According to the site, the series will be a motion comic adaptation of the current "official" sequel to the television series, and the casting sides they have make it look like an adaptation of the Faith-centric second arc, "No Future For You" (written by Brian K. Vaughan), with actors needed for parts including Faith, Lady Genevieve and the dream-sequenced Daniel Craig. The sides name "Maxx Initiative" as the people behind the motion comics, but aside from the mention of Jeff Shuter as casting director, no other creative personnel are named as being involved. Recording dates, according to the casting sides, are still to be decided, so don't hold your breath waiting for the end result, either - Although we are waiting to find out whether or not Whedon is involved in this any more than he was the Marvel motion comic version of his Astonishing X-Men comic.

We've got the scoop on a new Buffy series! [Sci-Fi Wire]

The fan-made Horrible Turn describes its legal status in the following, appropriately Whedonesque way:

Any similarity to the characters created by Joss Whedon is, like, totally a coincidence. And by 'coincidence' we mean accidental. And by 'accidental' we mean fortunate. And by 'fortunate' we mean intentional. And by 'intentional' we mean unauthorized.

While we're unconvinced that Dr. Horrible needed any backstory in addition to what we saw in the original web series (And, no, that doesn't includes you, authorized comics), we're kind of taken by the trailer for Horrible Turn:

Horrible Turn trailer from Horrible Turn on Vimeo.

Does this mean the movie will live up to its inspiration? We only have to wait until November 10th to find out.

[Horrible Turn] (Via Whedonesque)

So, what's the news about Farscape from Boom! Studios?

The big news at this con is that the Farscape is becoming an ongoing series, plotted by Rockne S. O'Bannon, Farscape creator, and scripted by Keith R.A. DeCandido. We've had the the first four issue mini-series, which was a huge success - and when I say "huge success," I mean, it really changed Boom! in a big way. It was the first part of this huge growth that Boom! has seen, and now, along with the Muppet Show books, the Incredibles books, Eureka, all these things have garnered us new attention. Farscape was the first one of that, the first issue came out in December 2008. So we've had a four issue mini-series and then another one, Strange Attractors, which immediately followed up, and saw very little drop in readership. It was pretty much even. We saw fans really stick with this book, which we were happy to see.

Then we just started up Gone and Back, the first issue of the third mini-series, and with the numbers we saw, and the fan response we saw, we thought, Okay. This is doing well enough to support an ongoing series. It'll be called Farscape, it'll be out every month, and fans and retailers can depend on a quality book.

The fan reaction has been really positive?

Yeah, definitely. We had the Farscape comics panel, and Keith made a great point, which was that there's not a lot of spin-off material [from the series]. There were a few novels; Keith wrote one, "House of Cards," there was a video game, Wildstorm put out two comics, and that was about it until the show was cancelled. Now, the Farscape comics being the only ongoing presence of the story, of the characters. We're lucky enough to have it be canonical, have the creator, I mean, Rockne is totally great for these books, he's really doing amazing things continuing the story, saying "This is the show. This can be seen, if you wish, as the fifth season of the show." You couldn't do that with Star Trek, because Next generation was going, then you had the novels... Obviously, with the logistics of making Next Generation, you couldn't do that with all the novels and making it work with all the material, but we're lucky. We're in a place where we can.

How involved is Rockne?

It's a pretty cool process. Rockne sends me a PDF of a plot for four issues, and getting those PDFs is a huge highlight, because he's been in the business a long time, he's smart as a whip, a great storyteller, and each of those plots is a great little short story, with a great beginning, a middle full of adventures, and when it comes to the end, I'm sitting here reading the PDF on my laptop and going, 'This is like watching an awesome movie,' except in this case it's going to be a comic that I get to work on!

So we send that to Henson, and we're very blessed in that our liason at Henson is not a guy who just rubberstamps things, he's willing to get into discussions with Rockne and Keith, and there we get the plot approve, Keith works on the script and then Rockne and Keith go on and on about the script, they work on it and then I get it, and then Rockne, Keith and I work on it, and then Rockne, Keith, the licensor and I work on it, and the process moves much more quickly than it should with all these people working on it. We're very lucky that way.

So will the structure change in the ongoing series? Will there be longer subplots, or will you keep to something you can easily put into trade paperback?

