Terminator/Cheers Crossover Cancelled

Fox is doing something really ground-breaking with the future of the Terminator franchise, and I haven’t seen it discussed in depth anywhere else, so I’m going to talk about it here. When I was in LA last week, I found myself having lunch on set of a new project that includes some of the old team from Fox, and they told me it would be okay to jot down some remarks.

It’s true that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has not been renewed or a third season. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be any more episodes.

“The idea came up one night last year when all the writers were out having a drink,” said show creator Josh Friedman. “And somebody said, well, if they cancel the show, then we just sneak into the prop room, flip on the energy bubble machine, go back five years, and start writing prequels.”

“And then somebody else said, well, why are prequels even necessary? I mean, the characters have a time machine. We could just put them whenever we wanted and still justify that it was part of the ongoing story.”

A few weeks later, the writers had gathered again to watch the Doctor Who 2008 Christmas Special, starring Kylie Minogue.

“That’s when [writer Ian] Goldberg stood up and said, hey, what the fuck are we doing? This whole American idea of ’seasons’ and ‘cancellation’ is bullshit. Doctor Who has been going on since the sixties. When the studio doesn’t want to make any more, they stop. When they want to continue, they hire another actor and call it ‘regeneration.’ When they want to do a one-off special episode, they just make it. There doesn’t have to be a show actually going on at the time, either.”

“We started talking about it, and we realized that we already had all the principal elements,” said Goldberg. “An epic struggle across multiple generations, alternate timelines, characters that don’t age and can change their appearance. Basically, we could make any show we wanted and still call it Terminator, as long as somebody was trying to kill somebody else.”

Studios are always looking for ways to re-market old content, and with Adobe CS4 and Final Cut Pro, known together in the entertainment industry as “CG,” it won’t be hard to incorporate new characters and old situations.

The initial plan was to roll out the first episode, a Cheers crossover, in late 2009. The episode would involve a resistance fighter from the future hiding at the bar located in 1980s Boston.

“He was just going to go into this rant about the future, and everyone was going laugh and assume he was drunk,” said Friedman.  “Eventually, when the Terminator comes to get him, the cyborg gets confused by all the zany antics in the bar, and  he gives up and leaves. But before he goes, he does shoot Rebecca between the eyes, which, for a lot of fans, would have been quite cathartic.”

That Cheers episode is off the docket (for now), but in future posts we’ll have the chance to examine some of the crossovers that more than likely will make the cut.

image by Danacea