Syndicated SFF TV Series From The Late 1980s through Early 2000s

[Christopher]

Earth Final Conflict remains a guilty pleasure for me. The past year in particular as I catch daily reruns on CTV Sci Fi Channel. I see all the flaws in the show, but it has a certain charm all the same in spite of (or perhaps because of?) those flaws.

I don't see it as something that can be judged as a single whole, since it was retooled and dumbed down so drastically from what it was originally meant to be. It went through multiple showrunner changes and reinventions, even more than Andromeda did later on, as well as many changes of cast and format. I like the first half-season under the original showrunner the best, but it starts to show hints of decline in the back half of season 1, then goes downhill fast in season 2, and I'd given up on it by the end of season 3.

 

[Marc]

Earth Final Conflict remains a guilty pleasure for me. The past year in particular as I catch daily reruns on CTV Sci Fi Channel. I see all the flaws in the show, but it has a certain charm all the same in spite of (or perhaps because of?) those flaws.

E:FC is great example of network interferance screwing up a very promising first season (and the less said about the last season the better).

Keep meaning to ask my father-in-law about a scene from one of the early eps. I know it's down town Toronto, I sure I've been through there but damned if I can remember where though.

 

[Christopher]

E:FC is great example of network interferance screwing up a very promising first season (and the less said about the last season the better).

No network, since it was syndicated. The interference came from the production company, Tribune Entertainment. Majel Roddenberry wanted a smart, sophisticated, intellectual, plausible science fiction drama of the kind that Gene R. always aspired to, but Tribune wanted a cheap, lowest-common-denominator mindless action show of the sort that was easy to sell overseas. So they ruined E:FC, and they ruined Andromeda. I profoundly wish Mrs. Roddenberry had managed to sell those concepts to some other production company.

 

[JD]

By the end of Earth: Final Conflict wasn't it an almost entirely new cast dealing with a different alien race from the one in the earlier seasons?

 

[Christopher]

By the end of Earth: Final Conflict wasn't it an almost entirely new cast dealing with a different alien race from the one in the earlier seasons?

Yes. Von Flores was the only cast member who stayed on as a regular for all five seasons, though Anita La Selva (Zo'or) was recurring in season 1 and 5 and a regular in 2-4. Jayne Heitemeyer, who'd replaced Lisa Howard as the female lead in season 3, became the new lead character in season 5, though the previous lead Robert Leeshock appeared occasionally in that season.

I was rather annoyed by that, actually, since when they wrote out Kevin Kilner as the lead after season 1, I felt that Lisa Howard should've been promoted to the lead role. But they apparently weren't yet willing to have a female lead, so they brought in Leeshock as a new lead in the stupidest way possible (as a half-alien hybrid who was born and grew to adulthood in a matter of seconds, complete with adult knowledge and a fashionable haircut). And when they finally did give the show a female lead, it was with a much less interesting character and actress. Leeshock's and Heitemeyer's lead characters had virtually no development or growth in seasons 3-4 beyond getting progressively blonder.

And I regretted that Flores stuck around for the whole run, because he was probably the best actor in the show, and he deserved much better writing than what he was stuck with after season 1.

 

[Marc]

By the end of Earth: Final Conflict wasn't it an almost entirely new cast dealing with a different alien race from the one in the earlier seasons?

pretty much.

Can’t remember when the season 5 lead was introduced but think it was after Lisa Howard left saying the show as it was wasn’t the one she signed on for.

Von Flores who played Sandoval was the only actor from go to whoa.

 

[Aragorn]

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[Christopher]

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Thanks. I always rather liked the Action Pack theme. (It was composed by Velton Ray Bunch, IIRC.)

 

[Mr. Adventure]

I think the closest spiritual successors we have to these shows are probably some of the Syfy Channel's original output.

I thought it was awful. Very stupid, crass, and unfunny.

hmm, I know it's not your intent but now my curiosity is piqued

I once had a dream in which I was having lunch with Matt Frewer, who'd found himself woefully miscast as the lead in a bad show very much like Super Force, and he wanted me to take over as showrunner and retool it into something smarter. I was intrigued enough that when I woke up, I started to imagine how I'd actually develop such a series, and I eventually wrote up a comic book series premise based on my musings, though I never did anything with it.

I love the idea of Frewer in a series like that. Then again, I was a fan of Frewer's Max Headroom series where he actually gave a pretty earnest take with Edison Carter. Being the first thing I saw him in I didn't think of him as a quirky actor until later and I really liked him as the lead.

Super Force had some interesting guest stars like adult film stars, G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary.

