Best Space Themed TV Show

[Supr49er]

Lost in Space

 

[Commodore]

I was trying to make a joke, given my user theme and occasional use of "shiny" and "rutting" as legitimate slang. That being said, I'd say that 14 consistently great episodes and a decent movie probably bode better for a series than 100s of episodes of wildly varying quality and 11 movies that alternate between god-awful and pretty good.

Yeah, I agree but I would at least have liked to see a second season. But the movie was good and offered a pretty good close to the series. You gotta love the agent's reaction when all those Reaver ships came barrelling toward them. It was instant "haha, we got you!" to "Oh crap! Shoot everything!"

 

[Disgustipated]

Since no one else mentioned it. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Am I the only one who remembers that show. I just remember the female interest being kind of hot in her jumpsuit. After looking it up, I can't believe it only ran for two seasons, it seemed like it ran longer. I most likely watched a lot of reruns.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Everyone hates Sinclair trying to Sinclair his way out of bad situations! That's right, his name is a pejorative describing his... you know... Sinclairishness. You just have to watch the first season to understand how poorly cast he was.

Some things on B5 haven't aged well. Their pre-9/11 security and customs detail is just comical. But back in the day, I would watch seasons 2 through 4 and the 5 finale over and over again.

I had such a crush on Marcus... And would you believe that the guy who played the Centauran Emperor (Wortham Krimmer) also played a very serious, straight-laced Episcopalian minister on my soap opera?

Since no one else mentioned it. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Am I the only one who remembers that show. I just remember the female interest being kind of hot in her jumpsuit. After looking it up, I can't believe it only ran for two seasons, it seemed like it ran longer. I most likely watched a lot of reruns.

I thought of mentioning it, but there are a lot of shows that were better.

 

[Disgustipated]

True, the show was very corny. But I still remember it after all these years. I always liked the original Battlestar better, however.

 

[theskibum]

Babylon 5 here. The most under appreciated show I can think of. Sci-fi's unfortunately usually run in syndication and to my dismay I didn't get to see the last 2 seasons when it was on the air due to my lack of cable TV as a kid. I picked up the DVD boxed set a few years back and watched the whole shebang in a couple weeks. It was just an amazingly well written show after season 1. Always good plots, great characters and a series finale that blows your mind! No Trek series can compete with it.

My #2 choice in the poll, and not far behind B5 for both quality and under-ratedness is Firefly. That show was 14 GREAT episodes of rootin, tootin, wild west laced sci-fi brilliance. I was sad when it was cancelled like everyone else that enjoyed it, but stoked that the movie did such a good job of wrapping things up tidily enough that I wasn't let down.

 

[Antilogic]

I had such a crush on Marcus... And would you believe that the guy who played the Centauran Emperor (Wortham Krimmer) also played a very serious, straight-laced Episcopalian minister on my soap opera?

Interesting if true (to both your crush and Krimmer's alternate roles). I didn't know that.

True, the show was very corny. But I still remember it after all these years. I always liked the original Battlestar better, however.

I hated the original Battlestar. That stupid kid and robot dog were always messing up the scenes--I'm so glad they wrote the kid out of the new one. You can still see a few deleted scenes where they were toying with the idea in the first season.

Technobabble was also reduced in the new Battlestar, which is a huge plus in my book.

Babylon 5 here. The most under appreciated show I can think of. Sci-fi's unfortunately usually run in syndication and to my dismay I didn't get to see the last 2 seasons when it was on the air due to my lack of cable TV as a kid. I picked up the DVD boxed set a few years back and watched the whole shebang in a couple weeks. It was just an amazingly well written show after season 1. Always good plots, great characters and a series finale that blows your mind! No Trek series can compete with it.

My #2 choice in the poll, and not far behind B5 for both quality and under-ratedness is Firefly. That show was 14 GREAT episodes of rootin, tootin, wild west laced sci-fi brilliance. I was sad when it was cancelled like everyone else that enjoyed it, but stoked that the movie did such a good job of wrapping things up tidily enough that I wasn't let down.

I thought the Firefly premise was too campy for my taste. Having rewatched B5 on DVD, I gotta say it hasn't aged too well. There is so much racism (towards the alien species, etc.) and the pre-9/11 security procedures are laughable.

But it was still a saga-format show, which is hard to pull off well. And B5 managed to do all right with the middle seasons (season 5 wasn't as good as 4).

 

[Disgustipated]

Yeah I hated the kid. I hate it when shows think they have to put a kid or a teenager in a show to appeal to a younger audience. It's one major problem with Start Trek: TNG. Wesley Crusher was mostly annoying. The only decent episode I liked him in was when he left star fleet and became a traveler or whatever they were called. I like how he stuck up for the native americans (or whatever they called native americans in the future lol).

 

[Antilogic]

Yeah I hated the kid. I hate it when shows think they have to put a kid or a teenager in a show to appeal to a younger audience. It's one major problem with Start Trek: TNG. Wesley Crusher was mostly annoying. The only decent episode I liked him in was when he left star fleet and became a traveler or whatever they were called. I like how he stuck up for the native americans (or whatever they called native americans in the future lol).

That idea must have been cooked up by people far too inebriated to remember their childhood. Who wanted to be the useless kid? When kids played cops and robbers, you weren't a freakin' bystander, you were the cop or the robber.

 

[G-Max]

The new BSG was the best TV show of all time... for 3 seasons. Then the showrunners switched to a stronger kind of weed and lost their minds, and the show collapsed under the weight of its own mythology, and they literally couldn't come up with a better ending than "God did it, the characters are angels, and Earth wasn't really Earth".

Prior to that, Andromeda was the best TV show of all time... for like a season and a half. Then Robert Hewitt Wolfe left and the suckification began.

Old BSG was dumb.

Firefly is good if you're drunk.

Star Trek is actually 6 different shows, with DS9 being by far the best and TOS nearly overdosing on ham and cheese.

Space 1999 sucked. No wait... I'm thinking of Space: Above and Beyond. What the hell is Space 1999?

Babylon 5 had its ups and downs. The entire first season is basically skippable, the second is okay, the third is awesome, and the last two, while good, got screwed over by "we got canceled prematurely so we have to cut the story arc short by a whole season... oh crap, we got renewed! Now what?" syndrome.

The Stargates are okay if nothing better is on.

Farscape was a mixed bag. The first season sucked, but it mostly made sense. The second season was excellent and made sense too. Season 3 tried to be good, but the showrunners had moved on to stronger drugs at that point, and it didn't really make any sense. By season 4, they had just stopped trying.

Space Cases should be on this list. It starred the original Black Ranger AND Kaylee from Firefly!

 

[Antilogic]

Babylon 5 had its ups and downs. The entire first season is basically skippable, the second is okay, the third is awesome, and the last two, while good, got screwed over by "we got canceled prematurely so we have to cut the story arc short by a whole season... oh crap, we got renewed! Now what?" syndrome.

I would argue that accelerating the pace of the story turned the 4th season into one of the best, right up there with the 3rd. Still shafted the 5th on major plot points, though.

 

[azzaman333]

No Futurama, Red Dwarf or Doctor Who means this poll is invalid.

 

[G-Max]

I would argue that accelerating the pace of the story turned the 4th season into one of the best, right up there with the 3rd.

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly that seasons 3 and 4 are roughly on par. However, season 4 could have been much, much better than season 3, and it wasn't. We should have gotten a more epic, knock-down, drag-out war like we saw in DS9, not this "six months, 2 or 3 battles, and it's over" nonsense.