Your Best and Worst Sci-Fi TV Shows!

[Lord Pendragon]

Best SF:

1. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. This is Star Trek at its best. Season- and Series-long story arcs, non-regulars with depth and background (Garrick, Gul Ducat, Kai Wyn...) intriguing philosophical premises ("Wormhole aliens or Gods?", "Can you be a religious savior of a religion you don't believe in?" etc.) and lots of space combat thrown in for good measure. Absolutely fantastic.

2. Farscape. This show has a great mixture of character-driven plot and wild off-the-cuff style. I thought the acting was pretty good, and the universe interesting and exciting.

3. The Twilight Zone (original). The greatest. Rod Serling was a genius, pure and simple. The only reason is isn't #1 is because I like story arcs. But every episode of TZ is fantastic.

4. Earth: Final Conflict (Boone seasons). People have bashed this show a lot upthread, but I thought the first seasons of this show were fantastic. The Taelons are one of the few alien races that truly feels alien, and the show had a wonderful story arc that made the viewer wonder how things were going to turn out. Where were Da'an's loyalties? What secrets were they hiding from humanity? What were they running from? Unfortunately it all turned to crap in later seasons when the producers decided to abandon the story arc format for self-contained episodes of general worthlessness, and killed off Boone, the character around whom the entire show revolved.

5. X-Files. I'm not a fan of the series story arc about the alien invasion, but I think the individual episodes are some of the best sci-fi out there, almost like modern Twilight Zone episodes. A lot of them are extremely well-written and acted. I've often wished a series would come out that treats magic in the same way.

Extra: I've heard good things about Babylon 5, and seen a few great episodes (the Sheridan torture eps. was almost as good as the Picard torture eps. from ST:TNG), but didn't ever get the chance to watch the whole series, so it didn't make my list. I loved Firefly but don't think I can judge it against complete series, when only six episodes aired. I also liked Dark Angel and the episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica that I've seen, though they're not Top 5 material (though BG may make it when the series is complete.)

Worst SF:

1. Star Trek: Voyager. It had a few good episodes (I loved the one with the Saurians and their refusal to admit they had migrated from another planet, rather than been born in their sector of space, as their religion claimed,) but on the whole was utter garbage.

2. Mutant X. A twisted, commercialized take on the X-Men. Gather a bunch of beautiful but untalented actors together, put them in black leather and give them horrible scripts. Fantastic! Mutant X shares a special place in my heart because my mom often accidentally taped it for me instead of The Pretender while I was in Japan. ARGH!

3. Stargate: SG-1. I'm sorry, I know a lot of people like this show, but the more I watch it, the more I consider it crap. The production design is fantastic, but the scripts and characters are garbage. How on Earth I'm supposed to believe that the fate of the world rests in the hands of Jack O'Neill I will never understand. And that's only the beginning of the hokiness the audience is expected to swallow.

4. The Twilight Zone (new). No original concepts, combined with the most awful host I could have imagined for the show = teh suck.

5. Nightman. Possibly the worst superhero show I've ever seen.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

I was going to post a "What? No votes for {list of shows}?!" message, but some of the more obscure ones have been mentioned (thanks thalmin, Hand of Evil, SuperGamera, and other for remember the obscure classics/garbage). My list included: Land of the Giants, Man from Atlantis, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Time Tunnel, Batman, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Prisoner: Cellblock H, Bible Man, Millenium, The Second 100 Years, and My Mother the Car.

Heck, someone even mentioned ElectraWoman and DynaGirl!

But, still, no one mentioned Dr. Shrinker, Wonderbug, or Johnny Socko and his Giant Robot.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

Oi! I worked on Xena and Jack!

Though I have to agree about Sinbad. First time I saw a fight on that show, I fell off my chair and couldn't stop laughing for ten minutes...

-Hyp.

I loved the Xena episode where she rescued someone and then they complained that they were "hoping for Sinbad"--the look on Lucy Lawless' face was priceless.

I can't remember the title, but it was during the first four seasons (I quit watching after that), and it was the "Groundhog Day"-plot episode.

 

[SuperGamera]

Aww... I loved Misfits of Science and Automan!

Okay, so I was about eight, but even so!

By 1983, I was already spoiled by Late 70's/Early 80's anime, so the fact that Automan never blew anything up or shot anybody didn't appeal to my suger-fueled brain. It lost out to shows like "Knight Rider", "Magnum PI", and "Tales of the Gold Monkey" on my TV viewing.

