Summer Glau

The Sarah Connor showrunners discuss what’s happened so far and speculate on the show’s chances for renewal.

February 28, 2008 - When the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles panel at WonderCon was first announced, Josh Friedman and John Wirth were not listed as participating. That’s because despite being the executive producers and showrunners of the series, they were striking writers and both were not participating in promotion of the show while on strike. But before the convention actually occurred the strike ended, and happily, both Friedman and Wirth were able to attend after all and speak about their well-received new series.

Shortly before they began their panel, I sat down and spoke to the two writer/producers. We discussed what’s happened on Sarah Connor so far, what might come next, and the big question fans are already concerned about as Season 1 comes to a close next week – Will the show be renewed for a second season?

IGN TV: I don’t want to dwell on the strike too much, but it’s great to see you guys here.

Josh Friedman: Good to be here!

John Wirth: Good to be seen!

IGN TV: I imagine it must be nice to be back in the thick of things again.

Friedman: Yeah, it’s good to be back. It was a very difficult fourteen weeks. We would see episodes broadcast that we hadn’t seen before.

Wirth: We were looking at them like anyone else would look at them, which has been a very, very interesting experience after many years of doing this.

IGN TV: How many episodes were shot after the strike began?

Friedman: One and a half.

Wirth: Yeah, one and a half were shot. And then there were some reshoots on earlier stuff after. But the big thing is that there’s a lot of post-production on this show. There’s a lot on any show, but particularly this show, with the visual effects and special effects and so forth. And we didn’t have a chance to get involved with any of that. We didn’t have a chance to get involved in the final editorial on anything but I think the first episode. We locked that one before we walked. So that was a little disconcerting I must say. Although, I must say this, [pilot executive producer/series consulting producer] James Middleton stayed behind and just did a great job on our behalf and we were so happy with the work that he did. He really stepped up.

IGN TV: Have you been able to put any final touches on the last episodes, or is it too late?

Friedman: No, it’s too late.

Wirth: That’s the ultimate backseat driving, you know? Even if we could have, I don’t think we would have.

IGN TV: Before you were on the air there was a lot of skepticism about a Terminator TV series. The show has quickly gathered a following though and people seem really into it. Are you finding that to be the case and are you interacting with the fans at all?

Friedman: One of the only things that I could do when we were on strike was surf the internet, so I spent a lot of time reading all the boards. I probably read almost every single comment about Terminator - probably too many at times. But I wouldn’t interact.

Wirth: And that was why, Josh?

Friedman: I didn’t go on, because I thought that it would be part of promoting the show. Even if I went on anonymously, which I wouldn’t do, I just felt it was part of promotions and I wouldn’t promote the show. So I didn’t go on and we didn’t do anything. It was very difficult, sitting there with my hands tied. But it is very gratifying. I feel like people are really engaging with the show. They’re engaging with the very small, subtle details of the show and appreciate what we’re going for. I feel like people get it, which is great.

Wirth: I’ve never experienced fans like this. I’ve done a lot of television shows and the internet has been around for awhile, so we’ve had a presence on the internet, but I’ve never seen anything like this. The sort of enthusiasm that people have – the desire to get involved with the discussions while the episode is airing. People are getting on those chat boards and they’re asking "Did you see that? What the hell was that? What does that mean?" People are sort of theorizing where we’re going and what’s happening with the characters. It’s very impressive and I love it.

IGN TV: Last week’s episode, "Dungeons & Dragons", took a big leap by actually going into the future. Was that something early on you were wary of doing or did you feel like you had to do it?

Friedman: I don’t know if we had to do it, but I really wanted to do it. It was part of my original pitch to FOX about the show. At the time, originally, when I was pitching them a 22 episode season, I said I wanted to do it four times. I wanted to do it once every quarter as kind of like a big quarter in a football game. We didn’t get to do that and I don’t know if we ever would have done that. They’re very expensive.

Wirth: But I have a feeling we’ll venture back to that world.

Friedman: Oh, we’re going to do more! I think so. But I was not afraid of it. I was afraid of it in that I thought if we didn’t pull it off, we wouldn’t get to do another one, and I really have some ideas for other ones we want to do. But we’ve been excited about this episode. We were always talking about the future episode.

IGN TV: How did you decide to introduce Kyle’s brother? I think all the fans wondered if Kyle would be involved in the show at some point.

Friedman: The inspiration was that I considered at one point introducing Kyle and James Middleton convinced me that people would throw me off a bridge if I did it the way that I was gonna do it. As opposed to doing it in the future, I had some thoughts about introducing him in the present, and it would have probably have been a little confusing for people. And so I started thinking about other ways to get the family involved. I think the Reese family is an important part of it, especially because of what it means to the Connors. I think that’s the most important thing about Kyle or Derek is just the emotional component for both John and Sarah.

Wirth: And you see it, like in that episode where she tells John "That’s your uncle." The whole inner world and inner life of the series just went to a completely different place.

IGN TV: It’s interesting to see Derek become essentially a human Terminator, something Sarah almost did herself in T2, but she couldn’t cross that line. I assume as the show goes on, the tension of him keeping that secret from them will grow?

