Mark Stern, Syfy's executive vice president of original content, recently told the Chicago Tribune that the debut season of Caprica, the upcoming prequel series to Battlestar Galactica, will have one less episode than previously expected. The season was originally slated for twenty episodes but now will get nineteen.

According to Stern, the decision was based purely on financial reasons. There came a point at which the creative team realized that they were compromising the quality of the show in order to keep it under budget. To fix this problem, instead of cutting corners, the producers and writers decided to shorten the season by one episode. Stern told the Tribune:

We always knew it would be a challenge to bring it in on budget, and the deeper we got into it, the more we realized that if we [stuck to the budget too closely], it was not going to be satisfying. ... We were cutting corners and we weren't happy with that and the executive producers weren't happy with that. ... We wanted to keep the quality of the show as high as we could, and so we put more money into it, but it still wasn't quite enough. We said, 'OK, would it help to cut an episode?' and we talked about it and [the writers] adopted the decision creatively.

So, one less hour of show for Caprica, but, all things considered, this is good. Given that the budget wasn't roomy enough for what the writers wanted to do with the show, it's nice to see that they opted not to dilute things just to have one more episode to sell commercial slots on. Of course we'd all like to see the full, twenty-episode season, but as things are, the Caprica team made the right choice.