Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)
2004–2009 American science fiction television series, reimagining of a 1970s series

Battlestar Galactica is an American military science fiction television series, and part of the Battlestar Galactica franchise. The show was developed by Ronald D. Moore and executive produced by Moore and David Eick as a "re-imagining" of the 1978 Battlestar Galactica television series created by Glen A. Larson. The pilot for the series first aired as a three-hour miniseries in December 2003 on the Sci-Fi Channel, which was then followed by four regular seasons, ending its run on March 20, 2009. The cast includes Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, Katee Sackhoff, Jamie Bamber, James Callis, Tricia Helfer, and Grace Park.
Battlestar Galactica is set in a distant star system, where a civilization of humans live on a group of planets known as the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. In the past, the Colonies had been at war with an android race of their own creation, known as the Cylons. With the unwitting help of a human scientist named Gaius Baltar (Callis), the Cylons launch a sudden sneak attack on the Colonies, laying waste to the planets and devastating their populations. Out of a population of several billion, there are about 50,000 human survivors; most were aboard civilian space ships that were not near the initial attacks. Of all the Colonial Fleet, the Battlestar Galactica (an older ship about to be decommissioned and turned into a museum) appears to be the only military capital ship that survived the attack. Under the leadership of Colonial Fleet officer Commander William "Bill" Adama (Olmos) and President Laura Roslin (McDonnell), the Galactica and its crew take up the task of leading the small fleet of refugee survivors into space in search of a fabled thirteenth colony known as Earth.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q237072. VIAF identifies the subject as 178507042. The Library of Congress control number is no2009062249. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1978, 2003 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.