Be careful what you wish for, as they say.

The SciFi Channel's "Stargate SG-1" this summer will reach an unprecedented tenth season but its very longevity may prove its undoing, executive producer Brad Wright said to Gateworld.

At the end of the series' eighth season, producers seriously considered ending the show and re-starting it as a new series to be called "Stargate Command," particularly since former series lead Richard Dean Anderson was out and new faces like Ben Browder, Claudia Black, Beau Bridges and Lexa Doig had come aboard.

In the end, they opted to make all the changes and leave it as the ninth season of "Stargate SG-1."

"Sadly, it could have gone on longer had we rebranded it," Wright said. "One of the problems of SG-1 going into its tenth season, and potentially further on into its eleventh, is that when a show has been on for a very long time ... there's a lot of money that is spent that stops going on screen.

"That's the reason 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' went off the air -- not because nobody would want to watch it, but because Patrick Stewart was becoming a big star and needed to move on," Wright said. "And now, of course, he doesn't even do television any more. That's what happens to a really successful franchise. And because seven years is the maximum, generally, the business model goes out to, and that's generally as far as the actor deals have been made."

With long-time talent seeking raises and other expenses rising, there comes a point when it becomes impossible to make a TV series on a given budget. "I do know that on our show for the last couple of years we've had to renegotiate ever year, and that is very difficult from our perspective," Wright said. "We don't know: a) whether we're doing to get a network pick-up; b) how much money we're going to get to make the show. And all of those things are contingent on the cast deals that we make. Which comes first, right? So it's been difficult the last couple of years."

Although the groundbreaking tenth season is in production in Vancouver and talk already of a year after that, Wright said there likely won't be a fifteenth season, for instance.

"There are pressures on the show that will make it difficult to go out that far," Wright said.

That doesn't mean that the imminent end to the "Stargate" franchise, however. "If there really is a Season Fourteen, I hope that whoever is making it is having a good time!" he laughed. "It probably won't be me. I'm hopefully still making something called 'Stargate.' Maybe it's a movie."

New episodes of "Stargate SG-1" will debut on the SciFi Channel this July.