So Much for 'Dead Issue': Amazon Is Already Hunting for Stargate's Next Writer

14 days ago by Eli Gatewood 4 min read

---

Six days after Richard Dean Anderson called the Stargate revival a "dead issue," Deadline is reporting that Amazon MGM Studios is quietly interviewing writers for a new take on the franchise — and this time, they want someone who's never touched Stargate before.

Well, that didn't take long.

Just last week I wrote about Richard Dean Anderson's blunt read on the cancelled Martin Gero series — negotiations gone "awry," and a private sense between him and Michael Shanks that the whole thing had gone quiet for good. Fair assessment at the time, based on the best information available. Turns out the timing was almost comedic, because Deadline's Nellie Andreeva reported this week that Amazon MGM Studios never actually put Stargate back on the shelf. They're searching for a new writer.

Deliberately Not Gero, Deliberately Not a Franchise Veteran

Here's the detail that actually matters: according to the report, Amazon isn't looking to replace Gero with another writer who has Stargate in their résumé. They specifically want someone with no prior connection to the franchise — the theory being that a completely fresh set of eyes has the best shot at building something with "broad appeal beyond the dedicated fanbase," which, you'll remember, is the exact phrase Amazon used back in June to explain why Gero's version got killed in the first place.

Read that carefully, because it's a real pivot, not a rephrasing. Gero was about as credentialed as this franchise gets — a working SG-1 and Atlantis writer, brought back specifically because he knew the universe cold. Whatever version Amazon is chasing now, they've apparently decided that insider knowledge was part of the problem, not the solution. That's either a smart bet on broadening the audience, or a signal that nobody at the studio actually agrees on what "broad appeal" means for a show that's spent thirty years being unapologetically dense with lore. Possibly both.

What We Still Don't Know

I want to be straight about the size of this update, because it would be easy to oversell it: there's no named writer, no series order, no cast, no production timeline, and no release window. What exists is a report — from a credible trade reporter, at a credible outlet, independently picked up by GateWorld and other sites — that active conversations are happening. That's meaningfully different from silence, but it's a long way from a greenlight.

It's also worth remembering how we got here. Amazon spent twenty weeks in a writers room with Gero, booked a London soundstage, started casting, and pulled the plug anyway — after Daniel Jackson was already written into the pilot script as the bridge character connecting our reality to a new one. A studio willing to eat that much sunk cost once isn't guaranteed to finish the job a second time just because they've started interviewing.

Where This Leaves the Fandom

Still, context matters, and the context here is that this comes three months into a #SaveStargate campaign that's now past 123,000 petition signatures, weeks after all three legacy shows simultaneously topped MGM+'s charts, and days after Stargate Atlantis found a brand-new home streaming free on YouTube. None of that forced this writer search into existence on its own — Amazon doesn't greenlight development based on a hashtag. But a studio that's genuinely done with a property doesn't usually keep quietly auditioning writers for it four months after killing the last version, either.

So here's where I land: Richard Dean Anderson wasn't wrong last week. From where he's standing — as an actor who was promised a role and then watched it evaporate — "dead issue" is a completely honest read of how the Gero version feels. But "dead issue" and "actively interviewing writers for a different version" can both be true at the same time, because they're describing two different projects. The old chapter is closed. Whether the next one gets further than a writers room is still completely unknown. Chevron's not locked. But for the first time since June, there's an actual verb attached to what Amazon's doing with this franchise, and that verb is "searching," not "silent."