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http://www.sfx.co.uk/2012/11/06/battlestar-galactica-blood-and-chrome-premieres-online-on-friday/

It’s a shame Syfy decided not to take the show to a series on TV, but the US network will air the pilot in 2013. In the meantime you can catch it online through Machinima‘s YouTube Channel, which will be hosting the two-hour pilot as a series of seven to twelve minute episodes. starting on Friday 9 November.

The remainder of the episodes will be posted over the next four weeks. A DVD is also expected some time next year

It’s a somewhat prosaic footnote for a once great franchise that for some unfathomable reason Syfy seems to have lost heart with, but let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth.

Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome takes place in the 10th year of the first Cylon war. As the battle between humans and their creation, the sentient robotic Cylons, rages across the 12 colonial worlds, a young, talented fighter pilot, William Adama (Luke Pasqualino), finds himself assigned to one of the most powerful Battlestars in the Colonial fleet: the Galactica. Full of ambition and in pursuit of the intense action that the Cylon war promises, Adama quickly find himself at odds with Coker (Ben Cotton), the battle-weary officer to whom he reports. With 47 days left in his tour of duty, Coker desires an end to battle just as much as Adama craves the start of it. Though they clash at first, the two men forge an unlikely bond when a routine mission turns dangerous and becomes a pivotal one for the desperate fleet.

Excellent!

Well This comes completely out of left field! I thought the project was canned!

I guess their current run of two headed killer shark movies is too high brow for the BSG crowd, so put it on the internet.

As I've told people for years, one of the big reasons BSG never found a bigger audience is because of the lousy channel it aired on. Why should anyone expect that it would be good?

gorgon wrote:
As I've told people for years, one of the big reasons BSG never found a bigger audience is because of the lousy channel it aired on. Why should anyone expect that it would be good?

Network television has never been kind to the sci fi show. At least BSG got a full run on SciFi and now network TV is riddled with actors from the show, which as a fun aside Doc Cottle is in the second episode of Cheers.
The cancellation of Terra Nova, Defying Gravity, and the failure to pick up Virtuality should tell you everything you need to know about network television and 21st century sci fi TV.

They canned SGU for this as it was going to be their next big project... it then changed from a TV show to cancelled, to a web series, to a TV version in the future. Just hope it's worth the wait. A trailer I saw some months ago looked pretty cool.

gorgon wrote:
As I've told people for years, one of the big reasons BSG never found a bigger audience is because of the lousy channel it aired on. Why should anyone expect that it would be good?

We are talking about SciFi in its golden five years when it had Stargate SG1, Atlantis, and BSG all running together right?

Or am I confused between a network that was doing well in ratings and some fictional network that was doing horribly?

BSG never got a bigger audience because the show cascading into the realm of 'WTF?' in season 3 and just got dumber and dumber from there. And Scifi is a genre that's pretty niche to begin with. Why do you think there are so few actual scifi shows on TV (baring cost of course)?

 LordofHats wrote:

gorgon wrote:
As I've told people for years, one of the big reasons BSG never found a bigger audience is because of the lousy channel it aired on. Why should anyone expect that it would be good?

We are talking about SciFi in its golden five years when it had Stargate SG1, Atlantis, and BSG all running together right?

Or am I confused between a network that was doing well in ratings and some fictional network that was doing horribly?

BSG never got a bigger audience because the show cascading into the realm of 'WTF?' in season 3 and just got dumber and dumber from there. And Scifi is a genre that's pretty niche to begin with. Why do you think there are so few actual scifi shows on TV (baring cost of course)?

LordofHats has the way of it.

On the positive we found some Polish knockoff Lego sets of Daleks and Doctor Who and the wife will be putting those on GC's birthday cake. 14!!!

 Wolfstan wrote:
They canned SGU for this as it was going to be their next big project...

I certainly hope not! SGU was one of the crappiest sci fi series that I ever had the misfortune of laying my eyes on, it deserved to be cancelled entirely on its own "merits".

Blood and Chrome's mini series hopefully does well enough on the web to convince Sci Fi to maybe give it another shot. I know that I'm being way too optimistic about this but...

