Battlestar Galactica spinoff, 'Caprica' has the green light

Back in mid-January, we reported via AICN, that NBC/Universal was interested in moving forward on the Battlestar Galactica spinoff series, Caprica. The series will actually be a prequel set 50 years in the past.

That interest has now been confirmed as legit and the pilot episode has been green-lit for production. The pilot will be 2 hours long and the series will deal with the first Cylon war and how it came about.

Caprica is set to be debuted in the fall, which should be right after Battlestar Galactica ends its run.

The full plot description is below. This could be a great new series on Sci-Fi, I hoped that it can live up to the quality that we’ve seen so far in BSG.

It is described as “television’s first science fiction family saga.� The show will be set on the fictional planet Caprica, approximately fifty to seventy years before the events depicted in the re-imagined series. It will tell the story of the Twelve Colonies at peace and living in a society not unlike our own. But high technology and a startling breakthrough in robotics brings to life the age-old dream of marrying artificial intelligence with mechanical bodies to create the first living robots â€� the Cylons. They are researched and built, ultimately leading to the First Cylon War.

The series will revolve around two families: the Adamas and the Graystones. Joseph Adama, father of future Battlestar commander William Adama, is a renowned civil liberties lawyer who becomes an opponent of the artificial intelligence/Cylon experiments wrought by the Graystones, owners of a large computer corporation that builds the first Cylons. According to Mark Stern, Sci-Fi Channel’s Executive Vice President of Original Programming, the script for the two-hour pilot episode concluded with an explanation for how the name “Cylon� was coined. On September 20, 2007, Battlestar Galactica writer and producer Bradley Thompson revealed that Ron D. Moore’s script for Caprica has a character coin the term, saying, “A cybernetic life-form node, a Cylon.