Ah, looking at the TV schedules, I understand why we never watched "Misfits of Science". I got to watch "Knight Rider" before and "Miami Vice" afterwards, but my mom got the TV at 8 pm to watch "Dallas". Even when I did get to watch it, it just didn't do anything for me, even though I loved superheroes at the time.

Still, if Courtney Cox had played her "Misfits of Science" character on "Friends", I would have enjoyed it a lot more!

 

[SuperGamera]

I'll agree with 7 of 9, but, c'mon!, the Doctor was a great character. Would've been great if they had given Harry Kim some character development, besides being the kid.

It wasn't that they weren't great characters, the Doctor especially. It's just that they became unable to write decent episodes for any of the other characters after about Season 5. Dating one of the showrunners certainly didn't hurt 7 of 9 (Borg implants and all) from getting lots of episodes. By the end, either of them could pretty much run the ship by themselves (and each did at least once).

In 7 years, Harry never got promoted, and only had some romance once that I recall, catching perhaps only the 2nd reported STD in Trek history. Many of the other characters got hardly any development at all.

Also, after DS9 muddied the morality and ethics of the Trek universe, Voyager was more often timid and PC. Somehow, Chakotay's hallucination-inducing device is OK, but more traditional methods are not? Also, the show de-fanged the Borg, making them all subject to the Queen (rather than the identity-consuming group mind they were in TNG). No longer was the entire race focused on assimilation, making genocide the only potential solution; they were simply unwilling participants in the Queen's plans, and removing her could solve all their problems.

Voyager had some great episodes, but the plot gaps, lack of character development, and large number of bad episodes make it the worst of the (TOS-TNG-DS9-Voyager) Trek.

 

[Kanegrundar]

Here's my list:

Top 5:
1. X-Files: I didn't really like the show all that much after Mulder and then Scully left, but the early seasons were excellent.

2. Babylon 5: FINALLY! I space show done perfectly!

3. V: It freaked me out as a kid.

4. Stargate SG1: I watched the first season on Showtime and then lost track of it. Now I'm thoroughly enjoying it again on Sci-Fi.

5. Millenium: I miss this show a lot. It was a very dark and depressing show (probably a big reason why it failed), but the stories and characters were top notch.

Runners Up: Quantum Leap, Space Rangers, and Farscape.


Worst 5 (in no real order)
Star Trek TNG: I hated this show. There are only a couple of episodes that I liked, and the rest were crap, IMO. Boring stories, boring characters, and uninspired aliens.

Star Trek DS9: Same problem as TNG.

Andromeda: Just plain dull.

Earth Final Contact: Another horribly dull show.

Battlestar Galactica (the new series): The original was OK, but it wasn't great. Now here's the new series and they start off by changing the sex of one of the primary characters?!?! Even with that annoying aspect, I gave it a chance, but sadly it was as uninspired as 99% of the made for Sci-Fi channel movies.

Kane

 

[frandelgearslip]

Best:
1. Babylon 5 --definately the best science fiction I have seen. The fifth season was not the best, but thats because everything got shuffled with the almost cancelation at the end of the fourth season. I mean there was so many moments that rank among my favorite all time moments from kosh's death (both the good version and the later evil version) to vir waving at whats his face's severed head on a pike after promising a couple seasons before that he would do that very thing.
2. Adventures of brisco county jr. Yeah I know but this is from my childhood and is the first television show that I watched that had actual real contiuntity and I am a sucker for continuity.
3. Star trek ds9 -- The best of the treks, in fact the only one that I ever really liked. Also the only one that didn't drown the viewers in a pile of technobabble. Plus Garik was one of my favorite characters of all time. Plus the only trek with continuity (did I mention I love continuity). Plus sisko would kick the ass of picard, kirk, janeway and scott bakula's character all put together in a heartbeat.
4. firefly -- had great promise.
5. I forgot this at first mystery science theater 3000. Excellent show, techinically science fiction, plus lots of the movies were science fiction. I thought the cut scenes in between the movie were some of the korniest crap ever but there reviews of movies are awesome
note: Buffy/Angel is fantasy so I didn't list them otherwise 1. angel, 2. buffy, 3. babylon 5...

