New StarGate series Prime Video.

[JD]

Well, good. I'd prefer a revival to a reboot. While the original movie was an unimaginative rehash of hackneyed 1970s ancient-astronauts tropes, the makers of the TV franchise built a rich and intricate universe that still has a lot of potential for future exploration.

My main wish is that the show will be set in a world where the Stargate program is public knowledge. In the later seasons, it got increasingly ridiculous that Earth had become this major player in galactic affairs yet the general public had no idea of it. And once you had a bunch of stories about political leaders and top scientists and business executives interacting with the SGC, there was no longer any good story reason to keep it secret from the public -- and it was morally reprehensible to have the US military and government doing all this big stuff in the galaxy without the voters having a say in what was done in their name. I've never liked the secrecy trope in sci-fi; it's an excuse to stick close to the real-world status quo, but the entire value of science fiction is in exploring the consequences of its speculative elements, the ways they transform human life and society. Secrecy stories are never about anything but keeping the secret; it's very limiting. There'd be so much more story potential if the Stargate program is publicly known now. Also, it'd be a good way to make the new show distinct from the old.

Yeah, I'm hoping they do this too. As the shows went on and we had Star Trek style ships, and constant alien attacks and invasions, it really became ridiculous that they were still keeping the whole thing secret. It was easily enough to believe they could keep it secret when it was just a handful of teams going through the gate, but once it started expanding beyond that they should have just told everyone about it.

I wouldn't be surprised if they bring in a few of the young actors who have played in some of the Prime Video TV series that have ended or are about to end, and Jason Moama, who played in Stargate Atlantis before she became famous, as the lead role.

Of all the actors who might come back, he's pretty low on list.

Hopefully they can contain consistency. One of my annoyances is shows coming back, getting history wrong. This isn't 1995, it's 2025 -- there are countless wiki fan sites, websites devoted to the shows with detailed information. Hell, they can even create fake names, register at a SG fan forum, ask questions to get canon right. Yet mistakes keep happening.

Since the showrunner, Martin Gero, was a writer and producer on all three series, and it also has Brad Wright, who was credited as co-creator of all three series and was a regular presence through all of their runs, and Joseph Mallozi was also an EP and writer on all three series, that all seems kind of unnecessary. They're the guys who the wiki and fan sites go to for their information.

I hope we get a proper 20 episode season. None of this 10 episodes every 2-3 years nonsense.

I can almost guarantee you that is not going to happen.

 

[SG-17]

I can almost guarantee you that is not going to happen.

I'd settle for 15 if it's still episodic.


I really do hope that the gate is revealed to the public, the mystery of the CMBR signal is solved, Destiny's fate revealed, and Atlantis returns to Pegasus.

 

[Christopher]

Multiple sources said he had input up through TNG's 3rd Season.

Input, yes, but you said "control," which is not the same thing. Roddenberry stepped down from the active showrunner role after episode 18 of season 1. Maurice Hurley (a close associate of Roddenberry) showran the last 8 episodes of season 1 and all of season 2, and Michael Piller took over from season 3 onward (which is why the writing massively improved from season 3 onward).

 

[Skywalker]

This is Amazon. We'll get 8 episodes, max.

 

[tharpdevenport]

Since the showrunner, Martin Gero, was a writer and producer on all three series, and it also has Brad Wright, who was credited as co-creator of all three series and was a regular presence through all of their runs, and Joseph Mallozi was also an EP and writer on all three series, that all seems kind of unnecessary. They're the guys who the wiki and fan sites go to for their information.

It's been almost twenty years since the long-running show that started it all, then two season of "Stargate: Atlantis", then two for "Stargate: Universe". You, I, all of us, can't expect them to remember everything about characters and in-univers show tech that started all the way back in 1997.

Star Trek production staff were getting things wrong during the time of wiki sites and fan sites as well. All the people you mention are human and I'm sure they made mistakes and will make more. But they are not alone now, they have the fans who can cite dialogue, specific episodes, provide photos, etc.

 

[oktay]

I'd settle for 15 if it's still episodic.

