What Cheer, Netop?

1. battlestar galactica(new) is about as watchable as daytime soaps and moves at the pace of a web comic
2. I'm sorry but as a huge SG-1 fan i am offended that babalyon 5 beat SG-1 (the longest running scifi show ever)
3. Ok I guess futurama fits on the list but where are the great brittish sci fi shows, really Red Dwarf is totally better than Lois and Clark.

4. This should have been a top twenty five list

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and why the crap is lost rated as a sci fi show really why?

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jwgh

Thinking about this a bit more, I think 'The Prisoner' belongs on the list, which is probably about as appropriate as 'Lost'.

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Wait, "The Prisoner" isn't on there but the "Logan's Run" series is?

The thing is, as you said, there really haven't been 50 good science-fiction TV series in human history.

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jwgh

It would be easier (and probably more fun) to put together a '50 horrible science fiction TV shows' list.

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jwgh

I was going to suggest Blake's 7 as another series unjustly passed over, but then I realized that I only ever saw one episode of it and don't remember much about it than that I liked it.

I guess there's always 'My Mother The Car'.

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jwgh

Mind you, 'I vaguely seem to remember seeing an episode sometime' seems to have been the main criteria for getting a spot on boston.com's list, so maybe that's not so unreasonable.

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jwgh

...another series I thought of was Brisco County, Jr., but I don't think I saw a single episode of it so I'm not even sure how science fictional it was (never mind how good it was).

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"Blake's 7" never really grew on me, though I know a lot of people like it.

"Brisco County, Jr." definitely merits inclusion if "The Wild, Wild West" does, since it was clearly another attempt to do that sort of thing, and was pretty solidly entertaining.

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Anything involving Bruce Campbell is usually solidly entertaining.

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jwgh

('My Mother The Car' joke stolen from

doctroid, by the bye.)

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vardissakheli.livejournal.com

WHERE?!

I have NEVER seen My Mother the Car. One of my favorite bands from Houston, The Judy's, included it in their litany of bad childhood favorites in their song "T.V.," and I was hopelessly devoted to The Ann Southern Show when it was on Knick at Knight, so I've been curious about it for a long time.

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jwgh

I thought the first season of the new Battlestar Galactica was good, but it has kind of lost its way recently.

Regarding 'Lost', I don't think it's as much of a stretch as some of the other stuff on the list.

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I agree that the Prisoner belongs on the list because of its alternate reality elements however in my mind if lost was a book it would not be in the science fiction section at the book store, at the same time I really haven't watched much lost, so yeah.

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saucypunk.livejournal.com

awwww Red Dwarf... I haven't watched nearly enough of that. Sometime when I have free time again, we should watch a whole lot of that.

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that would be fun netflixing

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SG1 - 1997-2007
Doctor Who - 1963-1989

Longest running?

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but was it new episodes for that entire time, I have just been going with the internet ranking of it as the longest running sci fi show.
I however just geeked out and checked up on this and I bow before your scifi knowlege...

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jwgh

1986's season got cut short and it was feared that it would be cancelled, but it was back in 1987 with Sylvester McCoy. Even so, that's a pretty long run. Episode guide at http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/index.shtml .

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Wow. I don't think I could disagree more with the ordering of this list. Okay, fine, the original star trek is a classic so maybe it deserves a top spot. TNG definitely deserves a top spot. As a DS9 fan, I resent its not being included, especially compared to such amazingly wonderful shows as "Earth: Final Conflict."

Mostly, I think there is something seriously wrong when Dark Angel is higher up than Quantum Leap. WTF? And I wouldn't classify many of these as "Science Fiction" -- they should have called it "scifi, fantasy, horror, and superhero shows." Isn't "The Avengers" a spy show? Can we call "Get Smart" scifi since he had a shoe phone?