Worst:
1. Star trek voyager: I despise this show with all my heart. nuff said. (Oh and also those one aliens that were given a number designation were such ripoffs of babylon 5.) Hell I could do a thread of just the top 100 reasons I hated the show, but I won't since the show has few defenders.
2. earth final conflict -- the first season was okay and the premise was great (ie. the classic benovalent aliens come down to save humanity from themselves, but turn out to be evil) But through its five seasons the shows quality decreased exponentially ( and it wasn't great to begin with)
3. Alias -- I watched the first two seasons, but the show has the same bad quality that I have as a dm. I get excited about new ideas too easily and if I let myself I'll rewrite my campaign world every other month. Alias does this every half season.
4. Farscape -- John crichton, especially in the early seasons, is an awesome character, but I don't know how many episodes one can have where some portion of the crew goes insane or turns evil. Farscape seemed to think that every other episode was a nice balance.
5. Dark angel -- Show sucked, jessica Alba hot, you know what thats enough to redeem it in my book, so strike it from my list.
New number 5 -- Battle star Galactica any version old, 1980, new, super ultra new whatever, there is about 100 other shows that deserved to be remade than this pile of garbage.

 

[SuperGamera]

,)
3. Stargate: SG-1. I'm sorry, I know a lot of people like this show, but the more I watch it, the more I consider it crap. The production design is fantastic, but the scripts and characters are garbage. How on Earth I'm supposed to believe that the fate of the world rests in the hands of Jack O'Neill I will never understand. And that's only the beginning of the hokiness the audience is expected to swallow.

MacGuyver saving the world from all manner of alien threats make as much sense as Starfleet having no effective Special Forces, and constantly sending command crew on "secret missions".

SG-1 is not high art by any means, nor does it aspire to be. It knows it's popcorn sci-fi, and isn't afraid to make fun of itself. But as far as current sci-fi shows go, it's probably the most family-friendly one out there, and has one of the highest female viewership rates of any sci-fi show. None of these factors would probably have mattered much to me when I was younger, but with a wife and boy, it is the sci-fi show we probably get the most group enjoyment from. The other current sci-fi/fantasy shows my wife and I watch (BSG, Lost and Carnivale) are not shows you can easily watch with your early teen child. SG-1 is probably the best "entry sci-fi" show in some time.

 

[mojo1701]

MacGuyver saving the world from all manner of alien threats make as much sense as Starfleet having no effective Special Forces, and constantly sending command crew on "secret missions".

They fixed that in season 3 of Enterprise. The MACOs? I loved the tension between Lt. Reed and Major Hayes.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

MacGuyver saving the world from all manner of alien threats make as much sense as Starfleet having no effective Special Forces, and constantly sending command crew on "secret missions".

MacGyver saving the world from all manner of alien threats I could buy into. Col. O'Neil is another matter. He's a complete idiot, who needs technobabble explained to him--sometimes repeatedly--that even I, an English Major who hasn't taken an advanced science class in his life--can easily understand. He's a bad tactician, a bad leader, and a moron. And he's in charge of the most important combat/diplomatic special ops team in history? Riiiight.

As far as Trek and Special Ops teams, I'd always thought they did have them, but that the command crew of the Enterprise, being officers on the Federation Flagship, where simply more qualified for many of the "secret missions" than those SpecOps teams. Most of the crew were believable experts and command officers, as well as away team members. Sure, you'd have the SpecOps guys do most of the secret missions, but for some of the particularly important ones (the ones, coincidentally, that got episodes ), you go to the best.

The only one I can remember that broke credibiity for me was Dianna Troi posing as a Romulan Tal'Shiar, but then Dianna Troi was a problem character from the beginning...

SG-1 is not high art by any means, nor does it aspire to be. It knows it's popcorn sci-fi, and isn't afraid to make fun of itself. But as far as current sci-fi shows go, it's probably the most family-friendly one out there, and has one of the highest female viewership rates of any sci-fi show. None of these factors would probably have mattered much to me when I was younger, but with a wife and boy, it is the sci-fi show we probably get the most group enjoyment from. The other current sci-fi/fantasy shows my wife and I watch (BSG, Lost and Carnivale) are not shows you can easily watch with your early teen child. SG-1 is probably the best "entry sci-fi" show in some time.

The fact that it's family friendly doesn't make it good sci-fi, though. It makes it family-friendly sci-fi. Full House was family friendly too, but that doesn't mean it was a good comedy.

Now The Incredibles is both family friendly, and a good movie. My contention is that while it may be family friendly and great "entry level" sci-fi for young viewers, SG-1 is still bad sci-fi. Obviously, YMMV.