Battlestar Galactica: Sam Esmail gives update on reboot series

It’s been four years since it was announced that Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail would be developing a reboot of Battlestar Galactica, but the series has been slow moving forward. Thankfully, now that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes are behind us, the series is back on track.

While speaking with THR, Sam Esmail gave an update on the Battlestar Galactica reboot series, saying, “We have a great outline and we’re probably going to go to pilot soon.” However, unlike Mr. Robot, Esmail won’t be running this series himself because he doesn’t believe he’s the best person to tackle hard sci-fi.

“I know myself as a filmmaker and I don’t know if hard sci-fi is something I’m going to be the A-plus person to pull off,” Esmail explained. “And Battlestar needs the cream of the crop. But I love the world and what Ron Moore did with the [2004 version] — how it was such an allegory for what we were going through at the time of 9/11. I knew that if we bring in the right partners to write and film the show, I could be on that other end as a person of guidance to say, “OK, I think this is working; it’s the same magic I felt watching the Ron Moore version.“

It’s been over a decade since Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica series concluded, and the world isn’t exactly in the same place; hell, things have changed quite a bit since the reboot was first announced. “The world is changing way too fast for us. I mean, when we started working on it, I obviously was aware of AI, but now, four or five years later, it’s in the public consciousness and now that’s so influential in how we’re going to tell the story,” Esmail said. “The allegory piece is something that is crystallized in a different way, too. The focus is the same, which is the fear of tech and how it might take over, but this idea of just “the robots are going to be our overlords” is a very facile and overly simplistic way of looking at it. Now that the audience is more sophisticated about the consequences, I think we have to match that with Battlestar.” 

The reboot isn’t the only Battlestar Galactica project in the works, as there’s also a movie in development from Simon Kinberg, and it seems that the movie will have a connection to the show. “I can’t say too much about it other than there is synergy between the two enterprises and constant communication between us,” Kinberg said last year. “We’ve become close and been having a really good time together and there will be, for lack of a better phrase and it’s an overused phrase, a shared universe.“