End Of Show suggests that, even though TSCC has been cancelled by Fox, the show may have a future as a straight-to-DVD movie series. Admit it, you didn't see that coming... but their thinking is sound:

Warner Bros have been trying to move into the area of DVD first features for many years. DVD features have always been a tricky area - Hollywood has an atmosphere where nobody likes to feel they are slipping down the spectum, and DVD premieres still have a stigma in the industry ("Direct to video"). However, many companies believe significant revenue exists in this area, with companies such as Fox and Disney moving in.

Warner Bros itself has established an arm called "Warner Premiere", who look purely at DVD projects. If Warners fail to find a network to continue the show into a third season, it seems fans should look towards Warner Premiere... Warner's tried to resurrect oldtime geek series Babylon 5 in DVD format and failed. End Of Show believes there's another more deserving franchise around waiting to be tapped. That franchise has killer robots in it.

Pointing out that the Terminator brand alone - never mind cliffhanger ending to season 2 - should guarantee an audience for any potential DVD continuation, we have to admit to being on board with this alternative, in case Fox passes. We'd still rather have season 3, though.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles resurrection possible on DVD [End of Show]

This Friday's rise (0.15 million viewers) may have been small, especially in comparison with the previous week's 0.5 million, but the week-on-week gain is notable not only for its rarity, but also the fact that this second gain came on a night when everyone expected the audience to drop, thanks to CBS' NCAA Basketball coverage (Dollhouse's ratings dropped this week, slightly, most likely through a combination of the basketball and running opposite BSG's finale). If this rise continues, even so slowly, the combination of this with the DVR additional viewership for the show gives weight to the argument that Fox should keep the show around for a third season... but maybe on a different night. Wednesdays look good, right?

Categorized | Broadcast, Featured, Friday, Nielsen Overnight TV Show Ratings

Updated Friday Ratings: Dollhouse foundation holds up against NCAAs [TV By The Numbers]

The Hollywood Reporter's James Hibbard didn't hold back when writing about the show's 17% drop in audience this weekend:

In the case of "Terminator," I'm calling it. Time of death: March 7, 9:20 a.m.

We're cautiously optimistic; Watchmen's much hyped (if less successful than was hoped) opening was targeted at pretty much the same audience as Fox's Friday line-up, and we wouldn't be surprised if the numbers actually bounce back up (slightly, at least) with the next episode. But will Fox wait to see that happen? We can only hope.

A slight ray of optimism comes from this interview with Fox President of Entertainment Kevin Reilly, which includes the following exchange:

THR: Can "Terminator" or "Dollhouse" financially make sense as broadcast shows next season if their ratings don't improve?

Reilly: Advertisers have liked the shows. Both shows are doing well on a c7 basis. It's too early to rule them out.

CBS tops Friday; 'Dollhouse,' 'Terminator' falls (again) [THR Live Feed]

In a word, no. In three words, well, not yet.

The reports (like this one) are taking their lead from TV By The Numbers' blunt assessment of the show's future this past Wednesday:

Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles returned to Fox's line up on Friday, February 13 and its ratings got caught under a machine press. That the show will be cancelled is a foregone conclusion now. I think it's likely that it finishes out its run this season though.

Their logic is sound, but that doesn't make their conclusion factual just yet; it's true that the ratings for the series have - to be brutally honest - tanked in its new Friday night slot, and unless some miracle happens, it's probably headed for the scrap heap. But stranger things have happened, and while ratings are very much unlikely to rise to the level of the show being a hit, they could definitely rebound above the cancellation point before the end of the season, given proper promotion. Summer Glau fans, consider this your cue.

Usually, the blurbs for fake DVDs are just babbled translations of whatever description the Chinese came up with. Maybe after years of having those lampooned, DVD piraters decided to copy-paste reviews from online instead. Only, I guess it's really hard to tell what's a good review when you don't speak English.

In case you were wondering, the review was from IMDB. Good job, marytothemax! Betcha didn't know millions would be using your review to decide whether to pick up a pirated version of Fox's Terminator show!

McG has already told journalists that he wants to use Connor's diary as a way to bring viewers into the story for Salvation, and hoped to get Hamilton to sign up, noting that she'd been very supportive of the movie so far. Now, Hamilton has told MTV that she's in negotiations to do just that very thing:

I don't know what direction they will go in. [but] I would probably be very happy to loan my voice depending on what the material is. Wait and see. They're already writing it. We've been negotiating it.

