David Gerrold’s The Star Wolf has not made it to television yet even though it has the potential to develop into a major sci fi TV franchise.
What Is It?
Based on the Star Wolf novels by David Gerrold, following is the description of the series that was given on the Kickstarter Page:
Jon Thomas Korie is supposed to be the Captain of the LS-1187, a starship so new it hasn’t earned a name yet. But two days before launch, he’s bumped back down to Executive Officer, and Captain Lowell takes command for what is supposed to be his last mission.
But Captain Lowell makes a strategic error that brings an entire Morthan warfleet down on the Silk Road convoy, a disaster for the Allied Worlds.
The LS-1187 is badly damaged in the fight, it’s left dead in the water, with half her crew dead or injured. Captain Lowell is dead as well. With almost no resources at all, Jon Korie has to rebuild his ship and bring his crew home safely, even while the enemy is searching for this last surviving starship….
This is a story of the courage of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. It’s about the strength of human beings in an impossible situation. It’s about war and revenge, hope and triumph. It’s about us.
The Star Wolf is an epic adventure of ordinary men and women caught in an extraordinary war against a race of superhuman creatures… the Morthans who have augmented their evolution, genetically transformed themselves into a breed of gigantic warriors, trained for aggression, ferocity, and hatred… and they have sworn to destroy humanity!
Why Didn’t It Fly?
In the late ’80s, Star Trek veteran David Gerrold (writer of the much-loved “The Trouble with Tribbles” episode) was brought in to develop a series that would recycle the sfx from 1978’s Battlestar: Galactica. He based it around his book Starhunt (which was a revised version of the 1972 novel Yesterday’s Children), but that ended up not going forward. In the early ’90s, Gerrold dusted off the idea and brought in fellow Trek veteran D.C. Fontana to help with developing a series to be titled Star Wolf. It would draw some similarities from the Gene Roddenberry series but would offer a somewhat darker, more military-focused turn on the concept. Several scripts were completed and the show was shopped around, but it did not get picked. He instead turned it into the novel The Voyage of the Star Wolf, and that would be followed by two more books in the series (with Starhunt acting as a prequel of sort to the series). Gerrold would continue to shop the concept around through the ’90s and into the ’00s, and it would draw plenty of interest, but it never received the greenlight to series.
Fast forward to 2013 when Rob Thomas successfully ran a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter to finance a Veronica Mars revival film. Gerrold saw the potential in that and got together with Fontana and producer David C. Fein to try and fund a pilot for a Star Wolf series. He believed that $650K would cover the first episode and that subsequent installments could be produced for $500K each, with the first story arc running four eps. This offered an exciting opportunity for a sci fi TV series to be produced with the support of the fans and without interference and oversight from a network. The show would be based on a known and well-respected property and it could continue as long as the fans were willing to support it. It’s also possible that the Kickstarter could have led to the show getting picked up by a network or one of the streaming services where it could have had a larger budget (but also tinkering from network execs).
Sadly, though, the Kickstarter campaign was unsuccessful, not even pulling in a significant fraction of its goal. And the failure was very much on the sci fi community. The campaign did not get much attention on social media, and genre-focused websites like io9.com and Blastr.com pretty much just ignored it. I did what I could at the time to get the word out in the early days of the CancelledSciFi.com site, but it was not enough. This could have been a great experiment and a game-changer for sci fi TV, showing that a series could be produced apart from the networks, but after the failed campaign the idea was laid to rest.
Would It Have Worked as a Series?
I believe that Star Wolf could have worked as a series and could have produced multiple seasons. The books offered plenty of material to cover and the show could have continued well beyond those as Gerrold put together a very rich universe. Seasons probably would have been six episodes long at best, but that’s not much different from what we are seeing these days. The Kickstarter campaign happened right at the tail end of the glory days of web series when independent creators were putting out some pretty impressive productions but couldn’t work out the finances to keep them going for extended runs. Platforms like Kickstarter presented some funding options, though, that could have made shows like Star Wolf viable. At $500K per episode, that could be sustained without a huge contribution from each individual supporting the show. And when you think of the money some fans have shelled out in Save-My-Show campaigns, it certainly seems like this could have worked if it picked up enough momentum. The surge in scripted originals from the streaming services in the years that followed essentially killed off the web series trend, though, and the eventual glut of programming during the Peak TV era made this sort of venture much less viable.
Should It Be Revived?
The Star Wolf series was a good idea when David Gerrold first came up with it and it is still a good idea today. It borrows from Star Trek to an extent but also charts its own course and this could turn into a major sci fi franchise if done right. Gerrold believed in 2013 that it could be done on the cheap, and that would certainly be of interest to the entertainment industry today. We appear to be headed from Peak TV to Peak Caution (more on that at this link), and the networks and streamers are less interested in big-dollar productions. Now might be the right time for Gerrold to dust this off again and take another try at turning his property into the television series it deserves to be. In the meantime, the novels are certainly worth checking out for those who want to see what this franchise could offer.
You can read about more sci fi TV shows that were cancelled before they began at this link.
Be sure to follow the Cancelled Sci Fi Twitter Site for breaking news and updates. And for the latest news and discussions on sci fi and fantasy television, follow r/SciFiTV
Follow our Sci Fi TV Schedule for all the currently airing and upcoming sci fi and fantasy television shows, and you can see the premieres for all the upcoming genre entries at this link.
