My opinion of what killed this show is the treatment they gave to 'Caprica' (the planet) as a whole.
While the show mostly focused on these 2 families, we could've learned more aout the planet, the culture, tie-ins to the lead stars, etc...
I was fascinated with the culture and was left hanging.
Poor characters...
Daniel Graystone - the only relatively decent character, good screen presence, well played..
Lacy Rand - well played..
Sam Adama - ok..
Zoe - She's a rebellious spoilt teenager, she's a brilliant rocket scientist, she's a religion fanatic and a suicidal terrorist to boot....puhlease!!!..15 year olds are not that complicated..
Amanda Graystone - the frequency with which she goes from the heights of sanity to bottom rocks of insanity is quiet alarming...and unbelievable..
The rest of the cast was forgettable ranging to terrible.
First half of the episodes were very loosely made... just to give an example, I remember the scene where Zoe inside the robot is brought inside the Greystone labs and there are two technicians there...one is a complete jerk and the other is of course a nice sensitive guy treating the robot as if it was alive....I remember thinking then..this good tech, bad tech routine is so cheesy..
Also as some have mentioned by now...the Sci-Fi elements were almost non existent compared to BSG to which this was supposed to be a prequel to. The overall tone was so different that it's no wonder many BSG fans stopped tracking it.
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Actually, it might have been the pre-debut statements from Moore and Eick about what the show would be like. They kept talking about "Dallas" and soap operas. The promo ads featured the two teenaged female characters. BSG is one of my favorite shows but when I heard and saw all this, I thought that they really were looking for a different audience, and that Caprica would only have minimal ties to BSG.
So at least for me, it was the promotional statements and ads before the show even started that doomed it. I don't remember if I ever saw the pilot during the year it was released. I only watched an episode or two of the series while it aired. They lost me before the show began, so it didn't have much to do with whether the 1st half of the season was too slow.
I think others may have felt similarly. The pilot had lower ratings than expected, and the numbers fell off from there. That would indicate that not nearly enough BSG fans carried over to Caprica. Then Syfy had the long mid-season hiatus, which really kills momentum for many of their shows. Some might have kept up with the show if they knew when it would air. Casual viewers are unlikely to search out the broadcast dates for the 2nd half of the season. Only the more enthusiastic fanbase would do that, and not enough did.
I did think the midseason cliffhanger was a little underwhelming, especially when compared to some of the powerful cliffhangers and tense moments on BSG. But that's only a minor critique from me. I just watched the entire season this year, almost 5 years later. If I had known that it really wasn't just "Dallas in space" or a "sci-fi soap opera," I would have given it a chance when it first aired. I thought it was a good show, very thoughtfully constructed, in the same manner as BSG. I might have tightened up a few of the early episodes. I certainly would have changed the pre-premiere advertising and producer interviews. All that talk of soap opera this and that chased me away from watching this show before I even knew what it was like.
Excellent post. I think Moore and Eick were so adamant about doing something new and not retreading old ground that they ended up making Caprica too different from BSG and like you said, a lot of the BSG fans tuned out.
shareA shame. I believe the same thing happened to Stargate Universe, a show I liked more than any of the others. Everyone wanted the jokes of the other series. I liked Caprica and disliked BSG.
April 25, 2024 - Flash Missing Vanishes in Crisis by Iris West-Allen.
I read lots and lots of comments from Stargate fans complaining that SG:U was "too dark" in tone for them. Obviously the producers of SG:U tried to take the BSG route and it backfired on them with the core Stargate fans who were used to shows with quite a bit of light hearted humor in them.
shareYeah, I remember watching the SG:U premiere and thinking it was a blatant copy of BSG. (military and civilians on an old starship far from home, gruff military leader and female civilian counterpart, eccentric UK scientist who later on sees visions of a woman no one else can see, documentary-style filming...)
It didn't feel like Stargate.
Jake Meridius Conhale, at your service!
"Old Man" of the BSG (RDM) boards.
What truly killed the show was "Blood and Chrome", a complete debacle by SciFi. This series should have made it to a second season. But once Blood and Chrome got a green light, they were pulling writer's and production staff off this show, which killed it. You could tell they began rushing towards the end. I agree, the first 4-5 episodes were hard with "where is this going" but it got better after that. The same way I felt about Fringe. I only got into that once I made it to the second half of the first season, then you saw the story arc coming.
shareThat's exactly the thing though. There have been several great tv shows from the past like X-Files and ST: TNG that got off to slow starts but eventually found their footing and got better. In this current day tv market shows don't get that chance. You either get acceptable ratings within the first few episodes or you get cancelled.
shareYes. I once read the true reason Sasha Alexander left NCIS after the second season, the ratings were not good and she thought it was going to be cancelled. Turns out, what saved NCIS was the Europeans loved it from the getgo. Then the US audience finally caught up and look at its run now. Americans are very finicky, and would rather watch a bunch of no talent hacks like the Kardasians and other BS reality shows.
shareJust finished watching the final episode on Netflix and jumped over to IMDb to see what people had thought about it.
I'm a huge fan of BSG and I think this show took that universe and created a backstory that took a steaming dump on the whole thing.
I loved BSG except for the way they ended it. They got way too into the whole religion thing. I watch sci-fi because I like sci-fi, not because I want to watch religious nutjobs constantly argue about the will of their god.
I think what really killed this show was taking interesting subject matter from the majority of BSG like artificial intelligence, what makes a person a person, how we define ourselves, how we relate to one another, how will the human race end and can we use technology to cheat death, etc., and dumping all of that in favor of tween drama with Zoe and Lacy, religious terrorists whose dialog could make anyone want to commit suicide, a 1930's Grand Theft Auto game, and bargain bin mafia characters.
