Posted in: Peacock, Preview, streaming, TV | Tagged: battlestar galactica, peacock, preview, ronald d. moore, sam esmail

Battlestar Galactica Has "Great Outline": Sam Esmail Updates Series

Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot, Homecoming) offered an update and some insights on his upcoming Battlestar Galactica series for Peacock.

Considering the project was originally announced in September 2019 – and things had been pretty quiet over the course of those four-plus years since – it's not surprising if you're surprised to be getting an update from Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot, Homecoming) on his upcoming take on the Battlestar Galactica franchise for Peacock. Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter while promoting his Netflix film Leave the World Behind, Esmail offered an update on where things stand, explained why he wants the "cream of the crop" to run the series, and how AI will be one of the factors that will play a role in their storytelling. "We have a great outline, and we're probably going to go to pilot soon," Esmail shared, which was definitely some unexpected good news.

Why Esmail Isn't Running the Series: "Because I know myself as a filmmaker, and I don't know if hard sci-fi is something I'm going to be the A-plus person to pull off. And Battlestar needs the cream of the crop. But I love the world and what Ron Moore did with the [2004 version] — how it was such an allegory for what we were going through at the time of 9/11. I knew that if we bring in the right partners to write and film the show, I could be on that other end as a person of guidance to say, 'OK, I think this is working; it's the same magic I felt watching the Ron Moore version.'"

Esmail: "Battlestar Galactica" Needs to Match Audience's Growing Tech Sophistication: "The world is changing way too fast for us. I mean, when we started working on it, I obviously was aware of AI, but now, four or five years later, it's in the public consciousness, and now that's so influential in how we're going to tell the story. The allegory piece is something that is crystallized in a different way, too. The focus is the same, which is the fear of tech and how it might take over, but this idea of just 'the robots are going to be our overlords' is a very facile and overly simplistic way of looking at it. Now that the audience is more sophisticated about the consequences, I think we have to match that with 'Battlestar.'"

Battlestar Galactica: A Look Back at Sam Esmail's 2021 Series Thoughts

Back in January 2021, Esmail laid out some of his thoughts on the directions that the series would take and his approach to the project. Here's a look at some of the highlights:

Esmail Spoke to Ronald D. Moore to Get His Blessing: "We're still working on the pilot. Look, it's a big universe; it's a big world, I want to respect the Ronald Moore 'Battlestar.' I spoke to him before I even took on the project to make sure that it's all kosher with him, because the last thing I want to do is step on his toes, and the one thing we both agreed on is that it won't be a reboot of what he did. Which I think we both wanted.:

The Pilot Will Help Shape the Show's World: "It's still in the early phases of trying to figure out the world via the pilot. I think we've got the basic construction of the type of story we want to tell, the part of mythology that we're gonna explore – because Battlestar does have a rich mythology and again I have to give Ron a lot of credit for that – and so now we're sort of closing in on what that pilot's gonna look like."

The Ensemble Series May Not Have an Ending When It Begins: "The expansion of [Mr. Robot] into a series feels easier than when you take a concept like Battlestar, which is inherently an ensemble cast of characters, where you're not telling just one story but you're kind of jumping into the lives of multiple characters and their arcs. So there's a bigger canvas that you're playing with. I think what we're doing is we're gonna work out some of the construction of where, thematically and sort of the mythology, of what type of story within that time span and within that part of the mythology we're gonna tackle, what we're gonna explore in this series. But I don't know specifically – and again we're still early – I don't know specifically if we're gonna work out every beat of how it's going to end in the same way that I did with Mr. Robot. It's very different because of how personal and singular Mr. Robot was in its story."

Will the Series Drop Weekly or Be a Binge-Drop? Yes- and Esmail's Excited About It: "When I spoke to Peacock about it, and Mike Lesslie who's an amazing writer – he's the one who's showrunning and writing the pilot – the one thing we got excited by is do we release an episode a week, [release all at once]? For me, it was like let's get in there and tell the right story and it will tell us how many episodes. We may dump three episodes in a row because it's a three-episode-long battle sequence that needs to be dropped in a row even though they're three signifying chapters, and maybe each chapter is switching a point of view within that battle sequence. There may be a 20-minute episode that's the backstory of one of the characters that gets dropped right after that.

So I can't tell you the number of episodes, but it's also kind of a little meaningless because I think we're gonna look at it as sort of like a spider web where we can plot and point and say, 'Well this isn't chronologically after Episode 1 or Episode 2, it's the backstory of someone, but let's release that so audiences can check that out if they want or they can just jump into the battle sequence'. We're really gonna experiment with form in that way, and again I think with a property like Battlestar it lends to that."

To learn why Esmail isn't helming the series, additional thoughts about the series' release, and more, check out the full interview here.

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