You'll probably still see four-issue plots, because we found out that those are kind of like meaty episodes of the TV show. It's a little bit more than you'd get in a forty-five minute TV show, but it works out roughly that way. Rockne has always put in all these subplots - For example, the first story of the ongoing is called "Tangled Roots," and it answers a lot of questions that were posed since the first issue of the first Farscape mini-series. So it's definitely, there's that thrill of the monthly book, and a company the size of Boom! doesn't get to do that that much, there aren't a lot of small companies that get to do long, ongoing series or long projects that have subplots, multiple characters, that kind of stuff. The kind of thing that I loved as a kid, reading X-Men.

Of course, there's talk about the webisodes. At the Farscape 10th Anniversary Panel, Rockne and Brian Henson gave a lot of discussion to the upcoming webisodes that they're hoping to make happen, and those would obviously continue. So, you know, it's one throughline you can follow. It's the first four seasons, it's the Peacekeeper Wars, it's the Farscape comics. It's one great propulsion of story.

Do you guys get say in the webisodes because Rockne's on board?

The webisodes are Rockne and Henson, and because Rockne is working on both, the comics and webisodes share story threads. That's all I can reveal at this point.
Farscape #1 launches in November from Boom! Studios.

Spinning out from The Hero Chronicles video podcast, Captain Alpha Male expands the mundane superhero's universe to include a new cast of characters and more traditional sitcom format that make us wonder just what Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog has unleashed:


The second episode goes live on Thursday.

[Captain Alpha Male]

Part-self-help, part-superhero-deconstruction, this new series of webisodes - written by Megan J. Wilson and directed by Michael Mann - explains itself a little like this:

In the safety of The Sanctum, where they depend on each other for anonymity, superheroes unveil the personal circumstances that have led them to a life of addiction and loneliness. Bonded by the anguish of their individual experiences and the often destructive nature of their supernatural abilities, they begin to learn to heal themselves. All the while, evil lurks in their midst.

Here's the first episode for you:

[Sanctumsodes]

The new webseries, premiering tonight on fashion website Modelina, recasts Heidi Klum as superhero The Kluminator, saving New York Fashion Week from the forces of evil and... well, dancing around to a version of "Misirlou," apparently. While I'm not averse to goofy superhero fun, I can't help but feel that this shows that the superhero trend may be nearing its end:

Spiked Heel: Supermodels Battle The Forces of Evil [Modelina]

According to a press release from the channel, BSG's first episode in months was the most watched show in the 10-11pm hour amongst the Men 18-49 and Men 25-54 demographics, helping the channel to become the third most watched cable network of the night. Overall, ratings on the show were up a staggering 23% in total viewers. But it's not only television where the show brought success; thanks to the Face Of The Enemy webisodes, the SciFi website saw its best day since Hallowe'en last year, and its best day in terms of video views since October 2006. The question now is, how many of those viewers will stick around, now that they know who the Final Cylon is?

Battlestar Galactica Returns With Double Digit-Gains [TV By The Numbers]

(In case you missed it yesterday, all of the webisodes, except for episode nine, were leaked early on Amazon, and should be easy to find elsewhere now as well.)

The thing that won me over about "The Face Of The Enemy," despite a bigger-than-usual dose of melodrama, was that Gaeta changed as a result of these events. And also the fact that Gaeta didn't have to view these experiences the way he chose to.

Here's what happened: a few days after the fleet found Earth, some of Cavil's Cylons showed up. (Can we call them Imperial Cylons, as opposed to Rebel Cylons?) The fleet jumps away, but one raptor, containing Gaeta, two Sharons and an assortment of redshirts, gets lost. They're running out of oxygen and the jump calculations to rejoin the fleet have gone "non-linear." So it's basically the classic lifeboat situation.

People start dropping dead, and it soon becomes clear there's a murderer aboard. Everyone suspects the one remaining Cylon, but Gaeta had an affair with her back on the planet of New Caprica, when she helped him save people from the prison camps. Oops, it turns out the Sharon really is the killer, and she also didn't help Gaeta save people — she took his lists of people who needed saving, and made sure those people got executed instead. Gaeta kills his ex-lover, and prepares to die alone, covered with blood and surrounded with corpses.

But there's a happy ending! Gaeta's current lover, Hoshi, has been searching for Gaeta in another raptor. And even though it's hopeless, and he knows he's just wasting time (and precious fuel), Hoshi refuses to give up. And he finds Gaeta, with minutes to spare.

