Adapting a movie franchise for the small screen can be a risky game. It’s one thing if a studio like Disney is willing to pump as much money into the TV spinoffs as they do with the movies, as they’ve done with all the Marvel and Star Wars shows on Disney+, so it can replicate the blockbuster spectacle of the films. But in most cases, a TV adaptation of a movie franchise will have a much smaller budget than its cinematic counterparts, so it can’t coast by on mindless spectacle.
As with any cash-strapped production, you can make up for the lack of spectacle with good writing and filmmaking. Ash vs. Evil Dead is every bit as anarchic and relentlessly paced as Sam Raimi’s original movies. What We Do in the Shadows has the same laugh rate as Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s film comedy classic. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles didn’t have nearly as big of a budget as the post-T2 Terminator sequels, but it is a much better Terminator story.
The makers of The Sarah Connor Chronicles had to practically go back to the indie production of the original Terminator movie. In its first season, the show had a budget of around $2.6 million per episode, which is a lot for mid-2000s network television, but nothing compared to the budgets of Terminator 3 and the many sequels and reboots that followed it, which have all cost upwards of $150 million. But what The Sarah Connor Chronicles lacked in blockbuster funding, it more than made up for with solid storytelling.
What The Sarah Connor Chronicles Did Better Than Every Terminator Movie Since 2003
The biggest problem with every Terminator movie since Terminator 3 is that they’ve been more focused on raising the stakes and putting more and more at risk. That’s a problem for two reasons: one, because you can’t really raise the stakes any higher than the possible nuclear annihilation of life on Earth, and two, because that’s not really the hook of the first two Terminator films.
Yes, the world is at stake, but that’s not what the story is about. The first one is really about the love story between Sarah and Kyle Reese, and the second one is about the surrogate father-son bond between John and the reprogrammed T-800. There’s an emotional core in each of these movies that the subsequent ones have forgotten about. They’ve introduced an inevitable Judgment Day and a whole separate evil A.I. network called Legion to up the ante, but they haven’t given us another relationship to relate to and root for.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles’ Smaller Budget Made It A Better Show
If anything, being produced on a slimmer budget than the movies made The Sarah Connor Chronicles a better Terminator story. The three-figure budgets of those movies encouraged the filmmakers to put the world at stake and fill the screen with action spectacle. But that wasn’t possible on the shoestring budget of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, so the producers had to get creative to give their audience the same thrills. They couldn’t just throw explosions at the screen, so they had to rely on their characters and storylines to keep viewers engaged.
Much like Dark Fate, The Sarah Connor Chronicles ignores the events of Terminator 3 and comes up with its own continuation of the story. It picks up shortly after T2, and follows Sarah and John as they struggle to prevent the invention of Skynet. It’s a smart show, it has a great cast (led by Game of Thrones’ Lena Headey as Sarah), and above all, it humanizes the stakes of the sci-fi story. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles only ran for two seasons, but it’s the best addition to the franchise since the double whammy of James Cameron’s original movies.
This story originally appeared on Screenrant
