Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is looking for ratings numbers in the vacuum of space

After being given the Friday night treatment by Fox, Ronald D. Moore’s Virtuality didn’t fare too well.

The movie that was originally slated to be a pilot for a series that  was your standard fare from Moore, employing his style and voice to air his perspective on different human scenarios.  In this case, it was about 12 space-faring crew members who were facing isolation on a 10-year space journey, and, dealing with what looked like a faulty virtual reality system.

I enjoyed it and the majority of the Screen Rant readers who commented on my review concurred that it was a good watch.

This is a DVR spoiler-free review.

“Follow me through the mirror, down the rabbit hole.  Trust me, it has to be this way.”

A rabbit hole indeed.  Ronald D. Moore has done it again giving us some brilliant writing with Virtuality as far as I’m concerned and Fox not sticking to the original plan of creating a series out of his concept is not only their loss, but ours as well.

We have 12 astronauts on a 10-year journey that becomes a potential rescue mission to save humanity.  Their space faring vessel is named the Phaeton.

The show opens with a scene that introduces the Virtual Reality system (VR) world from the ship.  We’re also almost immediately introduced to the glitch that we’ve been told about in the studio press releases.  I think glitch might be an understatement, but that’s just me.

Ronald D. Moore’s Virtuality airs this Friday night (June 26th) on Fox and from this writer’s perspective, it has come down a long and harrowing path to get here.

The project started out being lined up as a television pilot and through some unknown series of decisions, Fox has again taken a proven showrunner’s idea and seemingly squashed it with their thumb.

The show that was originally slated to be a pilot for a series has been reduced to a 2-hour movie that’s being aired in the vacuum of Friday.  At least Fox is consistent in their handling of sci-fi projects.

Virtuality was an idea that Universal Media Studios shopped around.  After communicating with several writers, they hit on Ronald D. Moore’s take on their idea. They shopped the idea to NBC, but in all its wisdom, NBC said it was too much “science fiction” for their network.  It was right after this that Fox snatched up the project.  The rest is history.  Sort of.

It is Thursday again and the weekend looms in front of us.

Today I’m going to chat about Summer Glau maybe being on Dollhouse, a tiny bit about Law & Order: SVU, a bit of Doctor Who news and some info about Ronald D. Moore’s Virtuality including the air date and scenes from the show.

And as usual, we’ll take a peak at ratings from last week.

Oh!  I’ve jammed in a subtle note about Burn Notice.

While you’re here, if there’s anything TV related on your mind, slap it in the comments and let us know what you’re curious about or have an opinion on.

Shall we get on with it?

Today’s Weekly TV Wrap Up will have a little One Tree Hill (Something a bit new, but a reader asked about the show.), some more on Dollhouse after the finale and Lie To Me news. We also touch on David E. Kelley’s disappointment, the dumping of a few shows by NBC and how Fox seems to be treating Ronald D. Moore’s Virtuality just like Dollhouse, but worse – If you can imagine that. I also have some David Tennant news for you.

Despite the season finales, it’s a bit of a quiet week for me.  Of course, I have the TV ratings from last week and a bit of a surprise at the end of the post, if you make it that far.

Shall we get on with it?

Kevin Reilly, the president of Fox Entertainment, was having a group chit chat with reporters about a few things that are on all our sci-fi-loving minds.

Even though we as a collective tentatively look at Fox with apprehension, they do have the largest collection of sci-fi genre shows out there (barring the Sci-Fi Channel, of course). They’ve got The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Fringe on the air; they’ve got Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse around the corner and they’re developing Ronald D. Moore’s Virtuality (I’m going to use the word “develop” lightly here).

Today I’m chatting about Supernatural, Virtuality, Heroes, Knight Rider, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Kind of like a grab bag!

The creator and executive producer of The CW’s show Supernatural, Eric Kripke, just signed an exclusive two year deal with Warner Brothers Television. In that deal, he will continue to run Supernatural and will be developing other projects under the contract for them.

I was going to start this out by defining what Virtuality means but there were just too many options to keep this simple and witty, so nevermind.

Virtuality, for our purposes, is a new effort from Ronald D. Moore, whose re-imagining of the classic series, Battlestar Galactica (BSG) is just mind blowing. This time, he isn’t just re-imagining, he’s creating from scratch!

Virtuality is about 12 people who crew a spaceship named Phaeton, which is on a 10-year journey to distant star systems. To stave off the boredom, NASA equipped the ship with virtual reality systems. These systems allow the crew to go anywhere and be anything they want, hopefully keeping them entertained in the process of their long trip. (I know, I know – Can anyone say ‘”olodeck?“)

It’s a great idea, until a mysterious computer bug shows itself in the system.

The show is from Universal Media Studios and producers Gail Berman and Lloyd Braun. After shopping their idea around to different writers, they liked the approach that Ronald Moore took, and suddenly we have a creative team. With Moore coming on board, he also brought along writer-producer Michael Taylor, who worked with Moore on BSG.