THUD: CAPRICA WON'T RESURRECT

It's a tough week for Eric Stoltz. First, the Blu-Ray of the Back to the Future trilogy comes out on Tuesday, which includes interviews and footage reminding him that he got sacked from that job. Now, his show gets canceled and he loses another job.

Damn.

I found it too boring. I tried to watch a few episodes but just couldn't stay engaged.

I loved the show. It wasn't as good as BSG but in some ways it took just as many chances. Its not often that we get smart Science Fiction on television and Caprica was extremely smart and juggled a ton of big ideas. Its a shame that it never found an audience but at least we got the one year.

They shot themselves in the foot with this. A soap opera style show was not the best avenue to explore the robot uprising and it resulting in a show that moved along at a slugs pace and without much connection to its parent show. If they hadn't spent so much time pussyfooting around maybe it could have built to something interesting. But as it stands there are too many elements that feel a little incongruous with Battlestar Galactica. Maybe they could have ironed them out with a second season, or maybe those elements will get incorporated into this new show.

Well, they were just using BSG to try to get free viewers. The concept never really had much to do with BSG in the original concept phase.

Yeah initially, but they wrote the pilot back during season 2 of Galactica, and the rest of the series after Galactica had wrapped, so there was plenty of time for it to be integrated into the show's mythos.

On another note I just caught up with last night's episode and between that one and last week's it seems they're finally getting their shit together. It's a shame they couldn't figure out a way to do it sooner.

Yeah, though the VR element never grabbed me, I have to say building a show on top of corporate politics, religious conflict, and the impact of technology on society is a fair sight more ambitious than the usual spaceship & aliens or X-Files wannabes we get on TV.

And so SyFy cancels its only intelligent sci-fi show that had so much potential.

Because what they really need is more Ghost Hunters type shows, movies of the week featuring dinosaurs chasing aging D-listers and more wrestling shit.

Fuck SyFy.

1.0 and 1.5 were all shot and produced as a whole in 2009 so everything was already in the can before the show even premiered. I think what really hurt the show's chances was SyFy's horrible marketing strategy. Putting a long hiatus mid-season was inappropriate.

They do that with all of their series. What hurt the show was it sucked balls. I couldn't get past the first half hour of the pilot.

Short attention span isn't an excuse.

I'm so disappointed. Good intelligent live action sci-fi now seems to be extinct with stupid shit like J.J. Abrams Star Trek and Avatar taking over. What a shame.

Not a surprise, really. Actually a lot of things do happen in each episode but the pacing is so slow it feels like nothing happens!

More fundamentally, the characters do not engage. They are all assholes, just like in BSG, but the characters in BSG had reasons. Adama was an over the hill Captain stuck on a rust bucket Battlestar (like a modern day Captain in the Navy assigned to a WWII Battleship. Cool ship but you know you aren't on the A list if you have that assignment). The President was a Bureaucrat in the Dept of Education, totally unprepared for the role she's thrust into. Kara Thrace had her frackin fingers broken by her mother ... and so on.

The people in Caprica are living in the heyday of the Colonies. We never get a real sense that they suffer any kind of economic problems at all (if that was the point, it didn't work, at least for me). So why the turmoil?

Also the characters are inconsistent. Greystone seems like a brilliant but naive engineer who descends into Hubris then madness, except then we learn that he was an asshole all along. Clarice seems to be a committed Polytheist, but then she's a boring dedicated Terrorist. Joesph Adama starts as a tormented lawyer and I was really interested to see how he'd turn into the guy who works as a Public Defender (defending "the worst of the worst") but no, he turns into Michael Corelone.

Oh and FYI? It wasn't really Daniel Greystone who created the Cylons, it was his daughter Zoe, no wait, it was Head Zoe who told her in dreams. That's right, now there is no Free Will in the BSG Universe, none. Everything is preordained. Bah.

It's a shame because (again like BSG IMO) the cast and crew deliver: it's the writing staff who are inconsistent and did not think things through.

I know everything was shot before it aired, but they still started things at a snails pace in the writer's room. This showed needed a stronger start.
Not to start pointing fingers at the creatives but just how involved was Ron Moore in this show? I know he wasn't the showrunner, but how much say did he have in the day to day running of the show and story development? Jane Espenson was the showrunner during 1.0 when story elements were really pussyfooting about. Could the blame be passed onto her? Maybe if they had a stronger creative head at the beginning Caprica would have had a chance. Ultimately I agree, the writing wasn't nearly as strong on this show as it was in Battlestar.

Meh, I'm not surprised. This show never caught on like BSG did with me.

Again, I'm not arguing against what was probably a decent TV show. I watched the pilot movie and the first 3 episodes and just didn't really have any idea of where it was going. It was just, meh. I TiVo'd the next 5-6 episodes but just couldn't ever make myself actually sit down and watch them.

You're forgetting about "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus". Come on man...get with the program!

Let's not forget "Sharktopus" as well.

What's Casper Van Diem and Eric Roberts going to do without SyFy? Think about them, people!

Don't forget those very fine original feature productions all seemingly starring Randy Quaid.

Saw the pilot, and while I liked the cigarettes, hats, and racial politics, the rest looked far too goofy and implausible for my tastes. It came off like the Sarah Connor Chronicles of BSG. Since Mr Moore was not involved to any real degree, I never watched past the pilot, and I can't pretend I feel the slightest bit sorry to hear this news.

Caprica had about 8 terrible eps up front, but the last couple have been really great. First few episodes pretty much sealed its fate though.

Yeah, since it's been back, the show has been quite good. It's too bad they lost their audience.

I think the first five episodes were a bit boring, but it started to get better. It certainly improved when they started to place less of an emphasis on the VR sections. Lately the shows been decent. I liked how the Tauron killed people using the Cylon, and then asked it, " How're you with tanks?"

Well if it really did get that much better, maybe I'll check it out once the DVD hits. I just found that where the pilot ended suggested that the show was going in rather silly directions

It was far from perfect, and yeah they fucked up at the beginning, but it's been getting better and I'm interested in seeing where they were going. But it all comes down to the beginning of the show and they failed to bring the goods at the beginning, and when you've got a rough start, it's hard to pull it (and viewers) back together. I hope Blood and Chrome ends up doing better.