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jwgh

I agree, the ordering seems pretty random. I haven't seen 'The Avengers' so I'm not sure how science fictional it is. (Have you seen The Prisoner? If so, would you think that it would belong on a list like this? I think I would lean towards including it, but I could see it going the other way too. I would agree that Get Smart doesn't belong, even though I'm not sure what the difference is.)

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I would probably include The Prisoner. I've only seen a couple episodes but it has much more of a sci-fi feel than many they've listed.

I am sad that they put on Earth: Final Conflict but not Space: Above and Beyond. While we're at it I could name about a million scifi shows that I liked. Misfits of Science! Time Trax! Speaking of sort-of scifi/fantasy, how about Highlander?

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Earth: Final Conflict is a show whose first season could have evolved into something very interesting, but didn't; instead it flailed around randomly and died. I think that cast picture is actually of the post-Kevin Kilner lineup.

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dawn-guy.livejournal.com

"Top 50 SF shows of all time" sounds better than "50 shows we could think of that have something kind of weird about the setting or characters".

I would call The Prisoner a psychological drama set in a dystopian society with futuristic technology and a "spy genre" backstory, which I'd think qualify it as significantly more SF than several things they did think of before press time (including The Avengers, gods bless Emma Peel and her wardrobe designer).

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It depends which season of The Avengers. Early on, it was more action/adventure/mystery than science fiction. Later, it was just drug-induced.

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jwgh

I also agree that listing Voyager and not DS9 is pretty ridiculous.

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Voyager was 95% poop, with a few good episodes here and there.

DS9 had a fantastic story arc spanning four of its seven seasons, with a few crap episodes as filler material.

I'm pretty outraged that doctor who came in so low. SG-1? bleh!

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Also, leaving off "Max Headroom" is a crime.
My very short list of Best Shows with Fairly Prominent Science-Fiction Elements, In No Particular Order:

1. The Outer Limits (original series, NOT the revival)
2. The Prisoner
3. Max Headroom
4. Futurama (note #3 and #4 illustrate the principle that parodic/satiric media SF is often better as science fiction than the serious stuff)
5. Babylon 5 (seasons 1-4 and the prequel movie)
6. Doctor Who (all versions)
7. Star Trek (original series, and some bits of the revived franchise)
8. The Twilight Zone (original series, and the Harlan Ellison-era revival, but not so much the other incarnations)
9. The Quatermass serials (if I can include The Prisoner, I guess I can include these limited-run series too)
10. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (TV series) (included per above, plus consistency with #3-#4)

Special honorable mentions go to the ancient series "Men Into Space" and to the British series "Star Cops", which were not the most brilliant shows ever but were notable attempts to do hard science fiction on TV. They get credit just for trying.

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...Note that I was drawing some kind of demarcation line that would just barely include "The Prisoner" and just barely exclude "The Avengers", though maybe it shouldn't have.

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jwgh

Everyone seems to agree that 'The Prisoner' should be in, and I think most people would agree with

paperclippy that 'Get Smart' shouldn't be, so there's got to be a line in there someplace ...

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I think the guideline I use below is pretty good: if someone asked me for a recommendation for a science-fiction show, I'd feel comfortable pointing to "The Prisoner" but not "The Avengers" or "Get Smart". The latter belong at the jokey end of the spy-thriller genre, which is slightly different though it still has many science-fictional trappings.

"The Prisoner" is a spy story too--it may or may not be a direct sequel to "The Secret Agent"--but I think what tips it over the line is that it has larger concerns that are more traditionally the province of dystopian and psychological science fiction: the nature and limits of identity, the individual vs. a super-technological tyrannical authority, etc.

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Also, "Life on Mars" is poised precisely on the boundary. It's mostly a weird take on the buddy-cop formula combined with nostalgic and mindfuck-horror elements, but you could argue that the role of time travel makes it marginally SF. (The second season opener seems to establish that Sam can actually change history, or at least become deluded into thinking that he has.) If it is science fiction, it probably belongs in the top 10 or close to it.

