Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Will the new Battlestar Galactica be Remembered

I am closing in on the Fourth Season of the New Battlestar Galactica, and I am wondering what the long term impact of the series will be on televised science fiction. An article here argues that BSG still deals with relevant issues. I am a little less sure of that myself, to be honest. Terrorism, while a pressing political issue, has always varied in the amount of press coverage it received. It was "in" in the seventies and the 2000's. But will it be so forever? I think the new BSG broke new grounds in character development and provided some more radicalized political characters, such as Tom Zarek. But compared to Blake's 7 or Babylon 5, it wasn't particularly daring for its time period. Both Blakes 7 and Babylon 5 dealt with terrorists, and sympathized with them far more than BSG did. Both Blake and Captain Sherdian were in a sense terrorists themselves. I don't think that BSG is a genre shifting show in the way that the original Star Trek, Blake's 7, STNG, and Babylon 5 were. Worse, it did not stop the decay of the genre that has been occurring since the advent of reality television. Today, outside of Caprica and the new Doctor Who (and sundry spinoffs), there is very little in the way of good science fiction. Ten years ago, we had a nearly fully functional Sci-fi channel, that ran series like Farscape and the new Outer Limits (relatively decent), as well as Andromeda, which was at least decent for a few seasons. There was Firefly and Dark Angel and a host of inventive programs coming out in the wake of the digital revolution created by the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars franchises. Now, there's literally nothing out there. BSG wasn't the first of a new breed. I fear it may be television science fiction's swan song.

2 comments:

  1. I think the last two seasons of BSG damaged anything it may have created. The scifi fans from the beginning seasons, kind of jumped ship when it started getting overly soapy and the writing quality started declining. This sent the message to the networks that the fans were fickle. I guess we are if by fickle you mean we demand quality.

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  2. I HATE THE SCI-FI CHANNEL.

    SCI-FI FORMULA: GOOD SERIES= Cancellation, Bad series= lasts five seasons.

    They ruined Strange New World, a nifty early 2000's series that was simply too smart for them, they botched the Babylon 5 TV pilots (not that those were particularly great), they cancelled Farscape just before it could finish its AWARD WINNING STORY, they took out whatever little originality was left in Andromeda by the time it got to sci-fi, and now they've cancelled Caprica.

    Hope you're doing good, Budd.

    John

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