Despite months of weighing their options, SyFy has decided to not go forward with a series based on the pilot Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva has reported.
“It’s a case of bad news/good news for Battlestar Galactica fans who have been flocking to the web to watch an unauthorized trailer for the long-in-the-works offshoot Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome over the past 36 hours. After lengthy deliberations, Syfy has decided not to go forward with the project, about the young years of William Adama, as a regular TV series. Blood & Chrome, initially envisioned as a Web series, was greenlighted as a two-hour TV pilot in October 2010. Because of intensive post-production, including special effects, the pilot was not delivered to Syfy until last November,” she wrote.
“As of January, Syfy president original programming Mark Stern was quoted as saying that he and the network brass were ‘trying to figure out the economics right now’ and that he hoped those would be figured out. Now, the network has passed on the project as a regular series but is looking to do it as a digital one, while airing the already produced pilot on the network as a movie. ‘Though the vision for Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome has evolved over the course of the past year, our enthusiasm for this ambitious project has not waned,’ Stern said in a statement today. ‘We are actively pursuing it as was originally intended: a groundbreaking digital series that will launch to audiences beyond the scope of a television screen. The 90-minute pilot movie will air on Syfy in its entirety at a future date.’”
Perhaps the concept strayed too close to actual science fiction and not close enough to wrestling for SyFy, which once upon a time as The Science Fiction Channel had actually carried programming with a science fiction theme, as hard as that is to believe given their present schedule.
It has also been reported by a number of outlets that Universal Cable Productions, which produced Blood & Chrome, may still shop the project to other networks (our vote is Netflix, but no one asked).
