Although The Sarah Connor Chronicles benefited from being part of the Terminator franchise in terms of publicity, this same connection was what eventually sank the series in the eyes of fans and critics. It is not easy to turn a big-budget, high-octane action movie franchise into a successful TV series. For every sleeper hit like television's Lethal Weapon spinoff, there are numerous failures like Mad Max’s canceled TV show.
Television shows typically operate on lower budgets than Hollywood blockbusters and, unless they are miniseries, feature far longer runtimes than mainstream movies. On occasion, this means that sufficiently ambitious TV shows can tell more complex, layered, and ambitious stories than movies can. However, this can just as often mean that—especially with sci-fi, action, and fantasy television—a show’s limited budget becomes immediately obvious when compared to theatrical releases within the same genre.
An example of this disconnect can be seen in 2008’s doomed Terminator television show, The Sarah Connor Chronicles. An ambitious attempt to transfer the franchise to television after its first three movies, The Sarah Connor Chronicles was intended to be a small-screen continuation of the Terminator series. Recasting Linda Hamilton’s iconic Terminator heroine Sarah Connor was the first major mistake that The Sarah Connor Chronicles made but, in retrospect, that wasn’t the only issue that could be traced back to its source material. Ironically, despite the franchise providing the series a high profile and brand recognition, most of the biggest issues with The Sarah Connor Chronicles stemmed from the Terminator franchise itself.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles Failure Explained
Despite its pilot earning a massive audience share, The Sarah Connor Chronicles quickly dwindled in popularity before being swiftly canceled in early 2009. Given its attachment to a lucrative franchise and its famous heroine, some viewers were surprised by the failure of The Sarah Connor Chronicles. However, there were warning signs. Around the time that The Sarah Connor Chronicles arrived on screens, the Terminator movie franchise was entering a flop era wherein the next three movies in the franchise (2009’s Terminator: Salvation, 2015’s Terminator: Genisys, and 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate) were all unsuccessful attempts to reboot the series. That said, the waning popularity of the Terminator franchise itself is only part of the reason why the cancelation of The Sarah Connor Chronicles was inevitable.
What Went Wrong With The Sarah Connor Chronicles
The Sarah Connor Chronicles was too ambitious, telling a convoluted and over-complicated original story in a franchise that was already infamous for being hard to follow. Without the budget for large-scale vehicular carnage, The Sarah Connor Chronicles was trapped in a quandary. The Terminator television show had all the narrative confusion of every feature-length Terminator movie, but none of the high-impact intense action sequences that made the difficult-to-follow blockbuster plots easier to ignore. Not only that, but as a television show, The Sarah Connor Chronicles had a far longer runtime, giving the show much more time to exhaust viewers. The Terminator movies always had a sprawling cast, intersecting timelines, and a trippy, self-reflexive take on time travel. However, the franchise also has awe-inspiring action sequences and a speedy pace that made this bearable whereas The Sarah Connor Chronicles was missing both of these vital ingredients, resulting in a series that only appealed to the most hardcore franchise fans.
Why No TV Show Could Recapture Terminator’s Appeal (In 2008)
There is a tacit admission when viewing a Terminator movie that the timelines may not add up and viewers are as well to go along for the ride rather than looking for answers. Terminator: Dark Fate killing off John Connor after he was already killed off years later in the preceding movie Terminator: Genisys is proof of this, as is the same reboot bringing back Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor despite her version of the character dying between two earlier franchise installments. However, the lower budget, more restrained vision of television production meant that there was no ride to go along with in The Sarah Connor Chronicles since a smaller budget TV show couldn’t offer blockbuster action like the Terminator movies. That is something that has changed since the 2008 debut of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, with much more ambitious, expensive streaming shows now being seen throughout the television landscape.
Could A Terminator TV Show Work In 2022
The failure of The Sarah Connor Chronicles could reasonably leave franchise fans doubtful about a Terminator television show's potential, but the economics of television production has changed a lot since 2008. As the two-part release of Stranger Things season 4 proves, streaming services like Netflix are willing to invest massive levels of money into television events that are designed to rival traditional theatrical blockbuster tentpoles. Not only that, but The Sarah Connor Chronicles arrived when R-rated television hits were still mostly dark dramas and smaller shows that earned critical acclaim but weren’t incredibly profitable for their creators. In contrast, content restrictions have been massively loosened since the advent of streaming and the success of boundary-pushing, big-budget hits like The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Sons of Anarchy mean that a new show could regain the original Terminator’s darker edge.
Furthermore, the convoluted plot and ambitious scope of The Sarah Connor Chronicles is nothing compared to that complicated storytelling structure and the large casts of hits like Westworld, The Boys, and the aforementioned Game of Thrones. This means that Terminator franchise fans would be better prepared for a slow burn story that took its time establishing its cast of characters and setting up its fictional universe in 2022. While The Sarah Connor Chronicles had issues as a television show outside of its reception, the main problems that sank the series had more to do with the Terminator show arriving too early in television history and less to do with its actual content. A revamped version of The Sarah Connor Chronicles would still need to fix major issues with the show’s characters and storytelling, but television’s slide into darker, more mature, and more ambitious storytelling over the last decade means that the Terminator franchise could succeed if the creators opted to bring back their small-screen series.