Money issues, space fever, and rip offs -- 1978's Battlestar Galactica was battling more
than just bad ratings. Production was chaotic, and don't even get us started on the Cylons.
In 1978, the sci-fi TV series Battlestar Galactica
hit television screens. It seemed like a promising project at the time,
especially in the wake of Star Wars fever, and many fans loved its epic narrative.
The story revolves around a civilization of humans living across 12 colonies who believe
that they are nearing the end of a long war with the Cylon Empire. They soon discover,
however, that they're sorely mistaken. In the wake of a devastating attack, Adama,
commander of the last starship standing, forms a ragtag army
of humanity's remaining forces and heads out in search of the 13th colony… Earth.
The show only lasted one season before it was canceled, and critics today consider
it to be one of the biggest flops in TV history — despite inspiring a far
more successful reboot in the 2000s. In 1979, the Washington Post asked the show's writer,
Donald P. Bellisario, why such a promising show ended up on the chopping block. He simply said:
'"There are thousands of reasons."
In the end, though, blame lay with the final nail in so many television coffins:
ratings. Battlestar Galactica enjoyed plenty of hype to begin with,
leading mainstream media sources to declare the show a hit. The premiere,
which aired on September 17th, 1978, was the fifth highest-program of its week.
However, the sci-fi show quickly lost ground to competition on CBS,
which was airing shows like All in the Family, and NBC,
which set The Wonderful World of Disney in the time slot against Battlestar Galactica.
The ratings slid downward rapidly, from a 40 share to under 30 in less than two months.
While the series still didn't do badly overall to begin with, it was incredibly expensive. Sources
quoted in the book By Your Command claim that the three-hour pilot cost between $7 and $14
million to produce. Each subsequent episode cost $1 million, which was more than twice the average
for an hour-long series. With ratings not meeting expectations, it's possible that ABC decided it
didn't need a massive, cash-consuming sci-fi project. At the time, Bellisario told the Post:
"I can't argue with numbers. We have dropped down. There's no one thing to blame. Sunday night is the
hottest viewing night of the week and the other networks hit us with everything they could."
The show faced a few other problems, however.
"We're doomed!"
Although its creator, Glen A. Larson, has claimed that the concept for Battlestar
Galactica came from a pitch to Universal Studios in 1967,
by this time he was well-known for ripping off plots from movies. And many saw major
parallels between his story about humans fighting an authoritative regime and the plot of Star Wars,
which had been released in 1977. In fact, the court case that 20th Century Fox brought
against Universal Studios, MCA, and ABC cited 34 similarities between the two projects.
While it's unclear if this lawsuit had any true effect on the prospects of the 1978 series,
it certainly didn't help: it increased the cost of the show while giving it heaps of
negative buzz. And although the suit wasn't settled until after the show was canceled,
it's hard not to imagine that it had a serious effect on its reputation at the time.
A number of other factors could have accounted for the show's downfall. For example, some accounts
of the show say that the production was chaotic, with scripts not arriving until close to filming
times and the crew shooting on weekends just to make deadlines. By Your Command notes that one
sticking point between producers and ABC took place around the casting of character Starbuck,
as the network would have preferred a different actor than Dirk Benedict;
this conflict likely spilled over into a production issue.
On top of all that, sci-fi in general was a harder sell in those days,
as producer of the revamped Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore pointed out in a 2014 interview with
Fast Company. The original series aired early in the evening during a family-friendly slot,
leading to some censoring of elements that its creative team didn't like. Bellisario
complained that the evil Cylons became, in his words, "rather laughable," and the
show couldn't depict its killing machines as actual menaces. He told the Washington Post:
"We just couldn't take them seriously. We just couldn't make them believable as adversaries."
In the end, while Battlestar Galactica didn't prove successful in its time,
it launched what grew to become a landmark sci-fi franchise — and for that,
the original series deserves to be remembered.