Random EPICness

Ron Moore’s fantasy cop show 17th Precinct

The above is a rough pilot of Ron Moore’s fantasy cop show that sadly never made it to our TVs.

Man…. We missed out on something big. As I have said many times, my favorite all-time TV series is Battlestar Galactica and so this show directed by the same director with stars from BSG and Caprica made me nerdgasm all over the place. It was messy.

This is just a rough version of the pilot, but I was still very much intrigued by this. Instead of electricity, people use energy from plants, instead of guns police use weird magical discs (honestly, those are a little too Power Rangers-like to my liking!), and instead of CSI-esque forensic procedures cops use telekenetic powers to reconstruct blood splatter patterns and have necromancers who talk to the dead to solve crimes. It’s just so fresh a concept.

I wish some network will step in and make this show happen. The pilot should probably simplify things a bit to make this happen. It just introduced so many concepts about the magical world in 44 minutes that it can be a bit too much for an average viewer. With most new TV shows, all you have to do is follow the characters and their conflicts/background. With 17th Precinct, not only do you have to do that, you have to follow every line of dialogue to understand hexes, totems, necromancers, and various technology (or magical stuff..?) shown throughout.

I really love shows/movies/books that challenge our imaginations and take me into a new well-constructed fantasy world. So I hope this show somehow sees the light. SyFy? ABC? FOX? Make this happen.

EDIT: oh and did I mention how awesome/unexpected the ending of this pilot is? That epic tense music “In The House - In a Heartbeat” (you know, that song played when the guy was running away from zombies in 28 Weeks Later?) makes any scene 5 times more fast paced and tense. Anyway, the reveal at the end reminded me of the BSG pilot at the end when the existence of a “mythical planet” called Earth was acknowledged, which made me double take and realize that the show is closer to home than I thought.