Battlestar Galactica: Derek Simonds tapped as showrunner of Sam Esmail’s reboot series

Last Updated on January 12, 2024

According to Deadline, the upcoming Battlestar Galactica reboot has tapped The Sinner creator Derek Simonds to serve as writer, executive producer, and showrunner of the series. He replaces Michael Lesslie (The Little Drummer Girl), who was originally attached to write and executive produce.

The Battlestar Galactica reboot series has been a passion project of Mr. Robot‘s Sam Esmail for some time and he will be producing through UCP. Esmail provided an update late last year, saying, “We have a great outline and we’re probably going to go to pilot soon.” Esmail also explained why he wasn’t running the series himself.

“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 said. “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.“

Although it’s been twenty years (seriously??) since Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica series began, some feel that it’s too soon to tackle the story again, but Esmail points to how much the world has changed in that time. “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.“