Televisionary writer Jace caught up with Virtuality co-creator/executive producer Michael Taylor for a one-on-one interview, in which he discusses the likelihood of FOX picking up Virtuality as a series, what his and Ronald D. Moore’s ideas were for the first season's storylines, the Sci Fi Channel’s possible interest in the series, a jaw-dropping slingshot sequence in the movie, and... a punk-rock Japanese version of the theme song from The Munsters!

/ Taylor: Certainly there have been those sort of discussions about following through... [With FOX publicity,] we've discussed how to approach this. The network has not made a formal announcement about the fate of the show. Peter Berg wasn't asked but he volunteered to make a shorter cut. One of the compromises that is made in getting this show on the air--and it's a way sometimes that networks and sometimes studios hedge their bets it's, all right, maybe it's not a series, let's make it a two-hour back-door pilot and we do it as a movie and we can make some money back, sell it overseas, whatever their marketing thinking is. But at the same time, I feel FOX may have thought, well, maybe it could work better as an hour or more clearly as a pilot and they wanted it shot to recut it that way. However, once you take a show and expand it to two hours, it's very hard to put that genie back in his mullah's bottle and I think Pete [Berg's] cut is very, very cool but it was a somewhat different show. And I think FOX thought six of one, half a dozen of another, and they decided, let's just air the original two-hour version to let people see what the entire project was that they essentially scripted it to be.

All that being said, if I'm being honest here, it does not look good for the show to be picked up by FOX as a series. That's why it's honestly being put on on a night like this and we have had discussions with other discussions, in particular Sci Fi Channel, which I think loves the show. But then there's a financial issue of them affording a show like this and being able to put it on. Honestly, this is probably it. One shot airing of this pilot. The good thing is a lot of pilots that don't make it to series--most of them--never make it onto television. So at least people have a chance to say, okay, this is what these guys did and this is what this great cast we assembled and a talented, amazing director like Pete Berg were able to create. Odds are that will be as far as it goes. And it would take a miracle of enough people watching on a night like this to change that. /



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http://www.televisionaryblog.com/2009/06/gono-go-televisionary-talks-to.html