Nov 17 | Originally hired as co-executive producer to help with the second half of the show's first season, Kevin Murphy has now taken the reins of Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica prequel on Syfy, according to The Hollywood Reporter. He now serves as an executive producer along with Ronald D. Moore, David Eick and Jane Espenson and oversees the day-to-day functions of the show.
Nov 12 | Star Trek star Zachary Quinto is loosely attached to star in the romantic dramedy Whirligig, reports Risky Business.Quinto would play the lead role in the independent Canadian film, which is aiming to shoot early next year. The movie centers on a man who, in a misguided attempt to woo an older woman, befriends the woman's adopted son.Chaz Thorne is directing the pic, based on a screenplay by Michael Amo, creator of the Canadian supernatural series "The Listener."
Nov 11 | The CNS Foundation, is hosting an on-line charity auction at www.charitybuzz.com. One of the items they are auctioning is a signed movie poster of the new Star Trek movie which has all the cast members and writers. The president of our organization is Carol Abrams, JJ's mother, and she arranged for the donation from Bad Robot Production Company. J.J. Abrams is also a major donor to their organization. The funds raised will go to help find a cure to neurological disorders in children. The auction link is here.
Nov 10 | Candice Bergen, Charles Lisanby, Don Pardo, Gene Roddenberry, Tom and Dick Smothers and Bob Stewart have been selected as the next inductees into the Television Academy's Hall of Fame. They will be honored at a Jan. 20 ceremony at the Beverly Hills Hotel. "This year's inductees have challenged and shaped popular culture, changed television for the better and entertained us royally while doing so," TV Academy Chairman-CEO John Shaffner said. More info at the Hollywood Reporter
Nov 08 | Unreality-SF.net has interviewed Star Trerk author James Swallow about some of his upcoming projects. He talks about Titan: Synthesis and Seven Deadly Sins: The Slow Knife, as well as some forthcoming Doctor Who and Stargate stories.
After a year of waiting, audiences can finally tap into their inner-4400. It's a calling that the follow-up to last summer's 6-hour miniseries is banking will make it one of the most successful series populating the not-so-empty summer airwaves beginning Sunday night.
THE 4400 broke ratings records and industry expectations with the compelling story of mismatched everybodies snatched away from their daily tasks and deposited haphazardly on a serene mountain beach last year. With a formula channeling THE X-FILES with a biting post-9/11 sensibility, THE 4400 did for USA Network (along with schedule partner THE DEAD ZONE) what it seems much of broadcast television is hoping to do this coming fall.
"What was very nice this past development season was hearing everybody say 'we're looking for a show like THE 4400!'" muses executive producer Ira Steven Behr from his earthbound offices in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles. "It's like f--in' A, baby, we're just a little cable show! The only thing that pisses me off is a lot of these [new] shows are going to have more money to spend and that drives me nuts!"
The former STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE writer inspired a subculture of dedicated Trekkies with his intricately plotted and character-oriented brand of enlightened space opera and he's infusing the same kind of passion into what hopefully will continue to be a wildly successful little cable show. But cable isn't a panacea for cutting edge genre series.
"When you take away the above-the-line on this show, what we have to actually make this show, it's just freaking ridiculous," he says, unconcerned about sugarcoating anything about the grueling process of bringing the show to air. "For a show with five storylines -- this is an ambitious show -- this is not an easy show to do and you're up in Vancouver [shooting it] with the weather."
THE 4400 succeeded last summer during the merger of Universal and NBC, putting the show's seemingly obvious renewal in suspended animation until earlier this year when, what Behr unapologetically derides as enough politicking to fill a book, finally gave way for he and his team to begin conceiving the show's "return". In a sea of creatively and commercially successful cable dramas, 13 is the new 26; but that doesn't mean it's any easier.
"That, you try to tell yourself is a good thing because there's none of those 'well, this one didn't quite work' [kind of episodes]... Here's my true feeling," he prefaces in a no-minced-words kind of way. "If I were in the DEEP SPACE NINE situation, where literally you had no one to answer to and you didn't get any notes from anyone basically (except for Rick Berman), and you had the money, and the ability to cast whoever you wanted to cast... 26? Are you kidding? I'd go for as many episodes as you can, when all cylinders are clicking. But that ain't the way the business works, baby!"
