But we quickly realized that that wouldn’t work, because of our budget, because once we did the prison show with Tom Zarek, it almost broke our bank in terms of the fact we were way over budget and had to pay for it in subsequent episodes to make up the deficit that we’d suddenly incurred. Building the new sets was one thing, but then building a new ship that wasn’t the Galactica was really difficult. We realized we couldn’t do this every week at all, so it forced the story back onto the Galactica. More long-term storytelling, much more about the pilots. Much more about Adama and Tigh and Kara and Laura. People that you could shoot on standing sets. So that forced the storytelling in season one to be much more character-oriented. It goes less and less plotty over time. It became much more about the core family.
DAVID WEDDLE
At the end of the first regular episode, “33,” Ron threw in this scene where Helo is trapped on Cylon-occupied Caprica. He was left behind. He’s in the woods and then Number Six approaches him and there are all of these Cylon Centurions, and it looks like he’s going to be killed. Then, all of a sudden, Six gets her head blown off and there’s a Sharon who he thinks is his Sharon. She says, “You’re in great danger, Helo. We’ve got to get out of here, right now,” and they run off. So we all read the script—Toni Graphia, Carla Robinson, Brad, and I—and we go, “God, that was a great scene. Why did Sharon come for Helo? What’s that all about?” And Ron said, “I don’t know. I just thought it was an interesting thing to throw in at the end.” And he did that a lot. I don’t mean to make it sound like Ron was haphazard or arbitrary. He had that creative instinct for writing scenes and not knowing exactly what they meant yet.
RONALD D. MOORE
The first season’s very difficult for the other writers, because I’m still figuring out the show. Often times I would send them off to do a draft. They would send me back the draft and I would go, “This doesn’t work,” and then I would rewrite it completely, only because I still haven’t figured out the show. Not that they didn’t do what I asked them to do, or that they’re bad writers, but there were a lot of times where I literally didn’t quite know what the episode was or how the characters should behave or what their proper voice was until I took it myself and started to just, like, do it. Sort of like, “There’s a car, go fix the car.” But sometimes you’ve just got to get your hands dirty and you have to take apart the carburetor yourself to kind of realize what the issue is. And then you can teach somebody else how to do it.
That is traditionally the way showrunners are. And for a reason, because the showrunner is expected to hold the vision of the show and the voice of the show. There’s an expectation that it’s going to go through your typewriter at some point. Even on Outlander, year one, I rewrote every script to varying degrees. To small degrees, to large degrees, as I’m figuring it out, I’ve got to do it. Everyone expects that as part of the game. The network kind of wants you to do it, because to them and the studio you’re the guy. You’re the one who’s responsible, and when it’s turned in we assume that you have taken a pass at this, so you stand by it and this is what you want the show to be. They don’t want to hear you say, “I had problems with it, but I didn’t change it.” They want you to just go ahead and make the changes.
The balancing act becomes at what point are you just making a change to make a change? And at what point is it a change that’s necessary to the show? That’s the key question. So what happens, in an ideal situation like Galactica, is season one I rewrite everything. Season two, I’m still rewriting quite a bit, but I’m doing less. Season three, now I’m starting to let writers take more and more of the burden of taking it all the way to the end and doing their own notes, their own redrafts and all that. And then the fourth season, I’m pretty much just diving in and out on little things here and there, and concentrating on my episodes that I might be writing. Doing more producing, and spending more time in editorial. And then the show is over.
But long before it was over, there were the battles—particularly early on—with the network, which oftentimes could get quite acrimonious.
TODD SHARP
(production executive, Battlestar Galactica [2004])
The studio has its interests. The network has its interest. The network is going to pay a license fee. The studio is going to take on the deficit. There are many, many shows that aren’t seen by anybody on the network, but make a fortune for the studio. There are also shows that are seen by tons of people on the network side, and don’t make any money for the studio. There are different goals on each side, and in this case the studio was making the show for the network. Mark Stern was the network executive who would give notes on scripts, but so would the creative executive and the production executives on the studio end. Sometimes, as it is in most places, it’s going to be done separately.
It’s not like you send the show out to everybody and then you get all the notes and you compile them. The show will go from the producers to the studio. The studio will take a whack at it. The studio will give their notes. The producers will make changes. Then the show will go to the network. Then the network will give notes. Now the studio and the producers will decide which of these notes are we going to or not going to do. There is that tension born out of separate interests and separate goals, and separate needs and separate opinions, and you hope that everybody comes together. I would say as a general rule that Mark Stern is one of the smartest executives in town. He’s a very smart and savvy and passionate guy. He feels very strongly about his convictions. His goal was to make a show that would appeal to the broadest possible audience. The producers’ goals aren’t always in line with that.
RONALD D. MOORE
Like I said, I sold the show under the idea that each episode was going to be really episodic and self-contained. And the first season is kind of reflective of that. But it evolved and just kept going in the direction of making it more and more serialized, just like Deep Space did. But the network didn’t like it. They were not happy with the show generally the first season. There was a difficult relationship, and they hated the first episode “33.” To be fair, Mark Stern, when we he first saw it, called me and said, “My God, what you did. This is West Wing in space. I can’t believe it.” He was really blown away.
