Robert C. Cooper

August 2006

This month, the SCI FI Channel
series Stargate SG-1 celebrates its 200th
episode. First launched on the Showtime pay cable network in the U.S., the show
is now in its tenth season and has been licensed into more than 120 markets, including
Australia (Seven Network), France (M6), Germany (RTL II), Malaysia (TV3) and
the U.K. (Sky One and Channel 4). It is distributed internationally by MGM
Worldwide Television Distribution.

Robert C. Cooper serves as an
executive producer for Stargate SG-1, in
addition to regularly writing and now directing episodes of the series. He is
the co-creator and co-executive producer, with Brad Wright, of the highly
successful SG-1 spinoff Stargate
Atlantis.

World Screen spoke to Cooper
about SG-1’s continued success and its
200th episode, set to air August 18.

WS: What are your
plans for the 200th episode?

COOPER: We’re
thrilled to have made it this far, to do a 200th episode is a very
rare thing. I think at first I really wanted to do a lot of celebrating behind
the scenes but I wanted it to be just a normal run-of-the-mill episode. It
turned out to be anything but that. We often sit around in story meetings and
pitch ideas that are meant as jokes, just to have a bit of fun with the things
that get bounced around in the room, knowing that they’d never fit into a real
episode. Or things we’d love to see but know they wouldn’t fit into a normal
episode. That’s when we realized that maybe the way to attack the 200th
show was to have a little fun and create situations that are more like Saturday
Night Live sketches, where all the writers could pitch a segment and
we’d come up with a framework that would tie those segments together. Each
would be a fun riff on something we had been wanting to do for a while. One of
the things we often come up against is the network trying to tinker with the
show and make it better. We’ve heard words like “younger” and “edgier”’ thrown
around, the sorts of things that will supposedly get us better ratings. So
there’s a segment where a network executive has suggested that we recast the
show younger and edgier. We flash into a sequence where we’ve cast younger
actors to play our characters. We do a play on The OC. We were all fans of Team America, the movie with the marionettes so we thought
wouldn’t it be fun to a do a segment of SG-1 with marionettes. We had a great time with that.

WS: How have you
managed to keep the series fresh?

COOPER: The answer
is that we’ve really embraced change on the show. We’ve had a lot of major
characters come and go. We started season nine with three new major regulars.
Some characters have come back. Anytime you change characters or have
characters leave, it gives you a whole new perspective on the story.

At the end of season eight we felt we had wrapped up so many
storylines and so many aspects of the series that we kind of reinvented the
show at the beginning of season nine. Wiped the slate clean, came up with new
villains. In season eight we had gotten to the point that we were winning all
the time and the bad guys had lost their bite and we needed to shake things up
and change our adversaries because that old adage, that your heroes are only as
good as your villains, is very true. From a creative standpoint, we have
aggressively tried to enforce change on the show so that it stayed fresh. We
have an ever-revolving mythology—some people would say complicated, we
like to say complex—and yet I also think that the show is entertaining
and easy to follow for the casual viewer. For those people who have religiously
stuck with the show there is a constant reward for having watched, so the
mythology does expand and grow and things do happen.

WS: What prompted
the launch of the spin-off Stargate Atlantis, and how do you
manage juggling the two shows?

COOPER: It’s not
easy! We have a lot of people to split up the work. Brad and I, we had a plan
to end SG-1, nobody ever expected the show to go on as long as it
did. And the original idea was to spin SG-1
off into Atlantis and keep the
franchise going. SCI FI decided that they really wanted both shows. That
totally changed our thinking about the spin-off. Atlantis had to exist in a different universe—it’s like
moving CSI to another city. We
had to move our team to another galaxy and create a new milieu, a new villain,
and that helped create a really unique identity for the show. It’s a big
undertaking to make one show, never mind two at the same time. We found as we
got into it that there were so many benefits, to use that old cliché word now,
synergy. We’ve built stuff that could be utilized for both shows and we've
developed an in-house visual effects department that services both shows.

It is difficult for us as writers, writing 40 episodes of
television every year and trying to keep it straight. Brad basically has been
running Atlantis. We’re both executive
producers on both shows. I pretty much run SG-1. That helps in terms of everyone under us knowing
who to go to. But, as far as the writing goes, we are one story department. We
have eight writers who work on both shows.

WS: Do you think you
would have had a difference experience doing the show for network TV, as
opposed to cable?

COOPER: I don't
think it would have lasted very long. We benefited from the fact that it was on
Showtime in the U.S., and it was allowed to develop its international
popularity, and to a certain extent live in relative anonymity even though it
was in syndication. It wasn't until the show jumped to SCI FI that it really
started to gain any awareness or notoriety in North America. I feel like the
business plan in place was responsible for the success of the show, or at least
the longevity of the show.

WS: Do you have
plans to do a feature film spin-off?

COOPER: We would
love to do that. We’ve developed two that have been folded into the series end
of things, just because story-wise they were eclipsed by the ongoing series.
It’s definitely on my agenda, it’s just a question of making it work, and
obviously satisfying the studio’s goals. We think Stargate is
more than just SG-1, it is a franchise,
a very recognizable brand, with tremendous worldwide awareness. We would love
to do it on a bigger scale, a much bigger canvas.

WS: The series has
been licensed into numerous territories—did you expect it to translate so
well internationally?

COOPER: Our
international audience is every bit as important to us as our North American. A
lot of American shows are made for the American audience. Brad and I are both
Canadian and we tend to think a little more globally and less about trying to
appeal to any one particular audience or culture. That was why we steered away
from the American military angle of SG-1. We wanted the show to
have much more of an international feel. The Atlantis expedition was an international cooperation. And in
some ways that was a response to the fact that it was the international
audience that got us to where we are.

WS: What’s the
biggest reward for you in producing this show?

COOPER: I’ve done
everything on the show. I’ve written, I’ve produced, I’m directing a little
bit. When you’re on a show that has been as successful as SG-1,
you always get a certain amount of interference, you’re spending a lot of
money, but for the most part we have been incredibly privileged to be left
alone to make the show we want to make. It’s like getting to play in a big, big
sandbox. I love the whole thing.

— Mansha Daswani