So you can look at this story and derive a few different morals: True love conquers all, since Hoshi's love saved Gaeta. Or, be careful whom you trust, since Hoshi was trustworthy and Sharon wasn't. Or even, some Cylons are nicer than others, since this Sharon killed for the occupation while Athena was fighting to destroy it.

Instead, the emotionally scarred Gaeta leaps for the bleakest reading: you can't trust any Cylons. And love is a luxury he can't afford, because the Cylons are about to hit the fan.

At least, after Gaeta goes and bitches out poor Saul Tigh for being a Cylon, and demands to tell Admiral Adama that the alliance with the Cylons was a mistake, he then has a conversation with Hoshi where he appears to dump him, and tells him to keep his head down. And reading between the lines, it sounds as though Gaeta is on his way to meet with Tom Zarek about fomenting revolution against the Roslin/Adama regime.

(By the way, how can anyone think the Cylon alliance was a bad idea? The humans got to destroy the Cylons' Resurrection Hub, preventing the Cylons from resurrecting ever again, assuming the Cylons were telling the truth. They found out who four of the final five were, eliminating a potential security risk. And they found Earth, whose condition wasn't the Cylons' fault. The humans got way more out of it than the Cylons did.)

In any case, if this had been a regular episode of BSG, instead of an episode-length story split into ten bite-sized parts, it would have been a middling installment. Pretty good, not great. Better than "The Woman King" and the episode that killed off Kat. It definitely gets a bit too melodramatic, and the bit where the evil Sharon tells Gaeta "You HAVE to face reality. You HAVE to see the world for what it is," wasn't Grace Park's finest moment.

As for Alessandro Juliani, he does a pretty great job, especially in the last webisode, where he has to carry the whole thing without any dialogue for a bit. (Except more of that singing, of which the less said the better.) The whole sequence where he covers his face with blood, surveys the corpses all around him, and almost kills himself but then doesn't, is pretty awe-inspiring. The rest of the time, he has a bit of his usual deer-in-the-headlights thing going on, but he mostly carries the romantic lead pretty well.

I have a feeling, from the clips we've seen so far, that these webisodes will add to your appreciation of the show's final episodes, even though they were added afterwards. We've already seen a clip of Gaeta lecturing a slightly scared-looking Baltar about his restaurant ideas, and we know that Gaeta and Baltar have unfinished business.

Oh, and the consensus online seems to be that Gaeta's chances of being the final Cylon have gone down considerably after these webisodes. (Bear in mind, they could be a deliberate misdirection, and he could still be our guy.) But if he's a Cylon, he definitely doesn't know it yet, judging from the venom with which he talks to Tigh at the end. Poor Tigh — he's pretty much the only person I feel sorrier for than Gaeta.

To make the episode, Gerrold teamed up with the fan crew behind Star Trek: Phase II, a web series that's intended to be the fourth season of the original series. He dusted off his gay-themed script, called "Blood and Fire," and also directed it. Originally, "Blood and Fire" was written for Star Trek: TNG, and approved by series creator Gene Roddenberry, but executives at the network balked. Gerrold says they told him they were worried they'd lose their advertisers because "mommies" would call in to complain that they'd seen gay people on Star Trek.

For the webisode, Gerrold re-wrote the script to bring it up to date with issues like gay marriage, and also to make the characters more openly gay. In the original, they were portrayed as friends - the only hint that they were gay was one character asking them how long they'd been together. In the new version, as you can see in the clip below, there's no question that they're lovers.

The episode is about the Enterprise responding to a distress call, and dealing with scary "bloodworms." It introduces a new character, Peter Kirk, the gay nephew of the captain.

According to AfterElton's Brent Hartinger, who has seen the full episode:

There’s tension between Peter and his famous uncle, who is determined to keep him out of harm’s way, even if it means treating him differently than the other crewmembers. Eventually, Peter reveals the real reason he requested a stint on the Enterprise: to be near his boyfriend, Alex Freeman (Evan Fowler). When the couple make plans to marry, Kirk agrees to officiate, but only “after the away mission” — which may or may not bode well for the future of this relationship . . . The portrayal of Peter and Alex's romantic relationship is treated no differently than any of the dozens of heterosexual relationships the various Star Trek incarnations have included over the decades. Indeed, the storyline is incorporated so naturally as to make the “official” Trek's inexcusable lack of gay characters even more obvious.

