Don’t Cry for Stargate - It Was Already Dead

The cancellation of Amazon’s new Stargate series is disappointing only if you believe a genuine revival was ever possible.

It. Was. Not.

The franchise has been trapped between nostalgia and trend-chasing for so long that Amazon’s cancellation functionally acknowledges a problem that MGM never solved.

The Amazon executives, Nick Pepper and Matt King who greenlit the show, have been swapped out. The new leadership is Peter Friedlander, the ex-Netflix head of U.S. and Canada scripted division, and Blair Fetter, another Netflix veteran whose worrying title is head of world building and genre series - AKA the Amazon Alpha Nerd.

The problem is that the nerd cred isn’t really there. The shows these two guys have worked on are The OA, Bojack Horseman, Sense8, and Hemlock Grove. There are few others but this gives you their taste profile which is not remotely compatible with classic Stargate because it’s all about:

• Character-centrism

• Serialization

• Prestige-orientation

• Emotionally driven

• And built around identity tags, melodramatic relationships, and internal conflict that reads like constant belly-aching

These things do not play at all well with a franchise built around military competency porn.

Let’s take a look at Stargate as a franchise.

The original film certainly made enough money to warrant theatrical sequels. Unfortunately, it was owned by Carolco Pictures, which trainwrecked spectacularly the next year with Cut Throat Island. MGM picked the rights out of the rubble but they were more interested in producing TV than theatrical content. The premium cable channel Showtime had a reputation for world building and genre series. What they didn’t have was a rep for paying a lot for it. Stargate promised a Star Trek style anthology adventure without much of a special effects budget, the uniforms could just come off the rack, and alien worlds that looked like the parts of British Columbia that don’t require a filming permit.

Stargate SG-1 did very well on Showtime but was canceled after five years for the same reason Buffy got canceled after five years - everyone wanted a raise. Back then you were locked in to your contract for the first five seasons after that it was time to pony-up or pull the plug. This phenomenon was called the five-year-itch. And it’s why SG-1 moved to Sci-Fi (SyFy).

The financial crystal cathedral that Farscape was built upon had shattered and Sci-Fi needed a new flagship. It was a good deal for both sides. Since Stargate no longer required a subscription, the ratings were huge. It was worth paying the extra money, for some but not all of the talent. Alas, poor Daniel!

Then the DVD boom hit, which changed the math exponentially. Welcome back, Daniel!

There was virtually no difference in price between printing a movie and printing series, the thing was people would pay no more than $25-$30 for a movie, but they routinely coughed up between $80-$100 for a full season. Which turned Stargate SG-1 into a goldmine. It is estimated to have pulled in somewhere between $500 Million and $1 Billion in the DVD market. And the Daniel Jackson character was too intrinsically tied to Jack O’Neil to be swept under the rug, on top of that the fans were seriously pissed. It wasn’t quite Kirk without Spock but his absence threatened DVD sales so it was time to break open the piggy bank.

By the time it moved to SciFi the show had a firmly established identity

What made Stargate particularly intriguing is that it fell neatly into the zeitgeist of its era. It became GWOT Trek, built around military competence porn. Teams deployed through the Gate, gathered intelligence, built alliances, and solved problems through courage, ingenuity, and when necessary - focused firepower. That mix of professionalism, exploration, optimism, courage and humor became the franchise’s defining identity. It was one that assumed that capable people could solve difficult problems, and that institutions (even when flawed) were worth preserving.

That was the Stargate audiences fell in love with, and every successor series has been judged against it ever since.

Stargate Atlantis met this standard handily. It was the first time the franchise demonstrated that it was capable of self-renewal. The Wraith were not just a reskin of the Goa’uld. They managed to build a new identity as a series while not losing the core that made it a Stargate show

Stargate SG-1 proved less capable of self-renewal but a lot of that was Sci-Fi’s demands. When Anubis was defeated the Goa’uld story was over, and Richard Dean Anderson was too physically broken down to continue as the lead of an action series. Don Davis was developing his own health issues, which meant they’d need a new commanding General was well.

The showrunners wanted a full reboot called Stargate Command.

Sci-Fi said, NO. Truthfully, it’s a little hard to blame them, as popular as Battlestar Galactica was, Stargate SG-1 was still the flagship of Sci-Fi Friday. Although, it obviously needed a retool and a new star because Anderson was done.

The timing allowed Sci-Fi to salvage something from Farscape. Popularity had never been that show’s issue, it was the crushing expense. Ben Browder had been the face of Sci-Fi’s prestige programming, was younger and able to handle the physicality required. He virtually walked from Peacekeepers War’s set onto Stargates. Claudia Black soon joined him. In fact the Stargate franchise became a welcoming safe harbor for displaced genre actors, both as guests and regulars.

• Jewel Staite (Firefly)

• Morena Baccarin (Firefly)

• Adam Baldwin (Firefly)

• Mitch Pileggi (The X-Files)

• Connor Trinneer (Enterprise)

• John Billingsley (Enterprise)

• Robert Picardo (Voyager)

• Marina Sirtis (TNG)

If your series had died before its time odds were good you’d be passing through the gate.

The new SG-1 only lasted a couple of more seasons on Sci-Fi because that was about when it turned into SyFy. In 2006 Pro-wrestling was brought on board, it was hated by the channel’s fans but became SyFy’s number one show. This was the start of SyFy channel’s hard pivot away from science fiction.

