Sam Esmail wants to “experiment” with Battlestar Galactica reboot

Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail reveals plans for his experimental Battlestar Galactica revival on Peacock, NBC’s streaming service.

Sci-fi franchise Battlestar Galactica got its start as a 1978 TV series, but became popular anew with a dramatically reimagined reboot in 2004 from Ronald D. Moore and David Eick. The show is set in a future where humans are struggling to survive after a cybernetic race of their own design nearly wipes out the species (or at least, that’s the version we get in the reboot). Now, NBC is looking to reboot the series once again for its streaming service Peacock, with Mr. Robot and Homecoming creator Sam Esmail behind the wheel. Assassin’s Creed writer Michael Lesslie will pen the scripts.

And for a while, that was all we really knew…until now. Speaking to Collider, Esmail revealed that although the show is still in its early days, they have extravagant plans for the series.

“We’re still working on the pilot,” Esmail explained. “Look, it’s a big universe, it’s a big world, I want to respect the Ronald Moore Battlestar. I spoke to him before I even took on the project to make sure that it’s all kosher with him, because the last thing I want to do is step on his toes, and the one thing we both agreed on is that it won’t be a reboot of what he did. Which I think we both wanted.”

Esmail was tight-lipped about exactly how it’ll be different, but he does have some thoughts on how the show will be released. “So I can’t tell you the number of episodes,” he said. “But it’s also kind of a little meaningless because I think we’re gonna look at it as sort of like a spider web where we can plot and point and say, ‘Well this isn’t chronologically after Episode 1 or Episode 2, it’s the backstory of someone, but let’s release that so audiences can check that out if they want or they can just jump into the battle sequence’. We’re really gonna experiment with form in that way, and again I think with a property like Battlestar it lends to that.”

"For me, it was like ‘let’s get in there and tell the right story and it will tell us how many episodes.’ We may dump three episodes in a row because it’s a three-episode-long battle sequence that needs to be dropped in a row even though they’re three signifying chapters, and maybe each chapter is switching a point of view within that battle sequence. There may be a 20-minute episode that’s the backstory of one of the characters that gets dropped right after that."

However it pans out, we wait with bated breath. Shooting should begin later this year.

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