With stints on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, The Dead Zone and Battlestar Galactica to his credit, writer/producer Michael Taylor knows how to build successful genre television shows. This Friday, June 26th, sees the premiere of Taylor's latest project, Virtuality, a two-hour TV movie originally conceived with Taylor's fellow Trek and Battlestar alum Ron Moore as a one-hour pilot about the crew of Earth's first interstellar spaceship, on a ten-year mission to explore a local star system. They're assisted on this mission by a series of virtual reality modules, and their activities inside these modules are broadcast to Earth in the form of a reality TV series. In the following exclusive interview, Taylor speaks with FEARnet about the similarities and differences between Virtuality and his other work; on Fox's reluctance to greenlight a series; and on what fans can do to change the network's mind…

Virtuality explores concepts you've dealt with in Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica. Is that where this show begins for you – as an extension of your past work?  

You know, it's interesting. People made the holodeck comparison, and it never really occurred to me at first. I worked on Star Trek and obviously I wrote shows that had a lot of stuff that took place in holodecks. Back then, it was still almost the dawn of the internet, when The Next Generation and these shows were getting on their feet. And now I think of it in different terms. I connect it more as sort of an extension, an extrapolation, of our current Internet technology. That to me is sort of the whole resonance of this show. The sense that in new various ways – through emails, through dating sites, through social networking programs – we spend a good portion of our lives online these days. In a way, we're already living in a kind of virtual reality, a virtuality. From the very beginning, of thinking about this show, that's what was more on my mind. And of course, people would say, "Well, back then, the holodeck," and I'd go, "Yeah, I guess so." I guess just because the holodeck sort of just came out of a different sense of make-believe. It really is the same thing in a lot of ways. It's just that, to me, it came out of a different intellectual context. Maybe that sounds a little too arch, but that's the thing. I was thinking about something different in the context of this show. So the holodeck was sort of like "Surprise." So now it seems old-fashioned, even though there are obviously similarities.

So no. Strangely enough, Star Trek was not an influence in that sense. It was an influence in that Ron and I both came up writing Star Trek, and the lessons of those shows were really about creating engaging characters and thought-provoking situations, which is the essence of good science fiction. But the holodeck was less a literal kind of influence on us, at least speaking for myself. I can't speak entirely for Ron.

There was also an element of virtual reality in Battlestar, with the Cylon technology.

Oh, their ability to project! You know, I didn't think of that either. [Laughs.] It's so funny that they have this innate ability to sort of project environments. And I used that. I made dramatic use of that in the last Battlestar episode I wrote, "Island in a Stream of Stars". Boomer sort of envisions her own house, her ideal house, peopled with her imaginary daughter, her imaginary life with Tyrol, the one she always dreamed of. That's very much what our characters are doing, in almost a literal way, as you'll see in one case at least, in this show. Yet, again, I didn't make the connection, in part because I hadn't been writing about Cylon projection at the point when I was writing this show. I didn't really use it until the end. It only cropped up very briefly on our first introduction of the Cylons, and then revisited at the end of the show.

But again, creatively, my eyes were always on our own culture, the future of that culture, and what we're looking to explore on Virtuality. I guess I simply wasn't looking backwards. If I had looked backwards, I could see influences – holodecks, Cylon projections – in my own background as a writer. But I was really looking forward and thinking of ways in which this show would approach this whole thing especially. Counter-intuitive perhaps, but that's my understanding of how I thought of things a certain way, and didn't think of them another way.

The show began as a one-hour pilot script and has been expanded to a two-hour movie. How was it expanded?

Quite a bit was shot to expand it. There are expanded scenes with all the characters, and we sort of took the plot further in one significant area. Which, I think someone has already remarked online – perhaps the fellow who does the Futon Critic reviews – that it's different than it was in the [original] script. He's intrigued and he's not sure he's entirely down with it. I think the way Ron thought of it [was] "We have more time, let's take this a little further." We have an interesting idea that puts yet another twist on the scenario. Maybe it makes the situation seem less dire, more dire – I'm not sure. But with Battlestar, if we had a really good idea, we wouldn't necessarily hold onto it forever. We'd put it into play right away, and we'd just be confident and hopeful that we'd come up with more really good ideas down the road. We didn't hoard them. So the idea was "Let's put it all out there. Let's really create [an] interesting scenario, expand on the story we had before rather than just pad it out. Take it in a slightly new direction."

Doing so required some actual changes in the natures of a couple of our characters, and the character dynamics. A character who perhaps seemed a little more villainous in the earlier draft – the character of the psychiatrist, Roger Fallon – now seems a little less so. He seems to be more genuinely concerned with the general welfare of the people on the ship than perhaps he did before. But these changes necessitated a rethinking of the characters and their motivations. But that's typical of the process on Battlestar, which has always been a kind of an organic one – new ideas come to the fore, stories change, and that affects the characters; that affects the situations of the characters, how they react. That's sort part of the creative process, at least the one I'm used to working in with Ron. I don't know if I'm being as specific as you'd like with the new material, but I'm really trying to speak to the major changes that were made. And speaking in a way that does not give them away, given that the entire one-hour script seems to have been published on the internet somewhere. Fortunately, the two-hour, I don't think, has gotten out.

How much of the show deals with virtual reality, and how much of it deals with space travel, and how does it weave the two together?