They could have done so much with this show and they ruined it worse than they did with the ending of BSG. When you write yourself into a corner like they did on BSG, you have to just let it all go and screw over your fans. That's what they did on Lost as well. Another great example of a show that was supposed to be sci-fi and ended up being a religious pipe dream.
If I want to see that garbage I'll go watch Noah. I wish they'd keep that embarrassing stuff to themselves and and leave sci-fi to do its thing.
The religious/supernatural aspect of BSG was there from the very beginning with the mini-series so I have to disagree with your point on that issue but I completely agree with your point about Caprica being too much of a tween drama.
I mean, the central premise of Caprica was supposed to show BSG fans how the cylons were created and why they rebelled. Without the religious aspect and the eventual creation of the cylon "god", I don't know what other compelling cause the writers could have come up with for the cylon rebellion.
I agree it was there from the start, but it could have been handled as more of step in the process or in their thinking rather than the driving force and ultimately the main theme surrounding the climax of the show and the ending.
I would imagine that once the cylons became self aware, the fact that they were still expected to be used as tools would pretty much be slavery and I think that would have been a much more believable and interesting reason for their rebellion than the robots buying into some crazy lady ranting about the supernatural.
I'll admit though, I still might have been able to stomach the religious route if they tried to make it believable or seem like the characters had some justification for their beliefs. To live in a world where the norm is to believe in many gods and then suddenly a 16 year old girl is certain there is only one and she knows the will of this god is pretty lame. I mean, if the writers backed up her random belief with some kind of reasons then I'd feel that she at least wasn't just a bratty, spoiled, nutcase. I'd think that if I were in her position, I'd think how she thinks too and then I might be able to relate to the character. Instead, this privileged teenage girl is suddenly like, "I know there's one god, not many. Let's go blow stuff up and be terrorists." Even more unbelievable is that her friends just say, "sure, I'll die for your random belief without any evidence. Let's go."
The reason I got hooked on BSG was the gritty science fiction approach. There were really physical machines in space. There was a military approach. There were human paradigms turned upside down. All of that faded away with the increasing religious mumbo-jumbo and the whole prophecy crap which even Deep Space Nine already handled smarter. At some point montages took over when screenwriting was not an option anymore to solve that trainwreck. And the final scene with the "angels" made me wish I had stopped watching when the show was still good, much, much earlier.
Caprica started exactly where BSG ended: with crappy montages, mystery and as far away from true science fiction as a show can be. I hardly made it through the first episode. Not because nothing happened or the situation made no sense yet, but simply because what I saw was already bad.
So, I can see why some fanboys and fangirls are sad that they don't get their BSG fix, but at some point one has just to admit that nobody wanted to watch because it was just not what the audience wanted to see. Not because people were not getting it, but because people already looked through what they would get, which simply was not worth watching.
I would have loved another take on BSG minus the cope out via visions and montages. I would have waited for an epic story to unfold. But the first episode already made clear that the show would never get there.
If we go purely by the tv ratings for BSG, you will notice a distinctive decline during season 3. Season 3 is also when the Final Five storyarc started and when the supernatural/religious aspect of the show was ramped up.
So yes, it could be argued that a lot of viewers didn't care for those changes.
I always kind of appreciated the religion aspect of BSG, I'm pagan and student of mythology though and found the conflict between the polytheists and monotheist cylons interesting from that viewpoint. I admit I'm probably in the majority. The only trouble with the ending it kind of made it look like the monotheistic view won IMO.
Back to Caprica, I did'nt like the mafia junk and teenage angst angle either and that all weighed everything down. The Mafia stuff might have been fine later maybe. I think the reason for all that was wanting the Adama family in the story so bad;it might have been better to have them enter the story later somehow.
"She's a white trash Valkyrie, straight from the edge of ruin! I love her!"
Agree 100% on the teenage angst issue. BSG was a dark, gritty, ADULT centered show so I think Caprica concentrating so heavily on two teenage girl characters and their teenage terrorist friends was a mistake.
shareOh I wouldn't say that. It focused on teens too much, it failed to provide a story that would be interesting to non BSG fans, they kept switching to girl in scenes where it would be more interesting to see the cylon (like dance scene, or bonding with her girlfriend, it would be funny to see big ass robot being all girly, that alone would keep viewers drawn in) I get it would rise production of the whole thing, but saying one single thing killed the show, just won't cut it
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I don't think, the young main characters in the show are a reason for the cancellation. If this were true, shows like Merlin (2006) would have failed even more.
shareI've been binge watching this show recently and I'm convinced more than ever that this show failed mostly for two reasons.
1. The slow pace and just too much emphasis on family drama.
2. The show was just too far of a deviation from Battlestar Galactica.
There was too much focus on things that didn't matter, and not enough focus on things that DID matter. Supposedly, religion was a big issue on Caprica, but there was not much detail on the two religions, or why they were at odds with each other. A great deal of time was spent fooling around in V-World, while real-world Caprica was just glossed over and ignored. The Tauron mafia looked way too much like something out of the Godfather, and again, they got way too much coverage. Even the part of town where they lived looked like Little Italy, and too much like Earth.
Two of the main characters, Joseph and Amanda, would spend several episodes moping around being depressed about their daughters. That's understandable, but it makes for very boring viewing for the audience.
I had heard that the creators and producers had spent a lot of time and money putting detail and otherworldly 'feel' into the sets, costumes, and atmosphere, but they were forgetting a maxim that George Lucas had once said - "The story is not the SETTING, the story is the STORY!".
By the second half of the season, the people in charge seemed to be getting their heads out of their asses, but by then, the show was already in a tailspin and flaming out.