BSG Producer Says Blood & Chrome Was Always Meant To Be A Web Series

By Rudie Obias | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

The first two episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica web spinoff, Blood & Chrome, is now available for your viewing pleasure. There is a lot of excitement surrounding the new web series because it’s the first Battlestar Galactica content since the prequel series, Caprica, was canceled in 2010. The series will be exclusively released on the Internet until it premieres on SyFy in 2013. And while Blood & Chrome has had a long and storied development, producer David Eick says that it was always meant to be a web series rather than a back-door pilot as had been reported.

Blood & Chrome consists of 10 episodes, clocking in at around 12 minutes each. Eick envisioned the web series to play out like an old movie serial from the 1930s. Each episode would end with a cliffhanger and audiences would have to come back the next week to see what happens next to the story’s hero. Eick believes the Internet is the perfect way to deliver episodes like this.

It was always developed, at least from my point of view, as a project for an online environment and it was something we would develop and structurally, narratively build as a 10 part serial. Kind of like the ‘Raiders of the Ark’ style adapted the 1930’s style movie serials where you have 10 minutes of story and a cliffhanger followed by 10 minutes of story and a cliffhanger and after 10 of these episodes it would resolve itself and react structure as a whole movie. So when I set out to develop this, my thinking was to design a mission, sort of speak, of course once the characters and the overall ideas were approved by the network, a mission that could be, as missions are often are in the military sense, divided into 10 smaller missions.

Is it just me, or does it seem like Eick is trying to play down the Internet element of Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome? It really sounds like the new series was originally going to be a new TV movie or pilot for a new series but was scaled down due to the failure of Caprica. Battlestar Galactica is a show that helped build SyFy into what it is today, so it  seems odd that the cable network would go so small with a new series with the Battlestar Galactica name attached to it.

Either way, Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome is an exciting new series regardless of how it’s being watched. It will premiere on SyFy in February 2013, with its Blu-ray/DVD release planned for February 19, 2013. New episodes will be uploaded to the Internet weekly. You can watch the first two episodes right here.