2023/01/07

In 2023, January 13^th, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles celebrates its 15^th Anniversary. Of course it is a spin-off from the Terminator movie where the third movie doesn’t “count”, this TV show was a follow-up from the 1991 movie Terminator 2: Judgement Day. When it came on air on FOX in January 2008, the WGA writers’ strike was still going, there wasn’t much original scripted stuff on TV and in part because of that reason, The Sarah Connor Chronicles did well in its first season. It was granted another season but that apparently wasn’t so successful while, in my humble opinion, the stories improved.

Still FOX cancelled it after two seasons with a huge cliff-hanger! FOX did it again! Can you blame them? Well the numbers went down but perhaps there were ways and good reasons to save it, FOX chose to ignore it. Fans were furious, tried to change the mind of the FOX brass but it didn’t work. Still fans tried to revive the show all through to 2015! The show is still popular today, on Rotten Tomatoes it scores very high, 85% by critical viewers as well as the general public!

Summer Glau as Terminator seems a bit odd, a woman not so big and apparently Summer Glau herself was also not convinced she was right for the part but her mother convinced her to audition for the role. Apparently Summer Glau got the role because of the fight scenes she had done in the Firefly movie “Serenity”. Josh Friendman wrote the character with Summer Glau in mind. Another fun trivia, at the end of the first season, Brian Austin Green is added to the cast as Derek Reese, which, in my opinion, was the best move in hindsight. Though it was Michael Shanks (Daniel on Stargate SG1) who also auditioned for the part. Few more fun trivia:

• The Character "Cameron" is a tribute to James Cameron, who wrote and directed the first two Terminator movies.
• FBI agent Ellison is named after Harlan Ellison, the science fiction author whose work on an idea similar to the Terminator story was credited in the first Terminator movie.
• Summer Glau had not seen "The Terminator" films prior to being cast as Cameron.
• Josh Friedman wanted to cast Summer Glau as Cameron Phillips in a pilot he wrote four years prior to "The Sarah Connor Chronicles", but she was already committed to Serenity (2005).

On IMDb you can even reads more trivia like this.

This show is also on the list: "12 Shows Fox Should Be Embarrassed About Canceling" from October 2015. Other SCI-FI shows on that list are Firefly, Almost Human, The Lone Gunmen and Terra Nova. FOX really knows how to knock-off SCI-FI but that is no surprise. The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a good show, solid stories, lots of action, good drama, decent acting and really good production values.

Screencaps taken from: kissthemgoodbye.net

Yeah what is it that people rather watch the 19^th season of something like NCIS or Law and Order instead of something new and fresh like this show? I cannot get my head around it that people rather watch something more of the same, season in, season out, barely any character evolving, barely any story-arc. The Sarah Connor Chronicles has become one of my favorite SCI-FI shows, in fact I believe it was my very first or one of my first TV show Blu-ray purchases!

Back in the first decade of the 2000 it took a while before TV show got a Blu-ray release and this show was one of the first available TV shows on Blu-ray, the very best format for TV! There were some drawbacks with these early TV Shows Blu-ray releases, for one you couldn’t select the episodes, so there was no episode menu, it played like a movie. I find this not ideal, but luckily the Blu-ray device remembers where you stopped watching. Since then the releases TV shows on Blu-ray improved a lot but these first releases were a bit annoying at times.

Final Word:

This show deserved much better, but in all honesty, I write this so often and I believe in most cases it is true but unfortunately this is not how TV works! Fluff can go on for years and years, while a good quality piece like this only gets two seasons, 1.5 is even more accurate with only 9 episodes in its first season. It turns 15 years in 2023 and it deserves to remembered for a long, long time and it has a huge rewatch value…except that it ends on a cliff-hanger, which sucks!