Friday, April 04, 2008

Tapping leaves Atlantis for Santuary!

Mike over at SyFy Portal floored me with this one. Amanda Tapping late of SG-1, with one season of Stargate Atlantis tucked away...is moving on. WTF?! The reports have it as "nothing personal" but I would suggest that might be a point of reference. The one good thing about this is that she'll be replaced by former "Star Trek: Voyager" actor Robert Picardo - though I can't say that I enjoy Picardo's character so much the few times I have seen it on SG. I did like him on Voyager. He added depth and pathos to a part that could have been done woodenly and gotten away with. What is being pointed out about Picardo's character, the recurring character of Richard Woolsey, is the very thing that I am put off by. Self serving, aprasive and political. I am really going to find it difficult to watch a show that spends more time with infighting than gate jumpin. Tapping's departure I would speculate has something to do with the Sci-Fi channel picking up the internet based series that she stars in called Santuary. Reports have the show already in production and Tapping may feel that her character in Santuary a bit more fun than her SG persona which has grown a bit long in the tooth. Santuary for those of you that might be living in caves....centers around Dr. Helen Magnus, an immortal protector of aliens in a series that began as a computer-generated world first found on the Internet. SciFi Channel, impressed with the work, greenlighted a series pickup and gave the show a 13-episode commitment as a fall series. The series will be the first television show to use completely virtual sets thanks to green- screen technologies.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tapping has said that she was offered a wonderful contract to stay on Atlantis and that she feels great allegiance to the Stargate franchise. However, with Sanctuary being picked up by SciFi she knew pursuing this, a show in which she is not only the lead actor but also an executive producer, she would be expanding into a very interesting new character and storyline. She said the decision was very hard to make. And I can only imagine how deeply she felt that. Additionally, choosing Atlantis full-time over Sanctuary full-time would have meant that Sanctuary's production company, Stage3Media, would have folded since this is their first project. Understandably, she did not want that to happen since she is on the board of directors for S3M and runs it with Stargate alumni she knows and loves.

Beam Me Up said...

coooool! thanks for the info, aahhh love the close in stuff. I did not know that Tapping was that closely tied to Sanctuary. Explains a lot of the decisions and makes much more sense now.

Thanks.