Threshold
(9/2005 - 11/2005)



Airs: Canceled? - Fridays 9:00pm ET/PT (CBS)

DVD releases:

The Complete Series (8/22/2006) [Buy It]

Premise:

In the middle of the ocean, a cargo freighter makes a chilling discovery: an extraterrestrial craft has landed on earth. Enter Molly Anne Caffrey (Carla Gugino), recruited to await the planet's first contact, along with a carefully assembled team made up of a brilliant physicist with strong religious beliefs, a language and communications expert and a highly trained covert operative. Together they implement the long-gestating Operation: Threshold, charged with finding out the purpose of the landing and the fate of the ship's crew, and preparing for the worst-case scenario of an alien invasion. (Official Description From CBS.)

Threshold is an alien-themed series from executive producers David Goyer (Batman Begins) and David Heyman (Harry Potter). Bragi Schut wrote the pilot and will serve as co-executive producer. Brannon Braga (Star Trek: Voyager & Star Trek: Enterprise) will also executive produce and be the show runner for the series.

Official Website: Threshold

News:

(11/28/05) - According to E! Online, CBS has canceled Threshold. Moving Threshold to Tuesdays, after a couple of week’s absence, apparently didn't help Threshold’s ratings. Threshold's November 22nd episode actually saw a ratings drop from its low Friday ratings.

(11/21/05) - Brannon Braga, co-creator and executive producer, said in a conference call with the press on Nov. 17 that Catherine Bell (The Triangle, JAG) will join the show's cast in a recurring role. She will play a genetic engineer who joins the Red Team.

Braga added that another recurring character will also join the cast, the fiancee of Red Team engineer Lucas Pegg (Rob Benedict). "She's going to become a recurring character," Braga said. "[She's] cool and pretty. She's actually a research physician at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, [Md.,] ... and Lucas is going to go through a very traumatic experience where, having watched that alien videotape in the pilot, he starts to unravel. ... And she's gong to come into the story. ... They can't tell her what's going on, and she's not allowed to see her [future] husband. And she's going to become a source of conflict for Molly."

(11/07/05) - According to Variety, CBS is moving Threshold to Tuesdays at 10 pm, ET/PT, following The Amazing Race, from its current 9:00 pm Friday timeslot. Close to Home will move to Threshold's old timeslot.

Threshold moves to Tuesdays on Nov. 22 and 29. Threshold's ratings have been decent, but not impressive. Executives reportedly hope that the SF thriller will hold on to more Amazing Race fans than those of Ghost Whisperer, which tend to be more female.

(11/02/05) - CBS will be streaming three episodes of Threshold on the network's official Web site, beginning November 2nd. This will be the first time CBS has offered episodes of scripted series programming on the Internet via commercial-free video streaming.

The first streaming video will be episode 3, "Blood of the Children," which will be online for three days. On Nov. 4, CBS will air "Revelations" on television, and then make the episode available on their Web site from Nov. 9-11. On Nov. 11, the episode "Progeny" will air on television, and then will be on their Web site from Nov. 16-18.

(10/13/05) - According to Variety, CBS is commissioning three new scripts for Threshold, waiting to see more ratings data before ordering more episodes.

(09/26/05) - According to The Hollywood Reporter, the second episode of Threshold drew 9 million viewers and a 2.6 rating, a drop from its Ghost Whisperer lead-in, but on par with last week's two-hour premiere.

(09/23/05) - Executive producer Brannon Braga recently told SCI FI Wire that the series will balance stories of the week with a season-long arc.

"It's worth noting that the weekly stakes of the show will be out in the real world, involving everyday people like all of us," Braga said. "And [wherever] the team is going, ... whether it's Miami or Ohio or Indiana or Baltimore, they're going to be going out to investigate strange occurrences, all related to what the aliens are doing, and trying to put out fires, save the people who are in danger and try to figure out what the hell they're doing and how they're doing it."

Future episodes will mix threat stories with ones involving politics and even the media. "There's also an interesting aspect to the show, though it's more of a sub-aspect, which we call the West Wing aspect," Braga said. "In one episode there's a senator who doesn't know about Threshold, who discovers $50 million has been diverted to something called Threshold, and he wants to know what the hell is going on. And the lid is almost blown off the whole operation. So the team is not only trying to figure out what's going on, they're trying to keep people from finding out."

(09/19/05) - According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Sept. 16 two-hour premiere of Threshold scored well with audiences. Threshold averaged 8.5 million viewers and drew a 2.9 rating among adults aged 18-49 from 9-11 p.m., according to early estimates from Nielsen Media Research. Among adults aged 25-54, Threshold had a 3.8 average rating.

