Giant Freakin Robot

Things haven’t looked good for Tochwood since Miracle Day debuted on the Starz channel last year… and then rapidly turned into a ratings flop. Even a lot of serious fans jumped ship, labeling the new series as a major step down in quality from previous Torchwood incarnations. Because of Miracle Day’s problems no one has been willing to commit to doing more of the Doctor Who spinoff, but here’s some good news: It’s not entirely dead.

Despite the low ratings Starz now seems open to doing more of it. In fact it sounds like the holdup isn’t the network, but series creator Russell T. Davies. Starz CEO Chris Albrecht recently revealed, “You know, Russell [T Davies] is so busy, Obviously, we’re in touch with the BBC all the time. They are our partners on [new shows] DaVinci’s Demons and Harem. We told them, we stand by ready for any news, but I think it would be a while before Russell came back to Torchwood.”

If you’re a follower of our sister site Cinema Blend, you may have spotted the news earlier today that Torchwood star John Barrowman has signed on for a role in the new ABC pilot Gilded Lilys. Set in 1895 and executive produced by Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes, Gilded Lilys focuses on New York City’s first luxury hotel. Barrowman will play a member of the show’s central family named Julius Ashford Lily.

At this point Gilded Lilys has only been ordered to pilot, so we won’t know for a while whether it will go to series. If it does, the show could theoretically hit the airwaves next fall or later. Assuming that’s the case, what does that mean, if anything, for the future of Torchwood?

Whether Torchwood even has a future is still up in the air at this point. After a much-hyped premiere on the Starz network last summer, Torchwood‘s most recent incarnation as Torchwood: Miracle Day was a disappointment in both quality and ratings. While I would argue that the show rallied somewhat and wound up in an interesting place, it spent waaaaaaaaaaaay too long getting there. If the show is to return at all, its presence on Starz is definitely not a sure thing.

The latest season of the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood was not the show’s best outing.  Despite a promising premise, talented cast, and an international co-production that upped the show’s budget, Torchwood: Miracle Day descended into absurdity before finishing on a veritable cliffhanger.  There’s been no official word on when (or if) Torchwood will return, but one of its stars is opening up about what it might look like when it does.

In a recent interview with CultBox, Eve Myles – known to Torchwood fans as the ass kicking ex-policewoman Gwen – revealed that she is also in the dark about when the show might return.  Despite the fact that the showrunners “can just pick the phone up and [John Barrowman and I] will be there before they’ve even put the phone down”, everything regarding Torchwood is in a kind of limbo.  Myles cites nebulous “things” happening in Russell T. Davies’s personal life as a primary reason for the delay, but it’s likely that the new television show he’s been working on figures into it, as well.  The Welsh actress does say that Torchwood definitely won’t be back in 2012, though.

It was a bit surprising when Russell T. Davies – the man who resuscitated Doctor Who and created it’s sexed-up adult cousin Torchwood - decided to make a The Sarah Jane Adventures in 2007, but it also made a lot of sense.  The Doctor Who world is extremely popular and expanding into the children’s market with one of the Who-verse’s most beloved characters could capitalize on that.  With the death of star Elisabeth Sladen and the end of The Sarah Jane Adventures in 2011, it would have been understandable if that had been the end of Davies’s childrens’ television career.  It seems that Davies has a taste for it, though, as he’s now working on a new children’s show he’s created with Doctor Who and Sarah Jane Adventures writer Phil Ford, Aliens Vs Wizards.

Davies describes Aliens vs Wizards as “a wild, funny, thrilling and sometimes scary collision of magic and science fiction.”  The protagonists of the show are two teenaged boys – one wizard and one “science super-brain”.  An alien race called the Nekross comes to Earth in a destructive search for magic, and the two boys have to join together their talents to fight the aliens and protect their planet.  I’m curious as to what kind of restrictions or limits they will put on magic and how they’ll blend it together with science, since the two concepts don’t always sit well together.  Then again, it is a children’s show, so maybe resolving conflicting ontologies isn’t a big concern.