The first half of "Blood and Fire" goes online this Saturday on the Star Trek: Phase II website. The second half airs in February.

You can see more images and a longer clip at AfterElton.

Originally, each episode of the troubled Whedon creation was going to be accompanied with a three-minute webisode of exclusive material, but that seems to no longer be the case in light of the numerous production hiatuses and rewrites required to get the series ready for its February debut.

Spoiler site Pie Spoilers is reporting that Fox's publicity department is now saying that they "do not believe that there will be supplementary webisodes" to the show, and that focus will be on "“[j]ust the actual show for the first season." It's certainly possible that the amount of rewrites/reworking that the show has had to go through recently may have eaten up the time allotted for the webisodes, but a more likely possibility is simply that Fox doesn't feel like spending the extra money necessary in light of both the current economic climate and the apparent Friday-night lack of faith that the network has demonstrated in the show so far.

Dollhouse premieres February 13th on Fox.

Dollhouse: Whedon To Drop Webisodes? [Pie Spoilers]

One of the big spoilers that's been swirling about this episode is that we'll learn more about the mega-hot Gaeta's bisexual dalliances. And we've got that covered: Right after Tigh tells Gaeta to take a week off, he meets up with his boyfriend in the hall and they kiss. His boyfriend also gives Gaeta some "morphia," which I assume is some kind of painkiller. Gaeta is still hobbling on his artificial leg.

We also catch glimpses of Gaeta's flashbacks to life on New Caprica, when he was working as a double-agent for the cylons and the human resistance. And making it with an Eight (Sharon) cylon.

The premise of the 10-episode series, called "The Face of the Enemy," is that the fleet encounters some cylons right after discovering what may or may not be a destroyed Earth. In a shuttle on his way between ships, Gaeta and a small crew (including an Eight) jump to safety with the fleet - but when they arrive the fleet isn't there. And we know some bad shit will happen, because the episode begins 3 days after their fateful jump and Gaeta is looking pretty banged up.

Question for you: Why the hell is Tigh in charge again? Wasn't he sent to the brig forever after he came out as a cylon?

Each episode is about 5 minutes, and so we can expect the full run of webisodes to last as long as a typical television episode. Next one pops on Monday, so be on the lookout for more hot Gaeta action!

Battlestar Galactica Webisodes [via SciFi]

Writing on the Whedonesque blog, Whedon offers the following sales pitch:

Is it worth fifteen hard-earned dollars? Absolutely. In fact, I can say without reservation that the Dr. Horrible DVD is worth $15.23 EASILY. More, if your dollars weren't the hard-earned kind, just the kind you have lying around in your mom's purse. God knows WE'VE worked hard to earn 'em. "Commentary! The Musical" is the most painstaking and exhausting piece of whimsey I have ever mistaken for a good idea. It has nearly twice as much music as Dr. Horrible itself — since you can't really talk that much during a commentary musical or it sounds like a regular commentary. (Which we also have, with the stars and writers, plus making-of's, ELE applications, and a few items left lying around by a notorious Bunny...) I can say without hesitation that I hesitate to say it's great. And by great I mean ridiculous. It's sophmoric, solopsistic, silly and the most fun I've had being exhausted since the fabled Mushortio itself. And everyone sings beautifullly. Which enrages me. I a little bit hate my friends now.

And, as the saying goes, that's not all:

I just want to say "thank you" to everybody who has supported this venture. We've been able to pay our crew and all our bills, which means a lot. What means more is proving that completely independent ventures can muscle their way through the blizzard of big-budget behemoths. (A blizzard of behemoths? Back to writing school, alliteration-junkie!) All that rhetoric about the future of entertainment that flew about during the Strike is still entirely true. We need to find our own way of producing entertainment. A lot of people are watching Dr. Horrible to see if it's any kind of model — way more people than I expected — and it means everything to me to help pave the way for artists to start working and making a living from the ground up. There are a couple of real pioneers in this that I know personally: Felicia Day, I'm thrilled to say, and choreographer Chris Elam are both looking far ahead in terms of monetization and interactivity. Me, I'm more like Jimmy Stewart in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", but at least I'm out there. Thanks, he finally summed up, to you.

Amazon claims the DVD is due December 19th; Whedon is "hoping Amazon is just playing it safe and we can beat that date."