They'll probably produce 8 high-budget episodes every two years. If it works out, I think we could see more high-budget Stargate TV series and potential movies on Prime Video, like the Star Trek TV shows on Paramont Plus.

 

[JD]

It's been almost twenty years since the long-running show that started it all, then two season of "Stargate: Atlantis", then two for "Stargate: Universe". You, I, all of us, can't expect them to remember everything about characters and in-univers show tech that started all the way back in 1997.

Star Trek production staff were getting things wrong during the time of wiki sites and fan sites as well. All the people you mention are human and I'm sure they made mistakes and will make more. But they are not alone now, they have the fans who can cite dialogue, specific episodes, provide photos, etc.

Of course they're not going to remember everything, but you were making it sound like the people making the new show were coming in completely new with no knowledge of the Stargate Universe, so I was just pointing out that it's coming from three of the people who built the universe.

 

[thribs]

They'll probably produce 8 high-budget episodes every two years. If it works out, I think we could see more high-budget Stargate TV series and potential movies on Prime Video, like the Star Trek TV shows on Paramont Plus.

I don't need it to be "high budget". That didn't really help Star Trek.

 

[Christopher]

I don't need it to be "high budget". That didn't really help Star Trek.

The TNG-era shows were high-budget for the commercial TV of their day, and it enabled them to have top-tier production values and casting. So I'd say it did help there.

 

[oktay]

I don't need it to be "high budget". That didn't really help Star Trek.

Brad Wright is also an executive producer and is working with Amazon. In the video, he says they'll be doing a lot of things they haven't been able to do in the past, and that he'll be a producer who never says no to the showrunners. This means it'll be a very high-budget project. All fantasy and sci-fi TV series on Amazon are high-budget, and the new Stargate show will also be high-budget. Amazon is the company behind the show, so budget won't be a concern. But for the show to continue, it needs to generate good viewership. By high budget, I mean a budget of $10-15-20 millions per episode.

 

[David cgc]

It's been almost twenty years since the long-running show that started it all, then two season of "Stargate: Atlantis", then two for "Stargate: Universe". You, I, all of us, can't expect them to remember everything about characters and in-univers show tech that started all the way back in 1997.

Star Trek production staff were getting things wrong during the time of wiki sites and fan sites as well. All the people you mention are human and I'm sure they made mistakes and will make more. But they are not alone now, they have the fans who can cite dialogue, specific episodes, provide photos, etc.

Another concern even with the people who wrote the shows is that it’s easy to forget what actually ended up in the episodes. One of the writers tells a story about how at one point while he was breaking an SG-1 episode, he suddenly freaked out and realized they hadn’t given Teyla anything to do (to be fair, it was the Atlantis crossover, so he wasn’t completely mixed up).

There’s also the case of the Battlestar Galactica movie “The Plan,” which has an elaborate deleted scene which was apparently written and filmed before any of the writers realized they’d gotten their timeline of the last few episodes of season two mixed up and there was no logical place it could happen.

It’s probably easier for us on the outside to keep track of everything.

Just hope they use the Gatewold Omnipedia and not the wiki, which is a poorly-sourced jumble of novels, obsolete TTRPGs, and nonsense stargate addesses taken from a DVD magazine partwork overriding ones seen on screen and in production documents.

 

[thribs]

Brad Wright is also an executive producer and is working with Amazon. In the video, he says they'll be doing a lot of things they haven't been able to do in the past, and that he'll be a producer who never says no to the showrunners. This means it'll be a very high-budget project. All fantasy and sci-fi TV series on Amazon are high-budget, and the new Stargate show will also be high-budget. Amazon is the company behind the show, so budget won't be a concern. But for the show to continue, it needs to generate good viewership. By high budget, I mean a budget of $10-15-20 millions per episode.

I saw that as well. Considering the show has always looked good since the start I’m curious what he means by that.

 

[The Wormhole]

Cautiously optimistic. I love Stargate and will be thrilled to see some new content, though a part of me worries they'll overdose on the memberberries/nostalgia like many (all?) modern revivals of older shows do.

