The man behind "Battlestar Galactica"

The objection that this makes the characters unlikable doesn't even turn out to be true. I'm sure you're well aware of that after seeing the response to what you've decided to do with Starbuck, a person who consistently made bad decisions for bad reasons but who was very popular with viewers all the same. To say she's "unlikable" sounds like an executive's objection.

It's a very fear-driven culture, the entertainment business. It's all about fear. You're afraid the audience isn't going to like it. You're afraid that they'll be turned off and that they're not as smart as you are. They won't get what you're going for. Can't it be safer? Can't it be happier?

It's also got to be difficult to go that route in a show that's substantially about the military. The armed services is an aspect of society people tend to be absolutist about. Was the military setting one of the things that got you interested in the project to begin with?

Well, that was in the concept itself. The original show was a war show. From my point of view, updating it meant that I wanted to treat the military aspects differently. I wanted to make it clear that the people who are serving are human beings, not exalted icons. They do have flaws and make bad judgments and are afflicted by the same curses as everyone else. There are drunks and womanizers and all kinds of different people who go into the military because they're just people.

It was important to me to portray it like that partly because of working on "Star Trek" for so long. One of the central ideas of "Star Trek" is that the people on the Enterprise and in Star Fleet were the best of the best. They were better than you and I, a better breed of human beings who were not torn with petty differences, jealousies and all the things that make people human. That stuff was almost bred out of them at Star Fleet, and that made the drama hard to convey. You were more distant from them as characters.

So I wanted the people on Galactica to be a very different crop. It wasn't going to be the best ship in the fleet crewed by an elite crew. It was going to be an old ship getting ready to go into retirement, and there were going to be a lot of misfits on that ship. What happens when the fate of humanity rests on their shoulders? That's a far more interesting question to me.

Again, science fiction gives me a lot of license. This is not an aircraft carrier. I don't have to be so careful not to offend people who serve in the Navy or have relatives in the Navy, or people who just want to posture about what people are really like in the Navy and you're besmirching the names of our fair soldiers and sailors and all that crap. This is a made-up universe. It's certainly modeled on the U.S. military and we do a lot of the interior character work centering around military culture and how they treat each other, but it's not meant to be a direct representation of the people who are serving.

But before this you weren't sitting around thinking about how much you wanted to do a show about fighter pilots?

No, but it is one of my lifelong interests. My father was a veteran. He was a Marine officer in the Vietnam War. He had a library full of military books. I had an interest in history and read a lot about the military. I was briefly in Navy ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corp] in college. When I was at "Star Trek" I jumped at opportunities to do things like go on an aircraft carrier for a weekend, and when I was in ROTC I spent a week on a nuclear submarine. I've always been fascinated by the military culture. It was one of the things that appealed to me about the project, but no, I wasn't setting out to find a military project.

"Battlestar Galactica" is a bit like "Lost" in that it's what's called a highly serialized drama, with a long continuing plotline. If someone misses a few episodes, they may stop watching entirely, thinking they'll never be able to catch up. At the same time, once you get past the first season, new viewers can be put off by how much they don't know about what's going on. So you can lose the viewers you already have much more easily than you can acquire new ones, and both shows have suffered dips in their ratings. Yet this also seems to be one of the most fertile and exciting formats in the medium. How do you deal with those challenges?

I don't. It's a genuine problem I have no solution for. We have long conversations with the network about the extent of the serialized nature of the show. It's certainly not something they're in love with. We the writers are always pushing to make it more serialized because it makes for better storytelling. We've done a few stand-alone episodes here and there, and they're almost never very successful for our particular series. They're not what the audience tunes in for. But the network's legitimate concern is just what you were saying: The audience tends to attenuate over time. It's hard to bring new people on board. There's the hurdle of them having to catch up on all the old episodes, and any hurdle you put in front of the audience is just a bad thing. I don't know what to say. This is the kind of show I like to do, and we're just going to keep doing it. Hopefully, we can persuade people to buy the DVDs and catch up at home and keep watching the show, but the show is what it is.

The availability of DVD sets seems to have made it more possible to do this kind of series.

I think it has. It's really changed the landscape. People are much more comfortable getting on to shows like this because they can pick up a boxed set and catch up.

Another thing: I don't know how reliable the ratings are anymore. I'm among those who cast a skeptical eye at the Nielsen Co. and the demographics and ratings they deliver. The fragmentation of the audience is so profound I don't know how the samples can even tell me how many people are watching my show anymore. It seems like such a crap shoot. It's like where the music industry used to be a few years ago, before they got -- what's that thing called? -- SoundScan. Before they got that it was like Nielsen; they called up store owners and asked them what was selling and what wasn't. When they shifted to a legitimate way of tracking each and every sale, it upended the charts. Suddenly, country music was huge, much bigger than anyone had thought. I think TV is in the same ballpark. We're relying on a really old system based on this sample of people, and it's not really accurate anymore. God knows how many Nielsen families are sci-fi fans.

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