In the superficial sense, the proportion of time spent in reality versus virtual reality, I'd say maybe ten to twenty percent of the show happens in a virtual reality over the course of the two-hour movie length of the show. Partly that's because of the needs of the pilot, to set up who these characters are, to set up the reality of their situation, meaning we spend a lot more time on the ship, in the general space that they all share, as opposed to these sort of private virtual spaces. Another factor is the expense of creating these environments. Though this was not an inexpensive show, there were constraints on our budget. We whittled everything down to the bare minimum, and so we couldn't spend forever in these virtual environments. A point of interest here is that in one technical way the show breaks ground – these virtual environments truly are virtual. They were entirely created within computers. There're almost no real elements in them other than the actors, and a couch they might sit on or something like that. They are not realistic backgrounds shot in another place. They are all created in the computer, as they would be in a true virtual reality program. This was partly a way for us to save money – to see how we might do this on a weekly basis with a series – and partly just an interest in working like this. It's really quite interesting to see how this works.

Why was Fox reluctant to greenlight a series? Did they feel it was too cerebral?     

Hopefully it's not too cerebral. I mean, that would be a real, legitimate complaint, if it's intellectual or dry material. We hope that it's really entertaining. And yet it's more concerned with character than it is with ideas, per se – we're very much exploring who these people are, and what their relationships are with each other than – we are about laying out a whole Matrix-y philosophy or something, like French Film School 101. No, not at all. I think, however, that there are certainly a lot of layers to this show. It felt dense to them. We have a bunch of characters on a spaceship, they have access to virtual reality modules, and, meanwhile, they're all participating in a reality show about the voyage. So you've got three major things going on; whereas one is generally enough for most premises. I love the complexity of it. I love the opportunities that gives you for a show that's about virtual reality. The media and other kinds of virtual realities are very much a part of our lives. We see our images reflected back on ourselves. We're reality stars. For a show that's very much about the nature of reality versus virtual reality, a reality show seems to fit right in. But it is another element. They're not saying it's too intellectual, but they're saying that it is complex. There's a lot of balls in the air, and we spend time getting those balls in the air. I think that would probably be more the issue.

But science fiction has always had a tough road, especially on network television. When it succeeds, like in a case like Lost, it's not even actually acknowledged as science fiction. It's science fiction that sort of comes at you from a kind of angle, downplaying the science-fiction aspect, at least at first. Even that show, I think, was a struggle getting off the ground, getting greenlit. It's always tough. I think it's interesting because science fiction has done so well in the movies. Yet on the small screen, it's a tougher sell. Not to audiences necessarily, I don't think, but to networks. Partly because it is innately intellectual, in the sense that all science fiction is about ideas. Ideas are its subject, ideas and character. I have a friend, Brannon Braga, who along with David Goyer created a show called Flash Forward for ABC next year; it's one of their tent-pole productions, and hopefully it will be a big hit. But there are ideas at the core of that show too. I think when people see how science fiction works on television, they're really impressed. But even Battlestar – Battlestar was critically lauded and it's the reason Fox wanted to do a project with Ron and myself. Yet at the same time, it had a relatively small cable audience. Not huge. It had a very vociferous, very engaged audience, it had tons of critics who were into it. But it still was not doing anything close to network numbers. Perhaps partly because it was true to what it was, to what it wanted to be. Hitting a network sweet spot with a science-fiction show is a real challenge. And it's possible we could've done it, and could still do it if Fox decided to change their minds or wanted to go ahead. It's hard to say. It's always a kind of crapshoot. The only thing you can say is that this is definitely not a doctor show, or a lawyer show, or a cop show. Even there, you can't guarantee anything. It is very much its own thing. It's a unique kind of show. Given the success Ron, in particular, has had with shows like Battlestar, it would be lovely if a network like Fox would give us the opportunity to say, "Look where this show can go, look how cool this is." That's all you really want in the end – you want an opportunity to show what you can do, where you could take a show. A pilot, in the end, is a pilot. It sets up a story, it sets up a bunch of ideas, a bunch of people. It puts it all in play. But it's a launching pad, it's a diving board, and you want to jump off there and you want to dive in and then you want to tell some stories. And that's where a show really finds its legs, and really shows what it can do. It's a shame if that opportunity doesn't happen for this show. But at the very least – this is unusual for pilots that don't become series – people will get to see it. We don't claim that it's perfect. There are things we would have liked to have changed and adjust after looking at all the material we shot for two hours. But we didn't have that opportunity, we didn't have that budget. We weren't able to revisit anything. We had to re-cut it very quickly to adapt it to this length for the airing on June 26th. We're still super proud of it, and think it's really cool. We're glad it's on and we hope people dig it. 

You've said there's a slender chance it could go to series. Is there anything you can suggest fans do to help that happen?

If people really like it, they of course could, I suppose, write or email the Fox Network. In particular, I guess, Peter Rice and Kevin Riley, who are the two top executives over there. They could also write to Mark Stern at the Sci-Fi Channel, who's really much into the show, and I think would love to put it on. It's really just a matter of money over at Sci-Fi. Their budget is just overstretched to handle this. But if they also knew there were a lot of people clamoring to see this show it wouldn't hurt.

Can you talk about the other projects you're working on right now?

I am working on Caprica. I am full-time writer and co-executive producer on Caprica, the Battlestar prequel. I have also just started to develop a new pilot. So I'm gonna take another shot at creating a show that sticks. Maybe I'm just foolish or a glutton for punishment, but I still think there's a way to make shows that are smart and widely appealing. I know it's possible because it's been done before, and there are always a couple of occasions where it's done every year. There's always something new that's good. A couple things. So I hope to try to develop a new network show and hopefully a new cable show as well. It's not that I don't have to worry about creating something that that many millions of people watch. [Laughs.] Still, millions are important.

Are these new shows science fiction?

Interesting… I think less so. One idea has a somewhat fantasy element. The other has a science-fiction element to a degree, but it's sort of a heightened version of a present-day situation. Both take place on earth. There are no spaceships involved. I'm hoping to go forward, if I can really crack the story and really make it work. It's interesting. It will be very contemporary, some contemporary political issues, and yet hopefully be really entertaining.