The game is now available as a free download from the iTunes app store. To get signed up and either defend or obliterate humanity, visit the Terminator Ambush site. If you try it out, hop on our comment boards and let us know whether it’s a bright new advancement in mobile gaming or as the Ahh-nold would say, “obsolete technology.”

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If those numbers hold up they would put the critically-acclaimed premiere behind NBC’s Deal or No Deal and probably behind the ESPN cable broadcast of Monday Night Football. (Those numbers weren’t immediately available.) But it’s expected that much of Monday’s programming finished behind MNF.That game was the Green Bay Packers’ first without legendary quarterback Brett Favre. Thus, it had promotion coming either directly or indirectly from just about every sports news/talk show airing over the past three months.

Fast forwarding, midseason games with one or both teams out of the playoff race will surely not hold the same ratings thrall. However, Chronicles was Fox’s highest rated show Monday night, surpassing its much publicized hit Prison Break. Zap2It notes that Fox won the demographic advertisers care about the most, the coveted 18-49 group. Yay for conspicuous consumption!

©2008 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Michael Yarish/FOX

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One of the most promising new shows of the strike-shortened 2008 TV season will return as The Hollywood Reporter confirms Fox has ordered 13 more episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The offshoot from the well-known Terminator film franchise debuted in January and was the highest-rated new scripted show among adults 18-49, drawing an average of 10 million viewers. Fox is also believed to be high on the show because of the promotional opportunities it presents the fourth Terminator film. That movie will star Christian Bale as John Connor and is set in the future controlled by the machines.

The season finale, which ended in a cliffhanger that saw Summer Glau’s Cameron character (a nod to visionary director James Cameron) blasted with a car bomb, brought in good numbers. I’m excited about this as I thought this show was really well done. I can’t wait to see what they can come up with now that they’re going to be around for a while.

©2007 Fox Broadcasting Co. CR: Jill Greenberg/FOX

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“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.

©2008 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Danny Feld/FOX

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Demon Hand

Air Date: February 25

Sarah finds a dossier from her stay at the mental hospital in Agent Ellison’s apartment, which leads her to psychiatrist and doomsday convert Dr. Silverman (guest star Bruce Davison); John learns what it took for his mom to escape the hospital; Cameron enrolls in a ballet class on her hunt for the Turk; Agent Ellison’s endo-arm discovery puts him in danger.

Dean Winchester would be proud!

Love the look on John’s face.

Does anyone look at him and think Hendricksen?

Lovely Lena.  Lovely lighting.

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Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles  (Fox at 9:00)

Queen’s Gambit

Sarah’s friend Andy enters his computer into a chess competition. While at the event, Sarah meets a stranger (Brian Austin Green) who shares a similar past. Meanwhile, Cameron undergoes grief counseling at school, and Agent Ellison tries to make sense out of the carnage resulting from a terminator clash.

Kyle XY (ABC Family at 8:00)

Between a Rack and a Hard Place

Suspicious of Taylor’s intentions, Adam Baylin returns to urge Kyle to keep an eye on Jessi, but Kyle’s new mission comes between him and Amanda. Meanwhile, Josh struggles with his additional responsibilities at the Rack.

Jericho (SCI FI Channel beginning at 7:00)

SCI FI is running a mini-marathon starting with the pilot episode of Jericho followed by “Fallout”, “Four Horsemen” and “Walls of Jericho”.  Jericho returns to CBS tomorrow at 10 with all new episodes.

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Dungeons and Dragons

Air Date: Feb 18

While in and out of consciousness and fighting for his life, a Stranger (guest star Brian Austin Green) flashes back to the year 2027, remembering his life in the future and his personal battle against the machines; meanwhile, Sarah finds herself trying to explain the past to Charley (guest star Dean Winters).

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“Our audience has always identified with this character that has an enormous task thrust upon her. She starts out as a waitress, her beginnings are not auspicious, but because of the calling she rises to the occasion and transforms into an amazing heroine. I think that’s something we’d all like to believe can happen to each of us, that if such a calling were thrust upon us that we could be strong enough and rise to the occasion.”

There’s no doubting Middleton’s (who acts as Consulting Producer on “Chronicles”) passion for this new series and its characters. You only have to watch the first few minutes to see that this is going to be a no-holds-barred thrill ride, something Terminator fans have come to expect.

The series falls into place a couple of years after the events of Terminator 2 but not exactly before Terminator 3, if that makes any sense. It’s all due to that mind-numbing paradox known as time travel, which, in Terminator lore, allowed John Connor to send his father back in time to actually. . .well. . father him in the first place.

Says Middleton, “I knew that Sarah wouldn’t appear in any future movies and I desperately wanted to bring that character back. And while I enjoyed working on Terminator 3, I completely embraced the idea that through something established in the mythology, time travel, we could create an entirely new storyline and timeline for Sarah Connor herself.”

