Crashing ratings play havoc on show budgets...
And the sucky economy certainly doesn't help.
Everyone get used to fewer SFX and more talkedy-talk in shows. That's not necessarily a bad thing if you have good characters and things for them to talk about. Might make shows buckle down and concentrate on good writing with no splashy SFX to distract the viewers from crap writing.
Heroes for example needs to concentrate on character development and interpersonal drama. They can save their pennies for the eye-popping big battle every so often, but the core of the show should be good old fashioned dramatic virtues of characters standing in a room and hashing it out, verbally.
Heroes has the basics - strong premise that is very open-ended to permit creativity, interesting characters, relationships with characters already formed and waiting to be developed, and a cast that is either very talented or at least well matched to their characters - a lot of shows don't even have that much.
T:SCC could have gone that route, they just didn't, at least not in time for me to not get bored and stop watching.
Fod dodgy CGI check out the episode of Lost where Sawyer, Juliette and Kate are going to be sent packing on the sub. The sub CGI was far worse than anything in the video you've linked to.
Yeah that was kinda sad.
And
Lost probably has a decent budget, still. But that Hawaii locale probably eats up a lot of it. I'm glad to just have any show that can afford a large, highly talented cast, to shoot in a pricey location that I haven't seen seventy billion times, and to even have a frakkin' sub in the story.
I'll remember I'm watching a TV show and not a movie, and cross my eyes so it doesn't look so lame. And then wait for Sawyer to take off his shirt.
for Summer Glau, I was 