[Whedonesque]

At first glance, it's pretty hard to watch. It's one of the grimmest things I've ever seen, and I've watched student productions of Samuel Beckett's Endgame. The first couple of three-minute episodes seem to consist of just Schofield acting his heart out in a grim post-apocalyptic, dystopian world. (You can take a drink now.) It's not entirely clear to me what the plot of Kirill is, but it seems as though Schofield's character is trying to communicate with our time, 50 years in his past, and warn us about some future disaster. And (shockingly) the Large Hadron Collider is involved.

MSN UK will post two three-minute episodes per week, for the next five weeks. And there's some kind of vague interactive component, to do with MSN's instant messenger tool "Live Search" and MSN's social network. Maybe you can communicate with a dying blogger in a ravaged world 50 years from now? Your guess is as good as mine. Here's the trailer:

[MSN]

I must admit this webisode looks light years better than the first, but I don't know if I'm going to ever get tired of yelling "sploosh" whenever his lady gets smacked by a car and turns into a wave. I'm sorry is the ability to turn into water that great? Would your nemesis be made out of Sham Wow? Yeach, props for Santiago's super ability but this girlfriend has gotta go. But also thank you NBC for spending a little more on this webisode than in Postie's storyline. But then again, this is only the trailer.

I discovered Hulu's ever-growing archive while I was looking online for an episode of Lost in Space, "The Hungry Sea." I wasn't alive for this show's original run, but the setting and tone are downright crazy today. The Museum of TV & Radio in New York used to let you look back into TV's past, and this was one of the first things I accidentally watched as a kid.

Then there's shows I wasn't even aware existed, like Land of the Giants, a Lost in Space follow-up that set the sterling template for Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Steven Bochco's 1975 version of The Invisible Man is another example of a program I was too young to originally watch, but it's perfect for the internet and the concept is still an entertaining re-imagining of H.G. Wells' original vision. Now they just need to get the British version on there.

Some series just resemble a bad dream. In fact, I really thought I had imagined NBC's The Pretender. For example: Johny Sokko and His Flying Robot formed the template for all the flying robot shows we've come to take for granted.

The biggest surprise (for me) is the Bill Bixby version Incredible Hulk. The show holds up great, at times resembling Lost with its inclusion of technology and savagery in the same frame. They even have "Proof Positive" — the only episode of the show that didn't feature Bill Bixby.

Let Hulu suck up your remaining attention span here.

The casting call is Sept. 24th in Los Angeles, CA.

NBC is looking for actors to play:

Rachel Mills: A 20-something lady who is ex-military, beautiful, athletic build and mysteriously trouble.

David Sulivan: a late 20's to 30-something male. All-American and Rachel's love interest. David is a good guy that suffers from a Dr. Jekyll-Hyde transformation.

Ryan Hanover: another 20-something who is quick tempered and has "plenty of attitude." An asshole jock type, but not super muscular (squeal, please make him gay with an attitude).

[Heroes Spoiler]

Howard Webster, who originally came up with the idea for the show in 1996 before being rejected by studios and deciding to self-finance the project, has been working on the show in his back garden and local Starbucks for the last year... and he wouldn't have it any other way:

I think Jonas Moore is an online trailblazer... It’s allowed us to circumvent, with a franchisable IP, all the traditional routes that you’d have to go through. Apart from Doctor Who in this country, where do you take a sci-fi drama to? For the TV manadarins, sci-fi is a poor relation to drama proper - Jonas Moore would never have seen the light of day if I’d taken that in at the development stage. But now we can demonstrate it has a colossal fan base; it allowed people like me to have a platform.

That platform is one that Webster sees as entirely mobile:

I was looking at an iPod and thought the screen reminded me of a comic book cell. I thought the iPod was going to be the fastest selling device in the world; if you could do a comic book for free you would have something big... In the winter it will be a perfect thing for people on their iPods. It’s a perfect little bus ride thing.

And even though the series is going to be turned into a show for regular TV, it doesn't mean the iPod-friendly webisodes will stop:

I’m keeping the digital online rights separate from the TV series because I wanted to keep it indie and cool and keep the community going. I’ve been working on the TV piots and its going to be a real reboot with a big plot twist in it that isn’t in the graphic novel. The web graphic novel is going to be the original story, fans will get to see the back-story online, just like Dark Knight is informed by all the old Batman comics.

So, the TV show will be overlong, depressingly bleak and incredibly successful compared with the original web-series, then? I can't see too many people complaining about that...

Howard Webster Interview [Paid Content]