From sci-fi to Outlander, TV producer Moore aims to surprise

Pick of the day: Outlander, 6.30pm, Fox Showcase.

Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe in season four of Outlander.

Pick of the day: Outlander, 6.30pm, Fox Showcase

When people look back across the impressive career of American television writer and producer Ronald D. Moore, his series Outlander may appear something of an outlier.

That is not to minimise this ambitious and popular Scottish time travel fantasy romance series, screening its fourth season beginning tonight, and with another two commissioned.

But Moore, an Emmy award-winner who began his career as a writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation and was showrunner for the successful reboot of Battlestar Galactica, already has announced his return to more conventional sci-fi fare with a new space drama for Apple titled For All Mankind. (“All I can tell you is that it’s about the space race, and what if the space race never ended,” he said recently.)

Though one doesn’t get the sense from Moore that he sees his work on Outlander as a departure.

“I write from a frankly very selfish place, I write stories I want to see or that engage me. I use my own internal barometer in terms of what I think a good story is,” he recently told a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas.

“There’s a part of me that’s always imagining sitting at home watching it. If it surprises me, if there’s a twist in a character arc, or I thought the story was going to be about this and it turns out to be about that; that always makes me sit up. I think that the element of surprise is an underrated quality of storytelling.”

This season the action in Outlander has moved to the New World, though shot with some difficulty, it is said, in Scotland.

Claire Fraser (Caitriona Balfe) and her Highlander husband Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) are trying to make a home in colonial North Carolina, on the cusp of the American Revolution.

Meanwhile, in the 20th century, things heat up between their daughter Brianna (Sophie Skelton) and Roger Wakefield (Richard Rankin), the historian who helped search for Jamie in the past.