Battlestar Galactica will fail if the show is rebooted yet again

The mid-2000’s reboot of Battlestar Galactica was so effective that there is no chance another attempt at rebooting it will work.

Former Star Trek series and Star Trek: First Contact scribe Ronald D. Moore rebooted the cult classic Battlestar Galactica for a modern audience in 2004 with SyFy serving as it’s home. It became one of the channels most successful shows and despite the final season relying too much on deus ex machina to resolve plot lines, the series as a whole remains beloved by fans everywhere.

So with the news that Michael Lesslie, the writer of summer flop-buster Assassin’s Creed, is going to take the reigns of the next attempted reboot of the franchise you can expect the worst to come from this.

Most reboots don’t work in a modern format. Namely due to the advances in technology over the last 20 years making the need to reimagine things being routinely pointless. There have been too many failed attempts to reboot or reimagine a franchise over the last decade and a half to expect a third retelling of the BSG story to be successful. Yes, some reboots have worked, but rarely and too few and far between to really warrant an opportunity to try. The need to lean on old ideas is becoming so overwhelming that fans have just roundly rejected things out of hand before they’ve ever had a chance to catch on.

Even good reboots like 2012’s Dredd and The Munsters failed to garner an audience.

That’s with well-made projects of love. Not cash grabs, which rarely ever succeed on their own. Have producers and execs learned nothing from brazen attempts at rebooting a beloved series in science fiction? Ghostbusters, Terminator, Robocop, The Mummy, Power Rangers (the film), and even Twilight Zone (series) have all failed to live up to their namesakes.

Yet, shows like Black Mirror – a  proverbial child of Twilight Zone essentially – remains a huge hit with fans. Other original ideas like the Handmaid’s Tale and The Expanse continue to find new audiences thanks to being just similar enough to other past franchises in the genre to feel familiar but also just different enough to stake their own claim.

Reboots for the sake of rebooting don’t work, not usually anyway. Add in the more polarized fandoms than anything ever seen before and rebooting something like an all-time classic is doomed to fail.