Why Amazon canceling the new Stargate series is a mistake - and fans are trying to tell them
Amazon has accidentally stirred up a full-on revolt from fans - and former Stargate stars
When news broke earlier this week that Amazon had pulled the plug on its new Stargate series, I was beyond bummed. I’ve been a fan of the show since I was a teenager. I loved the original movie as a kid, and watched SG-1 and all its spinoffs for more than a decade.
I’ve been waiting on more adventures through the ‘gate since Universe was canceled 15 years ago.
Amazon had originally tapped Martin Gero and a few other creatives who had worked on the original era of Stargate TV to tackle the new series. It was pitched as a balancing act project: something that would stay true to the canon and stories established in the prior shows, while kicking off a new era with a new cast and new heroes off on some new adventure.
Basically, the goal was to thread the needle — create a show that OG fans would love, while making it accessible enough for new fans to also jump in and enjoy the ride. Things seemed to be going well, with Season 1 mapped out and scripts pretty much written. They were on the verge of casting and eyeing a production start in a few months.
Then, boom. The trades broke the news that Amazon had killed the project. No retooling, no rethinking. It was just dead. The reason? The new regime of creative execs have since come on since the project had gotten its green-light, and they no longer felt the series’ direction played too much to the existing fans and was not accessible enough to bring in new viewers.
Why the new Stargate series was canceled
Basically, from everything that has been reported: the new Stargate show was shut down because they thought it would appeal too much to Stargate fans. Yeah, I know. The streamer wants something bigger and broader, unburdened by the canon that already exists across the original three shows and various movies (reports note the franchise could be redeveloped eventually with a new creative team with no ties to the original series).
To be fair, it makes sense that Amazon would want something that could appeal to as many people as possible — but the move of getting fans excited by Gero’s show, and announcing with fanfare that it would be a revival and not a reboot of the franchise, reactivated and engaged a huge fanbase. No, it might not have the name cachet of Star Trek, but Stargate is still among the biggest, most-established sci-fi franchises on the planet.
Amazon got those fans to buy into the project (the series was announced with a Q&A on the beloved fan site Gateworld, a move directly designed to let the hardcore fans in on the process). Fans were following every bit of development with bated breath, then… the plug was pulled.
‘Gaters were understandably upset, but what’s happened the past few days has honestly been impressive to see. Fan petitions have popped up like crazy with tens of thousands of signatures, and the original stars and creatives have taken to social media to encourage fans to ramp up a pressure campaign on Amazon to try and get the execs to reconsider moving forward with the series.
It’s a show of force from a fandom that’s been waiting 15 years for something new, only to have it promised then killed just as things were getting off the ground.
Will it work? Hopefully! But based on the law of fan campaign averages, probably not. But man, you gotta love fans for trying (I already signed the petition, in case you’re wondering).
Why this was the right take for Stargate
Stargate is a unique property, and Amazon made a mistake by killing this show.
Am I making a bit of a bold statement here? Sure. Namely because no one outside of Gero, some Amazon execs and the team in that writers room actually know what the series would’ve been about. The exact pitch for the series was never announced — all we do know is that Gero and the assembled OG creatives of Brad Wright and Joe Mallozzi believed it was the right way to bring the franchise back, and they were bought in and believed in this idea.
If the minds who made SG-1, Atlantis and Universe all believed this was the way to go and was something Stargate fans would love? Who am I to argue. Stargate worked, and developed so many fans and so much longevity, because they were the kinds of shows that writers like Wright, Mallozzi and Gero made it to be. It isn’t like Star Trek, which had been reinvented by different creative teams across The Original Series, The Next Generation, then the myriad shows that have followed in the past few decades.
All of Stargate’s three-series run originated from much the same creative brain trust. And those were the folks behind the new series. If anyone could recapture the magic, it would be them. Not to mention, fans still watch and binge those original shows. They remain in constant streaming rotation, and even still re-run on network TV pretty regularly on throwback channels. This isn’t some dormant, forgotten franchise.
The fans are still there, and the fans still love it.
Deciding to throw away all that good will, and abandon the characters and stories that fans love and want to revisit, just feels crazy. Doing something brand new and disconnected will almost certainly alienate the existing fandom (I personally will be less interested, especially knowing we almost had a new series that would’ve continued that original universe). And at that point, any new, future reboot assumes you can tap into a new, presumably larger general sci-fi fan base that will come in for whatever new thing they’re turning Stargate into next. That’s… a bold strategy, Cotton.
I get that a show connected to the old canon can be limiting, but everyone involved with this project — including the original execs who gave it a green-light! — all thought it did a good job of striking a balance to appeal to old and new fans, alike. That still feels like the right path, and the only path, that has any hope of threading the needle and actually working.
Maybe Amazon thought AI could do it better and more cheaply. Why involve emotional humans who were involved in the previous series? Resistance is Futile. (to borrow a phrase from TNG)
I've seen some boneheaded maneuvers in my life, but this takes the cake. Haven't the Amazon executives learned nothing by watching the colossal failure that is Kurtzman era Star Trek? Do they really think that making a Stargate series for people who won't watch Stargate while alienating the Stargate fans is anything other than a recipe for disaster? There needs to be house cleaning at Amazon.