Writer Josh Friedman (The War of the Worlds, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) is adapting the work for television.

Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (Transformers, Fringe) are producing. Steven Spielberg was previously listed as an executive producer on the project, but is no longer involved.

No word on a possible air date.

Ron Moore

According to Deadline Hollywood, Ron Moore, the man responsible for the “reimagining” of Battlestar Galatica, has gotten the greenlight from NBC to do a pilot for a series that is described as “an adult Harry Potter,” set in a world ruled by magic, not science.

Moore’s work on Galatica, initially a four-hour miniseries turned into a full series on the SyFy Channel, was widely hailed as some of the most sophisticated sci-fi of all time and helped revitalize the genre on TV.

Moore has a long history of working in genre TV. Prior to his work on Galactica, he worked on various incarnations of Star Trek, as well as The WB’s Roswell and SyFy’s Good vs. Evil.

Around 2002, he worked on a TV adaptation of Anne McCaffrey’s The Dragonriders of Pern for The WB, but he halted the production when the network reportedly insisted on changes that took the project too far from McCaffrey’s original vision.

The two-hour pilot for one recent Moore sci-fi project, Virtuality, ran on Fox last summer, to disappointing ratings and reviews.

No word on a title for the new Moore series, or the earliest that the show could run, should the pilot get picked up.

The interview is now available on YouTube.com (in two parts), and it’s fascinating, especially given the time the interviews took place: post-Twilight Zone and in something of a career lull, before Serling’s true legacy was known.

The questions are somewhat boilerplate, but Serling himself proves that his reputation as a visionary is not misguided: he is articulate and insightful not just about his own work, but also about the genre of sci-fi/fantasy in general.

In talking about sci-fi on TV, for example, he says:

I think the networks have almost ritualistically shortchanged the science fiction audience, both qualitatively and quantitatively. … I think science fiction is a high level literary form. And I think it’s much more than a small coterie of loyal viewers who have read Amazing Stories and want to go on. I think it’s a sizable group, particularly among the young, because we live in a society that’s so technologically improved and so scientifically oriented. Indeed, this is simply a reflection of what’s going on.

Interestingly, he’s not a huge fan of the original Star Trek.

Watch the whole interview:

h/t SFSignal

Q: Given all the sex and violence in Spartacus: Blood and Sand, will there be anything new in the “uncut” DVD version? — Wayne, Lakewood, CO

The Oracle Speaks:

“There actually isn’t a ton of stuff on the cutting room floor,” Spartacus executive producer Steven DeKnight recently told a gathering of critics in L.A. “Especially in television, you don’t over-shoot like you will on a film. There are some things, mostly of a sexual nature, on the DVD. One involving — I believe we put this shot back — an extra shot of, if you remember the gladiator Segovax that came to a very painful, unfortunate end when they castrated him at the end of that episode. There is an extra shot of him in there that you might not want to see.”

As for sex, he said, “There’s also in episode, I believe it’s [episode] six, in the gladiator orgy scene, there is some additional material. But  practically everything we shoot ends up on the screen.”

Q: I don’t mean this the way it sounds (or maybe I do!), but why did God create the Tree of Knowledge? He had to have created it — he created everything, right? But he already had that knowledge, so why create it at all? It seems like the whole point was to tempt Adam and Eve — I mean, who doesn’t want knowledge? And why is wanting that a bad thing? Would you invite your friends over, make this incredible-looking chocolate cake, and then say to them, “But you can’t have any!” I’m trying to be fair to God here, but it seems like He was being a major jerk. – Justin, Friday Harbor, WA

The Oracle Speaks:

The sad truth is that God comes off like an off-the-charts jerk in much of the Old Testament – which is precisely why it can’t, and shouldn’t, be taken literally.

The Bible isn’t an historical record: it’s a collection of myths and legends designed to explain a certain philosophical and spiritual point-of-view. (In the pre-scientific, non-rational ancient world, it was also used to explain natural world truths, but using it the same way today, in a post-scientific world, is, well, stupid.)

What philosophical point is the story of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (its full name) trying to explain?

