Ooh, nice to see this thread get some activity! Some latecomers to the franchise I see...nothing wrong with that! It's never too late to start enjoying a bit of Stargate
Okay, an SG-1-centric crash course on the evolution of the series for you folks who weren't around in those days, or those of you outside of North America who might not be as familiar:
SG-1 did not originate on the Sci Fi Channel, but rather was commissioned by the subscription channel Showtime (also birthplace of Lexx, Dexter, Weeds, Masters of Sex), hence the full-frontal nudity in the pilot episode and the occasional goofy awkward joke to namedrop Showtime. They made a commitment for 2 seasons/44 episodes, and were subsequently renewed for three further seasons.
At this point Showtime decided that they would not renew the show past season 5's conclusion, and Michael Shanks (Daniel) decided it would be a good time to exit as well. Over the years there have been conflicting reasons given for his departure, including feeling that his character was underutilized, but the explanation that's emerged in the years since has been that he wanted to pursue a film career.
As the show wound down, behind the scenes they were negotiating a rescue by the Sci Fi Channel, and so while a number of longstanding plot points were developed or resolved outright, they left themselves enough material to continue into another season if they got it; the season ended without a cliffhanger, but with enough dangling threads that they would have something to work with if they secured a sixth season.
Which, as we know, they did--Sci Fi ended up picking up the show, but only committing to a single season. With Shanks/Daniel gone, the core team was brought back up to full strength by hiring on Corin Nemec as Jonas Quinn following his debut late in season 5, and away we went.
This is the point at which Atlantis enters the picture. Behind the scenes (as in, not publicly announced) they began working on developing a spin-off series, something that would be faithful to the work they had done so far, but wholly Sci Fi's own rather than something they bought from another network.
The plan going through Season 6 of SG-1 was to operate as though it would be the show's last. Earth gets its first spaceship, the Stargate program is revealed to world leaders, and cure is found for the Jaffa's dependence on symbiotes. The show would end on the aptly titled episode 'Full Circle,' which would see them return to Abydos where everything started, finish off the Anubis story arc, and then launch the Atlantis spin-off series the following fall. Frequent rumour also indicates that Corin Nemec would have moved over to the new show as one of its main stars.
Except Atlantis wasn't even close to ready yet. And then Sci Fi chose to renew SG-1 for one more, so the conclusion of Season 6 was reworked to accommodate the change. Rather than find the lost city, they found hints to it. Rather than ascended Daniel defeating Anubis, their battle was interrupted with unknown results. Rather than a happy ending for Abydos, it was destroyed and the threat of Anubis magnified.
Along comes Season 7. This was going to be it, really really for real this time
Corin Nemec was unceremoniously booted (the reasons for this are unclear to this day) but as part of his severance was allowed to guest star in three episodes and write one, and Shanks came back as Daniel after his attempt at a movie career failed to pan out.
The plan here was to do Season 7 as its last season (by this point, the Atlantis spin-off had been announced), tie off a lot of hanging plot threads (hence the death of Dr Frasier), do a big spectacular TV movie to conclude the series, and see the final end of the Goa'uld threat. Atlantis would be found buried under the ice in Antarctica in the movie, replace the SGC as the base of Stargate operations on Earth, and the new series based out of the city would have seen the show's central villains as the Replicators threatening our galaxy.
Once again...things didn't quite work out that way.
Richard Dean Anderson (O'Neill) had a young daughter living in Los Angeles who he was rarely able to see (the show was filmed in and around Vancouver), and so he asked for a reduction in his screen time to allow him time to go home more often. This is why he was absent from a number of episodes, and in a bunch more, his role in the episodes was diminished.