 

[Christopher]

I love the idea of Frewer in a series like that. Then again, I was a fan of Frewer's Max Headroom series where he actually gave a pretty earnest take with Edison Carter. Being the first thing I saw him in I didn't think of him as a quirky actor until later and I really liked him as the lead.

The last time I watched Max Headroom, I felt that Frewer didn’t work as well as a heroic lead as he does as a quirky character actor. He was cast as Max first, of course, and played Edison because of that. But he’s just a bit too gawky in appearance and voice to be entirely convincing as a hard-hitting, ultra-manly, fearless investigative reporter. It’s not that he wasn’t reasonably good in the role, it’s just that it didn’t feel like the right role for him, that it didn’t let him do what he does best (although he had Max for that).

Indeed, in my dream, part of the problem with the Super Force-esque series was that the lead role was similarly ill-suited for Frewer's personality. In the comics premise I ended up developing, I leaned into that incongruity, and had the Frewer-esque lead character as a reluctant hero, trapped by circumstances into being the only one who could use the supersuit despite being not at all a man of action.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

The last time I watched Max Headroom, I felt that Frewer didn’t work as well as a heroic lead as he does as a quirky character actor. He was cast as Max first, of course, and played Edison because of that. But he’s just a bit too gawky in appearance and voice to be entirely convincing as a hard-hitting, ultra-manly, fearless investigative reporter. It’s not that he wasn’t reasonably good in the role, it’s just that it didn’t feel like the right role for him, that it didn’t let him do what he does best (although he had Max for that).

Indeed, in my dream, part of the problem with the Super Force-esque series was that the lead role was similarly ill-suited for Frewer's personality. In the comics premise I ended up developing, I leaned into that incongruity, and had the Frewer-esque lead character as a reluctant hero, trapped by circumstances into being the only one who could use the supersuit despite being not at all a man of action.

I could see that as being miscast but I liked that disconnect but I can't deny noticing what you say. Frewer as a reluctant hero would've been a good approach and what I envisioned when you mentioned it

 

[Aragorn]

I watched the first season of War of the Worlds and enjoyed it. But then the second season moved to the local Fox affiliate, and back then you had to watch Fox while standing on one leg standing on a chair holding a metal pole in one hand and ten feet of tin foil in the other, so I missed out on the whole season.

 

[Christopher]

I watched the first season of War of the Worlds and enjoyed it. But then the second season moved to the local Fox affiliate, and back then you had to watch Fox while standing on one leg standing on a chair holding a metal pole in one hand and ten feet of tin foil in the other, so I missed out on the whole season.

I remembered liking the first season of WotW, but when I revisited it some years back, I found it was pretty terrible overall, clumsily written with cheap production values. The one thing I really liked about it was the chemistry among the four leads, but they were broader actors than I remembered.

But I always found season 2 terrible. You're better off having missed it. They brought in a new producer, Frank Mancuso, Jr., who killed off both the nonwhite cast members (including the show's most popular character, Col. Ironhorse), destroying the great chemistry that was the only really good thing about the show. Not only that, but Jared Martin's endearingly eccentric lead character was stripped of all his personality and became a bland, generic protagonist, and the alien-looking and alien-sounding invaders from season 1 were killed off and replaced by a new faction that changed themselves into English-speaking humanoid forms, all of them white. Mancuso basically stripped away any trace of diversity from the cast. (And his excuses for killing off the nonwhite leads were unconvincing. He claimed to be unaware that Ironhorse was the breakout character, which would at best be sheer negligence for someone taking over the show. And he claimed he killed Norton Drake because the team would be on the run and a guy in a wheelchair couldn't manage -- but then he moved them into a new permanent base in the second episode.)

He also soft-rebooted the world of the show to be inexplicably far more post-apocalyptic than it had been in season 1, and it was just relentlessly grim and dismal and unpleasant, which was a weird way to try to make the show more popular. (The idea was to make the world more like it should have been 35 years after a cataclysmic alien invasion, but the massive inconsistency with season 1's more ordinary world was never explained.) The wriitng did improve moderately in the back half of the season, but then the series finale retconned the entire movie and series in a ridiculous way in order to force a happy ending, saying that the relentless and unprovoked invasion in the original movie was just a misunderstanding, the result of the one truly bad alien tricking the otherwise good aliens into thinking we were the aggressors, or something. Even though the very first thing the aliens did in the movie after landing was to vaporize a guy waving a truce flag. It was an insult to the audience's intelligence, and a bizarrely incongruous Pollyanna ending to such a dystopian, depressing season.

