When Brad Wright and Robert Cooper got "Stargate Atlantis" picked up to series by Sci Fi Channel in November, the seasoned showrunners were actually given a mandate to deliver 40 hours of television within eight months — 20 episodes of "Atlantis" and 20 episodes of its forerunner, "Stargate SG-1."

With a premiere date for both shows looming last month, Wright and Cooper recruited a grand total of one new staff writer to the already ultra-lean, Vancouver-based "Stargate" production team. ("It’s a good thing he’s a writing machine," Wright says of scribe Martin Gero.)

"Atlantis" was originally envisioned as a replacement for "SG-1" on Sci Fi and in first-run syndication ("Stargate" was cross-platform before cross-platform was cool). But even with older "SG-1" episodes also airing on Sci Fi, the originals were doing well enough for the channel to warrant an eighth-season renewal.

The "Stargate" chiefs hadn’t even cast "Atlantis," which was ordered by Sci Fi on the strength of Wright and Cooper’s pitch.

So as Sci Fi and MGM caught series franchise fever, Wright and Cooper determined that the only way to deliver those 40 episodes, with production beginning in February, was to run both shows as a single operation.

"We figured out that we had to have the top of the pyramid (of the ’SG-1’ staff) working simultaneously on both shows," Cooper says. "We had to have people we knew and trusted, people you could turn to and say, ’You know how we did it on Episode 153? Let’s do that.’ "

Wright and Cooper certainly have developed their own showrunners’ shorthand after laboring together on a show that has long been a quiet success story, first for Showtime, where it debuted in 1997, and then for Sci Fi, which picked up "SG-1" two years ago. It also boasts a rabid fan base in Europe, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Cooper joined "SG-1" as a writer when the show was in the pilot stage. Wright adapted "SG-1" as a series for Showtime from the 1994 MGM feature "Stargate" with former "SG-1" exec producer Jonathan Glassner; Wright and Cooper are co-creators of "Stargate Atlantis."

The mothership show stars Richard Dean Anderson, a TV favorite since his "MacGyver" days, as the leader of a band of explorers tasked with ferreting out the secrets of the universe — not to mention fending off a really nasty enemy force back on Earth — found in mystical "stargate" portals scattered throughout the galaxies. "Atlantis" revolves around a separate group of explorers sent to probe the legendary undersea city after a stargate shows them the way.

Surprisingly, MGM brass were a little wary of letting Wright and Cooper run both shows until the duo convinced them that such a setup would allow for maximum efficiency, Cooper says.

Whatever it is they’re doing, it’s working. "Atlantis" two-hour premiere last month was Sci Fi’s most-watched episode of a regular series ever at 4.2 million viewers. "Stargate SG-1’s" eighth season opener also scored a series-record 3.2 million viewers.

Now that "Atlantis" is up and running, Wright and Cooper have their eye on returning "Stargate" to the big screen, but they’ve in some ways been a victim of their own small screen success. Their first pitch to MGM for a "SG-1" feature morphed into the plot for the series seventh-season finale; their second attempt became the two-hour opener of "Atlantis."

"In our hearts, we’d like to see it go back to being a feature," Wright says. "But having to do two series at one time is a classy problem to have."