It's Out! Galaxis #5

The latest edition of my little digital free magazined devoted to science and science fiction is now out.

It's Galaxis #5, and it's a special science-fiction television preview issue, with a roundup of upcoming genre shows—Foundation, The X-Files, and more. We've also got an interview with author David Gerrold, a portfolio of Mandelbrot art, a report on the Hugos controversy, seasons 2 and 3 of our Star Trek: The Next Generation episode guide, and much more, including our big reviews section.

Catch Me on the California Channel

WATCH US ON THE CALIFORNIA CHANNEL: Tonight at 9 p.m. (PT), catch the first program in The Commonwealth Club's weekly series on the California Channel.

Tonight: my Week to Week Political Roundtable, featuring panelists Carla Marinucci, Dr. Larry Gerston, and Debra J. Saunders. In upcoming weeks: Economic forecasts, Randi Zuckerberg, Robert Reich, and more!

You can find The California Channel on your cable system by checking these listings: http://www.calchannel.com/local-listing/

Commonwealth Club programs will also air at various times throughout the week on that channel.

Battlestar Galactica Comes to BBC America

This weekend I was pleasantly surprised to see a commercial announcing that BBC America was going to begin airing the entire Battlestar Galactica series, the 2003-2009 drama that originated on Sci Fi Channel (later redubbed Syfy). The award-winning series was a critical and fan darling, for good reason. It had great writing and fantastic actors; it was one of the most mature dramas ever to air on TV, not to mention as a science fiction program. And unlike many series that tried to have multi-year story arcs, it did a great job keeping the storyline fresh and tension-filled, without stalling (I'm talking to you, X-Files).

The announcement was especially pleasing to me, because my head has been stuffed full with Galactica lately. That is the result of a long article on the Ronald Moore-produced Galactica series that I've been compiling for the second edition of my digital science fiction & science magazine Galaxis. (The first edition of Galaxis is already available – free – online for reading and downloading.)

Galactica begins airing Saturday, June 11, 2011, at 10 p.m. Eastern time on BBC America. If you missed this show during its first airing on Sci Fi/Syfy, then be sure to catch it on its new home and see how it earned its high reputation.

Emmys Are Very Gay so Far

And that's a good thing. Just noting: Gay winners, non-annoying gay jokes, gay actors playing roles in the proceedings, winners thanking their same-sex wives.

They might still mess it up by giving some sort of award to 24. But at the one-third mark, the Emmy's are looking quite good.

Seriously, the opening number was good and peppy, the humor has been good and (thankfully) not insulting, and the pace has been strong. So far, Jimmy Fallon's earning a gold star.

The Starlog Project: Starlog #153, April 1990: Quantum Leap into the 1990s

In its early years, every autumn Starlog published a science-fiction television issue, with previews of all of the genre series and specials for the fall season. That tradition died out in the early 1980s, though Starlog would continue occasionally to produce issues with heavy concentrations of TV-related articles and bill the issues as SF-TV specials.

Same with this issue, which is cover-dated April and which therefore came out in March 1990. Not exactly the beginning of the television season. Nonetheless, Starlog #153 features a show that would be iconic for many fans: Quantum Leap, starring a very pre-Star Trek Voyager Scott Bakula as a time-tripping and body-swapping hero.

Starlog #153
76 pages (including covers)
Cover price: $3.95

Odd/intriguing classified ad of the month: “SCREWED BY DWFCA? Join the national club that remembers its members! Send $5.00 to The Friends of Doctor Who, ...”

The rundown: Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell are the Quantum Leap cover boys this month; meanwhile, the contents page image is an SF illustration by artist Darrell K. Sweet. The Communications letters include comics writer Jan Strnad writing about the MPAA and the movie ratings system, a number of readers exploring Trek-analia, and more; and David McDonnell’s Medialog column reports on Disney plans to bring Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars stories to the big screen (and there’s also a photo of sometimes-genre star Sean Connery in the un-science-fiction film The Hunt for Red October, which would get its own article in a future issue, un-science-fiction-ishness and all).

Marc Shapiro interviews Alien Nation star Terri Treas; Kyle Counts profiles actress Lee Meriwether, who talks about acting as Lily Munster in The Munsters Today, as Catwoman in Batman, and as Losira in the Star Trek episode “That Which Survives” (which gets a great photo caption, commenting on her character’s ability to kill with a touch: “Meriwether as Losira from ‘That Which Survives’ will go down in Trek history as the one woman Kirk (William Shatner) didn’t want to be touched by.”); interplanetary correspondent Michael Wolff explores the implications of the Gremlins movies (with illustrations by George Kochell); Peter Bloch-Hansen talks with actress Catherine Disher, who portrays Mana in TV’s War of the Worlds; well, there might be dissension among the Doctor Who fan clubs, if the classified ads are to be believed, but the old shows continue to unspool in the video market, as David Hutchison reports in his Videolog column; and Bill Warren interviews “the man in that wonderful ice cream suit,” Ray Bradbury, who talks about USA Network’s Ray Bradbury Theater.

