Sam Esmail's Battlestar Galactica reboot has been ditched by Peacock

Despite having told us—less than one short, uneventful year ago!—this his reboot of Battlestar Galactica was in “great shape,” Sam Esmail’s attempt to revive the previously revived sci-fi series has now hit a major speedbump. Variety reports that streamer Peacock has decided to step away from the series, which was being developed as a passion project by the Mr. Robot creator, and which will now reportedly be shopped around Hollywood by Universal-owned subsidiary UCP.

You may recall that Esmail has been working on this thing for a long time: Although he’s logged other projects in the five years since Robot went off the air at USA—including writing and directing a film, 2023’s Leave The World Behind, and co-developing and producing Peacock show The Resort—Esmail actually announced he was trying to reboot Battlestar before Mr. Robot had even fully finished. (He almost beat Peacock to existing, period; the news broke right after the streaming service was named by NBCUniversal.) In all that time, we’ve never heard anything about the series besides some basic “moving pieces into place” reports, most notably the fact that Esmail wouldn’t be serving as showrunner, duties which would instead be handled by Derek Simonds, who developed Bill Pullman’s The Sinner for Esmail’s old pals at USA.

From an outside perspective, this is mostly intriguing as a measure of whatever staying power Esmail might have in the industry: Back in 2019, he was probably the only person in the world really excited for a reboot of Battlestar, and it was his pedigree that got the series greenlit in the first place. If Peacock has decided to back away from it—retreating back to less ambitious, more comedy-focused fare—than it raises a question of who’d be willing to partner with him in the hopes of getting a second Mr. Robot-sized success out of the effort.