I thought it was a good twist to the Stargate Universe and if it had been left run I think would of proved itself. Once the death knell was sounded they had to tidy it up in such away they could bring it back, which lead to a frantic ending...IMHO

Been looking forward to this but bummed that it's a web series now, and I'm not gonna watch it on the web. I'll wait for the DVD or Netflix.

PhantomViper wrote:

 Wolfstan wrote:
They canned SGU for this as it was going to be their next big project...

I certainly hope not! SGU was one of the crappiest sci fi series that I ever had the misfortune of laying my eyes on, it deserved to be cancelled entirely on its own "merits".

My eye is twitching, I really like SGU.
It was really getting good and invested in the characters but then it got cancelled
and SyFy earned my eternal hatred for it

 Hlaine Larkin mk2 wrote:

PhantomViper wrote:

 Wolfstan wrote:
They canned SGU for this as it was going to be their next big project...

I certainly hope not! SGU was one of the crappiest sci fi series that I ever had the misfortune of laying my eyes on, it deserved to be cancelled entirely on its own "merits".

My eye is twitching, I really like SGU.
It was really getting good and invested in the characters but then it got cancelled
and SyFy earned my eternal hatred for it

I hope you are kidding?!

One show was: "we need sand", the next was, "we need water", the other was, "we need energy"! But that point I was expecting to have a show with a long quest about looking for toilet paper.

I also particularly liked the episode where they went home with the stone thingies and immediately proceeded to get drunk faced and have their loved ones go to bed with complete strangers! /sarcasm

The complete cast, with the single redeeming exception of Robert Carlyle, was composed of people with the acting talent of wooden doors, which wouldn't be such a bad thing if it wasn't for the fact that I would care and relate more with an actual wooden door then with the characters that they were playing which were the most clichéd and 2d bunch since the "Clichéd and 2d show" went off the air!

I could carry on but it suffices to say that it was nothing more than DRAMA with a spaceship around it... Sci fi it was not...

SGU would have done better if it had not been titled "Stargate".

It was too far of a departure from what the established Stargate fanbase expected.

 Kanluwen wrote:
SGU would have done better if it had not been titled "Stargate".

Agree.

People went into SGU expecting a continuation of SG1/Atalntis and got a very different kind of show.

What I liked most about SGU was that it wasn't based on the old SG1 stuff .. I liked SG1, but it got real old real fast as soon as they realized there weren't any more egyptian gods to kill.

 Kanluwen wrote:
SGU would have done better if it had not been titled "Stargate".

It was too far of a departure from what the established Stargate fanbase expected.

Yep, it should have been called "Lost Housewives from Galactica", at least then people would have a more general idea of what they were getting into.

 LordofHats wrote:

gorgon wrote:
As I've told people for years, one of the big reasons BSG never found a bigger audience is because of the lousy channel it aired on. Why should anyone expect that it would be good?

We are talking about SciFi in its golden five years when it had Stargate SG1, Atlantis, and BSG all running together right?

Or am I confused between a network that was doing well in ratings and some fictional network that was doing horribly?

BSG never got a bigger audience because the show cascading into the realm of 'WTF?' in season 3 and just got dumber and dumber from there. And Scifi is a genre that's pretty niche to begin with. Why do you think there are so few actual scifi shows on TV (baring cost of course)?

Perspective. Because you're a science fiction geek, you see SyFy as the home of those shows. The average non-geek sees it as the home of fare like Sharktopus and Mansquito, and that's why it's a laughingstock. The geeks were already all watching BSG...the issue was that show had some mainstream upside potential, but it was always going to be an uphill battle given the SciFi/SyFy brand and the very name of the show, really.

SciFi/SyFy could have slowly overcome their early years of endless reruns of bad 70s series. They tried at times with things like the two Dune miniseries, BSG, getting Stargate from HBO, etc. But they ultimately just couldn't resist chasing the buck with all the cheapo movies, ghost reality shows, etc. And when you establish your brand as a schlock merchant, you make it harder for people to take your good stuff seriously.

The show did not have any mainstream upside potential past season 3.

And you also are ignoring the fact that whenever SyFy shows one of their "Ghost Reality Shows" they get more viewers than BSG did at the height of its viewer base. And whenever they do their miniseries (Tin Man, Neverland, etc) they have a huge upswing of viewers.

