The new Fox skien from “Battlestar Galactica” executive producer Ronald D. Moore is ready to get underway for its first episode for the possible SF weekly series.
“We start shooting the end of the month,” stated Moore. “We’ve got a cast. Peter Berg’s directing. It’s for Fox. It’s a completely different kind of show.”
“Virtuality” stars “New Amsterdam” actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in the lead as Captain Frank Pike, the commander of a deep-space mission.
The rest of the crew is composed of Clea DuVall, James D’Arcy, Sienna Guillory, Ritchie Coster, Joy Bryant, Jimmi Simpson, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Omar Metwally, Nelson Lee, Erik Jensen and Kerry Bishé.
Moore descibed the series in a recent interview with SCI FI Wire as “A group of astronauts who are on the first long-range mission to another star, which is going to take about 10 years to get there and back. So it’s 12 people in a tin can going in a very straight line for a very, very long time.”
The series is first slated for a 2-hr film pilot and if picked up could be turned into a weekly series as a Fox backdoor project.
“The public and private consortium that put this mission together gave the astronauts virtual-reality headsets that allow them to relax in their off hours, and, sure enough, things start going wrong, and they start wondering what’s really going on, and certain strange mysteries start occurring,” Moore said. “And yet these people are isolated and trapped, just with each other, a very, very long way from home and beyond anyone’s help, and they have really only themselves to deal with the strange things that are happening on the ship.”
According to Moore, it’s likely “Virtuality” will first air as a movie of the week.