Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Did You Know?

• Fox's marketing campaign for the show was described as the 'biggest campaign for a new mid-season show in years'.
• The series was originally scheduled to premiere on Monday, January 14, 2008, but was moved to a day earlier due to the writers' strike.
• Fox president Kevin Reilly said of the cancellation: 'We make no apologies for that show -- we did a huge launch with that show. We tried. It was time to move on.'

Series overview

After the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Sarah and John Connor thought they had stopped Skynet. They had broken into Cyberdyne Systems, convinced employee Miles Dyson to help them, and destroyed the company's research in an explosion that killed Dyson. The T-1000 and the re-programmed T-800 were also destroyed, preventing their technology from being reverse-engineered. This changed the timeline, seemingly averting the nuclear war known as Judgment Day. However, their victory only delayed the inevitable.

Four years later, in 1999, a new Terminator model called a T-888, nicknamed "Cromartie," arrived from the future to kill John. To protect him, the future John sent back another Terminator, "Cameron," from the year 2027. Cameron's appearance was modeled on Allison Young, a resistance fighter and friend of John's in the future, whom Cameron killed before being re-programmed. The Connors were also hunted by FBI Special Agent James Ellison, who believed Sarah was a dangerous criminal based on her past actions. During this time, Sarah had a romantic relationship with a paramedic named Charley Dixon, but she ended it to go on the run again. She and John moved from Nebraska to New Mexico, where Cameron found them. John grew tired of their constant running, so Sarah decided to try again to stop Skynet, now believing Judgment Day would occur in 2011.

In the pilot episode, Cameron and the Connors jumped through time to Los Angeles in 2007, just as Skynet was beginning to form. Cromartie was badly damaged during the attempt to kill them but managed to repair his metal endoskeleton and synthetic skin, continuing his hunt for John in the new time period. The Connors discovered that Skynet had sent other Terminators back to help create itself, while the human resistance had sent back fighters to stop them. Sarah also had to cope with the fear that she might be developing cancer.

Cast and characters

Lena Headey plays Sarah Connor, the mother of John Connor, who is destined to lead the human resistance. Law enforcement considers her a dangerous fugitive. Thomas Dekker plays John Connor, Sarah’s son and the future resistance leader. He is 15 when the series begins, turns 16 in the first season’s final episode, and is 17 throughout the second season. Over time, John deals with his complicated emotions for Cameron, a Terminator. John De Vito portrays a younger John Connor in the episodes “Queen’s Gambit” and “To the Lighthouse.” Summer Glau plays Cameron, a Terminator sent back from 2027 by the future John Connor to protect his younger self. Her specific model and full abilities are unknown, but she imitates human behavior better than any earlier Terminator and can eat small amounts of food, something no Terminator had done before. Later, the series reveals that Cameron took the identity of resistance fighter Allison Young before being reprogrammed. Richard T. Jones plays James Ellison, an FBI Special Agent who chases Sarah Connor. Initially confused by what he considers Sarah’s bizarre story, he later finds undeniable proof of Terminators, including Cromartie’s body, and slowly accepts the truth. In season two, Ellison seeks a job with ZeiraCorp and teams up with Catherine Weaver, unaware she is a Terminator until the final episode. Brian Austin Green plays Derek Reese, a resistance fighter sent to the past by the future John Connor. He is the older brother of Kyle Reese, John Connor’s father, and thus John’s paternal uncle. He knows Cameron from the future but remains suspicious of her. Derek appears occasionally in the first season and becomes a regular in the second. He has a romantic relationship with Jesse Flores, another resistance fighter from the future. He dies when a Terminator kills him while he tries to rescue Savannah Weaver. The series finale introduces another Derek from a different timeline.

Production

In November 2005, C2 Pictures, the company behind Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, announced it was developing a television series based on the Terminator franchise. Warner Bros. Television partnered on the project, and Fox agreed to produce a pilot. Josh Friedman, making his TV debut, was hired to write the pilot and serve as an executive producer. Additional executive producers included C2 founders Andy Vajna and Mario Kassar, along with C2 vice president of development James Middleton. Friedman noted that the show would have fewer action scenes than the films due to television's smaller budget, and he believed that the constant chase sequences from the movies would grow tiresome in a weekly series. The show was first called The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but "Terminator" was later added to the title to attract a wider audience. Friedman supported this change, though there was debate during pre-production. Sarah Connor first appeared in the 1984 film The Terminator and its 1991 sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day. An early draft of Terminator 3 included her, but she was ultimately written out, dying of leukemia before that film's story began. Middleton came up with the idea for a Terminator TV show after the third movie, saying, "After T3 came out, I started to miss Sarah. I kept thinking, How could we bring her back?" Friedman crafted The Sarah Connor Chronicles as an alternate sequel to Terminator 2, ignoring the events of the third film. He explained, "I almost think of this as T3. To me it takes the place of T3. But also I think that sort of in the spirit of Terminator, it's an alternate timeline. I know a lot of people get very worked up about the continuity and the canon and all that stuff."

Response

The series premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles drew 18.3 million viewers in the United States, making it the highest-rated new scripted show of the 2007-08 season. However, the second-season premiere saw a sharp drop to 6.3 million viewers, well below the first season's average. On Rotten Tomatoes, the first season holds a 76% approval rating from 34 critics, while the second season scores 94% based on 16 reviews. Metacritic gives the first season a 74 out of 100 from 24 reviews, and the second season a 67 from just four reviews. Robert Bianco of USA Today awarded the premiere four and a half stars out of five, describing it as "smart, tough and entertaining." Gina Bellafante of The New York Times called it "one of the more humanizing adventures in science fiction to arrive in quite a while." The Los Angeles Times praised the show for having "heart and feeling" and called it "an almost Shakespearean exploration of fate vs. character," noting it features "plenty of really great fight scenes, and explosions, as well as neat devices developed in the future and jury-rigged in the present." Daily Variety labeled the pilot "a slick brand extension off this profitable assembly line" with "impressive and abundant action with realistic visual effects and, frankly, plenty of eye candy between Glau and Headey." At the start of the second season, Variety highlighted Lena Headey's performance as Sarah, calling it "gritty" and noting she manages to be "smart, resourceful and tough, yet melancholy and vulnerable as well." Variety also wrote that the series "continue to deliver," getting "considerable mileage out of the constant peril" facing the characters. The Connecticut Post ranked it among the top 10 TV shows of 2008, calling it "smart, with thought-provoking meditations on parenthood, destiny and human nature," and praising performances by Lena Headey and Summer Glau.