MARK STERN
(former president of original content, Syfy)
I don’t care what anybody says, there was a lot of nervousness about Battlestar at the channel, from a lot of different sources about what we were trying to accomplish, including from me. But it was one of those things where you knew that you were uncomfortable, but it was the right kind of uncomfortable. It pushed you outside of your limit and you really had to steel your spine and say, “Okay, we’re going to do this.”
RONALD D. MOORE
The higher-ups at Sci-Fi and the Sci-Fi network were not so thrilled, and they thought it was too depressing, too down. You know, “No one’s going to watch this show.” They started talking about whether we could reedit the episode so that “33” would be the fourth or the fifth. It was one of those things, which was interesting. We never even took it seriously. We just said no, because there’s not even a chance. But they were fearful, and, “Oh my God, the show is just so dark and crazy. No one will watch it. It’s a huge flop.”
DAVID EICK
The note we would bristle the most at would be “It’s not fun…” or “It’s not likable” or “She’s not likable, because…” To us, the whole point was to do something in the genre where you weren’t stumbling over yourself to remind people that it was fun. By the way, that remains a hurdle and a challenge today as I know for both of us, as we continue to develop work on other stuff. You’re always fighting the fact that they buy, and to a certain degree the audience is trained to expect, a genre thing has a certain escapist component to it. Now, this is being said without really taking into account what’s happened with Jessica Jones or Daredevil and a lot of shows that have obviously not erred on the side of being silly or escapist. They r
eally tried to make a heartfelt or pathological kind of character piece. I commend that. I don’t get a chance to watch a lot of it, but I commend it. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. If you have Marvel, that obviously buys you a lot of leeway, but if you’re just trying to sell something in science fiction as a space opera or anything that has to do with fantasy, horror, sci-fi, and that kind of thing, you’re always facing a little bit of a struggle ensuring that people will allow you to do it seriously, that you can approach it from a place where you’re attempting to say something, not just entertain. Very, very difficult.
ANGELA MANCUSO
(former president, Universal Cable Entertainment)
Mark Stern and I definitely disagreed a lot; he always thought the show was too dark. And added into the mix was Michael Rymer, who had never done television before and he is not someone who puts a lot of levity into his work. Michael tends to be more serious in the tone of his pieces, and Mark was more on the side of lightening it up. We were more on the side of letting it be a little dark, a little scary and a little foreboding. Needless to say, there were definitely some disagreements on what the tone of the show should be.
RONALD D. MOORE
In “33,” there was a lot of argument about whether there were any people aboard the Olympic Carrier, which has to be destroyed at the end to avoid further tracking by the Cylons. We actually shot people in the Olympic Carrier where Lee is flying down the side of the ship and he looks in the windows. We shot them. There were all these people looking out the windows at Lee. The word came down that we couldn’t do that. There couldn’t be anybody on board that ship, and that was their hill to die on.
MICHAEL RYMER
What we tried to show was that there were times when you had to sacrifice the few for the many. The tough call, and I’m sure in real life it’s a lot worse than we imagine. You have a lot of blood on your hands. If you are not prepared to act decisively, if you are afraid to make decisions, you could cause a lot more damage. You have to take responsibility where the consequences are extremely high for a lot of people who don’t even know you, and that’s a big weight.
MARK STERN
There was a real involved discussion with the folks in New York, who, when they first saw “33,” got really nervous, because it’s a very atypical episode in terms of traditional television. So you’ve got all your cast and they’re exhausted, and they look like hell, and it’s a pretty dark episode. Then you’ve got one of your main characters who has to destroy a civilian ship. There was a certain amount of pushback from New York about wanting to move that episode down in the order, but we couldn’t because we were told it was a serialized show so it had to be in sequence. So there was a real gut check there. We changed it so the windows were empty, just to give us a little bit of breathing room there. So you don’t know if it’s filled with people or not, but we don’t need to see the little kid in the window crying when he gets blown up by Apollo in the first episode of your series.
RONALD D. MOORE
They just wouldn’t allow it. Finally David and I conceded on that. So David, with visual effects, put in some movement behind the windows. Little flickers suggesting that things might be moving in there, but we really felt there were people on that ship, because the story has no teeth to it if you don’t do that.
MARK STERN
By the way, that was just a back-and-forth discussion. It wasn’t like Ron and David were like, “We need to see those kids in the windows.” It was more like, “Look, guys, we’re all with you on this, but we’re seeing people.” It was a good example of a bit of give-and-take. Of, “We’re going to that place with you guys, but let’s just take a little bit of the edge off.”
TODD SHARP
This was a battle that Ron went toe-to-toe with the network on, and ultimately backed down. Now, that’s a situation where somebody might say, “I hate Mark Stern, because he made us lose that.” The truth is, Mark has interests that he has to represent and defend, which is about growing the audience for the show. What’s the good of making a show if you’re not going to have as many people watching it as possible? Between producers and the studio the tension is usually about money. For producers and networks, the tensions are usually about creative. In that case, it was very strong-willed people on both sides who felt strongly that we should either cross the line or stay just to this side of the line.
