What is the sga debacle?? Did he do something specific?? I only know that he also made the shows Dark Matter and Utopia Falls which both have diversity and representation so that makes me hopeful for the same treatment in a new stargate series.
hi! whew im so sorry im just getting to this lmfao. truthfully ive been rly busy and this is such a serious topic that i wanted to make sure i chose my words carefully and laid everything out in the best way possible.
disclaimer section! im not the best person to speak on this topic ahha. I just got into the fandom last year and it was only a few months ago that i started to hear some of these issues that existed previously (so if any veteran stargate fans wanna hop in on this and explain things in greater detail, please do)! also this is not a call out post or canceling thing. this is simply a hey-these-things-happened-and-maybe-we-should-be-careful-with-who-we-interact-with-and-trust type thing. anyways without further ado, here’s some of the sketchy shit that went down behind the scenes of stargate atlantis! (all sources are posted in the comment/replies btw)
> let’s start with the decision to kill off carson beckett because thats where the first weird comment pops up. now a lot of people claim that this was a move made by writers & producers to shake up the show and “make the actors feel less secure.” i’ve never been able to find that direct quote although ive heard people say that someone openly admitted it on the audio commentary/bonus features on the atlantis dvds soo take that however you like aha.
> after the sudden exit of paul mcgillion, tori higginson left the show a few episodes later anddddd ok this is where things escalate. this is an interview she gave where she openly talks about everything that went on behind the scenes. but to summarize, the writers ignored all of her input and refused to grow the character further when she had clearly outgrown the “Hammond” role. joseph mallozzi states in his blog post that brad wright himself was very fond and loved the weir character and he claims that the decision to write her out was because of “just simple logic.”(1) however, torri tells a different story. (2)
“Honestly? I found that quite shitty, to be honest (laughs).Oops. But I found out, because I kept going to them, I kept going up to them saying ‘I have a feeling my character, you’re not doing anything with me, and you guys have me for six years and I don’t want to, you know, be here not doing anything. Let me know what’s going on.’ And they kept saying “no, no, no, it’s great. We love you. We love you. Things can be great.’ And I said ‘well, if that’s the case, can we do something with her’ and they kept reassuring me that nothing - and the very last day of filming season three, as I finished filming the last scene on the last day I was called up to the office and was told that my character was going to become recurring if I chose to be. So, I thought that was not very, um, dignified, way to deal with it, and I was a bit surprised. So I was—so my reaction was one of yeah, I was a little bit surprised. I was a little bit upset by how it was dealt with. But I wasn’t upset at the decision because I understood it. I kept going to them saying ‘I get, I get what’s going to happen, just give me some notice so I can pack my apartment and move back to L.A. Really. So I wasn’t upset with the decision. I was upset with how it was handled.”
she was led on and told her role would be reduced after the filming of season three which is uh. absolutely insane to think about considering she’s the main female lead of the show. And this is just my personal opinion but i think its interesting timing that as soon as brad stepped down, joseph mallozzi and his writing partner, paul mullie got rid of her. It’s also pretty telling that there was some bad blood behind the scenes because she didn’t even reprise her character in season five for the ghost in the machine aka the episode where they “kill elizabeth” off. although i do wanna mention that since then, jm has posted that he believes elizabeth would actually still be alive today and is just in stasis somewhere waiting to be found …which is nice. i guess. maybe they shouldn’t have fired her in the first place but hey whatever.
and to end the torri section, here’s another quote that i think is the real reason she was let go from atlantis.
Question: And now Amanda Tapping seems to be doing exactly the same… just filing an episode. Torri said “Well, no. I understand that it’s a club, and you know, some people.. .you know. I think they didn’t like me constantly rapping on the doors saying ‘excuse me, why aren’t there any women writers or any women producers on the show?’ I think it bothered them. And so, Amanda, bless her, just had a kid so… bless her, man, she needs that gig more than [me]… you know what I mean? So I have no issues with any of them. I understand how it works. It is a bit of a political game and… I’m not very good at politics (laughs). I’m like Weir. I just want to act.”
