Caprica is a proposed television series set in the fictional Battlestar Galactica universe. It is described as "television's first science fiction family saga."[1] The show will be set on the fictional planet Caprica, approximately fifty to seventy years before the events depicted in the re-imagined series. It will tell the story of the Twelve Colonies at peace and living in a society not unlike our own. But high technology and a startling breakthrough in robotics brings to life the age-old dream of marrying artificial intelligence with mechanical bodies to create the first living robots the Cylons. They are researched and built, ultimately leading to the First Cylon War.
The series will revolve around two families: the Adamas and the Graystones. Joseph Adama, father of future Battlestar commander William Adama, is a renowned civil liberties lawyer who becomes an opponent of the artificial intelligence/Cylon experiments wrought by the Graystones, owners of a large computer corporation that builds the first Cylons. 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.[2] 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."[3]
The series has yet to go into production and to be aired on the U.S. Sci-Fi Channel. 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 set to be the show runner.
On April 27, 2006, the Sci-Fi Channel announced that Caprica was in development.[4] Despite rumors that the project had been consigned to "Development Hell", the producers stated at Comicon in New York in February of 2007 that it was not the case. However, on a March 24, 2007 interview, Ronald D. Moore stated that It's been in development at Sci-Fi for a while and they haven't picked it up, and I don't know if they're going to pick it up at this point, there's talk of doing it as a TV movie and seeing how that works, as a back-door pilot, much as we did with the "Galactica" miniseries. Right now there's nothing telling me that they're going to move on it anytime soon, so I'm starting to feel that it's going to remain on the development shelf.[5] On March 26, 2007, Moore said that the Sci-Fi Channel was not picking up Caprica as a pilot, though a movie or DVD release were still possibilities. According to Moore, the show was currently "on the back burner".[6] However, on March 18th, 2008 the Sci-Fi Channel announced that Caprica had been picked up as a two-hour backdoor pilot event.[7]
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. This may ultimately make the Sci-Fi Channel uneasy about picking up another story-arc-heavy series.
Ain't It Cool News reported on January 17th, 2008 that the new Sci-Fi Preview edition of TV Guide reports (on page 28) that the desperately script-starved SciFi Channel may put into production the fully-scripted pilot for the Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica. I just got a call from NBC-Universal, SciFi VP Mark Stern tells the magazine. They want us to take another look at the project. The prequel, set about half a century before the events of Galactica, will deal with Bill Adamas lawyer dad and his contemporary, the human inventor of the Cylons.
