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BBC’s Torchwood Has U.S. Roots

Julie Gardner, executive producer of the BBC series Torchwood and head of drama development for BBC Wales, told SCI FI Wire that the series grew out of a fascination with American science fiction TV shows, particularly those on the air in the 1990s.

Gardner and Russell T. Davies, the lead writer of both Torchwood and Doctor Who, met during a time of such shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Smallville and Battlestar Galactica, Gardner said in an interview. "And Russell and I were watching all of those shows," she recalled. "And every week we would talk about those shows with so much kind of love and kind of detail. And we would talk about why we weren’t doing those kinds of shows in Britain."

In that spirit, Gardner and Davies developed a script for a science fiction series called Excalibur, which centered on a team of paranormal investigators. "It was a kind of [an] urban-landscape, present-day series," Gardner said. "And the scene that Russell in his two-page pitch described was the scene where there was this sexy group of investigators in an alleyway at night, it’s raining, a corpse is on the ground, and one of them brings out a glove and is able to bring the corpse back to life, which is, of course, the central first scene in Episode 1 of what became Torchwood."

The project was put on hold when Davies was tapped to oversee the new incarnation of Doctor Who, but following the success of that revival, he and Gardner returned to their idea with a new twist that tied into the Doctor Who universe.

"We had a great crew working on Doctor Who, and we thought it would be a great thing to kind of keep that team together, but stretch their creative muscles in a different direction," Gardner said. "To do something very different. And Torchwood was born out of the Excalibur idea, because we loved working with John Barrowman on the first season of Doctor Who. His character of Captain Jack had really taken hold of people’s imagination. And we knew that the public was really responding to that character. So it made a huge amount of sense to take the Captain Jack figure and put him into the show that eventually became Torchwood."

Gardner added that while Doctor Who has a traditionally British feel to it, Torchwood’s American influences are evident in the premise. "I guess you could describe it as more American in terms of it’s slightly precinct-based," she said. "It’s the story of the week every week. It’s a sci-fi show that is rooted in the Earth. It’s not a sci-fi show [like] Doctor Who [that] travels in galaxies and time and space. It’s a kind of X-Files in some [sense], in terms of the stories of the week and how rooted that is."

Torchwood will have its premiere in the United States on Sept. 8 at 9 p.m. on BBC America. The first season will be available on DVD on Jan. 8, 2008.