Somewhere, Lena Hedley is crying.

http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2009/02/19/exclusive-linda-hamilton-in-negotiations-for-terminator-salvation/">Linda Hamilton In Negotiations For ‘Terminator Salvation' [MTV Movies Blog]

Ratings tracking site TV By The Numbers sat down to look at whether Sarah Connor's new timeslot is as much of a graveyard as fans suspect, and the answer isn't exactly what you'd expect:

[The show's ratings] on Mondays last Fall were the 3rd worst for any Fox scripted show. With those results on a Monday it would certainly have been cancelled at the end of the season... On Friday, expectations by the network may be different, owing to the perceptions of the difficulty in maintaining successful scripted shows that night. While the number of people watching television is only about 15% lower than it is on Thursday night, the broadcast networks have put themselves in somewhat of a chicken and egg situation. Except for CBS, which has seen some success, the other broadcast networks have either programmed cheap unscripted shows on the night, or made Friday the dumping ground for their scripted shows that were either failures elsewhere (Lipstick Jungle), cost subsidized (Friday Night Lights), or strategic leftovers (The Game, Everybody Hates Chris).

And so, the magic number that the site predicts will keep it alive, based on previous network decisions?

If Terminator can sustain more than a 2.0 demo rating, it has a reasonable chance of being renewed. Below that, and Terminator is going to be cancelled.

In plain English, that's 2.61 million viewers (EDIT: No, it's not. My math was based on bad information. Sorry). Unfortunately, the site isn't optimistic about its chances:

Sadly, and I'm a fan of the show, I don't think that's going to happen. I will predict a sustained 1.7 rating for the show on Friday.

Perhaps we should start planning the letter-writing campaign now.

Will Terminator Be Renewed Or Cancelled? How Well Must It Do On Friday? [TV By The Numbers]

At the L.A. stop on the McG Terminator roadshow, the director shared his dream of getting the original Sarah Connor in on the Terminator Salvation project. He would like to get Linda Hamilton to contribute a voice-over from the diary tapes we see her making in the original films, which would appear at the beginning and end of the film. This makes sense, as Sarah should not be around according to the Terminator timelines, but her tapes certainly could.

Mc G told the press that:

"We're in the business of doing that right now," McG said. "So we'll see what happens. She seems to be very supportive of the film. I look forward to showing it to her in about a week or so." He added: "The tapes that she left for her son to be aware of what it was going to take to win the war, those are the tapes that are going to bring us in and out of the picture."

[Sci Fi Wire]

Perhaps the only precursor to today's arty time-leaping flicks is Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, a tough story about a man adrift between the decades, attempting to stop a terrible virus from destroying the world. After staying in the present day (the 1990s) for a while, he's put in a mental institution where he begins to believe that the post-apocalyptic future is just a crazy hallucination.

The new wave of time travel flicks represented by Timecrimes and Primer use the idea of time travel to explore madness in the same way Gilliam did. In both movies, our time travelers are clearly going mad - in Primer, madness seems to be one of the side-effects of time travel. We see a similar trend on FOX series Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, where all the characters who have traveled through time struggle with madness and traumatic flashbacks. With madness-loving director David Cronenberg working on a remake of Timecrimes, and a new Terminator movie in the works, we're not likely to see an end to this trend soon.

Madness makes almost any story more literary*, of course, if only because it takes a certain degree of art to represent reality through the eyes of somebody unsure of what's real. Even healthy minds are time travelers: In our imaginations, we jump around in time constantly, comparing what's happening right now to an event ten years ago, or recalling vividly a person who is long dead. So perhaps the idea of time travel is particularly suited to complicated, literary stories. It's a simple way to translate mental states into plot devices.

But why is time travel the plot device that arty types want to steal from scifi right now? Why not create indie flicks about aliens or space travel? Possibly because it's hard to create non-laughable aliens on an indie budget - so don't expect lit writer Jeanette Winterson's recent alien novel The Stone Gods to get the arthouse treatment any time soon.

I think there might be something else going on here, though, something connected to many people's realization that humans won't be traveling to space en masse in the near future. That dream died in the 1980s, when the moon landing honeymoon was finally over. These days, we don't all share a dream that one day we'll go to the stars, the way kids watching the first moon landing did. Instead, perhaps the most widely-shared scifi-flavored dream is of escaping to the past or future, instead of to the stars.

Certainly the fantasy of escape is at the heart of Timecrimes, where a man called Hector strays from his wife by idly watching another woman undress through his binoculars. This small act of betrayal sets in motion a psychotic adventure with time machines, self-tripling, and unbearable guilt. Is the movie really about time travel, or just the consequences of sexual anxiety?