Behr, who last year traded his famous impromptu DS9 Disneyland field trip for a 4400 field trip to the Westwood cemetary (and may this year have to settle for the inspiring aroma of the La Brea tar pits next door to his current offices), talks more like a Hollywood outsider than a producer with high expectations riding on his shoulders. But he's keeping his eye on the ball despite a tumultuous television landscape and numerous pilots scrapping at the heels.
"I'm going to feel the same way about those shows that I felt about BABYLON 5. Chances are I'm not gonna watch 'em -- I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna watch 'em. I wish 'em all luck and basically what I care about is how we do; I try never to care about what the other guy is doing," he explains.
TREK fans are used to this kind of steadfast approach from Behr, who brought season-long arcs to the largely episodic franchise that were often meticulously planned, and sometimes unexpectedly discovered. THE 4400 shares this aesthetic.
"Anyone who says they have a whole show in their head starting out... that's a pretty dead show in my mind," Behr describes. "The show has to breathe and the characters have to live and you have to discover characters that you want to use. I wasn't thinking about DS9 ending; in the most obvious way you know it's coming, especially on a show like that where you know you have seven seasons; but you try to live in the moment to make what you have available as interesting and as appealing, as possible. It was only in DEEP SPACE NINE that by season three I realized, 'wow, this is a seven-year canvas we have to tell a story, we're going to get to do some things.'" He purrs that last line, relishing in the memory.
Refreshing our own memories after nearly a year hiatus (a badge of honor among the new crop of cable dramas), THE 4400 picks up six months from the enigmatic end of the miniseries last summer. Returnees Richard (Mahershalhashbaz Ali) and Lily (Laura Allen ) riding past a line of bending trees posed a myriad of questions to be addressed this season.
"We knew where we wanted to end this season going in -- I knew what I wanted -- and so far we're tacking toward that goal. We only have two more stories to break so I think we're gonna get there, but at the same time there's stuff that's now happening that until we started writing the first episode, Craig Sweeny (who wrote the opening two-hour) and I, we [hadn't discovered]."
But after learning that the 4400 were actually abducted by humans from the future -- not extraterrestials -- one has to believe there's at least a rough outline at work.
"I certainly have my view on what is going on, but I have been taught by experience that all kind of events during the production of a television series impact on what you want to have happen," he says. "I.e. Worf suddenly arrives on DEEP SPACE NINE and all the best landscapes of mice and men go out the air duct. I have an idea where ultimately I want it to go, but I don't know if I'll be around for the whole thing, someone else could come in... With most TV shows [unlike DS9], like this one, are we going to get to do another season after this? The ratings were really good last year, the network loves the show, it would seem we have another year at least, going in... [but] I never think about a show until I have to in terms of the endgame."
THE 4400 has a built-in serialized format structured around the mechanism of 4400 "cases" in most episodes, Behr says. "But all the stuff around 'em -- life interrupted -- goes on like it does in real life, and so the personal lives, the intertwined destinies of our characters certainly are serialized throughout the show and certainly, just as in what I consider the best television, something happens one week and has an impact the following the week or four episodes down the line."
In the opening episode "Wake Up call", 4400 philanthropist Jordan Collier (Billy Campbell) has joined with other returnees to found a "4400 center," a development that Behr explains will set the stage for a spiritual exploration of the 4400 and their situation this year.
"The 4400 are stepping forward and [have] a chance to unite everyone to help prevent this catastrophe from happening in the future, and it certainly deals the 4400 a question of faith and it has a quasi-religious feel to it," he says. "I think that the 4400 as an entity is incredibly interesting. One of the things that we want to do is allow the audience to make their own judgment about the 4400. We really made [them] into a very public movement, reaching out into the community and asking you to join with them in finding the '4400 ability within you' -- because they're all human beings like us. They've been studied and they don't have nannites in their system or any kind of 'tech'," (an oblique reference to the phrase that notoriously doomed many STAR TREK scripts), "that would make them different than you or I and so it's just an evolution, it seems, an accelerated evolution, of the human mind, the human species. The idea that we all have this ability within us if we can find it, is I think going to polarize the world in terms of the show and give the fans a lot to chew on."
