The Wall Street Journal-20080111-WEEKEND JOURNAL- The Weekend Adviser- -The Terminator- Reboots for Television
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; The Weekend Adviser: 'The Terminator' Reboots for Television
He'll be back. No, not, Arnold. Instead, get ready for other robot killers from the future, in "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," a new series that kicks off on Fox this Sunday at 8 p.m. EST. It continues in its regular time on Monday at 9 p.m., in the spot that had been home to the hit "24," which is on hold this season due to the ongoing writers' strike.
The original "Terminator" movie from 1984, directed and co-written by James Cameron, was about a robot disguised as a human being (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who is sent back from the year 2029 on an assassination mission. In the future, robot armies dominate the world, and the Terminator is charged with killing Sarah Connor, a woman whose son, John, is fated to become the leader of a human resistance movement. The new TV show is set between the time periods of the movies "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and "Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines." (Mr. Schwarzenegger, who was in all three movies, is now governor of California, and doesn't appear in the series.)
In the new show, John is a high-school boy, and his mother, Sarah, is trying to stay under the radar in New Mexico, to help him grow up to become the Terminator-battling savior of the human race. Somehow, their whereabouts are discovered by a particularly vicious Terminator (Owain Yeoman) who attacks the school. An attractive student who seems rather too interested in John helps him and his mother escape, and turns out to be a robot, more advanced (and certainly more friendly) than the destructive Terminators. The three flee and end up in Los Angeles, hoping to begin a new life.
Fox executives wanted to make sure "The Sarah Connor Chronicles" was more than a weekly chase show. Fox hopes that the dynamic between the mother and son, and the character of the young nubile Terminator, Cameron (a nod to Mr. Cameron), will add spice to the program. Peter Liguori, president, entertainment, Fox Broadcasting Co., says the female Terminator will be "the forbidden fruit" for the adolescent John.
Fox spent almost four months casting the series, which is a significant amount of time for a television show, with producers traveling to five cities to interview actors. English actress Lena Headey, who played Queen Gorgo in the smash movie "300," is Sarah. Thomas Dekker, who had a recurring role on "Heroes," is young John, and Summer Glau, who plays the tempting Terminator, was in the television series "Firefly" and the movie from it, "Serenity."
Although Fox feels the success of the three movies has generated advance interest, it has embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign. Last fall, almost five months before the premiere, it began running teaser ads on some of its reality shows. Then during the World Series broadcasts, it ran a movie-style trailer. The network invited bloggers to the "Terminator" set to build online chatter and recently launched a site in which people can submit photos to have their faces turned into something like a Terminator, www.getterminated.com. And the network is working with Verizon Wireless on mobile promotions. A special "Terminator Tour" bus is traveling to selected cities around the country, inviting fans to board and film an action scene opposite a Terminator, in front of a green screen. The complete video clip is then sent to the fan's email or cellphone.
The main drawback to the series, if it's a hit: There are only nine episodes. Fox had hoped for a 13-episode first season, but the writers' strike curtailed production.
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Quick Hits
Books
Pages From the Past
Geraldine Brooks is comfortable in the past. Her first novel, 2001's "Year of Wonders," was set in the late 17th century and concerned the effects of the plague on a British town. Her second, the Pulitzer Prize-winning "March," published in 2005, follows the father in Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women," when he is away during the Civil War. Now, with "People of the Book," Ms. Brooks goes further afield, tracing the history of a book from its creation in Muslim-ruled, medieval Spain, through 17th-century Venice, fin-de-siecle Vienna, World War II and to the recent past. The book is real. It's the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated manuscript of the text that accompanies the Passover Seder. It is now in the collection of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
Ms. Brooks first heard of this haggadah when she covered the conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s for The Wall Street Journal. The novel uses an Australian book conservator's work on the haggadah to provide a fictional saga about it. It alternates between the modern conservationist's efforts and imagining people's encounters with it through the years. Ms. Brooks had actually begun the novel before writing "March," but ran into difficulties in trying to find the right voice. "I was thinking the book conservator would be Bosnian," she says. "I had written about 50 pages in the Bosnian voice. I wasn't capturing the cadences. Sarajevans have this fantastically mordant wit. I wasn't getting it." Inspiration struck when she decided to channel her own Australian voice (she grew up in a suburb of Sydney) for the conservator. The novel, out now, has received largely positive reviews and makes its debut on the Journal's best-seller list this week.
Television
A Jane Austen Season
It is a truth universally acknowledged that there are never enough Jane Austen movies. Her novels have been adapted for the screen many times over the years, and now television's "Masterpiece Theatre" is presenting an entire Jane Austen season.
The season begins Sunday with "Persuasion," Austen's final novel. It is about Anne Elliott, who is in her late twenties and considered a spinster. Years ago she had broken off an engagement to a poor naval officer. Now he is a prosperous captain and back in her life, but courting her neighbor. The screenplay is by Simon Burke, who has adapted literary works such as D.H. Lawrence's "Sons & Lovers." Another experienced adapter of classics, Maggie Wadey ("Adam Bede"), wrote the script for a new version of Austen's "Mansfield Park," which airs Jan. 27.
The other screenplays in the series are by Andrew Davies, who has adapted many literary classics for television and film, including Trollope's "He Knew He Was Right," Eliot's "Daniel Deronda" and modern novels such as "Bridget Jones's Diary."
Mr. Davies felt that despite the success of director Ang Lee's movie "Sense and Sensibility" in 1995, the novel could do with revisiting. "It's difficult to do justice to the major Jane Austen novels in a two-hour movie," he says. "With a bit of extra time [PBS will air it in two, 90-minute episodes] and more economical storytelling we could encompass the whole novel more faithfully and thoroughly," he says. "Sense and Sensibility" airs beginning March 30.
There will also be a 90-minute biopic that dramatizes Austen's lost loves, called "Miss Austen Regrets," which airs Feb. 3. The season continues through early April. "Masterpiece Theatre" runs at 9 p.m. Sundays in most markets, though times and dates may differ at some PBS stations.
