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.

Glenn Beck and science fiction

Yes, Glenn Beck and science fiction. Despite the huge popularity of media celebrities like Beck, there has been relatively little attention paid in science fiction television and film to the possibilities of the Father Coughlins of the airwaves and broadband. Babylon 5's Dan Randall is probably as close as any of these shows have come to dealing with the cult of media worship that surrounded Beck, Limbaugh, Coughlin, etc. Making matters worse, these programs always show some safe CNN-like champion of bland liberalism replacing the conservative media of the right, a result that is both unlikely and seemingly not much better than the alternative. Partly, science fiction is cautious about its portrayal of the media because it is unsure what forms of mass media will be used to inflame the conservative masses of the future. Yet there is plenty of material to play with here. For instance, a talk radio host or a televangelist getting ahold of nanotechnology and using it to control his followers every thought and mood. Or a right wing rabble-rouser on the level of Tom Zarek, with or without the strong political critique that Zarek offers of centrist liberalism (preferably with a good right wing critique of liberalism, as oppossed to the cornball stuff Hollywood comes up with). So science fiction TV, you are on notice: We need some mass media personalities on our shows, if only to critique the mass media.