HELP ME ROND
IN PART TWO OF OUR LOOK AT WHAT THE ABORTIVE TV SERIES STAR WARS: UNDERWORLD MIGHT HAVE BEEN, WRITER RONALD D MOORE REVEALS WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO HELP GUIDE GEORGE LUCAS IN THE WAYS OF THE SMALL SCREEN
WORDS: TARA BENNETT
BY THE MID-2000S, writer and producer Ronald D Moore was a major player in sci-fi television. He came up in the medium the oldschool way, steadily moving up the writing ladder of experience, eventually gaining the kind of critical cred that translates into creating and showrunning his own series.
His eight years on the Star Trek franchise, from The Next Generation through to Voyager, taught him the creative churn of script turnaround while honing his skills in the writers’ room and on the set. He then transitioned to executive-producing Roswell and Carnivàle, and rebooted Battlestar Galactica into a gritty modern classic. It’s not surprising, then, that Moore was on the radar of another sci-fi creator who was looking to put together a team to help him transition his popular space opera universe onto the small screen.
That guy was George Lucas, of course, who as we’ve already discussed was at that time exploring how the television medium might be a more conducive landscape for the kind of expanded, serialised and grittier storytelling he couldn’t do on the big screen with Star Wars. This would have been the Star Wars universe’s first live-action TV series, Star Wars: Underworld.
While Lucas and his producing partner Rick McCallum had successfully created The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for ABC in 1992, for all intents and purposes that series operated more like a blockbuster film, with huge budgets and massive international filming. Expensive and unwieldy to produce for a US broadcast network, it was impossible to sustain for many seasons. Even a decade later, any live-action Star Wars television show would have to bend to the medium more.