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Anyone On ‘Galactica’ Can Take A BulletSeries given more freedom to break out of the niche
By ALAN STANLEY BLAIR
May-14-2007
It’s no secret that "Battlestar Galactica" has struggled in the ratings during its third season, but that’s only part of the formula that the SciFi Channel is looking at when the series returns for its fourth and final season next year.
Talking to the Web site Crave Online, SciFi Channel vice president of programming Mark Stern said that part of the overall master plan includes taking a look at what worked in Season 3 and what didn't. But one warning that Stern did give is that not everyone will like the direction Season 4 will take.
"What I love about it -- and they've done the same thing in Season 4 -- is they never really just sit back and say, ‘Well, that works so let's just do that again.'" Stern told the site. "It's always like, ‘OK, let's elevate it.’"
Some of that took the forefront when the series settled itself on New Caprica for the beginning of the third season.
"We were on New Caprica and we were out of space, we were out of our spaceships for four or five, six episodes," Stern said. "I think that disconcerted some people and definitely the series went into some relationship-driven places and there were some love triangle things that some people felt like it departed a bit too much. I think people are definitely looking at, I think [executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick] are definitely looking at what worked and what didn't work as well as they go to Season 4."
Stern also delved into the murky zone of how to evolve the show naturally without losing the audience, something that the recent love triangle storyline of the third season seems to have done for some viewers.
"It's always about, 'How do you grow the show? How do you continue to evolve it without evolving it to a point where it's no longer the animal you started with?'" he said. "That's a constant calibration process of back and forth. Sometimes you go a little too far on one side. Then you bring it back around again. The key is to hold onto what's working about the show, why are people watching it, let's make sure those elements are there and then going from there."
However, despite the hard-hitting drama the series provides, "Battlestar Galactica" always will be something of a niche show. However, thanks to various entertainment media, Stern said he hopes that the BSG audience will continue to bring in new fans even this late in the game.
"I think part of it is ''Battlestar Galactica’ on the SciFi Channel' is always going to be a barrier to some people and the recruitment of that is just always going to be a challenge," Stern said. "I think part of it is that it's serialized so there is maybe the sense of it's too late for me to come in and figure it out. Look, that's part of the issue of doing a serialized show. You've got to make sure you have a way of recruiting people. That's why I love DVDs and iTunes basically."
With that in mind, Stern also added that the producers of the series have always been given a lot more freedom than other shows to allow the series to stand out from other sci-fi series without facing an ever-escalating budget.
"They [the producers] know what they're doing and it's not broken and we don't need to fix it," he said. "So for us, I think we view our role as let's kind of be a keeper of the flame in terms of what the heart of the show is and what's working about it. If we feel like it's going a little a field, let's talk about that but otherwise, they really know what they're doing."
Crave Online did the interview before series stars Edward James Olmos and Katee Sackhoff said they believed that the fourth season would be the final season of the show. Eick later denied the claim, but sources told SyFy Portal over the weekend there is little doubt that "Battlestar Galactica" will end after the fourth season.
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