Caprica Very Different From Battlestar

Source: SciFi Wire

David Eick and Ronald D. Moore, executive producers of SCI FI Channel's original series Battlestar Galactica, told SCI FI Wire that their upcoming prequel Caprica will be a markedly different series.

Eick compared it to the feature film American Beauty, while Moore referenced the TV soap opera Dallas.

"Caprica is a story that Ron Moore and I concocted with [co-executive producer] Remi Aubuchon, and we're casting as we speak," Moore said in an interview at SCI FI Channel's upfront presentation to advertisers in New York on March 18. "I'm very excited about that. If Battlestar Galactica is Black Hawk Down, I would say that Caprica is American Beauty. Caprica is all about the inner lives of the people on a planet and how their personal relationships as well as their professional relationships inform what will become the creation of the Cylons."

Moore, a former Star Trek writer and producer, said that Caprica is not a show along the lines of any Trek spinoff series. "It's a different animal altogether," he said in a separate interview. "Unlike those shows, which are all riffs on the same notion of what Star Trek was, Caprica is really a completely different kind of genre. We're trying to do something different."

Instead of Galactica's action-adventure space-based war show, Caprica will tell a story that takes place before any of the wars happened. "This is really more of a sci-fi Dallas," Moore said. "It's a political story, a family story. It's about the creation of the Cylons, and it's about a company. It's planet-based. It's very character-oriented, very serialized and very much about the characters. It's a whole different genre, and that's what makes it exciting."

Production will begin this spring on a two-hour backdoor pilot. Moore said he will be "very involved" with the pilot, but stressed that it's too soon to say whether he'd remain on board if SCI FI Channel gave the green light for a weekly Caprica show.

"If it goes to series, it kind of depends when that happens and what I'm doing," he said. "We'll just wait and see." --Ian Spelling