DAVID EICK
We had to make a couple of calculated decisions about the happy factor; not to accommodate a network note about make them nicer, because if you’re going to write a drama about the Holocaust, you’re probably going to have this scene where they sing a Hanukkah song on Hanukkah, because the tragedy comes from human spirit struggling in spite of all the hardship. So you need those scenes, too.
DAVID WEDDLE
Back on Deep Space Nine, we saw Ira Behr heroically pushing the envelope and breaking the rules as often as he could get away with. Battlestar started as a reaction toward Star Trek, then it grew into its own unique, organic show.
BRADLEY THOMPSON
The key is to take chances. That was the biggest thing. Ron was also encouraging in that he was like, “I want you to surprise me.” He was confident enough to say if that surprise wasn’t enough, he could push it back.
DAVID WEDDLE
In season two of Battlestar we had an episode called “Valley of Darkness.” Chief Tyrol and others were on Kobol and they had to get medicine to a guy who’s been hit. Tyrol and Cally have to go back to their landing site all the way across this planet …
BRADLEY THOMPSON
Where they left the med kit.
DAVID WEDDLE
And they lose a guy who gets killed on the way. I can’t remember if there was an endpoint carved out or not. But Brad and I were given the freedom to write it however we wanted to. So we wrote that they go through all this shit and then somebody dies. They get back and the guy is already dead. We eventually changed it to he’s dying and it’s too late. But I remember Ron’s note was, “The guy’s already dead. It was for nothing? Awesome!” We had that kind of freedom. We were allowed in drafts to just do stuff like that and let Ron see it and see what he thought. It was a logical extension of the Deep Space Nine aesthetic, because now we were free, because we weren’t with a franchise. We didn’t have all these inhibitors.
MARK STERN
There were definitely conversations about how far to take certain things. The mix of light and darkness. One of my favorite stories about the series is that there was a constant dialogue with Ron and David about the balance of where does this show become hopeless versus just a struggle? And where do you start to maybe detach from that struggle because it’s so hard? You always wanted to go there and not pull your punches, but there was definitely a discussion back and forth about, “Let’s give ourselves things to hold on to while these people are going through their struggle,” which obviously got pretty dark. Early on I remember saying, “You know, even though things are difficult on the ship and everything’s a struggle, life goes on and people have birthdays and celebrations and we should see some of those things.”
RONALD D. MOORE
The network wanted birthday parties. We’re in the first few episodes. I get this call. They’d seen the story outlines of the scripts and they say, “The show is just too depressing. It’s too dark. It’s too down. Why can’t these people go to a birthday party or go play basketball once in a while to get away from their troubles?” I’m like, “These people just went through an apocalypse. Billions are dead, they’re running for their lives, and you want them to have a birthday party?” “Yeah, we just think you’re being too precious with the show. This isn’t what people want to see, and you’re underestimating the impact of what you’re doing,” blah, blah, blah. So basically I told them to go fuck themselves.
MARK STERN
So this pilot achieves a certain a number of flights, and there’s a celebration. Yeah, they hoist him on their shoulders and then, in the
middle of the celebration, a bomb shakes loose and rolls into the room and blows everyone up. And with that I was like, “Okay, got it. Won’t be asking for that again.” That was their little “fuck you” to the network, which I appreciated. It was like, “Okay, it’s not all going to be hearts and flowers.” Truth is, you always got nervous when you’d read a script and there would be something happy happening, because you knew, “Uh-oh, it’s not going to last.”
RONALD D. MOORE
The network got their draft and I get this call saying, “Okay, we get it. No more birthday parties.” And then they promptly said, “But does it have to be twenty pilots dead? Can’t it be fifteen?”
Ironically, this was similar to an argument that the producers on Deep Space Nine had in the final season where they wanted the Ferengi character to lose his legs in a war, but were told he could only lose one of them.
RONALD D. MOORE
It’s the same argument. Somehow that makes it better for you? Fifteen or twenty? Favorite phrase was, “It’s just the tonnage. It’s not any individual thing, it’s the tonnage of how much depression and horror that’s in the show. It’s just the tonnage of it; it’s so severe, you just can’t handle it.” I just kept hearing the mantra all year one about how dark the show was, how no one’s going to watch this, why can’t you lighten up and be more fun? And we just kept fighting it. David and I, fighting it tooth and nail.
We had a huge fight with Mark Stern about the episode where Kara is interrogating the Cylon Leoben and puts his head in a bucket and all that. Mark didn’t want to show it. He didn’t want torture on the show. Can’t have the characters torturing anybody. They’re heroes, they have to act like heroes. And this was right in the middle of the whole thing that was going on in Guantánamo and waterboarding, and all this kind of stuff. It was in the news. And we were like, “No, we are doing this show because this is an important thing. We’re doing the show to talk about things like this.”
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