I even liked the SF shows that Sci-Fi Channel used to run, before it changed its name to Syfy (what the hell is a siffy anyway?) and clogged its schedule with bullshit ghost-hunting shows. Things like Farscape and, uh, well, Farscape.
Here are some of the SF TV shows I've watched and liked:
UFO
Star Trek (in all its various forms)
Babylon 5
Battlestar Galactica
Lost in Space
The Time Tunnel
The Starlost
The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr. (not technically SF, but it DID have an orb)
Space: 1999
Buck Rogers in Whatever The Hell Century This Is
Farscape
Firefly
Space: Above and Beyond
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
Land of the Giants
I liked all these shows, and some of them I liked an awful lot.
I mention this mostly to demonstrate that I'm not some realist literary type who thinks science fiction is mere "pornography of ideas", as someone once said (it might have been me, upon seeing the cover for the Space Plumber novel. It wasn't called Space Plumber, but that's what the hero was. I wonder if a plumber in a spacesuit would exhibit butt-crack. But never mind.) I mention this so when I say that there are two wildly popular SF shows that I don't like, never liked, can't like, never could stand, you understand that I'm not exactly a hater of the whole genre.
The first is The X-Files. Honestly, the whole men in black government conspiracy grey aliens Zeta Reticuli business wears itself out on me very quickly. Like Brylcreem, a dab will do me, and for quite a while. Since I don't really dig that whole dark gummint UFO conspiracy business, I didn't really dig the show, and was always kind of mystified by its wild popularity. And it isn't because there were aliens and UFOs in it. Got no problem with aliens and UFOs - for years I had posted on my office wall certain choice quotations from G'Kar, and I think personally it would be really cool if there really were alien spacecraft at Area 51. But the whole conspiracy thing quickly turns into drudgery for me.
The second is Doctor Who. The wild popularity of this show remains a complete mystery to me. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I was supposed to do some reading before watching the show. But man, is it ever tedious and uninvolving. Back in the days when Tom Baker was the Timelord, people at work used to change their work hours so they could get home in time to catch it on PBS in the afternoons (this was before TiVo, obviously). I tried to catch the wave, and failed utterly. I could list a whole series of defects, like the fact that the Daleks were the least convincing villains in the history of television. I mean, come on, you could stop the Daleks dead in their tracks by spreading a little gravel on the sidewalk. They'd get high-centered, spin their wheels, and that would be that. But fundamentally, I didn't like the characters and didn't care if they lived or died. And I got really tired of people at work blathering about their sonic screwdrivers and debating the significance of Dr. Who's scarf. To paraphrase an alleged quote of Dr. Freud, sometimes a scarf is just an affectation. The only good thing that I could see in the whole tedious mess was, frankly, Elizabeth Sladen.
So that's that. I never got into the whole paranoid conspiracy theory angle of The X-Files, and Doctor Who never convinced me that I should give a rat's ass what happened to anyone in the show.
I'd much rather watch Space: 1999 than either one of those clunkers.
I am forced to withhold judgment on the whole Stargate business. The movie was kind of goofy but worth watching a time or two, but I have no idea what the show is like. As a matter of principle I don't watch "Syfy" much anyway. If they're that embarrassed with the label "science fiction", they probably wouldn't want me hanging around their channel anyway, what with all my Star Trek models and Alien mission patches and G'Kar quotes.
Just to give you a taste, here's my favorite G'Kar quote:
G’qon wrote that the war we fight is not against powers
and principalities, but against chaos. There is a greater
darkness than that which we struggle against, and
worse than the loss of life is the loss of hope.
-- G’kar
8 comments:
Well I can define it. Irwin Allen. He has got to be the biggest suck ass producer in TV history. Canned muzak, bad actors and bad story lines. Voyage to the bottom of the sea, Time Tunnel, The Land of Giants, Lost in Space, etc etc etc. The man pumped out these shows as though he were Roger Corman only no where near as creative. Irwin Allen was a Quantity man not a quality man.What bothered me about the X Files is that nothing ever resolved itself. Very infuriating. As for Space 1999 it really use to tick me off when they compared it to 2001. The only similarity I could see was that there was a resemblance to the moon bases and that's it. Gerry and Sylvia Anderson will never match Kubrick and Clarke. I'll stick to Star Trek TOS and 60's ,70's and some 80's Sci Fi movies. Is it just me or has the moral and philosophical depth gone out of Science Fiction?
DR, Who? B)
I think you have a point - the common thread in all those crappy shows IS Irwin Allen! I guess it says something about me that I ate them up anyway - though at the time, there weren't many other SF options on TV, which maybe says something about TV...
And you're right about the X-Files - nothing ever did seem to get resolved, though I confess I stopped watching it fairly early on and I wouldn't really know.
I don't buy the comparisons between 2001 and Space 1999 either. The only commonalities were that they both took place (at least in part) on the moon, and they both tried to present spaceflight in a reasonably realistic light. I liked both, but I don't generally compare them. It's hard to compare a movie like 2001, whose special effects still seem pretty good today, with a TV show that was doubtless produced on a limited budget anyway.
And yes, I notice the same sense of moral or philosophical exhaustion in modern SF. Star Trek TOS had a strong moral dimension, and I thought the Known Space series, 2001, and practically all of what Clarke wrote posed interesting philosophical questions, or at least tried to.
Nowadays we have "Avatar", which is slick, pretty, hugely popular, and about as intellectually stimulating as an episode of "Gunsmoke" - and I might even like Gunsmoke more, because I'm a sucker for that bogus Old West stuff.
I watched all the Irwin Allens as well and loved all of them especially the Time Tunnel but alas as I got older... The 2001/1999 comparison was made like crazy when that show first came on the air and being a 2001 fan at such young age ( it's still my all time favorite movie) it even kinda bothered me back then. Actually if you listen to the old radio programs of Gunsmoke they've been known to get pretty heavy at times. http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=gunsmoke%20AND%20collection%3Aradioprograms . The Internet Archives by the way is a great place for the old Sci Fi radio programs as well, such as Dimension X and X Minus 1, etc.
Thanks for the radio link, I'll look into that!
When I was in the hospital back in January for about a month, waiting for my bone marrow to grow back in and start working, I watched the TV Land channel a lot and managed to refresh myself on a lot of the old Westerns, especially Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel. Fun stuff!
No old science fiction on that channel, though, at least at the time. I was hoping they'd at least have Star Trek TOS and The Invaders, but no.
2001 is a great movie! It bothers me a little when people say "It's too long and it doesn't make any damn sense!" I didn't think it was long enough, personally; I could have stood more. And it isn't that hard to get, though it probably does help if one reads the novel. But it kind of irks me that 2001 gets pigeonholed as a "freaky and incomprehensible science fiction" by the same people who think Twilight and True Blood are exemplars of great literature.
Do you consider Quantum Leap science fiction, William?
I guess I would say it's science fiction, though I confess I never watched it and I'm basing this opinion solely on the trailers and things I've read.
But from what I've read, the science fiction elements are mostly contained in the premise and the episodes themselves aren't particularly science fictiony. No green Orion dancers, anyway.
No, you're exactly right about that. Nevertheless, I think it was greatly under-appreciated. A very humane series and I miss it.
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