Catacombs Reference LibrarySpace 1999 Producers Planning Improvements
Catacombs Reference LibraryNew York Times, 10 August 1976, p41
One of the threats to the network program schedules last year was a syndicated British science-fiction series called Space: 1999, about a group of earth explorers trapped on the Moon as it hurtles out of the Earth's orbit and travels endlessly through outer space.
The show attempts to cash in on the success of the 1960's science-fiction series Star Trek, but never lived up to its expectations and failed to dent the network ratings.
Undismayed, executives at the Independent Television Corporation (ITC), producers of the show, said they would introduce more interesting characters and bring in Fred Freiberger, a former producer of Star Trek, to oversee the writing of the plots.
Space: 1999 was first offered to the networks, and after it had been rejected, ITC executives decided to bypass the networks and to sell the program through syndication, on a station-by-station basis.
Although many other shows are syndicated, few are produced on the scale of Space: 1999, which has a large budget and spectacular special effects that some critics have hailed as being some of they best on any television series.
Last year in the United States 155 stations broadcast Space: 1999, with 86 network affiliates scheduling it in place of network fare that they felt would not do well in the ratings. In New York, WPIX-TV, an independent station, shows the series on Saturday and Sunday evening.
Abe Mandell, the president of ITC, believes that science fiction has proved to be the perfect genre for early-evening family viewing because "there, is excitement and adventure but no gross violence or gross sex."
Why then did the series falter? The new producer, Fred Freiberger, said that "the average American series is far above the average British series in terms of plot, structure and characterization" and these were the elements that he was trying to alter.
One character has been eliminated. Dr. Victor Bergman, scientist on Moon Base Alpha, portrayed by Barry Morse, will have died over the summer. Catherine Schell will play a new character named Maya. She is an alien creature with the power to transform herself into any animal or object.
The two leading characters, Comdr. John Koenig and Dr. Helena Russell (played by the American husband-and-wife acting team of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain), have been "humanized" and will show more emotion.
Love will also come to the Moon with a romantic relationship developing between the main characters.
Each episode of Space: 1999 costs about $325,000, of which about 20 percent goes toward the special-effects unit. A staff of 12, under the direction of Brian Johnson, a special-effects expert, works at Bray Studios, near Windsor, England, producing in 10 days, one episode's worth of lunar launchings, attacks by alien spacecraft and encounters with strange planets.
Regardless of whether a network eventually picks up the series. ITC officials say they can afford to produce the expensive syndicated series.
"We produce for the world," Mr. Mandell said, adding that although the United States makes up 60 percent of the market, the series receives substantial profit from distribution elsewhere.
And there is another motivation. If the series lasts for at least three years, Mr. Mandell believes he can "strip" it: syndicate the reruns for showing five nights a week. That is when the company can really make its profits, he observed.