> now this is where the joe flanigan of it all starts to come in. he’s been vocal about defending torri higginson and openly saying how bad of a decision it was to kill her off. (3) and his interview with dial the gate was enlightening on a few topics. (4)
- his character didn’t get a backstory until season 3. tptb literally told him, “john likes ferris wheels” and called it a day. which is actually mind boggling. they gave him nothing to work with and somehow he turned it into gold.
- he’s also said many times and in different interviews how terrible it was that the writers carried over from sg1. the cast would pitch ideas but would be shut down because they would sound “too much like an sg1 ep” which is ridiculous considering how many atlantis scripts are just a rip off of sg1 eps anyways.
> and finally the whole whispers debacle. now i don’t really know a lot about this, so I’ll just link the tumblr post that first brought this to my attention! (5) there’s also the whole “the writers stopped taking notes from the cast after season 3 and specifically started to shun joe out” thing (which is very obvious in seasons 4 and 5) so i’ll also link another great tumblr post because they explain it so much better than i can. (6)
> there’s also the fact that once it became clear that universe was not doing well, both bw and jm turned and blamed it on atlantis and even sg1 fans.
“I don’t think if we, for any reason, go away, it is an issue necessarily of the quality of the product that we’ve been making. I think getting moved on the schedule has hurt us. And the fact that some of the fans that liked SG-1 and Atlantis were so angry that they have deliberately hurt us, which is unfortunate.” (7) Brad Wright.
Jaso967060 writes: “Heck I think alot of people from “that other site” could be won back if some changes are made. (Finding out the Destinys Mission and the crew working together more instead of tearing each other down…and having more action…changes like that.)”
Answer: Disagree. Given that their deluded mission statement is to see SGU cancelled in order to pave the way for an SGA return, I doubt that very much. (8) Joseph Mallozzi
this post is getting too long so i won’t go into the whole “stargate atlantis viewers were not the right demographic the writers wanted” thing. because yes this may have been said by one of the writers (i don’t have a source but so many people bring it up and it makes sense considering the type of show universe is). also joe flanigan talked about how the writers and producers disrespected atlantis fans and he sorta mentions this quote too so im gonna link it. (9) also i would just like to say huge shoutout to joe for not caring to be diplomatic lol.
but yea. please take this post however you would like. all of this happened years and years ago so one can only hope people have learned from their mistakes. and if a fourth stargate show is ever made, I just pray they’ll finally have women and poc writers/producers/directors as main contributors. also joseph mallozzi has done so many interviews with dial of the gate in recent years, so i would check those out if anyone would like to hear his current thoughts on stargate. (if you do, please message me because i would love to know if he acknowledges any of these topics ahah).
and to end this lovely post, let’s reminisce on that one time joe flanigan called the writers of atlantis “rodney mckays” <3
“Because the writers are all McKays – they are the collective Rodney McKay. It’s a whole load of little McKays running round up there in the offices.” (10)
so sorry this took a million years to respond to ahha. and i may have gotten a bit sidetracked but i hope i answered your question !!
havocthecat
and this isn’t even EVERYTHING tbh
just ask me what happened to the nice queer couple in stargate origins (don’t ask me, it was awful, trust me, you don’t want to know)
and I love sg1 and sga but I also am fully cognizant of their flaws
drst
So off the top of my head:
Mallozzi got kicked off the main fan website for his own show for being a huge asshole to fans. Gateworld was the primary fan site for Stargate (this was before social media) and they had to ban him for being a dick to people. That tells you all you need to know about this dude.
There was a serial rapist character they introduced in a “humorous” episode, and when the fanbase pointed out this guy was drugging and raping people and it was not funny, they deliberately brought the character back in another episode.
When Universe was being promoted the Bridge Boys club (the producers) bragged that it wasn’t for their existing fanbase, and they were pretty explicit that they meant the heavily female fanbase of SGA. They were making a show for dudes, instead. Honestly they wanted to have their own BSG and failed.
In response to this bragging, the female fanbase of Stargate didn’t watch SGU. Individually some did, but collectively SGU had the lowest ratings among SyFy’s shows for female viewers. They told us it wasn’t for us and then they got mad that we didn’t watch. And blamed us for the show getting cancelled.
The Boys were also pretty blunt that they brought Jewel Stait in because Rachel Luttrell wasn’t hot enough any more after she had the baby.
