Before this remake, actor Richard Hatch (who played Captain Apollo in the original series) spent years trying to revive Battlestar Galactica as a continuation, even co-writing novels and comics and producing a proof-of-concept trailer called The Second Coming.

A separate attempted continuation by Tom DeSanto, set 25 years after the original series, entered pre-production but was scrapped following the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In 2002, Universal Pictures decided to pursue a remake rather than a sequel, and David Eick approached Ronald D. Moore to develop a new four-hour miniseries, with Moore also crafting a backstory suitable for a potential weekly series.

While writing the miniseries, Ronald D. Moore was simultaneously developing the HBO series Carnivàle, so David Eick oversaw the day-to-day production of the Battlestar Galactica miniseries in Vancouver, Canada.

Special effects for the miniseries were created by Zoic Studios, the same company that had previously worked on Joss Whedon's Firefly.

As an easter egg from the Zoic Studios crossover, a Firefly-class ship can be seen flying above the city during the opening scene of Part 1 in Laura Roslin's doctor's office, though it does not appear in the later Season 2 episode 'Epiphanies' which revisits the same scene.

Executive producer Ronald D. Moore stated that the space battle effects were deliberately created to look as if a Discovery Channel documentary crew had actually filmed the footage.

The two-part miniseries drew 3.9 and 4.5 million viewers respectively, making it the third-most-watched program in the history of the Syfy channel, and it became the highest-rated cable miniseries of 2003.