(09/16/05) - Brannon Braga (Star Trek: Enterprise), co-creator and executive producer of Threshold, told SCI FI Wire that the show will explain up front what its aliens are doing. "It's bioforming," Braga said. "They're sending out this bizarre technological signal that mutates our DNA, [turning us] into them. There are no aliens. They're turning us into them."

"I liked the concept that she wrote this contingency plan about what if an alien intelligence came to Earth and it was hostile," he said. "This plan was purely theoretical, and one day the government calls her and says it's really happening. So that her 'What if?' scenario becomes a 'What now?' scenario. And she really has to start planning this s--t, because it's really happening."

How will Threshold handle the competition of so many new SF shows on the fall television schedule? Braga believes that this is a very different kind of show, because Threshold deals with a group of people who work for the government who are trying to stop the aliens. "In a funny way, a lot of shows deal with government conspiracy, and there are the people in the shadows who you don't quite know what they're up to," Braga said. "We are the conspiracy. We're leading the conspiracy. And they are going to do some shady things. The Threshold protocols are going to occasionally call for some gray areas to be explored."

(08/30/05) - The co-creators of Threshold told SCI FI Wire that they are aware of the tough competition among SF series this fall, including NBC's Surface and ABC's Invasion. Can Threshold handle the competition?

"I think they're probably asking the same thing," executive producer Brannon Braga (Star Trek: Enterprise) said in an interview at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles.

"There's [no] question that all ... of these shows probably won't survive," Goyer said in an interview. "But I remember when ER and Chicago Hope both debuted, everybody was all, 'Oh, they're not [going to make it]. But they both [did]. ER [lasted] longer, but they both lasted for a long time. Two of [the new SF series] might survive, or maybe only one of them will survive. But I do think it's interesting. I mean, I've seen [Invasion and Surface]. I don't know if you guys have, but they're all really different. So it's kind of funny. I mean, they're all nominally science fiction shows that are dealing with aliens, but Invasion's very much small town, kind of Bodysnatchers. Surface is like The Abyss, kind of. And then ours is this weird kind of X-files-y [show], but also Twin Peaks-y."

In Threshold, Carla Gugino stars as Molly Caffrey, the leader of a government "red team" of oddball experts who must deal with an alien threat. In the two-hour pilot, Gugino's character has dreams about what appears to be an alien world after a close encounter with some UFO phenomenon.

"It's also one of the ways we're going to talk about [how] the aliens might even communicate or be communicating," Goyer said. "One of the things we're trying to do with the whole first season is, ... Molly and her red team of the threshold people are scrambling to try and find out what's going on and may frequently be wrong about what's going on, because it's not like the aliens just come down and say, 'Well, we're going to be doing this. We're going to be doing this.' A lot of what we're trying to do is posit the aliens as genuinely alien, so that even struggling to communicate with them is really difficult. And because our show is going to be a slow rollout, it's going to be a while before there's even any really secondary communication with them."

(08/26/05) - Feature-film director Peter Hyams (A Sound of Thunder) will be directing the second hour of the two-hour premiere episode of Threshold. Co-creator and executive producer David S. Goyer (Batman Begins, Blade: Trinity) told SCI FI Wire in an interview that he helmed the episode's first hour and planned to direct the second hour when he received the green light for his next movie, The Invisible.

"I had to immediately start preproduction on that, so I had to find a replacement really fast," Goyer said. "And one of the things that we liked was that people had seen the first hour and thought it had more of a cinematic quality, so we thought we have to find a feature director to do the second hour. Who's available? I find out Peter Hyams was available, so I just called him and said, 'Can you help us out?' He said OK."

Goyer said that he would welcome Hyams' return. "We would love for him to come back," Goyer said. "He did a great job. He's a really sweet guy, and he had a great experience as well. We would love for him to do more."

(08/25/05) - According to The Hollywood Reporter, CBS will air the two-hour premiere of Threshold on Friday, from 9-11 p.m. ET/PT on Sept. 16.

(06/02/05) - David Goyer, co-creator of Threshold, told SCIFI Wire that he was thrilled that the show was picked.

"I'm very psyched," Goyer said in the interview, "We've been given a very rare opportunity. It's a very intelligent show, and I really credit CBS with going for it."

"It's sort of nominally about an alien invasion, but it's so different from those kinds of shows that once it comes on the air people will realize how different it is," Goyer said. "I can guarantee you that no one has ever seen alien invasion stories like this before."