The plans for the TV movie were deemed a bit too ambitious, and were scaled back into the two-part season finale 'Lost City.' Sci Fi ultimately chose to renew SG-1 one last time (again) and have it run concurrently with Stargate Atlantis for one season, so the ending of 'Lost City' and premise of Atlantis were reworked to put the city in another galaxy. Several of the creatives from SG-1 would transition over to head up Atlantis, and Sci Fi reduced the episode order for SG-1's eighth year from 22 to 20 in order to try to split costs a bit better between the parent show and the spin-off.
Don S. Davis (General Hammond) was starting to have problems with his health--particularly his heart--and chose to retire from the show, with a possibility of later guest appearances. This dovetailed with RDA wanting even further reduction in his screen time, so with the departure of Davis/Hammond in the Season 7 finale, O'Neill was promoted to General and base commander when Season 8 kicked off, allowing RDA to further reduce the amount of time he had to be on set.
Enter Season 8: the final season (again). The resolution to the Anubis storyline featured in the Season 7 finale is quickly undone and the 'Replicators threaten our galaxy' story originally intended as the core storyline for Atlantis is reworked into the RepliCarter storyline. As the show moves toward its conclusion we see the final resolution of a number of storylines: the Maybourne story is wrapped up. The Rogue NID story is concluded. The Jaffa liberation story reaches fruition. The Replicator storyline is concluded. The Goa'uld/Anubis storyline is finally truly completed. The entire 'ascended beings' storyline hits its thematic conclusion. O'Neill finally takes Carter fishing. Teal'c gets hair. And one last time (
) we come full circle back to the events of the original movie, with a 2-parter that takes us back in time to Ra-ruled ancient Egypt, and then we get that cute concluding scene where the whole gang is fishing together.
The end (sort of). With all the show's major storylines concluded and Richard Dean Anderson resolute that this is the end and he will retire from the show, everybody from creatives to actors were determined this was the end of the show as we had known it.
And then Sci Fi renewed it again, this show that was, for all intents and purposes, concluded. The initial decision was made that the show would re-debut in the fall as season 1 of the new series "Stargate Command," but it was later decided that this was a poor way to market the product, and instead it became simply season 9 of SG-1.
Naturally the show had to start with a little retooling. With both Don Davis and RDA retired, the show was two important cast members short. In the season interim, Amanda Tapping (Carter) got pregnant and would be unavailable for a number of weeks at the start of filming. The decision was made to hire Beau Bridges as the new General, and Ben Browder as the new commander of the team itself. Lacking female presence, the producers decided to bring back Claudia Black after her well-received guest appearance in Season 8--which had the bonus appeal of having her act alongside her former Farscape co-star. Black was brought on for a brief run of several episodes (either 3 or 4, I forget), but they enjoyed working with her so much that her run was extended to six episodes with possibly more to come later.
Sometime during the production of Season 9, something unexpected happened: for the first time since the show had been on Sci Fi, they had significant advance notice that they would be renewed for another go. So for the first time since leaving Showtime, they were able to do a big cliffhanger season finale. Claudia Black was reintroduced as the catalyst of that story, knowing that they were going to bring her on full-time for Season 10.
The ball got rolling on the show's then-record-setting tenth season. The new cast was settled in, Black was on board, Morena Baccarin had been introduced as their new villain, and we had a fun crossover with Atlantis, which was by now standing on its own two feet. Then Sci Fi decided to be needlessly callous: during the production party for completing filming the show's 200th episode, they received a call from the network that they were being cancelled.
Back in the hot seat they were well-familiar with from Seasons 6-8, they were now forced to rush through story they had spent the last year building up and sketching out for the future. Eventually plans for a 20-episode eleventh season were stripped down and reworked into the 90 minute film Ark of Truth.