The ratings for Stargate SG-1 were still fine but declining, however it was good enough that the production company was planning another season. The cancellation in 2007 took the production company and MGM by surprise.

The following was still strong enough that Steve Jobs made an aggressive push to buy an 11th season as an iTunes exclusive. SyFy killed it, by declaring it would not release the franchise like Showtime had.

Stargate Atlantis only lasted another year. The production expense had been carried by both shows, now it was born solely by Stargate Atlantis. When the US dollar crashed against the Canadian dollar in 2008, it became financially unviable for SyFy Channel, which by then didn’t want it anyway. They were shifting hard into things like Warehouse 13 and Eureka.

MGM initially didn’t care. So far as Metro Goldwyn Mayer was concerned, Stargate’s primary revenue stream was DVDs. Consequently, Stargate SG-1’s 11th season was turned into two made for DVD movies Stargate Continuum and Stargate The Ark of Truth. There were two more in planning stage, Stargate Extinction that would have finally wrapped up the Stargate Atlantis dangling threads and Stargate Revolution where the Stargate program was finally going to be revealed to the world.

You’ll recall that earlier in the article it was mentioned that MGM had heavily leaned into TV content ten years before. This turned into a river of gold during the DVD boom, but as was mentioned in The Plastic Age of Hollywood: Patient Zero - Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit the river eventually dried up. A combination of cheap DVRs, Netflix-by-mail and streaming had crashed the DVD market, which was catastrophic for MGM. This began the venerable studio’s long slow trip down the drain and eventually into bankruptcy.

The DVD meltdown set off a panic within MGM. They were desperate to find money. They couldn’t find backing for The Hobbit, let alone the Stargate franchise.

Given the level of crisis that MGM was facing, it was easier to convince themselves that the Stargate formula had failed rather than the DVD market had dried up for good. When organizations face external problems they cannot influence, they often focus on internal things they can, whether its a good idea or not. Doing anything feels better than doing nothing. They couldn’t change the DVD market, but they could change Stargate. MGM didn’t necessarily believe the formula had failed but they did believe the formula was the only variable they could control.

And by the end of 2008, everyone wanted their own versions of Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Even SyFy wanted their own version of it. And there was perhaps a feeling they’d been too hasty about throwing their flagship property over the side when they didn’t have a replacement ready.

Even the people who liked Stargate Universe will admit that it never felt like Stargate.

The military competency porn of professionalism, optimism and humor was replaced with interpersonal drama, mutinies, love triangles, constant conflict among the cast, pessimism, and a generally miserable tone.

The old fans left and the new fans that were expected, never arrived. Stargate Universe was the Patient Zero of the pop culture vandalism to come.

Sadly, there was actually worse to come.

At the dawn of the Streaming Wars when everyone was trying to create their own individual boutique streaming services, Stargate Command was created by MGM in 2017. On top of being the streaming platform for everything to do with Stargate it had a made for streaming mini-series called Stargate Origins (its name was repeatedly changed in hope of tricking someone into watching it.)

It was about Catherine, the old woman from the first movie when she was a young kick-ass girl-boss in the 1940s, it featured her adventures through the Stargate and her fight against the most laughable strawman Nazis this side of Stallag 13. It was profoundly bad in every way available to it and ended with Catherine getting her memory erased as a figleaf to the rest of the franchise’s continuity.

When Stargate’s revival was first announced, there was a feeling of… Not cautious optimism because at this point optimism for any reboot is completely unwarranted. Perhaps cautious curiosity is a better term for it. The producers were saying the right things. As opposed to something like the Acolyte or Supergirl where fan hostility seems to have been openly courted by the creators.

And then came the cancellation announcement that said all of the wrong things. It was clearly made by someone very, very junior at the end of the working day because it was up there with Fallout 76’s reply of “The bag shown in the media was a prototype and was too expensive to make. We aren’t planning on doing anything about it.”

Amazon is now in bunker mode over it. And frantic promises to create a new Stargate for MODERN AUDIENCES was about as welcome as bubonic plague tumors in the groin. They’ve gone silent because it’s the weekend and they are hoping, (not without reason) that it will all blow over.

Maybe Martin Gero’s Stargate would have been good. By all accounts, it sounded far closer to the spirit of the franchise than either Universe or Origins. Perhaps it would have succeeded where every other attempt at revival has failed.

We’ll never know.

What we do know is that Stargate spent the last twenty years trapped in a cycle of reinvention. Every owner, every executive, and every new creative team began from the same assumption: that Stargate needed to become something else in order to survive. Darker. Younger. More serialized. More prestigious. More modern. More appealing to audiences beyond the people who made the franchise a success in the first place.

But the audience never wanted a new Stargate. They wanted Stargate.

Not because it was perfect, but because it was one of the last science fiction franchises built around the idea that competent people could solve difficult problems. It believed exploration was worthwhile. It believed institutions, though flawed, were worth preserving. It believed courage, professionalism, humor, and friendship mattered. In an age increasingly defined by cynicism, those qualities became unfashionable in Hollywood and more valuable to audiences.

So don’t cry for Stargate. The cancellation announcement merely made official what has been true for a very long time. Stargate didn’t die when Amazon pulled the plug. It died the moment the people in charge stopped believing that Stargate was enough.

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