How Stargate: SG-1 Quietly Built a Massive TV Universe

The Stargate franchise is often overlooked, but it began with Stargate: SG-1. Showrunners Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner launched a series that still holds a dedicated fanbase 25 years after its inception, and they used that show as the foundation for a much larger franchise — notably doing so before the era of streaming services and widespread genre television.

SG-1 sprang from a deal between Showtime and MGM, which owned the rights to the original Stargate film. After the movie’s box-office success, director/co-writer Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin pitched two sequels that would have tied myths like Bigfoot and the Yeti into a larger origin story and revealed that the chyrons on the Stargate were coordinates to other alien worlds.

"Whether it was Bigfoot, or the Yeti — we were going to tie everything together into a larger mythology. And it was going to be so much fun. It was going to be so wild," Devlin said during an interview for the Dial the Gate podcast.

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