While it was the end of SG-1 as a weekly series, it still wasn't quite
the end, though. Many of the longtime creative and behind-the-scenes folks from SG-1 transitioned over to production roles on Atlantis, and the effect--the changes from Season 3 to Season 4--are pretty stark. There was also the case of Amanda Tapping, who was still under contract to Sci Fi for another year. There was no way they were going to waste that money, so Torri Higginson (Weir) was abruptly and unexpectedly fired from Atlantis at the end of Season 3, and it was announced that Tapping/Carter would be the new leader of Atlantis when Season 4 debuted in the fall. She didn't end up appearing in every episode, because she was also filming the two SG-1 TV movies, and at the end of that season/year, her contract expired and she left Atlantis. (It was also around this time that she started working on Sanctuary.)
Heading into Season 5 of Atlantis, they were down a leader again, so the decision was made to hire Robert Picardo as the new base commander, following his prior guest appearances in both SGA and SG-1. Jewel Staite was promoted from recurring to main, and the show really started to diversify its story ideas.
We saw the continuing evolution of Todd and his relationship to the protagonists, the introduction of a new antagonist race in an alternate universe, the reintroduction of the Asgard as antagonists, the beginnings of a Pegasus alliance, and thennnnn....SPLAT.
Out of nowhere, the people running the show announced that they were ending the show that year, and starting up a new one in the fall. The new show would be a departure in tone, closer resembling 'gritty' sci-fi like Battlestar Galactica than the lighthearted fun that had characterized the TV shows for, at that point, 15 seasons. A not-insignificant number of fans were livid, despite assurances that both an Atlantis tie-up movie and a third SG-1 movie were going to come out too.
When Stargate Universe debuted October 2009, the fandom had split in two. On one side, the cautiously optimistic, and on the other, the toxic, frothing-at-the-mouth crowd who were determined to hate and bring down the new series no matter what.
And man, there was
a lot of whining when Universe launched. Whining and complaining and bitching and moaning on a scale that I haven't seen before or since: someone even set up the domain sgusucks.com as a forum dedicated to trolling the new show, several of the cast were verbally(textually) harassed so much on Twitter that they left the platform, it was a real mess. It was a bit sad, and while I know that online fandom only makes up a fraction of viewership, I do really believe that all the negative buzz hurt the show's chances with casual viewers. It sounds like the complaining even wore down the creatives as well--at one point, Brad Wright made the PR gaffe of indignantly ranting 'if you don't like it, turn off your TV.'
Of course "Syfy" (as they were calling themselves by now) didn't help much either. Promotion of the show was poor to say the least. The 3-part pilot aired as a 2-part one week and part 3 the following week. The show aired late on Friday nights. Despite the show's heavy serialization, "Syfy" doggedly stuck to their mid-season breaks policy, so the show that was already struggling to find its audience suddenly was on a 4 month hiatus after only 8 weeks on the air. And then after another 9 weeks remaining the second half of the season, we were off again between seasons from June till nearly October.
Season 2 started up and the show started to be a bit more warmly received. The last few episodes of season 1 and start of season 2 had won seemingly a fair few people over, but ratings took a hit as "Syfy" had decided to move the show to Tuesdays (where they would have to compete with shows on the big networks) to make room on Friday nights for WRESTLING OF ALL DAMNED THINGS. "Syfy" declined to announce whether they would give it a third season, but with viewership holding largely steady during the first half of season 2, the creatives were optimistic of their chances. Production wrapped on the show's season with the story unresolved and concluding on something of a cliffhanger, but with an ending of sorts snuck in a couple episodes previous just in case.
SGU went on its midseason break with nobody the wiser, but still cautiously optimistic that a season 3 would happen. Except it didn't. "Syfy" pulled the plug, and worse, they didn't even notify the cast. Several of them only found out when the news was sent to them on Twitter.
When the show came back for its final 10 episodes, "Syfy" had moved the show, again, this time to Monday nights (again, where it would have to compete with the big networks). The reason for this second move? Tuesday night wrestling.
Plans were made to do a TV movie to finish off Universe's storyline, and word was that it would include SG-1 and Atlantis as well, replacing the previously announced Atlantis and SG-1 movies. And then MGM went bankrupt, putting an end to any further continuation of the franchise.