Steven Spielberg's time travel and dinosaurs show Terra Nova fires its entire writing staff, but is certainly not "troubled"

By Sean O'Neal | November 4, 2010 | 4:47pm

Aux Features TV

Steven Spielberg’s time-travelin’ dinosaurs show Terra Nova—which we boldly sashayed into calling “troubled” when it lost executive producer David Fury—continues to suffer “setbacks,” which is another nice euphemism for saying that it seems like polarizing and sole remaining showrunner Brannon Braga (24, Star Trek: Enterprise) continues to be someone that nobody else can work with. Much as Fury had “creative differences” with Braga, the Los Angeles Times now reports that the majority of the writing staff (including X-Files scribe Chris Brancato) was “let go” last week.

However, producers insist that, despite outward appearances and our sashaying assertions, it does not mean the show is in trouble. Instead, it’s just that the constant delays in its journey to air—which will finally culminate in a two-hour special premiering in May, followed by a summer-long production for a debut in the fall 2011 season—meant that a lot of the writing staff was just sort of sitting around, dreaming up wacky time-travel and dinosaur scenarios during their downtime. So to save costs, every writer “without an overall deal” was let go. But not Brannon Braga. There’s obviously some sort of “deal” with that guy.