That the world is far from a perfect place and that, seemingly unlike most other creatures on this planet, we are “cursed” to have an awareness of our plight and of our own mortality.

The Tree of Knowledge also represents free will, a fundamental component in most Western religious thinking. In God’s defense in the story, free will is pointless, symbolically and literally, without other choices. Since God gave Adam and Eve free will, he had to give them the option to “opt out” of paradise.

(Although the story doesn’t quite hang together here, does it? Isn’t free will meaningless without knowledge?)

Furthermore, the Garden of Eden story establishes perhaps the most fundamental component of the Judeo-Christian world-view: that human beings are fundamentally flawed and incomplete, and can only be made whole through a relationship with God (and religion).

Incidentally, I personally disagree with most of the points of the Garden of Eden story and its extremely negative view of the human condition: I don’t agree that human beings are fundamentally flawed in needing of salvation, or that human knowledge is a curse, or that the desire for it is a bad thing.

In this Oracle’s opinion, the limited world-view of the Garden of Eden story would infect Western religious thinking for generations to come, with the forces of religion being on the wrong side of almost every intellectual leap forward, before and since the Enlightenment.

And now The Oracle must go lie down. His head hurts. Next week, we go back to talking about Lucy Lawless’s breasts.

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Q: So I must know: will Lucy Lawless be back in the second season — not the “prequel” — of Spartacus? Basically, did she die in the finale? — MAGPIE, Toronto, Canada

The Oracle Speaks:

First, a spoiler alert.

“She was still twitching at the end of Season 1, if you look,” Spartacus‘ executive director Steven DeKnight said at the recent Television Critics Association conference in L.A.

In other words, yes, she’ll be back, not just in the prequel, but also in the subsequent second season.

“You know, the original plan with Lucy and that character was to kill her at the end of the season,” DeKnight said. “Basically we had John Hannah and Lucy Lawless for only one season. That’s what we could get them for. Towards the end of Season One, Lucy was having such a great time, and we all loved her so much, there was interest in bringing her back. And I got a call from Rob Tapert saying, ‘Starz called, and they’d really like Lucy to come back, and you know, Lucy really wants to come back,’ and I said, ‘Absolutely not. She’s got to die. That’s the way the story goes.’”

But DeKnight soon changed his mind, he said. “The next day I called him up and said, ‘Rob, I got an idea. And we’re thrilled to have — Lucy will be back in Season Two. And where the story goes with her is really something special. I’m very excited about that.”

What of John Hannah? “John Hannah is a little harder to bring back, obviously,” DeKnight joked.

Q: Are lembas magic or is it just a really, really impressive Powerbar recipe? — Jonah, Dallas, TX

The Oracle Speaks:

We know what Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson thinks: in the movies, one bite of lembas bread “is enough to fill the stomach of a grown man” — which is, of course, physically impossible, so magic must be involved.

But in the book, it’s a little different: “one cake” is enough for “a full day’s march,” which is much closer to the laws of physics and means that magic isn’t necessarily involved.

Still, there are repeated references to the fact that lembas don’t just sustain the body; they also sustain the spirit.

“Lembas does put heart into you,” J.R.R. Tolkien writes. “A more wholesome sort of feeling.” And Gollum can’t eat the bread.

This could, of course, all be psychological; when eating lembas, people often think of the elves (and the beauty of Galadriel), which could definitely provide a psychological boost.

But then there’s the fact that the elves, who created lembas, are an immortal, magical race — literally created by the magic of Eru IIuvater. Everything they do is suffused with magic — although not necessarily magic of the spellbook and incantation sort.

And come on: one thin cake for a full day’s march?

Count on it. Lembas are magic.

A more interesting question is why is the word always italicized when plenty of other elven words are not?

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Now Starz is continuing along the same fantasy theme with a new 10-episode series, Camelot, coming in 2011, starring Joseph Fiennes as Merlin, Eva Green as Morgan, and Jamie Campbell Bower as Arthur.

Eva Green (Morgan)

But after literally hundreds of movie and TV adaptations of the King Arthur legend (one currently airing on the SyFy Channel!), is there really anything left to tell?