 

[JD]

I think the closest spiritual successors we have to these shows are probably some of the Syfy Channel's original output.

Yeah, shows like Warehouse 13, Eureka, Sanctuary, Wynona Earp, and Resident Alien would fit in pretty well with a lot of these shows.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

I still have my old VHS copy of the original British version of "Max Headroom". It's been probably 30+ years since I last watched it; I wonder if it still holds up. I do recall that the reactions to the "Blipverts" were much more graphic than what was shown on the ABC version. Full on "Scanners" 'your head 'plode' with brain matter hitting the camera. There's also an introduction by Max Headroom and a quiz you can take at the end of the video. You answered a few questions correctly, wrote them down and mailed them to Coca Cola (I think it was) and if your name was drawn, you won Coca Cola products.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

^ so happens I was watching some of this just the other day in case you don't want to dig out that tape

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[P Tom]

I watched seaQuest DSV and rather liked the show and its depiction of the then near future of 2018-2022, which is now the current timeframe. The show initially tried to be grounded in scientific issues, and then got real cheesy by the second season. For the third season there was a time jump of ten years and the show was renamed to seaQuest 2032, and given a more militaristic theme. Then it got canceled mid-season due to poor ratings.

 

[Christopher]

I watched seaQuest DSV and rather liked the show and its depiction of the then near future of 2018-2022, which is now the current timeframe. The show initially tried to be grounded in scientific issues, and then got real cheesy by the second season.

Yeah, it was frustrating. Season 1 tried to be a hard-SF show, although it had some unfortunate detours into episodes about psychic powers and aliens. But season 2 was ridiculous. And I hated the way they talked about it in the media. In season 1, the producers said, "No, this isn't science fiction, it's a credible extrapolation of real scientific, technological, and social trends" -- which is exactly what hard science fiction is. And then in season 2, the new producers said "Okay, now we're going to start doing science fiction" -- and instead they did sheer fantasy inanity that made Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea seem credible by contrast. In both cases, it was a hell of an insult toward science fiction, and it drove home the profound disconnect between the public perception of what "science fiction" meant and what it actually is. It's like people didn't even notice that 50% of the phrase is "science." Always drove me crazy.

 

[Ron M]

I watched seaQuest DSV and rather liked the show and its depiction of the then near future of 2018-2022, which is now the current timeframe. The show initially tried to be grounded in scientific issues, and then got real cheesy by the second season. For the third season there was a time jump of ten years and the show was renamed to seaQuest 2032, and given a more militaristic theme. Then it got canceled mid-season due to poor ratings.

I thoroughly enjoyed SeaQuest DSV's 1st season (and still do; I have it on DVD and rewatch it occasionally). It was proof that hard-sci-fi could be done well. Heck, they even had Bob Ballard come on screen to explain the science at the end of each episode! And it was oddly prescient in at least some of its depictions of the late 2010's--but I guess that's what happens when you're basing your show on actual science.

Towards the end of the first season, I remember reading an article in the newspaper (back when those were still a thing) where they interviewed a studio exec who said that since X-Files was so popular, they were going to go more in that direction for Season 2. I think I made it about 3 episodes into the second season before I just couldn't take it anymore; it was a completely different show.

I did hear that they retooled it yet again for Season 3, so maybe I'll check that out at some point. Was Season 3 any better?

 

[Christopher]

I thoroughly enjoyed SeaQuest DSV's 1st season (and still do; I have it on DVD and rewatch it occasionally). It was proof that hard-sci-fi could be done well.

I respected the attempt, but the only two episodes I thought were really good were "Bad Water" and "Photon Bullet." The rest were mediocre to disappointing. It aspired to be another Star Trek TNG, but it just wasn't on the same level.

Towards the end of the first season, I remember reading an article in the newspaper (back when those were still a thing) where they interviewed a studio exec who said that since X-Files was so popular, they were going to go more in that direction for Season 2. I think I made it about 3 episodes into the second season before I just couldn't take it anymore; it was a completely different show.

Execs never understand. They think that what makes a show or movie work is what it does, rather than how well it's done. So they make inferior copies of the format or subject matter and are surprised when they aren't as successful as the thing they're copying.

I mean, if season 2 was meant to be like The X-Files, it failed miserably. TXF was about mystery and ambiguity, but SQ season 2 was just straight-up wackiness.

I did hear that they retooled it yet again for Season 3, so maybe I'll check that out at some point. Was Season 3 any better?

It was less awful, but I didn't think it was very good. It was barely even the same show, and it replaced Roy Scheider with Michael Ironside as the lead.