 

[Caretaker]

I think it would be interesting if they establish the events of the (unmade) direct to DVD films Revolution and Extinction as having happened, even if we never got got to see those events onscreen. Maybe Devlin and Emmerich will get some of their unused film sequel ideas worked into the series - I assume there was some sort of compromise to get them brought aboard.

 

[oktay]

I saw that as well. Considering the show has always looked good since the start I’m curious what he means by that.

In the past, TV series from the 1980s to the 2010s were typically produced with budgets of $60-70 million per season. Because they typically had more than 20 episodes per season, they were typically produced with budgets of $1.5-2 million per episode. Therefore, Brad Wright and his team likely received a lot of "no" when they were making Stargate SG-1 and other TV series when they wanted to do something that required a significant budget. Nowadays, most streaming services, with a few exceptions, including Prime Video, focus on producing high-budget TV series. Video is said to be using all the technology developed in the last 14 years (presumably including the "StageCraft" technology used in The Mandarin. This is quite expensive technology, and after shooting the scenes with "StageCraft," they will re-edit all the scenes with CGI.)

 

[Christopher]

Cautiously optimistic. I love Stargate and will be thrilled to see some new content, though a part of me worries they'll overdose on the memberberries/nostalgia like many (all?) modern revivals of older shows do.

I think that sort of thing is more likely to happen when new producers who are also fans are in charge of the revival and give in to their fannish impulses. If the original writer-producers are back in charge, I think they'd be more interested in telling new stories and not repeating themselves. Writers are usually the harshest critics of our own work, rather than being fans of our own work. And producers are often unhappy with the compromises and shorcuts they were forced to make in the original show, and welcome the chance to do things better in a revival, or do the things they weren't able to do before.

I mean, look at Star Trek: TNG. Aside from the pilot's McCoy cameo and "The Naked Now," Roddenberry strove to make it as disconnected from TOS as possible, to blaze new ground rather than revisit old storylines, species, and characters. It was later producers who started bringing back elements from TOS.

Maybe Devlin and Emmerich will get some of their unused film sequel ideas worked into the series - I assume there was some sort of compromise to get them brought aboard.

Again, we don't know if they're "aboard" in any creative sense, since "executive producer" often just means someone with a financial stake in the show, like an investor or a copyright holder. In recent years, Devlin & Emmerich were trying to convince MGM to do a reboot, so it seems they and the TV producers were pitching competing projects. Maybe MGM decided to go with Gero's project and got D&E to accept the outcome by giving them a token EP credit and the payment that goes with it.

 

[Noname Given]

Input, yes, but you said "control," which is not the same thing. Roddenberry stepped down from the active showrunner role after episode 18 of season 1. Maurice Hurley (a close associate of Roddenberry) showran the last 8 episodes of season 1 and all of season 2, and Michael Piller took over from season 3 onward (which is why the writing massively improved from season 3 onward).

Being able to say "No" to a pitched story everyone else wanted to do - and were only able to do BECAUSE GR was hospitalized - seems like a lot of Control to me.

 

[Christopher]

Being able to say "No" to a pitched story everyone else wanted to do - and were only able to do BECAUSE GR was hospitalized - seems like a lot of Control to me.

Again, he still had some influence, obviously, but he was no longer the showrunner. Life is an essay question, not a true-false test.

 

[thribs]

Now the question is will Teal’c be given an axe and be tasked into looking after a boy?

 

[oktay]

Again, we don't know if they're "aboard" in any creative sense, since "executive producer" often just means someone with a financial stake in the show, like an investor or a copyright holder. In recent years, Devlin & Emmerich were trying to convince MGM to do a reboot, so it seems they and the TV producers were pitching competing projects. Maybe MGM decided to go with Gero's project and got D&E to accept the outcome by giving them a token EP credit and the payment that goes with it.

It's also worth mentioning that a few years ago, Amazon merged MGM and Amazon Studios, renaming MGM "Amazon MGM Studios." They even changed the name of MGM's social media accounts and MGM's own website to "Amazon MGM Studios." They only use the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer name as a logo for films.