This means that by the very act of being and doing in the pilot episode, Sarah effectively changes the future so that the events of Terminator 3 may never happen. This leaves the TV show open to a variety of twists and turns including depositing our heroes into the present day, despite the fact that it’s beyond the date of Judgment Day as laid down in the earlier films. (Still with me?)

Great, click the link and keep reading. . .

The true joy of the series is that you don’t have to understand the previous films or even wrestle with the conundrums of time travel because this incarnation is more about people than technology.

“I’ve always loved Sarah’s intensity. While fighting very viciously against her foes, you can see the stakes, her fears, her anxiety and it’s very interesting,” says Middleton. “A fantastic character created by Jim Cameron and Lena has knocked it out of the park in terms of taking this character and making it her own.”

Lena Headey is a British actress known for her work in 300 and The Brothers Grimm. She’s been handed the daunting task of recreating a powerful woman that has always been identified with another actress, in this case Linda Hamilton. Tired of the comparisons already, Lena should look to her fellow countrywoman Michelle Ryan for support. It wasn’t long ago that Ryan was fielding the same questions when she took on the role of the new Bionic Woman.

Says Lena, “It’s a new generation. Linda Hamilton will always be the original Sarah Connor and the imprint that she left is very strong. I take from the movies what is undeniable, which is a strength and an instinct and an absolute sense of wrong or right that is ingrained in her.”

But Lena brings a few new nuisances to the role. “There’s all sorts of things going on with Sarah. I think her relationship with John is reaching new depths. She’s learning to be a mother. She’s learning what it is to live like this. It’s a very potent mix of emotions and hopefully people will embrace what I bring to Sarah and come to see it with fresh eyes.”

One fresh new twist is the relationship between Sarah and John’s Terminator protector, Cameron, played by Firefly’s Summer Glau.

“The interaction between Sarah and Cameron, the protector machine is very complicated,” says Middleton. “Sarah has a well-earned fear of machines, yet she must keep this machine close to her in order to protect her own son. So there’s a wariness that Sarah has for Cameron, but as the series goes on, it’s impossible for either Sarah or John not to become somewhat emotionally attached to Cameron as a being. It’s a very interesting thing watching Sarah deal with what is really her worst nightmare and having to embrace it every day.”

What Lena Headey has come to embrace are the demands of playing an action hero.

“I feel like Sarah has so much going on and so much adrenaline in her body constantly. I love the physicality of the show and I think it’s already served to feed the emotional intensity of it all.”

What she doesn’t love is what she calls the “breakable curse”, where none of the breakable surfaces on the show ever break when they’re supposed to. “You’re being told by experts, ‘just really hit it and it will break on the first punch’ and actually it’s agony.”

What’s really agony is the fact that there are only nine episodes in the can and that may be it for Sarah Connor Chronicles’ first season.

Says Middleton, “It takes us about five weeks to get a show up and running. We would have to get the writers back into the room, they know what they have to do, but still it takes time. Our show is very involved in terms of CGI, and practical special effects, and costumes and sets, so the preparation time is critical. I don’t think there’s a scenario where we could have those last four episodes of our order to be running continuously with our season.”

But since episode nine has a tremendous cliffhanger, Middleton doesn’t mind if he has to call it a season finale. He’s confident that the series will take hold and come back at some point be it later this season or the start of the next.

In the meantime, he works on the next Terminator movie, an animation project (more about that later) and Internet content for The Sarah Connor Chronicles which he says will help viewers get more invested in the series.

“I do revere the franchise, and I know what the expectations are but at the same time it’s fun to be given an opportunity to work on something that has such rich mythology and to expand on it. It’s been a great ride and we’ve all been energized by the process.”

Easy to say that now that the show is on a filming hiatus. I’d like to ask him that question again when they’re in the middle of filming episode eleven of twenty-two if The Sarah Connor Chronicles gets picked up for a second season.

Watch The Sarah Connor Chronicles Mondays at 9:00 on Fox.

Source: Fox Conference Call/ Photos: Fox

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On January 1, we offered up a prize to fans of the the new series Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. In order to win, readers were asked to answer this question:

If you had the power, what would you do RIGHT NOW in order to create a better world in the future?

We got lots of great answers and today we got an answer from “Sarah Connor” herself, actress Lena Headey.

Lena’s first reaction was to say that she couldn’t answer because her first thought involved world politics and she didn’t want to start down that road! But then she came up with a safer answer:

“I’d create a time machine to erase wrinkles but not wisdom.”

Hey, I’d like one of those.

Terminator 4 Producer and Sarah Connor Consulting Producer, James Middleton decided to risk being controversial with his delicately put answer:

“I’d go back and change the results of a recent election.”

We’ll leave you to fill in the blanks and surmise from that what you will.

Keep watching SFUniverse for our full interview with Lena Headey and James Middleton coming soon!

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The one time showing will be available as a free streaming video exclusively on Yahoo! and only for 24 hours.

The commercial-free preview begins Friday, Jan. 4 at 9:00 PM PT/Midnight ET. The premiere will also feature an exclusive introduction by Lena Headey (Sarah Connor).

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