Has Sarah Connor finally been targeted for termination? The title of the imminent McG money-spinner/burner, Terminator Salvation, has taken on a new meaning for the cast and crew of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Their show, which has been steadily improving, learning as it goes, now looks set for the chop, following its bizarre but satisfying season two finale.
It's a tough little show, one that has weathered adversity well, even benefiting from the writers' strike by curtailing season one into a punchy dozen episodes. It's flourished by having to be inventive. An example: rather than expensively stage the SWAT team v Terminator battle that closed season one, it went for the more stylish approach of having the dead troopers falling into a swimming pool to the strains of Johnny Cash's The Man Comes Around.
It's done well to get this far in the current climate. Genre shows are regularly cut down in their prime – Firefly and Drive are just two examples of many. Longer running shows such as Star Trek: The Next Generation really only hit their stride from season 3 onwards; they need that long to get everyone working from the same page.
Official word on the show's future has been vague, but then it always is. Warner Bros has said little more than the show is under consideration; Entertainment Weekly has been claiming insider information that it's all over, while one of the show's writers, Ashley Edward Miller, has been Twittering that the fat lady-robot hasn't yet started singing.
What we do know is that the sets have been destroyed – not a huge problem, since it doesn't have complex standing set pieces like Battlestar Galactica – and the show's Shirley Manson (who has been another steadily improving aspect of the series) described herself as "an unemployed actress" on The Craig Ferguson Show the other night.
It seems that they're waiting to see just how Terminator-crazy we get over the new movie. While I hope that this works out, one can't but note how different these Terminators are – judging from the clips and trailers I've seen, McG has transformed it into a Transformers movie while the show has taken things off into some great nature-of-humanity routines, electronic sentience explorations and smart time-travel conundrums, while respecting the source material.
The relationship between television and film has usually been more parasitic than symbiotic. There has been no shortage of legitimate TV tie-ins: Planet Of The Apes, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, etc. But there are plenty of other shows suspiciously similar to successful movies of the time: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid morphed into Alias Smith and Jones, the original Battlestar Galactica was forced to legally prove its dissimilarity to Star Wars, and The Fall Guy was the TV knockoff of Burt Reynolds' Hooper. Plenty more were less direct in their "homages": the early 1970s buddy cop movies influenced Starsky And Hutch while shows like BJ and the Bear would be so confused they'd take whatever was going (in that case Convoy, Clint Eastwood's orangutan flicks, Smokey and the Bandit and many more).
Termintor's legacy is a little more complex. James Cameron found himself the recipient of a lawsuit by the brilliant and incredibly litigious writer Harlan Ellison, who noted marked similarities between The Terminator and his classic The Outer Limits TV episodes Soldier, and Demon with a Glass Hand, resulting in Ellison's name being added to the movie's credits – not for nothing is Sarah Connor pursuing an ex-FBI operative named Agent Ellison.
Whether the movie makes the slightest bit of difference to the TV show's fate – and vice-versa – remains to be seen. After all, no one seems too concerned that the new Star Trek movie is the first since 1989's Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier to hit cinemas without a TV branch of the franchise being in production. Like all the Terminator characters, big and small-screen, we'll just have to wait and see what the future holds.
