No matter how big a hit Fox’s Terra Nova is, the first season order will only run 13-hours. We’ll get a two-hour premiere and 12 episodes in the first season, says the production team. That’s due to the difficulties with the shooting and post-production associated with the new Steven Spielberg produced show.
“It simply wasn’t possible to do this show until now,” producer Brannon Braga says. “We’re literally creating things as we go along.”
Braga went on to say the show is producing a movie-quality show on a television budget. We previously reported that the production team wanted to make sure we saw dinosaurs on the show each week.
Producer Rene Echevarria added: “A lot of production houses we approached said, sorry, it can’t be done, not on the time frame we required. Even five years ago this show simply wouldn’t have been possible.”
When asked what the budget actually was, Echvarria remained silent, but when the rumored $100m/season number was mentioned, he laughed and said “No, absolutely not even close… I so wish I had a budget like that.”
Some of the show’s solutions have apparently originated with Steven Spielberg, who is one of 13 producers. According to Braga, Spielberg “will take a sequence and analyze it in such an instructive way. The show is filled with elements like that. He’s weighed in on visual effects of course, on scripts, on casting, on the look and feel of the show.”
Regardless how good or bad it is, Fox will screw it up somehow. They will either show the episodes out of order like they did on Firefox or they will change the air date/time, oh, I don’t know 10 times in the 13 episode run. And if the show is REALLY bad, they will renew it for five years. But if its GREAT, they’ll cancel it by episode #5!
Seems like shorter seasons are becoming the norm these days and shorter episodes.
Sad to hear, though I’m interested to see it.
By the way, posts seem to be doubled in their content today/recently. There’s duplicated stuff here (pasted twice?), and in the recent post about Rise of the Apes.
Interesting, they mention the idea that they are producing a Movie quality show on a TV budget. Kinda the excuse the Lucas used for not having put his Star Wars series into production yet. I’m sure it’s probably going to be canceled due to the large production budget alone.
13 hours? Two-hour premiere plus 12 hour-long episodes equals 14, no?