Maybe not, but the producers promise it’ll be unlike any Camelot-themed project so far: smart, sophisticated, and realistic to the Dark Ages in which it’s set.

“The magic really lies in the political essence of the piece,” star Joseph Fiennes told a gathering of critics at the Television Critics Association in Los Angeles last week. The characters have “very strong agendas politically, and that’s what I’m excited about, where the power lies rather than sort of slaying dragons and things like that.”

Still, Fiennes was quick to point out, “Yes, there will be some dark arts and we’ll see people changing shape and things disappearing!”

As most Camelot-themed projects do, Camelot uses Thomas Malory’s classic Le Morte d’ Arthur as its source material.

“We’re starting right from the birth of Arthur, and we’re going through,” said the show’s showrunner and head writer, Chris Chibnall. “We’re just about to [film] our version of the sword in the stone this week, which is not like any other version you’ve seen. And we’ll go through and kind of try and tell what might be the truth that lies behind the myth. What would have been the [real-life] events that could have contributed to these myths? What was interesting to me when we were talking about Camelot was excavating what it might be like to have lived then, and how these stories might have come about.

“We have a grand plan,” Chibnall said, “which, if we get things right, I hope we’ll have multiple episodes, multiple seasons.”

Joseph Fiennes (Merlin)

As for the all-important relationship between Merlin and Arthur, “Their relationship really is from when [Arthur] was born,” Fiennes said, noting that Merlin carefully plans the trajectory of Arthur’s life.

“I think of Merlin as a sort of cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Donald Rumsfeld,” Fiennes joked, referring to Kenobi’s mentoring qualities and Rumsfeld’s political agendas.

“Their relationship takes many different turns and shifts,” Fiennes said. “[Merlin is] sort of tutor. He’s a father figure. He’s a brutal headmaster. He’s got to give this boy all of the tools to be king in a ruthless world, and he has to do it in a very short space of time. So there’s a lot of ‘cruel to be kind.’”

According to the Chibnall, Camelot won’t have quite the sex or violence of Starz’ envelope-pushing Spartacus.

“This is an adult drama, of course, but I think we are our own show,” Chibnall said. “The amazing thing about Camelot is you can talk about political pursuits.”

That said, expect plenty of romance. “The extraordinary thing in all the versions of Camelot and the Arthurian legend is it’s all about the romance,” he said. “It’s all about the passion. It’s all about great ideals compromised by falling in love with the wrong person … And also, we have some beautiful actors as well, so, frankly — anyway, let’s move on.”

Said Fiennes, “There will be, I’m sure, scenes of intimacy, scenes of violence, but I think really underpinning that, and I think it’s a big difference in what I’ve witnessed, is that there’s a very deep sense of character and narrative.”

Interestingly, Fiennes actually grew up near Stonehenge, a place that factors into some of the Merlin legends.

“I used to climb those rocks, and there was some kind of myth that Merlin brought those stones and built that himself for some pagan ritual,” Fiennes said. “But I certainly, at the age of nine or ten, was climbing them — marauding all over them. And they’re very full of energy, so maybe there’s some lineage to that moment to where I am now. Who knows?”

The project, an Irish-Canadian co-production, started work in June at
Ardmore Studios, just outside of Dublin, which, for the record, is where John Boorman’s 1981 movie Excalibur was also shot.

But the producers say they’re taking strong advantage of the Irish countryside as well.

“”We want the richness and vibrancy, and we want a sense of reality to it,” Chibnall said. “Big and bold and cinematic and epic. It’s like the country has been waiting for Camelot to be there because the landscapes are perfect for the Dark Ages.”

The show, which is a co-production between NBC and Britain’s BBC (where it runs under the name The Adventures of Merlin), ran last summer on NBC, but ratings were poor by broadcast network standards: it had an average of 4.17 million HH/viewers per episode.

For its second season, Merlin gravitated to SyFy, which is part of the NBC Universal Group. Ratings were considerably lower — an average of 1.28 million HH/viewers — but it’s been a strong performer by SyFy standards, increasing its time-slot by over 80%.

