Delve Into 'Battlestar Galactica'

If the phrase "Battlestar Galactica" brings to mind a 1970s TV show filled with cheesy special effects, silly plotlines and Bonanza's Lorne Greene dressed in a flowing velvet cape, it's time to clear your head and flip on the SciFi channel on a Friday night.

There you'll find a dramatic reinvention of the original show. Greene is gone, and so is much of the cheese. What remains is a series that retains the core idea of the original: a space saga about the survivors of a surprise genocidal attack.

With the Cylon attackers reimagined from slow-moving tin-can robots to fanatical androids that look human, the result is a show with an intentional resonance to post-9/11 America. It's also one that numerous critics -- including Rolling Stone, Time and the Chicago Tribune -- are calling one of the best on television.

Ronald Moore, the creator and executive producer of the new "Battlestar Galactica," jump-started the franchise with a popular miniseries in 2003. In January of last year the show debuted as a regular series on the SciFi channel, quickly becoming the network's top-rated program.

With Battlestar on hiatus until October, Moore gave a keynote speech late last month at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose. Following his speech, Moore spoke with TheStreet.com.

Why did you decide to help revive "Battlestar Galactica?"

"Galactica" was a unique opportunity, in that it gave me a chance to do things that I wanted to do in science fiction; to change the tone of it, to do something more naturalistic, more realistic, to really make it grittier and a little different than how I saw a lot of the rest of science fiction.

	Ronald Moore

And it was this amazing chance to do something relevant and to really comment on the world around us. I could take science fiction back to doing what I thought it used to do.

The original "[Star] Trek" series ... dealt with a lot of hot-button issues at the time: It dealt with racism, and it dealt with war, and it dealt with a lot of ideas that were very, very timely and very important. And this was a chance to make a science fiction show that wasn't purely escapist, but actually dealt with the world that we live in.