Friedman: Yeah. I think that to me a lot of the Terminator mythology and the themes of it have to do with how do you prosecute a war? That’s certainly what’s relevant to today. What lines do you cross? Do the ends always justify the means? What’s moral when so many lives are at stake? Sarah’s always drawn a particular line, but she almost didn’t in T2 - She almost killed Miles Dyson, but John stopped her and she saw Danny and she didn’t do it. So she’s always been that character who hasn’t crossed that line, but it seems very obvious that there will be characters who will stop at absolutely nothing to do what they think is right. And I think it’s important to have all the colors of the rainbow of that morality explored.

Wirth: Also, when you’re prosecuting a war, not everyone’s necessarily on the same page. So some people may have one way of doing it and other people may disagree with how that happens, and so then that creates other issues, like who’s in charge and how are we going forward and are we on the same team?

Friedman: Are we going to waterboard?

Wirth: Yeah, exactly.

IGN TV: We didn’t see the adult John in the future. Is that something you’re going to avoid doing or that you’d like to do at some point?

Friedman: I think the answer to both those questions is yes!

IGN TV: [Laughs] Okay, gotcha. The show is doing well in the ratings, but everyone wonders is it doing well enough and speculating that because it’s such an expensive show it might be a harder sell for renewal. Should the fans be optimistic, based on what you’re hearing?

Friedman: Well first, it’s not an expensive show. It has not been an expensive show. People are surprised when they find out what we spend on the show. The cost of the show is in no way connected to whether they pick the show up or not. That’s going to be something that’s based on their take on the ratings. We can’t control that. We can only try to do the best shows we can — and we think we have — and hope people watch them.

We’re at a time where ratings are such a weird thing right now, because we’re one of the top downloaded shows. I think we’re the third or fourth DVRd show. We’re a top 10 show with males. The first five of our episodes are in the top 50 downloads according to Entertainment Weekly. You know, there’s a lot of ways [to look at it]. We say, "Hey, we are succeeding!" Just because the advertisers don’t make money off those people as much, doesn’t mean those people aren’t watching the show. You can’t just say, "Eh, that doesn’t matter." That’s where we sit. We feel like we’re doing a pretty good job. Yeah, I wish three million more people were watching the show in a way that…

Wirth: …was meaningful to them.

Friedman: Yeah, that is meaningful to the networks and the studios. But it’s the demographic I think.

Wirth: There are shows like 24, which put out a DVD set after their first season and then the numbers increased pretty dramatically their second season. We’re planning to do the same thing and we’re hoping that there’s enough cookies and goodies and so forth on that DVD set that people will discover that. And people that haven’t maybe appreciated the show for what it is or think maybe that it doesn’t have anything to offer them – like women for example – will discover "Wait a minute… There’s two women in the leads in this show and they’re strong women. One of them’s a mother and the other is sort of a mother… That’s cool. We want to see that." So we’re hoping that we can grow this audience. We’re delighted with what we have though.

IGN TV: You have a lot of things in play, such as Cameron’s mysterious agenda and Derek Reese’s plans. Do you have the story plotted pretty far ahead?

Friedman: Just write "Friedman smiled mysteriously."

IGN TV: [Laughs] Will do.

Friedman: No, we do. I remember I said it last year at Comic-Con that we had four seasons planned and I will stick by that.

IGN TV: Four years would work pretty well with a certain timetable you’ve set on the show.

Friedman: [Smiles Mysteriously]

IGN TV: Since you’ve been on the boards a lot, I know you’ve seen every question, but the geeky audience gets very specific on the minutiae. I saw your blog recently about complaints about the Terminator head going through the time portal…

Friedman: Yes! The head had skin on it people! Let it go!

IGN TV: [Laughs] I guess the other frequent one is that some people ask why Cameron seemed somewhat more humanized in the pilot compared to later.

Friedman: You know, that’s an interesting question and I think it’s hard, because I watch her performance, and I was there and I know what we were talking about to her at the time… I find her performance very mannered and strange [in the pilot]. I find it very extreme. I find that she’s asking non sequitur questions of him in a very programmed way. I will say that I also believe that a pilot is a learning process and you start to learn types of things that you’re interested in and when I sat down to write the second episode, I knew that I really was attracted to that sort of calmer, odder part of her. And I don’t believe that she had to go out and be sort of manically ’high schooly’ in the future. It was just something I think that she knew she had to do for John, and I think she moves eight years into the future and it’s a whole different [thing]. She doesn’t have a context for that. No one’s told her how to be in 2007. And really, I don’t find her performance in all the episodes after that… I find them to be odd, but I don’t think anyone would look at her and say, "My god, that’s a robot!"

Wirth: She says in the pilot she was waiting for them for 73 days. These are learning machines, so she had ample time to sort of fit in to that environment and act like a human being in that environment. I think once she changes environment, that personality as it were gets shed and she moves into a different place. There’s kind of a public and a private persona in a sense to that personality.

Friedman: Also — and this is sort of my master answer to many of these questions relating to her especially — whatever she does may be for a particular purpose. She’s been programmed to come back for a particular purpose or purposes. It may seem inconsistent to a viewer, but it doesn’t mean it’s inconsistent to what her goals are. We don’t know what she’s doing exactly, so she may be doing stuff for a particular reason… to keep John off guard; to make Sarah feel more at ease in a certain way. I think that Sarah would be creeped out immensely if she acted purely like a girl. I think it’s reassuring to Sarah in some way that she’s identifiably robotic. I think that’s not an unreasonable idea, if you knew your mother and you were sending someone back, that you might do.