What’s Life Like After Battlestar?

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With the first part of the Battlestar Galactica finale airing tonight, I thought it would a cool idea to see what the television landscape would look like in the next year following the show’s conclusion. Shows like ‘Lost’ and ‘Heroes’ are beginning to show their age and once in a while it’s nice to get a glimpse of something new and refreshing to feast our visual appetites. Here’s what we can expect in the next little while.

I think the biggest thing people are expecting from the Sci-fi Channel is the spin-off series Caprica. This series has been in development hell for the past few years and few thought it would ever be made into a pilot, let alone a series.

The show takes place ten years before the first Cylon War (fifty years in the past from Battlestar Galactica) and follows the lives of two families, the Adamas and the Graystones. After one of their daughters is killed in an act of terrorism, she is magically reborn through the power of cybernetics. Honestly, I’ve been waiting for this for a long time and while it might be more ‘tame’ than Battlestar Galactica, I enjoy a good family saga.

The most anticipated show to expect this fall would have to be Flash Forward, from Treshold’s David Goyer and Star Trek’s Brannon Braga.

Based on the novel by Robert J. Sawyer where everyone on Earth blacks out for two minutes only to see themselves in the future. The show revolves around events in the year 2009. At CERN the Large Hadron Collider accelerator is performing a test run to search for the Higgs boson. During the run the entire human race loses its consciousness of the present and experiences events from about 21 years in the future. Each individual, except for those asleep, experiences their own future through the senses of their future self. This “flashforward” lasts a matter of two minutes, but when it is over many are dead in accidents involving vehicles, aircraft, and any other device needing human control.

Kings is an upcoming TV series airing on NBC based on the King David story. The series is set in the modern day metropolis of Shiloh, a city under siege where the fighting has gone on for too long and cost far too many lives. When David Shepherd (Christopher Egan), a brave young soldier, rescues the King’s son (Ian McShane) from enemy territory, he sets events in motion that will finally bring peace.

As reported, HBO recently bought the rights to George R.R. Martin’s ‘Songs of Fire and Ice’ series. If all goes well then each book (roughly a thousand pages a piece) will encompass an entire season. Very rarely is a fantasy series given precedence in the television medium, so it will be interesting to see them adapt these books should the pilot ultimately go forward.

Two other television shows to keep an eye on are Eastwick, a show based John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick about three modern-day women who discover they have magical powers, and V, a chronicle of human resistance fighters battling aliens with The 4400’s Scott Peters.

Then of course if all of these shows don’t pan out there’s always Dollhouse, Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, Fringe, Heroes, True Blood, and many others provided that they get renewed. In the last couple of years it seems the market for quality science fiction programming has exploded, and I have no doubt the genre will continue to expand in the years to come.