Before the show even began, Terminator TV show chose to focus on its title character. Although The Sarah Connor Chronicles was hardly as disastrous as some retrospective reviews claim, the series had some major issues. For one thing, turning the originally R-rated sci-fi action franchise into a family-friendly TV show limited the maturity of its content. For another, the lower budgets of television meant viewers knew they couldn’t reasonably expect to see the same level of vehicular mayhem that the big-budget blockbuster Terminator movies could afford to stage.
Much like Mad Max’s canceled TV show was always doomed to be a toned-down version of the violent, action-packed movie series, the smaller scale and longer runtimes of television meant the medium was not ideally suited to the impactful, fast-paced Terminator franchise. However, none of these issues was the biggest problem with The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Instead, the Terminator TV show was doomed from the moment the show chose its title character.
By focusing on Sarah Connor, the expensive misfire simply reminded viewers that TV couldn’t afford to bring back original Terminator actor Linda Hamilton. In contrast, Nick Stahl and Edward Furlong were far less associated with their role as John Connor and the character had already been recast, making him a perfect protagonist for a new Terminator TV show. Much like Terminator 3 needed John Connor’s cut death scene, The Sarah Connor Chronicles need to focus on an aged-up John so that the small-screen version of the franchise wouldn’t immediately garner unfavorable comparisons to its bigger-budget predecessors.
The fact that John had, at this stage, already been played by two actors in two movies meant that the Terminator character, while central to the lore of the series, didn’t have a definitive face or personality that viewers immediately expected. In contrast, Linda Hamilton’s Terminator character Sarah Connor was as iconic a sci-fi heroine as Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and fans were understandably annoyed to see her recast in Terminator's TV spinoff. Recasting the Terminator’s lead character set The Sarah Connor Chronicles up for failure, particularly when the show was audacious enough to name the series after a heroine whose recognizable actor the creators opted to replace.
No more so than a TV series about the T-800 would never have worked without Arnold Schwarzenegger starring in it, a show called The Sarah Connor Chronicles that didn’t feature the original, fan-adored iteration of Sarah Connor was always doomed to failure. There were other major issues with the show, such as ballooning budgets and a stalling story, and ironically, Lena Headey’s turn as Sarah Connor is looked back on comparatively fondly by many franchise fans as a better attempt than Emilia Clarke’s later swing at the part in 2015's disastrous reboot Terminator: Genisys. That said, failing to change the focus of The Sarah Connor Chronicles to the more easily recast John when Terminator heroine Linda Hamilton opted not to return is still what ultimately led to the show’s failure with fans at the time.