The Fan Network pages include Lia Pelosi’s compendium of fan organizations; Ian Spelling – who would one day write a syndicated science-fiction news column called High Trek – interviews Quantum Leap star Scott Bakula – who would one day star in Trek; Tom Weaver contributes a Q&A with actress Mala Powers, who discusses her roles in Flight of the Lost Balloon, Doomsday Machine, The Wild Wild West, and more; artist Darrell Sweet (illustrator of many genre book covers) is profiled by Erik A. Venema; Kris Gilpin checks in with actress Bibi Besch, who talks about facing The Wrath of Khan with her clueless ex; R. Erwin Kennedy reports on a stage musical version of Plan 9 from Outer Space, arguably the worst movie ever made; Jimmie Hollifield II talks with actor David Frankham about his career on screen, including Return of the Fly, Master of the World, and more; Desire Gonzales profiles actor Edward Albert (yes, the son of Eddie Albert), who discusses his role in Beauty and the Beast; Kerry O’Quinn’s column, anachronistically called From the Bridge again and not just Bridge, views the collapse of European communism through the lens of science fiction; and David McDonnell’s Liner Notes column explores his theories for why he hates making deadlines.

“I’m the most cinematic writer around – all of my short stories can be shot right off the page. If necessary, I wouldn’t do teleplays for the series, I would hand the directors the short stories and say, ‘Mark it with a red pencil.’ Each paragraph is a shot, and by the way the paragraph reads, you know whether it’s a close-up. ‘He said such-and-such-and-such’; that’s a close-up. ‘They were sitting around the room; they were discussing their problem.’ That’s a long shot, obviously. Then when someone speaks, you move in.”

–Ray Bradbury, author, interviewed by Bill Warren: “At Play in the Business of Metaphors”

To see more issues, click on Starlog Internet Archive Project below or visit The Starlog Project’s permanent home.

New Battlestar Galactica Prequel Series Coming – to the Internet

Slice of Sci Fi reports that a new prequel series will join Caprica in depicting the events that took place before SyFy's groundbreaking Battlestar Galactica TV series.

But before you rev up your digital TV recorder, you should know that this series, called Blood and Chrome, will be an Internet video series of 10-minute episodes. The show will use digital backgrounds (think Star Wars prequels); the sets of Battlestar Galactica were reportedly scanned at the end of the show so they could be used in digital scenes in the future.

If Blood and Chrome is successful, it might spawn other online series of the same sort, and it might also be a "backdoor pilot" to a new Battlestar prequel TV series, according to Maureen Ryan at The Chicago Tribune.

Here's hoping.

NBC Tries to Fix a Self-Made Mess with Jay Leno/Conan Change #jayleno

Frankly, I never understood why NBC thought it needed to usher Jay Leno off The Tonight Show in the first place when they should have been locking him in for the next 10 years. No, I don't watch late night TV; but millions of people do, and they clearly watched Leno in droves.

But NBC wanted to replace him, for whatever brilliant network programmer reason, so they gave Conan O'Brien the Tonight Show slot (and Conan might be a wonderful person who nurses hurt kittens back to health and makes people laugh, but he's not Tonight Show material -- nor would David Letterman have been, had his early wishes been granted). And Leno got a new five-days-a-week 10:00 pm program.

Which tanked.

I'll admit that I thought Leno would have done better at that hour than he did, but the fact is that he didn't do well at all, despite NBC's claim that he is performing exactly where they thought he would and where they promised advertisers he would. The affiliates, however, were getting hammered because Leno was delivering terrible lead-ins to their 11:00 pm news; and no one was tuning into the end of their news to watch Conan.

So today it looks like Leno will get a 30-minute program at 11:35, and Conan will follow with a full hour. Oh, and NBC suddenly has to come up with five hours of quality 10 programming on short notice (so you know the quality will be great!).

They made the mess, they can clean it up.

UPDATE: Read reactions from Aaron Barnhart -- the original Late Night TV guru.

3-D TV Coming to ESPN -- Grab Your Avatar

USA Today reports that ESPN is launching a 3-D channel in June 2010 that will air at least 85 sports events in its first year. The channel, creatively called ESPN 3-D, will air as its first program a World Cup soccer match between South Africa and Mexico.

Soccer might not be the best inaugural program, because so much of the game on TV is long shots showing large portions of the playing field -- that's simply how the game is viewed, with only short closeups. Compare that to baseball, which has tons of closeups but of course only bursts of action. Nonetheless, basketball, college football, and the Summer X Games are also slated to air on ESPN 3-D, so we'll get a chance to see how each fares in this format.

How confident is ESPN in the new channel? Mixed, if you ask me. USA Today says the company has only committed to the channel for one year -- hardly enough time for a channel to build an audience, especially when that audience needs high-end televisions and has to wear special glasses.

On the other hand, "ESPN has been testing ESPN 3D for more than two years, even showing a USC-Ohio State college football game in select theaters and to 6,000 fans at the Galen Center on USC's campus," according to ESPN's own report on the development.

I'm looking forward to the soccer match between the earthlings and the Na'vi.