TV Rewind: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Was the Terminator Sequel We Always Needed

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:

The Terminator franchise kicked off with two of the best sci-fi action films ever made in 1984 and 1991, and despite spawning four more would-be blockbuster follow-ups, the best Terminator sequel wasn’t on the big screen—it was on the small one.

Basically, you can skip every movie made after Terminator 2 and just pick up here. Trust us.

After the decent-but-mixed reception to Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003, an effort ramped up to bring the Terminator franchise to the small screen, with the project eventually evolving into Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The show aired on FOX for two seasons from 2008-2009, and over 31 episodes, proved to be the smartest and most deftly executed extension of the world created by director James Cameron in those first two films.

The series wisely opted to pick up the story as a direct sequel to Terminator 2: Judgement Day, ignoring the events of Terminator 3 (that film ended with the nuclear apocalypse underway and an adult John Connor hiding out in a bunker waiting things out, so it would have made for a tough square to peg in a narrative sense). Instead, The Sarah Connor Chronicles begins in the year 1999, just a few years after the events of Terminator 2, with a slightly-older, teenage John Connor (now played by Thomas Dekker) and his mother Sarah Connor (a pre-Game of Thrones Lena Heady) on the run and laying low, still believing they successfully stopped the rogue AI Skynet from causing a nuclear holocaust and killing most of mankind.

That assumption is proven wrong when yet another Terminator arrives and tries to kill John while he’s at school, until he is rescued by another Terminator sent back to project him, played by Firefly alum Summer Glau as the mysterious Cameron (a not-so-subtle wink to the director of the first two films), who joins John and Sarah on the run. She even gets to deliver the iconic Terminator line, “Come with me if you want to live,” while rescuing John from that series-opening attack.

But it’s the next twist where The Sarah Connor Chronicles brilliantly side-steps the problems that have plagued most of the big screen Terminator sequels, which have either aimed to reimagine the story (2009’s Terminator Salvation mostly ditched the time travel concept all together for a confusing post-apocalyptic mess with unnecessary twists) or reboot the saga (2015’s Terminator Genisys, which starred another Game of Thrones alum in Emilia Clarke, went back and changed the original timeline to create its own alternate saga).

Instead of something that convoluted, The Sarah Connor Chronicles simply picks up the action a few years after Terminator 2 and has John, Sarah, and Cameron jump a decade forward in time to the present day of the series’ run in 2008 as a way to escape Skynet’s threat and land somewhere closer in the timeline to the AI’s new launch date so they can once again try to avert it. It’s a narrative choice that retains the mother-son dynamic that made Terminator 2 work so well, while still respecting and carrying on the canon and story of the first two films.  

Franchise creator James Cameron only helmed the first two Terminator movies, which are easily the most beloved in the franchise, and Sarah Connor Chronicles creator Josh Friedman wisely used those two films as his Rosetta Stone for how to craft this next legacy chapter in the franchise. It’s those choices that make the TV series arguably the most “true” follow-up to the original two films, and in the places where they made their own narrative decisions to adapt the concept for the small screen, they nailed every beat.

The casting couldn’t be better, which is all the more impressive when you consider how iconic these roles have become in the years since the original films. Dekker has the same feel as Terminator 2 star Edward Furlong, looking basically like one might imagine the character would look a few years older and more seasoned in this life. He plays the evolution perfectly, too, as we see John scarred and matured by the traumas and growth throughout the series. He’s a young man who knows as a teenager that he has the literal weight of the world on his shoulders when he grows up. We get to see how that can change someone, as they try and grapple with that pressure. The show luckily cast Heady just as her star was beginning to rise, and she perfectly channels the stress, desperation, and conflict of a parent thrust into this impossible situation that Linda Hamilton played so well in Terminator 2. 

But don’t dismiss The Sarah Connor Chronicles as simply a slavish homage to the original two films. It builds out its own world, crafted on the foundation James Cameron created and spinning out what that story might look like in day-to-day living with the narrative space a TV series can provide. How do you try to figure out where and how a killer AI is being created? It’s an impossible question, and we get to see the Connor family struggle to answer it themselves, following leads and threads that sometimes lead to answers, and sometimes don’t. There is no plan, they simply know the threat is coming and are desperately trying to stop it. There are mysterious factions and pieces of the puzzle scattered decades across time, which everyone is trying to piece together with only a fraction of the picture in front of them. Terminator has always been a story about family, and The Sarah Connor Chronicles takes us inside that family and tells one of the most ambitious chapters of what happens to them all after Terminator 2.

Revisited in 2024, the show’s concerns and take on artificial intelligence seem all the more prescient and terrifying—as so much of the technology they were experimenting to create the Skynet of the future is here now, accessible on our laptops and smartphones. The series also took its time with literary and religious allegory, unafraid to wrap its apocalyptic threat and questions of artificial intelligence, humanity, and the human soul in with the action and drama of this adventure.

One of the show’s best additions to the canon is that of new character Derek Reese, John’s uncle sent back from the future on his own mission to try and avert Skynet’s launch. Derek is played by 90210 alum Brian Austin Green, a controversial casting choice among fans at the time, but one that proved brilliant once viewers had a chance to see Green in action. He quickly became a fan favorite, and his grizzled future soldier became a series regular in the show’s second season.

Glau’s Cameron also grows into a fascinating character, as we slowly learn why she was sent back in time by future John Connor, though we never truly learn just how close their relationship was in the future, as we see how her presence in the past might change young John along the way. She’s clearly different from the other Terminators we’ve met across the franchise, and the bond she forms with John is equally sweet, unsettling, scary, and charged—usually all at the same time.

Sadly, the series was canceled after its second season due to declining viewership, but ends on one of the most brilliant and ambitious cliffhangers a drama has ever pulled off (we won’t spoil it here if you plan to watch). It’s a shame we never got to see how it would’ve played out in a third season, but it’s one of those cliffhangers that still works as an open-ended ending in its own way. 

Which seems fitting for a franchise that, even 15 years after the series ended, simply refuses to die.

Watch on Hulu

Trent Moore is a recovering print journalist, and freelance editor and writer with bylines at lots of places. He likes to find the sweet spot where pop culture crosses over with everything else. Follow him at @trentlmoore on Twitter.

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.