From Sci Fi Wire.

“I was just a piece of that. I wanted to work with Ron Moore,” director Peter Berg says about his experience on the FOX pilot “Virtuality.” “I’m a big fan of his. Those guys were trying to do something very dense and original and complicated and if they have more time [it] would be completely terrific.”

Berg was in attendance at the TCA summer press tour to promote his new NBC drama “Trauma.” I had the chance to speak with him for a few minutes about the project, which aired on June 26.

“I just read that there’s a European thing, a deal going on in Europe to finance it as a European, co-finance it as a European series,” he said. “I don’t know, you should try to talk to Ron Moore about that but I think that would be fascinating, with the same cast and [everything]. It’s all talk at this point but I think the response to ‘Virtuality,’ the critical response surprised FOX.”

He adds that he’s hopeful it will happen.

“Just spoke to VIRTUALITY co,creator Michael Taylor he says VIRTUALITY is almost certainly dead at Fox but Taylor says VIRTUALITY producers are trying to get a VIRTUALITY series going as an int’l co_production, a la Meteor & Defying Graity.”

File this under, “Things That Make You Go Hmmm.” Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Herc goes a little more in-depth with his chat with Taylor over at AICN.

ITEM: FOX entertainment President Kevin O’Reilly calls Virtuality, “dense.” Not stupid, but the show has got a lot going on.

ITEM: Sex sells.

ITEM: America likes sex.

ITEM: ABC orders 13 episodes of Defying Gravity, a new show focusing on “eight astronauts from five countries on a mysterious journey through the solar system.” Ron Livingston will play Captain Maddux Donner, while Laura Harris will play a fellow astronaut Chloe, who’s also… Maddux’s old flame.

Virtuality fans may be asking themselves, FTW? But it only gets better, everything the astronauts do is being recorded and sent back to Earth. The show premieres later this month, so it’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out. But listen, the minute Jimmi Simpson starts showing up in people’s dreams, I’m going to kill someone.

More at IGN.

1932
Aldous Huxley, in his novel Brave New World, parodies that screwy ballyhoo-y Hollywood, and especially the advent of the talkies, with “the feelies,” multisensory movies you watch by gripping two prongs that zap you with the neural sensations of the characters.

1968
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is published, in which people use “empathy boxes” to relate to and feel the plight of Mercer, a messianic figure who is pelted with stones as he climbs a mountain.

1987
The great ABC TV show Max Headroom airs, building upon the also-great BBC made-for-TV movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future, about an artificial intelligence auto-generated from the noggin of an injured TV newscaster … a show that was better SF than a lot of the Gibson knockoffs published around the same time.

In 1987, I said that mankind’s need for virtual environments would never evolve beyond Max Headroom, and Dennis Miller’s jokes about virtual Claudia Schiffers be damned, I’m sticking to it. Read the full article here.