Anyone who has seen an ordinary time travel film like Back to the Future would hardly recognize Timecrimes as part of the genre. Hector is not trying to change the past in order to make the present better, or even just to revisit a beloved lost time. His travels back to the recent past are clearly surreal representations of his own knotty psychology where sexual desire somehow always leads to murder. Not exactly the typical stuff of science fiction.

Still, it is science fiction - at least, a version of what SF would be if completely unleashed from the idea of genre. What's intriguing about the new wave of time travel indies is that they are unafraid to turn the conventions of hard SF into metaphors. There is no effort here to be "scientific," or to create a plausible time loop scenario. Instead, we are treated to a genuinely startling exploration of unknown territory in the human mind. And we get a glimpse of what science fiction might look like in years to come.

* You can see metaphorical time travel cropping up in non-SF literary work too: Joseph Heller's famous war novel Catch-22 is about a man whose madness causes his very narrative to become unstuck in time. (Unlike a similar work, Slaughterhouse Five, where the narrator is literally, not metaphorically, unstuck in time.) And both Marge Piercy and Joanna Russ have written literary SF novels (Woman on the Edge of Time and The Female Man respectively) that mix time travel with possible madness.

Skynet 5 is the latest iteration of a global communications system deployed by the British Armed Forces. The final satellite in the system was launched this week, and will allow high-bandwidth telecommunications between British forces located anywhere in the world. In addition to voice communications, it will allow data transfer and the remote control of robot airplanes, one of which is called "The Reaper." One of the manufacturers was quoted by BBC News as saying:

So, computers can talk directly to computers.

Are you terrified yet? It gets better. The system is actually privately owned and developed - the British Armed Forces are only promised a portion of the bandwidth as part of the contract. The one reassuring aspect is that the company is not called Cyberdyne.
Seriously, what the hell? Is it British humor to name something like this Skynet, or bureaucratic idiocy? Might as well get to work on the self-awareness chip and the "really angry at humans" algorithm. Image by: BBC News.

Final Skynet satellite launched. [BBC News]

You've been involved in Firefly, Serenity and The 4400. Are you particularly attracted to science fiction or do you choose the the projects based on the roles?

Well, scifi has sort of chosen me! The first scifi I ever auditioned for was Firefly, and it was the first television series I'd ever read for too, as a regular. Scifi fans are so loyal, they love to see their actors working, and I think that's why I keep going back to doing scifi.

The characters that you've played are all superwomen who kick ass, but they've all been "tweaked" somehow, or in some cases aren't even human. Do you feel like that's anti-feminist?

Well, look at Lena's character. She's a powerful woman, but she's normal but thrust into extreme circumstances. I like playing roles that are very vulnerable, and I think that Cameron is very vulnerable. Even though she's a robot, there's a vulnerability about her because she's alone in this new reality. She's childlike in that she's absorbing everything around her and trying to fit in and find her place. That's what's interesting to me. I don't want to play a character that is one-dimensional. I think that the women, I've played, while they're powerful, they're also vulnerable, they're emotional, and they are multi-faceted.

We've hear that Joss Whedon likes his actors to have some input in their characters, did you do that when you played River Tam in Firefly?

Oh, you heard that did you? *laughs*

Was it true?

No, not for me! We don't change anything about the characters. Although it's important for every actor to answer their own questions about our characters... we used to joke with Joss like "Hey, I have idea for this scene!" And he'd be like, "Uh, yeah. We're doing it my way." *laughs*

I trust him completely, and there were days when I came for scenes and I didn't know how I was going to do them. If Joss hadn't been there, I would have been lost.

Let's say something magical happened tomorrow, and they said Firefly was coming back on the air. Would you be up for it?

You know, I never had another experience like Firefly. It was very different for me because I'd hardly worked before. I was like a little sister and it was a very safe environment for me. I've never had that since, and I would definitely go back in a heartbeat.

Your character changed the most on the show, going from an innocent, lost little girl to a superweapon who could kill everyone in the room at the drop of a hat. Did you bring some of that to the role as Cameron?

I've wanted to make them very different. My main concern when I got this role was 'How do you make people care about a robot?' I've been trying to do that in a lot of different ways. What happens in the show is that you're drawn to her and you start to care about her, but then you see her do something that is so cold, and so inhumane that it's scary. That's what I'm going for!

You have a background as a dancer, do you still do that?

I do, although it's not easy. I go to classes often. I have a very physical role and I have to work out a lot, but I'd much rather go to dance class than go to the gym.