The third season of the series has already been filmed for U.K. broadcast.

Since ABC/Disney, which produced the show, will not be producing a third season, these fans have concentrated on finding another producing entity to take it over. They’ve raised almost $25,000 to date, which they’ve used to place ads in Variety, Hollywood Reporter, and on a bus shelter in Burbank.

They’re also doing email and Twitter campaigns, fan videos, and online petition, and plan to have a presence at the upcoming Dragon-Con convention in Atlanta.

“I think it’s incredible what they’re doing,” says Mary D. Brooks, the webmaster of a number of Seeker-themed websites.

Such fan campaigns have been successful before with other syndicated shows: once Xena: Warrior Princess seemed doomed to cancellation, but  fans rallied and ended up bringing it back for another season.

But to date, there has been no public movement toward the possibility of a third season for Seeker.

“You can easily ask the same question of Battlestar Galactica, which became one of my favorite TV shows,” said Jeff Davis, an executive producer and the writer of Teen Wolf the series, at a gathering of TV critics last week in Los Angeles. “I loved the original version, and I love the new version. I recognize its datedness.”

Tyler Posey

Indeed, when MTV told Davis they had the rights to Teen Wolf and were thinking of remaking it, he was initially wary.

“I am a huge fan of the original movie,” Davis said. “I loved it. But the question really is — A, it’s a basketball movie, and, B, it’s a comedy. And I said to them, ‘Is that the kind of movie you want to make?’ And they said, ‘No. We want to reinvent it for modern audiences, but we want to use the same kind of themes of a teenager exploring new-found powers and take the metaphor of a werewolf a little bit further, a little edgier, a little sexier.

“I think what we’ve done is we’ve paid really good homage to the original movie,” Davis said. “And to be quite honest, I consider myself a creative person, but also as a businessman, and you can’t dismiss the power of branding.”

The show will debut in March 2011 on MTV, but TheTorchOnline.com has seen a rough cut of the pilot, and Davis is right: it’s nothing like the original movie.

Instead, it’s a lot like The Vampire Diaries, with werewolves instead of vampires: broad, fast-paced action-romance involving attractive teenage characters.

But since The Vampire Diaries was much, much better than expected (and also better than Twilight, the project that started the teen vampire phenomenon), Teen Wolf’s obvious  ripping off of The Vampire Diaries is not necessarily a bad thing.

But while the show plans to feature romance, the producers also insist that it will be only one small part of the show.

According to Davis, “If it was a [broadcast] network [and not a cable channel like MTV], we’d be told, ‘Focus far more on the relationships. Don’t do too much of the werewolf stuff. Yes, he’s a werewolf, but we don’t want to do too much of that.’ There’s network sci-fi shows that are constantly being told, ‘Less sci-fi, more soap opera.’ But here they have been telling us, ‘Edgier. Go for it. We want to see action. We want to see twists. We want to see surprises,’ which is one of the most exciting things, to me, about working in cable.”

According to Tyler Posey, the 18-year-old actor who plays the main character who gets bit by a werewolf in the show’s opening minutes, the werewolves here are not like those in other similar projects.

“The werewolf that we are doing is completely different than the other werewolves that are kind of going around right now,” Posey said. “It’s more of a sexier kind of sleek werewolf. [We] got to push that sexy. It’s not as hairy as the original, the Teen Wolf, Michael J. Fox. But it definitely gives it a much darker and new feel to this werewolf.”

The show includes an element that’s new to the werewolf mythology, a mysterious ancient rivalry that, thankfully, doesn’t involve vampires.

Also in terms of reinventing the werewolf mythology, the show introduces three kinds of werewolves: an alpha, a beta, and an omega, the last of which takes the full wolf shape.

“The alpha being [most] monstrous,” Davis said.

“The way we like to put it is, the other werewolf shows and movies have werewolves you can pet,” Davis said. “We wanted to have one you could kiss.”

Not surprisingly (and perhaps disappointingly), the show is using lycanthropy as a metaphor for adolescence and all its animal-like urges.

