Podcast:Taking a Break From All Your Worries
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Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Ronald D. Moore, executive producer and developer of the new Battlestar Galactica, and tonight the smokes are Shermans, the Scotch is Glenross, and the episode is "Taking a Break From All Your Worries".
This one went through quite a bit of change. Which is, of course, something I'm sure you're shocked by; those regular listeners to the podcast often hear how radical changes have gone through. This one went round and round quite a bit, mostly in terms of tone and in what we were trying to accomplish with this episode. As the title implies, "Taking a Break From All Your Worries"- oh, and the trucks are back, as you can see, 'cause it's garbage day and I'm here at home in Berkley- home in Altadena, having returned from Berkley, briefly, to do the podcast. "Taking a Break From All Your Worries" is obviously a reference to the Cheers theme song. This episode was conceived as a lighter one. This was our comedy episode, (chuckles) oddly enough. The irony of that is twofold, considering what the episode- how the episode turned out in terms of tone and feel and also the fact that the last time we tried to do somewhat of a comedic episode, we also handed it to Eddie Olmos to direct. And neither one is probably a laugh riot, but I think the Tigh certainly, the "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down" episode Eddie directed season one, certainly had a lighter- a light comedic touch. This one was not so much a case of Eddie taking the material and turning it dark, it was just over the process of working through this episode, story lines and scenes and then on to performances and then the cut and mood just kept getting darker and darker, just by the nature of the material. But the irony is we all still thought about this one as our light, fun-filled, episode, right up until where we saw the finished cut. (Chuckes.) We went, "Oh. Ok. So we won't really put a laugh track to this one."
The network, in fairness to the network, was also a bit surprised, because we had sold this to them as a light episode and we said, "Well, we'll do a light episode and this will be the one, episode twelve," and they were quite happy, as you can imagine, after all the darkness that we do in the show, to have something to look forward to on the horizon that was a little bit lighter and when they saw the episode they too were shocked and not too happy that it had not turned out as light as it was- as light as it had been sold to them, in all fairness. And so there was, there were a bit of discussions about content and mood and graphic issues and so on, but in this case they were certainly within their rights 'cause they had been, from their point of view, they had certainly be sold a bill of goods in terms of what the episode was going to be. From our side of the fence, I don't think any of us ever really intended to turn this as dark as it turned out to be.
We had begun this episode with the idea that...