Interview: Jonathan Glassner on THE ARK, STARGATE: SG-1, and ISLAND CITY, the sci-fi series that could've been

While I was out at the TCA tour in January, I was lucky enough to secure a few minutes to sit down with Jonathan Glassner, one of the executive producers of SyFy’s The Ark. At the time I talked to him, the series obviously hadn’t yet premiered, and I hadn’t had a chance to watch much more than the trailer for the series and the panel that he, series creator Dean Devlin, and the stars of the series did for the critics in attendance. That said, I was still excited to talk to him because A) the series looked good, and B) he’s got a back catalog that’s filled with participation in a whole bunch of series that I’ve watched at various points over the years.

The Ark was described in the promotional materials as "a sci-fi mystery drama." You've pretty much covered all three of those genres at one point or other over the course of your career.

Jonathan Glassner: [Laughs.] That's true!

I know I'm going to double up on some things you were already asked during the panel for the series, but what's the origin story of the series?

Well, Dean [Devlin] created it, so I can't really talk to that a lot. I know just from conversations with him that he was talking to an executive at another network who mentioned, "Why hasn't anybody done a space show that is just about the people more than about aliens or anything else?" And that got his wheels turning...and five years later or something like that, he sat down and actually wrote it! And then SyFy bought it.

Since you came aboard, you've helped flesh it out further?

Yes, quite a bit.

What would you say is the best template to describe it for people who are coming into the series?

Boy, that's tough, because I think it's very different than a lot of shows, mostly because it's set only a hundred or so years from now. So the technology is not 23rd century technology. There are no tricorders. We don't beam down or beam up. We can't do any of that stuff. So the challenges are much more contemporary. It's not an alien-of-the-week show or a culture-of-the-week show...which, believe me, I've done plenty of! [Laughs.] It's much more of a character drama about the people on the show in the worst of circumstances, trying to survive.

Which is easier to do when, as you say, the technology is closer to being based in reality than not.

Yeah, exactly. 

How is structured in terms of the season? I don't know if you can speak to this or not, but is it going to be something that's self-contained? Or is there an opportunity for a second season?

Well, we're hoping for a second season! [Laughs.] We ended it in a way that's assuming there's a second season, so I hope there is! But, yeah, that's the plan. That's the hope. 

I have to geek out, because I love to ask about obscure stuff: it looks like your first writing gig was on The Wizard.

No, my first was on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Okay, I couldn't tell the timing of what came first.

Still, wow. [Laughs.] You're not old enough to remember The Wizard! 

I absolutely am!

Oh, okay! 

I was already a big David Rappaport fan from Time Bandits. 

He was amazing. It was so sad what happened to him. I was just a lowly story editor, so I barely got to talk to him, but anything you wrote for the guy, he made it better than what we wrote. He elevated it. He was just a really talented actor.

Given that you wrote on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, I'm guessing that we may have a mutual acquaintance in Jim Beaver.

Yes! I love Jim! 

Okay, I knew he wrote on that show because I did a Random Roles with him several years back for the A.V. Club.

Yeah, I think that was his first writing jobs also!

I believe you're correct. And you clearly had an affinity for anthology series, because I know you also wrote for Freddy's Nightmares and The Outer Limits. Were anthology shows - the original ones from the '50s and '60s - what led you into writing?

No. I mean, I loved Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone and all that, but I started out as a cop-show writing. Well, after Alfred Hitchcock, that is! But my samples were all cop shows. And after I did Alfred Hitchcock and The Wizard, I did 21 Jump Street and started doing cop shows. And then I went back to science fiction, and then after that I did C.S.I. Miami, so...I've done a lot of both. But Star Trek was probably my most formative show. I grew up watching that every day on repeat. Luckily, it was airing every day back then!

You must've enjoyed the chance to work on Star Trek: Voyager, then.

Yeah, well, that was a depressing thing. I wrote the story for a Voyager episode, and in the time it took them to decide whether they were going to go on to script, I got something else. So I couldn't write the script! And no offense to that other show, but...I would've much rather done Trek! But it was too late. It just took them too long.

On the cop-show front, I saw a couple of real obscurities on there, one which I'm sure was a freelance gig, but...you did an episode each of Nasty Boys and Ohara. 

Yeah, although my first spec script was actually a Moonlighting, which got me a whole lot of my first work. In fact, it didn't occur to me until just now that it was Moonlighting that got me the Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which is not the same thing at all! [Laughs.] But it worked!

[Writer’s note: I was really hoping to get any story about Ohara, but there clearly wasn’t one to be had. Still, it’s worth offering up this video, which shows the three—count ‘em—three versions of the show’s theme song that ran over the course of its two seasons. I can’t believe there were 30 episodes of this thing and yet there’s not a single full episode on YouTube!]