“We wanted to do a story about a teenager who wasn’t necessarily a geek, a dork, but who is kind of the kid who you remember in class,” Davis said. “But if they got hit by a bus someday, it would be like, ‘I think he sat behind me in class.’ He’s that kind of guy. So it’s a moment of taking the ordinary person and making him extraordinary.

“When you are talking high school, I mean, that’s a time of life when it’s sexual awakening, and it’s finding yourself, your identity,” Davis said. “Being a werewolf is a way for us to tell a story where our desires are kind of heightened, senses are heightened.

“Our paradigm has always been to take the tone of The Lost Boys: funny when it wants to be, scary when it needs to be, and romantic as well,” Davis said.

The main character’s “sport” has been changed from the 1985 movie from basketball to lacrosse — in part, because the helmet lets the producers hide  some of Posey’s character’s eventual transformations (which can be spurred not just by a full moon, but also by heightened emotions, a la The Incredible Hulk). Lacross is also an extraordinary violent sport, producers said, reinforcing the animalistic theme of the series.

“When sitting down to write a teenage show, you — as we writers often do — go into our own past,” Davis said. “And I went to a Jesuit Catholic prep school, and I always remembered the lacrosse players walking around with the sticks in their bags and looking very cool. So it’s a cool sport.”

The series is being shot in Atlanta which, ironically, is also where The Vampire Diaries is shot.

The show almost immediately gained a cult following which soon became legion, an army of fans who just couldn’t get enough of the adventures in the ancient gladiator training camp. While many critics turned their noses up at the excessive gore and violence (not to mention the generous helpings of full-frontal nudity and sex scenes), websites across the blogosphere began to pop up, honoring the new series. That Spartacus was a hit, there can be no doubt.

On its surface, Spartacus was the ultimate guys’-guy show. Each episode seemed to be injected with a superdose of testosterone, and with each limb that was excised from a body, the fans became more and more bloodthirsty. The thirteen-episode first season culminated in what has to be one of the most shocking, blood-soaked climaxes in the history of television, in which Spartacus and his fellow slaves rebel and lay waste to an entire houseful of Roman citizens, brutally murdering men, women, and children.

Just as the network promised, Spartacus pushed the envelope farther than any show that had come before it.

But it did even more than expand the limits of violence and nudity on television. It accomplished a much higher goal, and it did this — if you can believe it — subtly.

Spartacus is the first of its kind: a guys’ show that is inclusive of women, minorities, and gay and bisexual characters, without ever calling attention to itself for this fact. It never pats itself on the back for being forward-thinking. There was never a “very special” episode of Spartacus that dealt with a character’s sexual identity, or a story in which they learn that beyond our skin color, we’re all really the same.

Spartacus just assumed this to be true, and in a rare display, it respected its audience enough to assume they would be on the same page.

So were they?

Most of them were. But not all, of course. Recently, series showrunner Steven S. Deknight spoke to TheTorchOnline.com writer Michael Jensen about the show’s two most significant gay characters, Barca and Pietros, who were killed halfway though the first season.

MJ: You’ve had some time since the season ended and people reacted to what happened with Barca and Pietros. Has any of the negative reactions changed how you write gay characters? Do you feel like you’re more aware of the issues than you were before?

SD: It still comes down to the story and what works best for the characters. The only time I had a reaction to anything that’s said, is every once in a while I’ll come across a comment on the Facebook site or the official site, and I’m sure all your readers have read similar things, where someone will say—usually a guy—”I love the show but can you cut out all the gay shit.” That’s the only thing that will trigger a violently negative response from me.

For me, and I think Rob too, it’s even more reason to continue including that in the story until people come to accept it. I don’t understand how you can watch Season 1 and fixate on that, especially when I think the Barca/Pietros storyline was beautiful and tragic. I was very heartened that even people who were a little uncomfortable with the gay content, when Barca got killed, they were very upset and very moved, which I think is a step in the right direction.

MJ: And a testament to the storytelling and the acting. You guys were able to overcome that internalized prejudice people have. Now, the show obviously had a lot of female nudity, but it had more male nudity than any show I’ve ever seen. It was very homoerotic, yet clearly it was a smash success. The show was hugely popular. Did you expect more negative reaction or less?

