Guarding An Uncertain Future

March 2, 2008 by brian

“Uncertain future” has a a dual meaning where Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is concerned. These heroes aren’t just battling evil robots and machine-led conspiracies, they’re fighting sitcoms, reality shows and other dramas on the crowded Monday night primetime docket. SFUniverse attended a packed conference call where queries about the show’s future were the order of the day. Executive producer Josh Friedman and Brian Austin Green (SCC’s Derrick Reese) clued us in on the difficulties of defending the future.

One of the pitfalls of sci-fi shows is the cost as compared to other shows the network could put in the same time slot. That’s only gotten worse with the onslaught of reality shows. Could Fox’s purse strings play a role in whether or not Terminator returns?

J. Friedman: You know it’s not actually an expensive show to produce. In fact, I think we’re below the budget of many action shows that are on TV right now. In fact, our budget is much more in line with your basic drama that you would find on any network. So I don’t think that cost at this point plays much of a factor. As to the ratings, you know I don’t know what to make of it, really. I think that the show has done well for a new show and for a new drama. There are not many that do very well or haven’t been doing very well, certainly in the last strike era. And we do very well in certain demographics. We do very well in DVR. We do very well on downloads. I think for our type of show that is a big chunk. We were one of the top five shows being TiVo’d right now, which is how I watch the show because otherwise no one would know that I’m watching.

Genre fans have an insatiable appetite for spoilers. Friedman goes above and beyond to make sure nothing critical gets out. So the few days before the season finale two-hour cliffhanger are a real exercise in patience for him.

J. Friedman: I’m a fascist about spoilers. I’m the biggest pain to the marketing and promotion department, and I think they were very happy that I was on strike for 14 weeks. Before they could do whatever they wanted to do and since I’ve gotten back I get these little e-mails and they say, “Can we show this?’ And I say, “No.” If I had my way the commercials would be 30 seconds of black with the words “Sarah Connor” on them.

BA Green: I actually did a talk show one night and the only clip we could get of me on the show, because I hadn’t premiered on it yet, was the teaser from the episode before, so it was like “Next week on the Sarah Connor Chronicles” and it showed my running and fighting, everything that everybody else had seen. We couldn’t get any more footage than that. I knew at the end of it all that was Josh’s doing.

Brian said he’s having an incredible time playing a pivotal character in the Terminator franchise’s history. It sounds like he’s still trying to talk Friedman into giving him the costume Derrick Reese wore while fighting Terminators.

BA Green: Because if I did, (get to keep it) I would actually have it on one of those mannequins in my movie room or something, here. It was the coolest thing ever. The blaster alone, the fact that I was the only one with a green scope on it was pretty cool. But there were a bunch of specific little things all through the costumes that—just little details that you really didn’t pick up, but everybody had Terminator Kills on their sleeve, these little badges. And they were just little Terminator heads but everybody had one for every kill. Some guys had one and I think I had seven, which was pretty cool.

One of the most striking images of this season was Cameron’s unexpected ballet performance at the end of last week’s episode. One interviewer asked if traditionally cold, stoic Terminators would keep “trying to be like Cylons.”

J. Friedman: I would argue with all due respect that Cylons have wanted to be like Terminators for many years…Probably all of them wanted to be like Blade Runner. But I think she (Cameron) is a more advanced model and she has more ability to at least mimic emotion and do some things. I think any time you have any form of cyborg, android, …, whatever, there’s always a temptation by the writers to start exploring that whole humanity thing. How far it goes and where we go and what her limitations are is something I’m still exploring. It’s interesting because I think that for where—there are two groups of people I think who watch these shows, there are the real sci-fi people who watch these shows and then there’s everybody else.

It seems that everybody else has probably never seen Battlestar Galactica and probably can’t remember Blade Runner and couldn’t tell you what was going on. So they’re all fascinated by it, and then you have the people who’ve seen every episode of Star Trek and …they’re like, oh they’re going down this road, because we’ve seen this road, and you sort of have a responsibility on the one hand, I think, to try to explore it in the ways that it most obviously occurs. And then I think to the people who’ve seen these things before, which includes me, you want to keep those people interested so you want to explore it in the ways that we haven’t seen it before.