Not too long ago, I started a binge of Stargate: SG-1, and I'd never actually watched the show before. I'm very pleased to say that it holds up. 

It still airs all the time. It's strange. 

I actually just did a piece for EW about the best sci-fi shows currently streaming on Prime Video, and I made sure to mention it.

Oh, well, thank you!

Absolutely. Now, how did you find your way onto that show originally?

I was doing The Outer Limits...and it's too bad that Dean isn't here right now, because it's a good story! But I was doing The Outer Limits, and I was going to leave the show for personal reasons. It was shot in Vancouver, our first child was born there, and we just wanted to come home. And the studio said, "We have a commitment for a show on Showtime. If you'll stay, it's yours. What would you like to do on it?" And I said, "Well, you have this movie called Stargate that would make a great series." And they said, "You can't do it. We can't do that right now." And I assumed it was because Dean was doing it.

But what it was, I think, is that they were in negotiations to do sequels to the movie. And then that fell apart. And a few weeks later, they called and said, "It's yours if you want to do it." And apparently Brad Wright, who was my partner and who was actually working for me on The Outer Limits, had said the same thing to them. So they said, "Would you do it together?" Which we were thrilled to do. And there we went! And you never hear this anymore, but we had a 22-show commitment from Showtime, and after they saw the pilot and the first two episodes, they gave us 22 more. So we went straight through on 44 episodes.

That's amazing. And, as you say, virtually unheard of. Do you have either a favorite episode or story arc from your time on the show?

Well, the one I think I'm most proud of - not necessarily my favorite entertainment-wise, I guess - was the Tok'ra, which is...the end of season one and the beginning of season two, I think? It's been a long time. [Laughs.] But it was where we introduced a version of the Goa'uld that were not bad. They were the rebels. And we got to do a great dramatic story with Carter's dad, who was dying of cancer, and the one way to save him was to put a Goa'uld in him. So I think that was my favorite, just because it was so juicy and dramatic. Carmen Argenziano, who has passed away, was so good in it. Anyone who hasn't seen it, look it up.

Yeah, it's one of those where, despite the inherent sci-fi premise, it's still weirdly relatable for anyone who's had to deal with the loss of a parent.

Yeah, exactly. It brought some good human drama to the show rather than just sci-fi action.

I have a stock question: do you have a favorite project you've worked on over the years that didn't get the love you thought it deserved?

Well, I wrote a pilot called Island City...

I'd just like to point out for the record.... [Holds up notepad.] ...that I have it written right here. Okay, carry on.

[Laughs] ...which they made as a TV movie which was meant to be a backdoor pilot. And it didn't get picked up, and I always wished it had, because it would've been a blast to have done it as a series.

I was wondering, actually, if it might've been a backdoor pilot. IMDb lists a lot of pilots just as TV movies, but I know that a lot of actual TV movies are intended as pilots.

Yeah, and what was interesting was that it did so well that they had to pay me my participation...and as my agent at the time said, "That never happens. It must've made so much money that they couldn't hide it anymore." So, yeah, it did well. But they still didn't make a series out of it.

I actually talked to Brenda Strong last year...

Isn't she a sweetheart?

She really is. Somehow, however, we never talked about Island City, which is particularly unlike me when you consider that I regularly do a feature for this newsletter called Pilot Error, where I talk about pilots that never made it to series. Can you kind of summarize what Island City was all about?

Island City was set... [Pauses.] Boy, when I think about it, it was kind of prophetic in a way. Genetic engineering had progressed to the point where they had a shot that would give people permanent youth, and the whole population took it...and they found out about five years later that it mutates, and it turned 95% of the population into monsters. And the only people who didn't turn were people who refused to take it or a few people who had a genetic difference that made it so it didn't change them. And the show's about the last refuge of normal people in this walled city where everything outside it is a wasteland with all these crazy monsters running around, killing everything in their sight. And the show was about a special military unit whose job was to go out and rescue people who were normal but were still out there and to bring them back to the city. Oh, and Brenda's character had taken it and was permanently young, but her husband was, like, 70 years old, because he refused to take it, so he was very bitter. It had some fun stuff in it.

Circling back to The Ark to wrap up, you said you already have it set up with plans for a second season. Do you have it plotted out what your plans would be for subsequent seasons?

We have broad general notions of it. I mean, we want to hopefully see what people are saying about it online and figure out who the popular characters are and all that kind of thing. But we ended season one in a way that it's got about five directions it can go, and we've got to decide which one, which is going to be a challenge to figure out.