"It's very scary. We're really excited. I'm excited about how intelligent it is. It asks a lot of really provocative questions, and it doesn't let the audience off easy. I think people will be surprised by the way that aliens are sort of a MacGuffin, a way to hold a mirror up against society. We're going to be getting into a lot of controversial stuff in the show, and CBS is really letting us go for it. I'm being a little vague, but I have to be, because there are a lot of twists and turns and surprises that will be coming up in the first few episodes and because there's been a little bit of a misdirect in terms of what little bit has been let out about the show."

(05/20/05) - CBS has ordered 6 episodes for fall 2005. They will air at 9:00pm between Ghost Whisperer and Numb3rs.

(05/13/05) - Braga said in an interview at the Saturn Awards, "It's a psychological thriller, science fiction show. It's contemporary sci fi about aliens amongst us. But more emphasis on the psychological suspense and less emphasis on the effects-heavy type of genre piece."

Blade: Trinity writer/director David Goyer told SCI FI Wire that Threshold is "a science fiction show for people who don't like science fiction."

"Threshold is a TV pilot that I'm developing," Goyer said in an interview. "I'm not writing it. A young writer named Bragi Schut is writing it. ... It has to do with alien invasions, although people will never really see the aliens involved. And it's meant to be filmed in a more low-tech way, like 28 Days Later or something like that: ... a way of telling a very big story in a kind of microcosmic arena."

"It's an interesting one-liner," co-creator Goyer said in an interview with SCI FI Wire. "It has to do with an alien invasion, but you never see the aliens. It's a very novel approach to an alien invasion story, because they're invading us through our DNA. They're bio-forming us. They're altering us."

"Something like 80 to 90 percent of our DNA is junk DNA," he said. "We don't know what it does. And the aliens have figured out a way to activate it and are slowly, literally, changing our chromosomes. They're basically, over the course of generations, turning us into them. Along with that they've got genetic racial memories, things like that, that they're starting to implant in us."

"It's all from the point of view of a woman who works at a think tank as a contingency analyst," Braga said in an interview with Scifi Wire on May 13. "Basically, it theorizes about what-ifs, and alien invasion is something that think tanks really do contemplate as thought experiments, but no one ever really thinks they might happen."

"So it is told from her perspective and that of the team that she puts together to handle situation. And that team includes Charles S. Dutton and Brent Spiner and Peter Dinklage. It also includes a guy named Rob Benedict and a guy named Brian Van Holt. It's a really excellent cast. And the woman is played by Carla Gugino. That's the basic premise, but I don't want to reveal too much because I don't want to jinx it. It was a good concept, and I really liked David Goyer and David Heyman, our other executive producer, and the other people involved."

Scifi Wire has leaked information from an internal document, "Threshold begins with the discovery of an extraterrestrial spacecraft in the middle of the ocean. Molly Anne Caffrey (Carla Gugino), a physician and former NASA employee, is recruited to await the planet's first contact, along with a carefully assembled team made up of a brilliant physicist, a language and communications expert and a covert operative, the document said. Together they implement Operation: Threshold, charged with finding out the purpose of the landing and the fate of the ship's crew and preparing for the worst-case scenario of an alien invasion. "

Cast:

Carla Gugino as Molly Anne Caffrey
Charles S. Dutton as J.T. Baylock
Brent Spiner as Nigel Fenway
Robert Patrick Benedict as Lucas Pegg
Brian Van Holt as Cavennaugh
Peter Dinklage as Arthur Ramsey


Crew:

Bragi Schut - Creator, Executive Producer
David Heyman - Creator
David S. Goyer - Executive Producer
Brannon Braga - Executive Producer
Mark Rosen - Executive Producer


Episode List

Episode #Prod #Original
Air Date		 Episode Title
 
 
Season One
1. 1-116-Sep-2005 Trees Made of Glass (1)
2. 1-216-Sep-2005 Trees Made of Glass (2)
3. 1-323-Sep-2005 Blood of the Children
4. 1-430-Sep-2005 The Burning
5. 1-507-Oct-2005 Shock
6. 1-614-Oct-2005 Pulse
7. 1-721-Oct-2005 The Order
8. 1-804-Nov-2005 Revelations
9. 1-922-Nov-2005 Progeny
10. 1-10 The Crossing
11. 1-11 Outbreak (aka Escalation)
12. 1-12 Vigilante
13. 1-13 Alienville
14. 1-14 Head Trip





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