Entertainment
The Sci-Fi Spinoff That Destroyed Our Chance At A Franchise To Rival Star Wars
By Joshua Tyler
| Published
New space science fiction shows rarely catch fire right away. Star Trek was infamously cancelled after three seasons due to low ratings, only to rise from the ashes in rerun syndication. Firefly was cancelled after a few episodes, only to spawn a movie so good it ended up near the top of our list of the best space movies of all time.
But one space series did the impossible. It captured the cultural zeitgeist right away. In the now-forgotten era of binge-watching via post office-mailed Netflix DVDs, it became an obsession for sci-fi fans and normies alike.
That should have been a launching pad for a generational sci-fi franchise to rival Star Wars. Instead, it spawned a spinoff series so disastrous that everything it built evaporated into thin air, leaving behind nothing but the sweat of shirtless wrestlers.
This is Why Caprica Failed.
Battlestar Galactica Finishes On A High
When the reimagined Battlestar Galactica finished in March 2009, it had the two things a franchise needs: audience heat and critical credibility. During its run, episodes of the show aired in theaters to eager packed audiences. It was a watercolor topic of conversation and sucked in even people who weren’t into science fiction.
The final run averaged 2.2M viewers in the U.S., and the finale spiked to ~2.4M, the show’s best number in years. Those may not sound like big numbers, but they were huge for a show airing on SyFy, a basic cable channel people otherwise ignored.
When Battlestar Galactica arrived on DVD, it became an even bigger hit as people bought box sets and binged the show all at once in the pre-streaming era. Battlestar popularized the idea of binge-watching, setting the stage for the streaming future that was to come.
The BSG universe was perfectly poised to go bigger and become the kind of mega-media franchise that lasts for generations. Star Trek turned itself into a mega-franchise after being canceled three seasons in, and here was Battlestar Galactica riding a wave of success that should have made it much easier to propel to the next level.
Instead, the follow-through came in stuttered moves that dispersed attention and trained fans to stop checking in. Only a few short years after its success, Battlestar Galactica was a dead franchise, a once-in-a-generation missed opportunity by SyFy’s parent company, NBCUniversal.
How NBCUniversal Squandered Battlestar Galactica’s Potential With Its Next Show
NBCU/Syfy did produce companion pieces: Razor (2007) during the run and half-hearted DVD-only The Plan (2009) after, but the core “what’s next” arrived as Caprica in 2010.
Ronald D. Moore, the genius solo creator of Battlestar Galactica, only served as a co-creator on Caprica. He shares the title with a man named Remi Aubuchon, who’d previously worked with Moore in the BSG writers’ room. By all accounts, it was Remi, not Moore, who was the real architect of the show. Which may, at least in part, explain why it’s so different.
Set more than fifty years before the events of Battlestar Galactica, Caprica is about how human bureaucracy accidentally invents the society that will lead to its own extinction. Caprica focuses on two families, the Graystones and the Adamas, as cutting-edge technology collides with grief, religion, and ego. It results in the birth of the Cylons. The idea was for it to happen slowly, very slowly, over the course of the show.
In practice, Caprica played out like a soap opera, with few sci-fi elements on screen. The show was creatively ambitious but also tonally totally different.
Caprica was a prequel about corporate intrigue set in a universe where audiences expected gritty space combat. It gave fans something with the Battlestar Galactica name attached to it that bore no resemblance at all to the franchise they loved. Imagine if, after Star Trek was cancelled in the 60s, CBS had decided to follow it up with a Star Trek police procedural set on Earth, and you’ll start to understand what a horrible mistake Caprica was.
Caprica needed patient scheduling and a clear runway to overcome the hurdle of its premise. It didn’t get either. Critics tried to give it a chance, but despite praising its intellect, ultimately they admitted it was unreasonably slow, way too talky, and wildly uneven. Again, basically nothing like the tension-filled world of Battlestar Galactica.
