Tuned In: ‘Chronicles‘ resurrects Sarah Connor
By Rob Owen
Source: Post-Gazette

Arnold Schwarzenegger is busy with his work as California’s governor, but the “Terminator” film franchise will continue in Fox’s 2008 TV series “The Sarah Connor Chronicles.”

The pilot episode is a slam-bang, action-filled adrenaline rush that’s set after the events in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” Sarah Connor (Lena Headey, “300″) and 15-year-old son John (Thomas Dekker, “Heroes”) go on the run from an evil Terminator, find help from a new, friendly model and time travel to the present, setting the show off on a new time line.
In the original 1984 “Terminator,” an artificial intelligence network called SkyNet sends a robot (Schwarzenegger) from the year 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and prevent her from giving birth to a son who will lead the resistance movement against SkyNet.

In 1991′s “Terminator 2,” SkyNet again tries to take out John Connor (Edward Furlong), and this time John and Sarah are protected by a duplicate of the bad robot (Schwarzenegger) from the first film.

In “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” Sarah Connor had died. The new TV show posits an alternate time line where she lives, which gives the franchise two time lines. (A “Terminator 4″ movie is in development that will stick with the Sarah-is-dead plot.)

” ‘Terminator’ fans have very ambivalent feelings about ‘Terminator 3,’ and what I don’t like about ‘Terminator 3′ is that Sarah is not in it,” said “Sarah Connor Chronicles” executive producer Josh Friedman, who wrote the 2005 film “War of the Worlds” and 2006′s “The Black Dahlia.” “It’s a show in many ways about time travel, but it’s not a time-travel show. Certainly we will see characters, human and less so, returning from the future to the present, but we have no plans right now to jump anyone to the future.”

The show will focus more on the characters, especially Sarah, said consulting producer James Middleton, who’s also developing the “Terminator 4″ movie.

“The whole idea from this series came from, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to understand this icon of science-fiction action movies?’ ” he said. In addition, there’s the mother-and-son’s ongoing fight to save humanity. “One of the core things about our show is faith. Our characters operate and fight a battle in every episode based on the faith that they can prevent Judgment Day, but the odds against them are formidable.”

Friedman said the show will not feature John and Sarah on the run. They’ll settle in Los Angeles while trying to hunt down the pieces that will eventually come together to form SkyNet.

“It’s a great opportunity to explore the value of humankind,” Friedman said. “How do you prosecute a war against a force that doesn’t value you at all and still maintain your own humanity? How does Sarah raise a son to be the leader of the free world? You can’t just teach him how to shoot guns. She has to teach him how to live a moral life.”

Guns are already causing some controversy for “The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” There’s a scene in the pilot in which a Terminator robot shoots up a school in his efforts to exterminate John Connor. Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Liguori noted that the scene was filmed before the massacre at Virginia Tech.

“What we plan on doing is reshoot [the scene] in recognition of what’s happened. With all that being said, you know, the approach on ‘Sarah Connor’ is that tone of a comic book show and not the gritty reality of, let’s say, a ’24,’ ” Liguori said. “But we clearly recognized it.”

How that scene will change and whether a gun will still be seen inside a school is not known. Friedman declined to offer specifics on the changes producers plan.

“Art is a mirror of society, and you can’t run away from that,” he said, defending the inclusion of the original scene. He also points out that despite the gunplay and explosions, “No character actually dies in the pilot.”

Friedman said the scene was inspired by talking with his wife about sending their child to school.

“That got me thinking about Sarah and John and that relationship, which was very much about this woman who’s a control freak,” Friedman said. “For all of us as parents, it’s a very scary world. For her, in particular, it’s a very scary world. I was expressing something personal … worrying about my child in one of the last places you’d like to feel safe.”

Questions also linger regarding the departure of “Sarah Connor” star Dekker from NBC’s “Heroes.” Last season he played cheerleader Claire’s friend Zach, who appeared to be destined to come out as gay, a parallel to Claire coming out as a superhero. “Heroes” producers even said that was the plan, but Dekker ended up leaving the series. Some have speculated that the departure was out of fear on the part of his management that it would hurt his chances at getting the John Connor role if he were to play gay on “Heroes.”

“It was something that definitely got blown out of proportion,” Dekker said, noting he was hired on “Heroes” on a per-episode basis. “Me not appearing on the show anymore has nothing to do with the character. They’re totally separate events. This came along totally separate from that whole thing, episodes and episodes later.