The setup is that the 4400 each play a particular role in future events, presumeably engineered to avoid some greater devastation that -- unsurprisingly -- looms ambiguously on the horizon, leaving the characters and the audience in a constant state of uncertainty. NTAC agents Tom (Joel Gretsch) and Diana (Jaqueline McKenzie) are charged with tracking down and cataloging the various incidents that occur involving members of the 4400.
"Tom Baldwin is in a position that I would not want to be in. Based on one conversation [in last year's finale], he feels that he's been given this mission by the future to help move along this task they have put forward of saving mankind; but at the same time that does not always jive with the job that he has."
The precog child Maia (Conchita Campbell) has something of an idea about events to come, but no one knows the full shabang. "I think most of the 4400 are pretty bewildered and some of them are definitely outcasts in society with or without their abilities," Behr adds. "So I don't think anyone has the whole story in their head, nor does Maia, necessarily, though she does come up with some interesting precognitions that prove true. But again we're trying to keep the show, just like DEEP SPACE NINE, very fluid. Shifting alliances, don't get too certain who is on the side of the angels, and who isn't; we try to give everyone a point of view; I think it is a show that can, at least on one level, engender a lot of debate amongst the fans, in terms of what they're rooting for and whose side they're on and what they're hoping for."
Undoubtedly many fans of THE 4400 were hoping they'd be able to debate the intricacies of more new STAR TREK episodes this coming television season. The aging franchise was brought to a halt this spring when cancellation finally took hold after 18 years on television. But don't look for Behr to commisserate about the woes of the largely successful franchise.
"I felt that we had stayed too long at the fair to begin with," he says after a lengthy consideration. "Look, let's not have some STAR TREK for a while, it's been ubiquitous for a lot of years; let the field get replanted and let it grow again. But it's really tough to be bemoaning that there's no STAR TREK at this stage in the game. All I know is as with many people, STAR TREK was very, very good to me and I like to think I was good for it. Am I gonna miss it? I'm not gonna 'miss it.' I miss DEEP SPACE NINE in terms of the people and so forth but in terms of it not being on television, I'm not going to 'miss it.'"
If THE 4400 delivers on the promise of its debut miniseries, it may similarly mollify the sting for many TREK converts. Although the show will be without Peter Coyote as the Home Sec bureau chief (Behr holds out hope for a late season appearance by the actor, who will appear in the new Fox series THE INSIDE), many familiar faces will buttress the show. Jeffrey Combs is no sooner sending off the ENTERPRISE crew than appearing in the first couple episodes of THE 4400 with plans for additional stints; FIREFLY's Summer Glau will guest; DEADWOOD's Garret Dillahunt and THE L WORD's Karina Lombard will also both do guest roles.
Character is key and Behr takes pride in the positive feedback since THE 4400 aired last year. Jordan Collier is but one character who the writer says will become even more complex this season.
"What's really interesting about the show is I'm starting to hear from the actors things that I used to hear from the actors on DS9. Salome Jens, when she was playing the head of the Founders, would come to me and say 'I thought I was a hero. Am I now a villain?!'"
In Behr's estimation that's as good an omen as there can be. Well, other than a thumbs up from the famed residents of the Westwood cemetary.
THE 4400 debuts Sunday at 9 PM on USA Network, following a marathon presentation of the miniseries. Learn more at The4400.com.
It's only a spoiler if you plan to watch season one before the season two premiere on Sunday. By the time the next new episode rolls around Sunday night, the characters will have known this information for six months and most of the audience will have known it for a year. You'll probably find this information more useful when watching the show than anything else.
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"You know what six movies average out to be really good? The first six Star Trek movies!" -- Fry, Futurama
you cannot be serious. the original episodes of this delightful show first aired almost a year ago. you simply cannot expect anyone to give spoiler warnings on information that old.
yet the information that he gave you will not hurt too much. you will still be able to enjoy it :) and i hope you do. the 4400 is one of the best ideas for a show that i have ever seen. AND the actors all rock. it is marvelous!
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Enemies strengthen you. Allies weaken. I tell you this in the hope that it will help you understand why I act as I do in the full knowledge that great forces accumulate in my Empire with but one wish--the wish to destroy me. You who read these words may know full well what actually happened, but I doubt that you understand it.
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