A Four-Quadrant Show

The Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan spoke the Fox’s chairman, Peter Liguori, about "Virtuality," the pilot "Battlestar Galactica" executive producer Ron Moore and co-executive producer Michael Taylor are making for Fox, and also about Joss Whedon’s mid-season show for the network, "Dollhouse."

MR: What’s going on with “Virtuality”? It seems like there’s so much positive buzz about it, but that doesn’t always translate into a pickup [to series].

PL: Yeah, look, this is why do you pilots. Especially, the more ambitious the show, the more important the pilot is – just being able to do that exercise and figure out, do we have the characters right, can we [execute] this. Ron Moore, honestly, he’s the real deal. When you sit there and talk to someone and say, “Does he have a strategy? Does he have a 100-episode plan, does he have a grip on his characters?” He’s got it. It’s a very ambitious pilot, it’s a very ambitious premise. I think we cast it really well....

MR: So there’s a gay relationship on the show. Can you talk about that, about things you find interesting about the show?

PL: What I think is interesting about it is, it’s the first 21st or 22nd Century office show, office drama. It’s a bunch of people working in a claustrophobic environment, working for a business with a specific mission. Where do you have to go to with that? You have to go to character, you’re not going to go to “Star Trek”-ian moments. You’re really going to go back to the characters to get to the core. And that is the genius of Ron. Plus there’s a social commentary, he does that in “Battlestar” and he has that here. The gay relationship is one part of that.

About Joss Whedon Liguori said:

You can launch a show and it’s a 4-share show. It’s not going to become a 24-share show. The thing with Joss, you launch his show and instantly it becomes somebody’s favorite show. To me, in this current television environment, if you can be somebody’s favorite show, you’d better be patient with that show.

[It used to be] and 18-share show, that was the bar you had to jump over. If you’re looking at a 7-share show in an 18-share-hit environment, wrap it up, move on. Done. Today, I sit there and say, you know, I sat there from a distance and saw “House” premiere at a 7-share. I know I have certain tools at my disposal for promotional platforms. And you know what, I’d rather know I have a very strong, loyal core that I can build on. That being said, getting out of the gate is important in this environment.

Other news & notes:

Tim Goodman of The San Francisco Chronicle reviews "The Cleaner" the new Benjamin Bratt series that co-stars Grace Park:

This is quite a departure for Park, who plays it sassy, sexy and spunky here, not her measured "Battlestar Galactica" persona.

Trek Movie Report also rounds out all the details about the collapse of JumpCon.

Newsrama has information about a new Battlestar Galactica comic book series from Dynamite called "Battlestar Galactica: Ghosts" by Brandon Jerwa. The four issue miniseries is an original story about a black ops Viper squadron out on their own since the time of the attack on the colonies.

io9 recently reported that manga publisher Tokyopop will be publishing an anthology of Battlestar Galactica manga called, "Echoes of New Caprica" in March of 2009. Tokyopop has previously produced Star Trek manga.

io9 also wrote about the theory oriented website Battlestar Revealed.

The recent Astronomy Picture of the Day for July 15th, was the Lagoon Nebula which you may recall from the Battlestar Galactica episode "Home Part 2" in the Tomb of Athena Planetarium show.

That last link to Nebulae in fiction reminds me of this xkcd comic.