half-inch floppy downstairs to get a printout of your script. We did most of the changes in pen and ink on the physical pages themselves. Now I’m in an environment where we’re writing scripts and shooting them off. It’s a whole different world.
The same could be said for Battlestar Galactica, which represented world building from the outset. Referring back to the series bible, the history of humanity on the show begins on the planet Kobol, described as “the quasi-mythical world which in Galactica’s universe is the cradle of homosapien. The location of this planet has been lost in the mists of time, but our characters have presumably been raised with various myths and legends.… Kobol seems to be an Olympian setting in which gods or god-like beings cohabited the planet with mere mortals. At some point in the distant past thirteen ‘Tribes of Men’ left Kobol never to return again. Why they left is open to conjecture.… The thirteen tribes travelled far away from Kobol and eventually twelve of them settled in a star system with twelve planets capable of supporting human life. The remaining thirteenth tribe broke off in a different direction and legend has it that it found ‘a bright shining planet known as Earth’ … The people of the Twelve Tribes colonized twelve different planets and each colony was named according to what we here on Earth would regard as the Zodiac: Caprica (Capricorn), Picon (Pisces), Gemenon (Gemini), etc. By the time of the pilot, the Colonials have lived on their worlds for several thousand years and yet their technology is not that much more advanced than our own.…”
In terms of religion, the Colonials have “a poly-theistic belief system that worships at least some of the God-like beings on the planet Kobol … The [Lords] are roughly analogues to the Greek and Roman gods of Earth (this linkage also helps tie Earth’s b
elief systems and roots to those of Colonial society, remembering that we are all supposed to come from the same homeworld, namely Kobol) … Colonial society is very similar to 21st Century Earth society and can be considered a parallel world for all intents and purposes.…”
The flip side of the Colonists, of course, is the Cylons, described in the bible as “originally simple robots which grew increasingly complex with more and more powerful artificial intelligence. They eventually were used for danger work such as mining operations and they were used as soldiers in the armies of the 12 Colonies. As the Cylons became faster and more powerful, they also became smarter and more independent and there came a point at which the Cylons developed true sentience and self-awareness.… They rebelled against their humans masters and the Cylon War began. The war quickly became a desperate one for both sides as they came to believe that their own survival was dependent on annihilating their enemy.… The Cylon War finally ended in an armistice, the terms of which required the Cylons to leave the Colonial star system for a world of their own.…
“One of the more interesting aspects of the Cylons today is that they have consciously modeled themselves in the human form. Twelve forms to be precise—each of them embodying valuable aspects of the human body and personality. Just as western Man believes himself to be created in God’s image, the Cylons molded themselves into the likeness of their own creator. To be sure the Cylons believe humanity to be deeply flawed, but they also acknowledge its positive traits and have striven to preserve what they believe to be the worthy aspects of mankind into their only culture. Deciding that only twelve models of Cylon were necessary suggests that the diversity of humanity is overrated and that there are relatively few physical attributes worthy of preservation … The fact that the consciousness of one Cylon can be transmitted from a dying body to another Cylon body also suggests that the Cylons place a tremendous value on life itself.” It should be noted that, while there are only twelve models, there are likely millions of Cylons out there.
So Say We All Page 39