Ratings slid from a mid-season high of 1.6 M to fewer than 900,000 viewers after a hiatus; Syfy then canceled the show and pulled the remaining episodes from its schedule, burning them off months later. Whatever audience was willing to follow learned the wrong lesson: don’t invest.
After Caprica, NBCUniversal Stopped Caring
It was a failure so immediate and extreme that whatever faith there was in BSG evaporated. Still, a last-ditch attempt to salvage things was thrown together.
After Caprica, the series Blood & Chrome was announced, and it sounded like the crowd-pleaser they should have made in the first place. It was to be about young Adama in a Cylon War setting.
Unfortunately, NBCUniversal had already quit on BSG. Rather than a fast series order and a serious investment, the project arrived as a 10-part web series on Machinima in late 2012 and only later as a TV movie in early 2013.
Battlestar Galactica needed a grand Star Trek: The Motion Picture-style blockbuster movie to push it to the next level. NBCUniversal gave it a low-budget web series. Producer David Eick publicly positioned Blood & Chrome as “always meant” for online, but that didn’t make it better; it just made it more insulting.
Ronald Moore Killed His Own Creation
The truth is, much of the fault lies at the feet of Ronald D. Moore. Before you come at me with your pitchforks, let me say that I love Ron Moore. And I loved him long before Battlestar.
Moore was a huge part of the creative force behind the best parts of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and his work is simply incredible. But when he finished Battlestar Galactica, he basically quit on the franchise he’d birthed into being.
He’s admitted he was burned out. Burned out on space stuff. He spent a decade working on Star Trek, then created his own space show, and he just didn’t want to do space sci-fi anymore.
The thing is, that’s what he’s good at, and that’s where his success always was. Nothing he’s done since has come close to reaching the level of quality achieved in Star Trek and BSG. He’s done a lot since then, just none of it in space.
Ron Moore had a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and when BSG finished, he decided he wasn’t going to do anything with it. The result was a show no one wanted in Caprica, followed by the evaporation of everything he’d worked so hard at creating.
He could have been the next Gene Roddenberry, but instead, he’s spent his time since making things like time-travel romance, with no real cultural footprint.
SyFy Gets Turned Into A Wrestling Channel
While all this was unfolding, the channel that launched Battlestar Galactica was repositioning itself. Sci Fi Channel rebranded to Syfy in 2009 and leaned harder into broader-appeal reality/wrestling alongside genre.
Turning your science fiction channel into a wrestling channel was always a bizarre choice. It diluted the sense that “space opera lives here,” right when Galactica fans needed a dependable home for successors. Trade coverage and industry commentary at the time called out the shift, with cancellations clustered around quality scripted sci-fi.
NBCUniversal Throws Ron Moore’s Sci-Fi Universe Away
Universal eventually began announcing Battlestar Galactica feature films. That sounds positive, but it wasn’t. They were all reboots and not continuations of the show. There was one with Bryan Singer attached in 2011, later Francis Lawrence in 2016, then Simon Kinberg in 2020. None of them actually happened.
What had happened was that NBCUniversal had clearly signaled to fans that the once-in-a-generation sci-fi universe Ron Moore spent 10 years building was being thrown in the garbage, and that if BSG ever came back, they’d be starting all over from scratch. Universal did the impossible, producing a hit sci-fi show. And then they decided to erase it and start over rather than continue to grow on that foundation.
Imagine if, instead of giving William Shatner’s Captain Kirk a movie, they’d recast him and redid all the same episodes again. Or instead of introducing a new show set in the same universe, in the form of The Next Generation, Star Trek had wiped the slate clean, created a new sci-fi universe, and slapped the old name on it.
Unfortunately, that’s now standard practice in Hollywood. A practice that accelerated beyond all reason after BSG. That mentality is why there has never been another long-running sci-fi universe like Star Trek or Star Wars, and why there will never be. Battlestar Galactica was perfectly poised to take that trip, but no one at Universal dared to make a real investment.