Do you have any shows or projects coming up where you dance?

Well, you could ask Joss about that. We might have a little something coming up...

Firefly, the musical? Summer had to run off to her panel, but we'll be checking into this!

• First of all, let's turn to the historical similarities. Back in 1986, Francis Ford Coppolla directed (and George Lucas executive produced) Disney's Captain EO, which was turned into an attraction at Disneyland, Disneyworld's Epcot Center, and later at Tokyo Disneyland and Disneyland Paris. Michael Jackson starred as EO, and Anjelica Huston played the evil Supreme Leader who was a horrific cybernetic queen who lived in a giant rat's nest of tentacles and cables. EO sang her a song and turned her pretty multiple times every day before fading away in 1998.
• In 1989, Masamune Shirow's famous Ghost in the Shell manga started appearing in Japan. As Major Motoko begins following the trail of the mysterious "Puppeteer," they eventually capture one of the cybernetic bodies that he/she has "ghost hacked" into. Just before falling into government hands, the body had thrown itself in front of a bus, which didn't leave her body fully intact. No arms, no lower torso, and a dangling spinal column. Oh, and no clothes, either.
• Mamoru Oshii directed the animated version of Ghost in the Shell in 1995, giving us a better look at the now-named "Puppet Master," who looks much like he/she did in the manga, except without that scowling countenance. Maybe getting some color and a little animation did wonders for his/her complexion. Plus they still haven't managed to find a halter top or anything.
• When Star Trek's Data met the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact in 1996, she looked a lot like a combination of both the Ghost in the Shell puppet-body, and the evil queen from Captain EO. Although she had a much splotchier complexion and didn't look so good once all of the skin got burned off her face, but she was cybernetically sexy as she got lowered into her sleek body. Plus, Data got a little Borg action from her, so she couldn't have been all bad.
• Of course, it's hard to look at any of these ladies without comparing them to the Venus de Milo. While she may have her lower torso intact and her spinal column tucked away nicely, she's still armless and mysterious. Plus she's locked away in the Louvre behind that giant glass pyramid and the Da Vinci code, so who knows what secrets the 2000 year old statue is keeping. She might be the mother of all Terminators, for all we know.

• It's planned as a trilogy, which means if the first movie sucks, it'll kill the rest of them and leave you with a cliffhanger. Of course, if it performs even halfway decent at the box office, they'll rush into the next two with gonzo effects, more explosions, and zero storyline.
• John Connor isn't the main character. In fact, it's not a Connor at all, it's a guy named Marcus who was someone taken out of the picture before "Judgement Day," and wakes up 15 years before the laser blasts and flying Hunter Killers that we see in at the beginning of Terminator 2. Apparently John Connor is around in this future, but plays a very minor role in the film. What this means is that you've got the fourth film in a series, in which John Connor is set up in each film to be the end-all, be-all salvation for all mankind, and he's not even in the movie. Neither is his kick-butt mom, Sarah Connor, who now has her own Fox TV series to deal with.
• The T-600s that were talked about in T2 make an appearance. Those are the Terminators with rubber skin, which sounds a bit erotic to us. Can they try and explain why the T-800s all look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and speak with an Austrian accent? Probably not. Plus, can they explain while you have to be nude to time-travel, but there's no problem sending a fully-functional robot covered in human skin back through the ages? Just encase a nuclear bomb in human skin and send it back to Los Angeles when John Connor was a kid. He'd be a goner,
• Marcus gets a butt-kicking female buddy named Blair in the first film, and she plays a pilot for the humans. So you've got Marcus and Blair fighting robots, basically. Which sounds like a bad Fox reality show that could actually become a reality if this strike keeps dragging on. While it's not clear exactly what she'll be doing, we imagine they're going to toss in a romance between Blair and Marcus. They'll hate each other at first, and then end up getting naked in a bunker together while bullets whiz by overhead.
• John Connor's daddy Reese shows up in this film, and he and John are buddies. Can you imagine having a friend your age who is actually your dad? It might be fun for awhile, but it would sure put a damper on the "so what hot chicks have you banged?" discussion. Plus, not that we don't love Michael Biehn as an actor, but he's way too old to play Reese at that age now.
• We find out that the robots have human brains in their metal heads. Now, this could ostensibly be cool, although we're at our wit's end trying to figure out how SkyNet, a sentient computer program created by the military, could possibly get a human brain into a robot body. Unless it gets a sympathetic and wacky mad scientist to start helping out, then it just couldn't work. Whoops, looks like we just spoiled the entire plot.

The Future Begins Here [CHUD]