Caprica - A New Sci-Fi TV Show

Caprica is an upcoming television series set in the fictional Battlestar Galactica universe. It is expected to get its worldwide premiere in early 2010 on SCI FI in the United States. The rights to broadcast the series have also been picked up by Sky1 in the UK and Ireland. A two-hour backdoor-pilot was filmed in 2008 and scheduled to air in December of the same year, however, with the decision to turn the project into a full series, this will now be pushed back. The first season, composed of 13 episodes including the pilot, is expected to begin airing in early 2010.

Premise

A terrestrial drama rather than a space opera, Caprica is described as "television's first science fiction family saga."

Set against the backdrop of the Twelve Colonies at peace and living in a society close to our own, 51 years before the events depicted in the re-imagined series, (Caprica) revolves around the entanglements of the Adamas and the Greystones. The worlds of Joseph Adama, father of future Battlestar commander William Adama, and Daniel Greystone, an überwealthy technologist, collide when their daughters are lost in an act of religious terrorism. Daniel obsesses over his dead child and, setting his considerable wealth and sprawling industrial corporation to the singular task of bringing her back to life, begins to experiment with startling breakthroughs in robotics and AI. Joseph, a prominent civil liberties lawyer, becomes a vehement opponent to the path Daniel starts down.

Plot Details

- "The Graystones include father Daniel, a computer genius; mother Amanda, a brilliant surgeon and unfaithful wife; and their daughter, Zoe, who is martyred to her boyfriend's religious fanaticism – but not before she installs the rudimentary elements of her personality and DNA into a machine, creating a digital twin of herself, Zoe-A. After the human Zoe's death, Daniel uses these raw materials, some stolen technology and his own grief to cobble together "a robotic version of his dead daughter." This robot version, known as Zoe-R, is a Cylonic Eve, the first of her kind."

- According to Mark Stern, Sci-Fi Channel's Executive Vice President of Original Programming, the script for the two-hour pilot episode concluded with an explanation for how the name "Cylon" was coined. On September 20, 2007, Battlestar Galactica writer and producer Bradley Thompson revealed that Ron D. Moore's script for Caprica has a character coin the term, saying, "A cybernetic life-form node, a Cylon."

Development

- After a drawn-out pre-development cycle, on March 18, 2008, the Sci-Fi Channel announced that Caprica had been picked up as a two-hour backdoor pilot event, indicating a possible commitment to a series, contingent on ratings.

- NBC Universal Television Studio is developing the show, in conjunction with the executive producers of Battlestar Galactica (Ronald D. Moore and David Eick) and 24 writer Remi Aubuchon, who is writing the pilot, and is set to be the show runner. The pilot will be directed by Friday Night Lights veteran Jeffrey Reiner.

- According to a statement by Ron Moore in the Season 3 Companion book, the proposed Caprica prequel series will have a story-arc-heavy format like its predecessor; a large reason why the network is reluctant to greenlight the series is because story-arc-heavy series notoriously have difficulty in picking up new viewers, as compared to a series composed of mostly standalone episodes. This was already the cause of friction between Moore and the Sci-Fi Channel at Caprica's parent series — the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica were arc-intensive, with detailed attention to internal continuity, but were not pulling in the Nielsen ratings that the network wanted, so the Sci-Fi Channel pressured Moore into retooling the third season of BSG to consist of largely standalone episodes. This measure actually backfired, as it resulted in negative criticism from both fans and critics, and Moore revealed in the Season 3 finale podcast that the network finally grudgingly admitted that standalone episodes simply do not work in the format of story he is trying to tell.

- On July 20, 2008, the Sci Fi Channel announced the network might pick up Caprica as a series early, and make the pilot an extended season premiere. This could push the project's broadcast date to 2009.

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