Last but not least, they forced Amanda Tapping to go work on SGA because she was under contract when SG1 ended. She wanted to go do her own show, “Sanctuary” but they insisted she had to keep working on Stargate, and they were angry that she wasn’t grateful for the work. I don’t recall if Shanks and the other SG1 actors were still in contract at that point, since they all got to leave, maybe they weren’t, but it would be notable if they let all the guys out when the show was cancelled but not Amanda.
darthmelyanna
The “shutting Joe out” thing is actually WAY WORSE because it goes to how Mallozzi dealt with his employees.
TV networks/studios have photographers who take official photographs for publicity purposes. Those images will have a network/studio watermark on them. Most importantly, the actors in the pictures get paid if and when someone licenses the picture for, say, an article about the show.
Mallozzi had a blog where he would share behind-the-scenes stuff from productions, including pictures. Except they weren’t the official, licensed pictures that he would have had to pay to use. They were pictures he took. Without permission.
The license fees weren’t a big deal for the main cast, but for a day player with three lines? This was depriving them of a source of income. So they went to the president of the union on set. Which was Joe Flanigan.
Joe went to Mallozzi as union president to file an official complaint about it. Mallozzi didn’t have a leg to stand on. He was absolutely in the wrong, and thereafter he made a big fuss about how he’d definitely asked permission to take these pictures on his blog and it definitely wasn’t violating union rules.
And after that, the producers stopped talking to Joe.
freifraufischer
The stuff about Amanda Tapping was also worse. Her contract was written so that she had to do X number of episodes in the Stargate franchise when SG1 was cancelled.
She had already moved on, had filmed the pilot for Sanctuary which she was the executive producer on and her show had been picked up when they forced her back to do the year of Stargate Atlantis. She had an entire production that was relying on her as the lead and producer on Sanctuary and so as not to put them all out of work she ended up having to film both shows that year (Sanctuary Season 1, SGA Season 4). Sanctuary is an amazing show but there is a reason that Amanda looks physically tired during episodes of both shows and much better in Sanctuary Season 2. Because she wasn’t having to do Stargate anymore. She also had to wear a wig during the first season of sanctuary because the character had a different hair color.
The Bridge Boys were also shooting themselves in the foot with this because they were in effect actively sabotaging another show being produced for the people cutting their paychecks. Let’s just say SyFi liked Amanda a lot more then them.
As a weird aside also coming from Tapping she told my ex-wife at a con after the shows were over that she would read through fan message boards trying to figure out background for her character that made any sense (as it turned out I was writing some of that meta and she recognized my user name). She had tried to ask the writers for any kind of backstory for Sam and got nothing. She was also apparently not the only actor who was doing this.
And I just remembered another “great” part of the production. There are things that you can ask extras to do “cheering with specific lines” but you can’t make them do because it’s technically acting. A lot of extras will do so if the set is a nice place. There are also lines that productions can’t cross with using non professional extras. The stargate productions pulled so much bullshit that the vancouver extras union representative had to institute work to rule mandates that effected a ton of unrelated productions. There are several episodes of Battlestar Galactica where the crowds are particularly uninvolved in the things going on and those episodes were filmed during this period of tension.
They were so shitty to extras that they made things hard for OTHER sets.
Like. I’m trying not to add things like “okay NOW malozzi is saying ‘oh weir was alive all along,’” but literally people (me) were going to cons and talking to torri and she was saying things like, “I wasn’t getting any answer about a future for elizabeth and I decided to say no to give the fans some closure, it was a surprise when they recast me.” it seems obvious to me that the decision to “make elizabeth alive and in stasis all along” was a bullshit ex post facto.
I also have pdfs of the old Higginson transcript about her knocking on doors asking where the women directors and writers were at. Not sure if I ever saved the audio though. (Kind of like how I saved the old Liz Gracen files on how The Raven turned into a trashfire because no way was I going to let THAT accusation go unanswered every time. How is it that the women always get accused? HOW?)
And fuck Lucius Lavin, that character was a rapey trashfire and I don’t care how venerable Richard Kind is as an actor, they could have written better material for him. Or just brought in Lucius’ less rapey twin brother to bring him back.