TVSquad

A few more details have emerged about the Battlestar Galactica spin-off that's in the works. Don Kaplan of the New York Post writes that first drafts of scripts for the series, called Caprica, have shown up at the SciFi network's offices, and gets a few details from BSG creator Ron More on what the show is going to be about.

According to Moore, Caprica will take place 50 years before BSG and will be about the creation of the Cylons. The show will center around two families: one who owns the Microsoft-esque coporation that develops the Cyclon technology, and the family of Adama's father, a lawyer who starts to oppose the Cylons' creation. "It's a family drama and a political drama about corporations and politics. It's almost [more] like a sci-fi soap than it is an action-adventure series," Moore tells Kaplan.

Because he's promoting his new series 30 Rock, Lorne Michaels is getting awfully chatty these days about the goings on at his "other show", Saturday Night Live. First, he mentioned that the cast was going to downsize for creative and budgetary reasons. Now, in a talk with Don Kaplan of the New York Post, he goes one step further and says that aside from Tina Fey and Rachel Dratch, who already left to do 30 Rock, four additional cast members are about to get their pink slips. According to the article, the four even know who they are, but the names have not been made public yet. In addition, there will be auditions among the remaining cast in order to fill the "Weekend Update" hole created by Fey's departure.

According to Michaels, change like this is good for the show. "After about four years . . . there's a staleness that comes over the show," he told Kaplan. The reason why he had such a large cast last year, apparently, was because he knew budget cuts were going to be made, and he'd have fresh (read: cheap) names ready to go when it did. But some of the high priced talent, like Amy Poehler and Darrell Hammond, will likely stay on, states Kaplan, as will last year's breakout star, Andy Samberg.