The first season of SeaQuest was excellent, a real gem of TV sci fi. I was very pleasantly surprised to see it on Sci Fi myself. When they put on a plug for the first season on DVD I became extremely tempted to pick it up.
The first season had one episode that dealt with a crashed alien ship towards the end (as the network was starting to demand more exotic sci-fi elements, you could tell that it didn't mesh well with the rest of the show), and an episode where they met some people with minor psychic abilities (empathy mostly), but it was generally pretty good hard sci-fi in the first season.
The later seasons went downhill fast, as it became more and more "monster of the week" and the network tried to make it just an underwater version of Star Trek (later seasons involved the SeaQuest getting teleported to the oceans of an alien world, finding an underwater wormhole to the distant future and dealing with a sentient world-controlling supercomputer that had to be destroyed to the people of Earth could live free, dealing with the aftereffects of their own "eugenics wars" called the "Dark Age of Genetics" with a plotline involving a race of genetically engineered superhumans, ect).
Note that after the first season, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (a very respected institution) didn't do those little educational closers at the end about the science behind what happened in the episode.
I guess it was a lot like Sliders, a really cool 90's sci-fi show that was excellent early on, but started to go downhill fast after the first season as the network meddled in it and tried to "improve" it.