I'd count "Quantum Leap" and the new "Battlestar Galactica" as qualifying science-fiction shows, but they don't quite make the cut quality-wise, though they are not bad. "Buffy" isn't quite SF regardless of its occasional use of SF tropes, and "The X-Files" gets excluded for annoying me. Of course the long-running shows I consider great were all actually tremendously variable in quality; "Doctor Who" has had many, many stinkers in its time.

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...also, while I love MST3K, I exclude it because it's enough of a special case that if someone said "I want to see a science-fiction show", I wouldn't point them to that.

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jwgh

Agreed. I'm not saying it wouldn't belong in a top 50 list, maybe, but there's no way it should be in the top 10; that's just sad, somehow.

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In my list, I did include two shows that were outright comedies and a third that was a dark satire with comic and parodic elements, but they were core science-fiction shows whose primary mission was telling science-fiction stories, so I think they count. "Red Dwarf" would too, but I'm not that familiar with it and what I saw of it never grabbed me.

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jwgh

That reminds me (somehow): Science Fiction Theatre was one of the inspirations for Scientifiction Theatre Presents, right?

Also, as a general comment: if we start including anime series then the whole thing gets harder, because there seem to be a ton of pretty decent science fiction-themed ones out there. I guess the most obvious one is Cowboy Bebop but I would might rank Kino's Journey above that. The other ones I can think of off hand are Texhnolyze and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya but I'm not sure either would belong in a top ten list.

Oh, I guess there's also Geneshaft. That's not great, but one feature it had that I liked was that it featured a giant robot running beta software and the software crashed a lot, rendering the robot largely useless for most of the series.

Which also reminds me: if you haven't seen it yet, I would really recommend giving Kino's Journey a look; I think you would like it a lot.

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Yes, Science Fiction Theater was pretty much the inspiration for Scientifiction Playhouse, though Frank Baxter's intro to "The Mole People" also played a role.

I find the show fascinating, but not in a good way. It managed to ape the tone of authoritative didacticism that one associates with Fifties Science! without actually being in any way well-researched or informative. To this day, many people insist that it was a fascinating series well-grounded in scientific fact, and all I can figure is that they haven't actually seen it since they were small children.

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People who are wondering what we are talking about should read this.

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paracelsvs.livejournal.com

PS: Take Jake up on that suggestion to watch Kino's Journeys. It is definitely for you. Possibly also Geneshaft, because even though I agree that it isn't really very good, it has a lot of stuff in it that makes it worth watching anyway.

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If you're including anime series and science fiction there is no way that Neon Genesis Evangelion can be left off the list, and at least one Gundam series. Actually, there are about fifty quadbillion scifi anime series out there, many of which are quite good.

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paracelsvs.livejournal.com

Yes, I would agree that that list would have a tendency to be completely overtaken by anime, if they added it. There really is a lot of it out there, and by the inverse of Sturgeon's Law if nothing else, there is a large number of great stuff.

Bebop and Kino, obviously. Evangelion too. I haven't actually watched any Gundam but its influence over the years in Japan is huge, and it single-handedly transformed the giant robots genre from the naïvistic Tetsujin 28-style robot-vs-monster-of-the-week style to a more realistic war story style, with giant robots as a war machine like any other (although usually more powerful than most).

Beyond that, series I've greatly enjoyed would include Crest of the Stars (epic aristocratic war drama in space, including an entire season of 13 episodes dedicated mostly to a single battle for a jump point), Nadesico (a simultaneously light-hearted and serious parody and homage to classic sci-fi anime, such as Gundam), Stellvia (a surprisingly realistic show about kids going to military school in orbit, to take part in the culmination of a centuries-long global effort to protect the Earth from an incoming supernova shockwave).

And then there are the real classics, like anything by Leiji Matsumoto (Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999, Space Battleship Yamato, and so on). And there's tons of stuff I haven't even seen, like Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

Since the list seems to conflate science fiction and fantasy anyway, there's even more to add from that side of the genre, and I won't even start going into that.

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