SD: I’m honestly always surprised by negative reactions to sexual content, language content, I was even surprised by some of the negative reaction to the violence in the show. For me, I look at shows at being entertaining and hopefully moving, but first and foremost our job is to entertain. I look at the show as something I would love to watch even if I wasn’t working on it. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I live in Los Angeles and things are a little bit different here, as they are in any big city. I’m always shocked when other people are shocked.

There are moments in the show where I’m like, “Oh, alright. I understand you being shocked when Segovax is castrated.” I mean, I cringed myself. At the end of the day, the important thing for us is we’re not actively trying to promote any single agenda. Everything comes together because we’re just trying to tell the best story we can, and if there’s a little bit of social activism in there, all the better.

Deknight casually makes a reference to social activism as an almost incidental side effect of their storytelling, but that is where the show is truly remarkable. That the show could be considered progressive is not a statement they’re attempting to make. It just is.

As stated above, the show has its share of gay and bisexual characters, and there are more to come in the coming seasons. Both Barca and Pietros were also people of color, as are other prominent characters like Doctore and Naevia. And speaking of Naevia, she was one of a batch of strong, resourceful women showcased on the show, in such company as Lucretia, Illyithia, and Mira.

Spartacus is an action show for the 21st century, truly the first of its kind. It is a landmark series and should be applauded for that fact. Of course, in a perfect world, such inclusion wouldn’t be newsworthy. But until we reach that day, it’s a good thing we have shows like Spartacus.

But what of the second full season that the producers were already working on when Whitfield’s cancer was discovered?

“The thing about Season 2 is it’s a bit of a different show,” showrunner and executive producer Steven DeKnight tells us. “We start down the path of what most people know about Spartacus — how this rebellion came together. But what always interested me is not that everybody broke out and it was, ‘Rah rah! We’re together! Let’s band together and form an army!’ It’s very contentious. There are a lot of mistakes made. It takes quite a while before they build anything close to an army.”

In other words, if it wasn’t already clear, Starz’s TV Spartacus is a far cry from the version of the story seen in the 1960 Kirk Douglas movie.

“As much as I love the Kubrick/Kirk Douglas movie, [the real history] was not a merry band of people,” DeKnight says. “There was a lot of this faction breaking off and looting and pillaging and then coming back, and there was a lot of infighting. What I take from that, and what I want to illustrate in the show, is that all that infighting comes from personal perspective and people’s desires and passions: some people wanting to be purely free and others wanting revenge. It is all a big mess.”

And, of course, the character of Spartacus will be in the center of the mess.

“One of the things I love working with Spartacus is he’s a hero, but as we’ve seen in Season 1, he doesn’t always do the right thing,” DeKnight says. “He can be reactionary, and he can let his passions drive him, which is something we want to explore. We want to explore how to take this man from that to a true, true leader. We saw a little of that at the end of Season 1.

“Tempers certainly flare quite a bit [in season 2]. Even among heroes there are betrayals, and people who think they are doing the best thing, and people who do the wrong things for the right reasons. It’s a slippery slope. It’s a learning curve for everyone involved in the story.”

What of the first season’s cliffhanger-like ending, where it wasn’t quite clear who was alive and who was dead, especially Lucy Lawless’s Lucretia character?

“I’m of two minds with the cliffhanger season finale [in general],” DeKnight says. “Sometimes it works: I have to go back to Season 2 or 3 of Star Trek: The Next Generation with the Borg and Jean Luc and the cliffhanger ending. But honestly in this day and age with so many channels, you just don’t know if you’re coming back, so my goal with this show is to have a thrilling conclusion to each season, but it’s a conclusion.

“So if it doesn’t come back you can say, ‘Yeah, I would have loved to know what happens next,’ but it’s not like this person is in a burning building and this one is going down in an airplane. Who lived? What happened? I want to put a firm exclamation mark on the end of each season. We’ve got a damn good one coming up in Season 2 and, I think, at the end of the prequel.”

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