Putting it bluntly, SyFy isn't "taken seriously" because they're some kind of schlock merchant...it's because they're called "SyFy". It's considered the "Nerd" channel, and even the wrestling they show on the channel has taken a viewer hit since it started on there.

Nerd stuff -- or at least the right kind of nerd stuff -- is more mainstream than ever. Harry Potter, LotR, Halo, Batman, etc. are all ultimately nerd genre franchises that enjoy wide appeal. SciFi/SyFy absolutely could have evolved down a path of higher quality. Look at how AMC went from a second-rate oldies channel to one that aired modern movies and now quality series the envy of everyone this side of HBO and Showtime. The content was out there to be had for SciFi/SyFy -- look at Lost, The Walking Dead, etc. And BSG had enough of the right elements in place that it *might* have been a mainstream hit.

NBC agreed, and that's why they kept flirting with airing BSG on NBC. Complaints about storylines in later seasons, etc. don't have much to do with this conversation. But it should be said that if BSG had captured a wider audience (on SyFy or NBC), it's likely that some of the storylines in later seasons would have been written differently to appeal to and keep that audience. You gotta feed the advertising machine.

Movies like Dinocroc get ratings too, or at least enough ratings to make them nicely profitable. But my objection has nothing to do with profitability and everything to do with how bad programming decisions affect people's attitudes about your brand, which can then affect viewership and thereby influence programming decisions. It's a bad and vicious cycle, and SciFi/SyFy has fed it with too many s**tbombs in among the decent-to-good programming. Wrasslin' on SyFy proves my point that their brand has been managed very poorly.

Although I suppose the name change from SciFi to SyFy was a final, telling signal that the channel wasn't about science fiction anymore, let alone quality genre programming.

I'm also in the cam of having liked SGU and wishing it continued...

What? Can't believe they can't find a spot for this on TV.

http://io9.com/5959252/watch-the-first-episode-of-battlestar-galactica-blood-and-chrome-right-here?utm_campaign=socialflow_io9_facebook&utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Not bad so far...it already has more appeal to me than Caprica. I wish someone would pick this up. The wrenches are kinda funny...what sound are they going to have when flying through space? A Model-T air horn? Beep, beep, Ah-ooh-gah!

It wasn't too great, the 12 min run time is kinda awkward as well

I really want Caprica more though

Regarding SGU - Its first season was terrible, but its second season was excellent and really started to get good. They ditched the whole "overuse the stones to turn to show into an Earth-based soap opera" garbage and started to forge ahead with a genuinely interesting story arc about a cipher encoded in the background radiation of the universe.

Unfortunately, by that point most of the viewership had gone.

Sci-fi can't afford to have a weak start, its very rare that a show can recover from that.

Terra Nova had an excellent final 2-3 episodes, but everything before that point was garbage so it got cancelled.

I don't know how the hell Enterprise even made it to 4 seasons, but seasons 3 and 4 were pretty good.

Stargate Atlantis could have kept rolling for a very long time, it was a great show that stuck to the SG-1 formula of not taking itself seriously instead and sticking to the epic space battles, humour and adventures.

I liked that show even more than SG-1 simply because it was just plain entertainment. Plus Jewel Staite, and McKay! You absolutely need funny men and attractive women. Has to happen! But it can't be done blatantly either... Eli making planet of the apes jokes in SGU "look nerd losers, we're making a pop culture reference for you guys to laugh at!" was terrible and unfunny... T'Pol getting naked in every single episode of Enterprise that was ever made was also terrible and obvious.

 scarletsquig wrote:
Regarding SGU - Its first season was terrible, but its second season was excellent and really started to get good. They ditched the whole "overuse the stones to turn to show into an Earth-based soap opera" garbage and started to forge ahead with a genuinely interesting story arc about a cipher encoded in the background radiation of the universe.

Unfortunately, by that point most of the viewership had gone.

In fairness from what I remember Sy-Fy kept moving it around in the schedule and Sky basically dropped 90% of advertising it so it was harder to find when it was on.
The first season was fairly poor but set groundwork for charcater and plot development as they came to terms with their existence and how they inadvertently spawning human life in a galaxy and had just discovered their nemesis/opponent (The Drones)

Can't wait for it but I'll prob wait for a ncie DVD of it.

Sigh, I really want to watch it but it just looks like crap on my PC. Any word of this going to DVD or Netflix?