worst sci-fi TV series of post 1964
- Thread starter jefferiestubes8
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You know, I never liked the original BSG (and vastly prefer the remake), but even I'll concede that it doesn't belong on a list of the worst shows ever, not when they are any number of simply bad shows out there--like the recent remake of FLASH GORDON.
The old BSG has good productions values and art direction, as well as a few appealing characters. It was competently done by professionals. It wasn't BLACK SCORPION or something.
The old BSG has good productions values and art direction, as well as a few appealing characters. It was competently done by professionals. It wasn't BLACK SCORPION or something.
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Space Rangers was pretty bad.
Award for most ridiculous premise has to go to "Space:1999"
Award for most ridiculous premise has to go to "Space:1999"
I sincerely hope that nobody ever wastes their time trying to have any sort of discussion with you, as given your comments here I can't imagine a conversation where you'd have anything remotely worthwhile to add.
Anyway "Andromeda" was pretty fucking terrible in almost every way. I can't believe that stupid shit has a following. SGU was also pretty bad, even for a Stargate show.
Nope, no sarcasm here. I have fond memories of BSG. Now, Galactica 80? that deserves some extreme sarcasm.
Indeed it does.
??? How can anyone mention the cast of Cleopatra 2525 and not mention Jennifer Skye? And yeah, it was campy. It was made by the same people as Hercules/Xena. Torres & Pratt came from those shows (pirate queen Nebula and um, some Amazon). Sky (Amarice) seemed to be a prototype sidekick being introduced for Lawless' pregnancy since Gabrielle was in non-violence mode then and Xena: Pregnant Princess can't do much action beyond punching and holding a sword with a menacing glare, but between seasons, they decided to create these new shows to replace Hercules because Sorbo was tired of not getting invited to Hollywood premieres since the show was in New Zealand and basically refused to negotiate for a new contract after the original expired. They chose to have Skye lead one show (futuristic, serious) with 2 sidekicks (more like a trio show than a lead with 2 sidekicks) and give Bruce Campbell the other show (historic, comedic). This led to Amarice vanishing after a few episodes and Gabrielle turning into Raphael (red fashion, sais) and taking on a big piece of the action as opposed to playing defense with a staff.
Conan the Adventurer is the early 90s cartoon, a pretty good albeit forgotten cartoon. ... Ah, I see the Conan tv series (from 97-98) was renamed Conan: The Adventurer. I remember watching it then (regrettably). It was just called Conan or Conan: The Series. The most memorable character from the show was the midget (same one from Seinfeld). If it was a parody where Conan was big & inept and the midget was ignored by everyone but he always got the killing blow on the warriors and dragons because they were all focused on the big muscular 'threat', it would have only been half bad.I just noticed on the Hulu page for Cleo 2525 it recommends you might also like Conan the Adventurer.Shows like Cleo and Black Scorpion are hard to judge because they were meant to be tongue-in-cheek.
The worst sci-fi series is ultimately probably a 1 season or less show. Starlost, Salvage 1, Woops, and the like are good examples of widely forgotten shows.
Small Wonder was a sitcom with a robot as a girl. I wouldn't call it sci-fi. If you do, you must call A.L.F. sci-fi along with Mork & Mindy.
The Powers of Matthew Star, bad? I remember it vaguely from Sci-fi reruns as just very mediocre standard early 80s fare. Fun fact: the show was delayed one season because the lead actor was almost killed during filming and needed time to recover from his injuries.
Earth: Final Conflict had great potential but it squandered it. Season 1 was pretty good, though a bit lacking in some areas. Season 2 did remedy the problem areas of Season 1, but it also threw out everything that made Season 1 good. Season 3 was the same as 2, Season 4 did actually improve the quality of the show. It felt more focused, better written (not well-written though). Then Season 5... is legendary. I think it is a strong contender for the worst single season of any sci-fi show that ran >1 season. Daan was still a great character and it's sad, Leni Parker should be one of the prominent names batted about in sci-fi discussions but her performance & character was overlooked by being on "that show" and EFC being only widely known for its casting purges by the Tribune commissars.
I was going to pop in and nominate the totally-unwatchable Starhunter, but then I came across something far more interesting...
Is it really a spoiler when it's so bad no sane person should be watching?
How/why would anyone put a planet between the Earth and Moon? I can think of better ways to spend my time, personally.
Is it really a spoiler when it's so bad no sane person should be watching?
How/why would anyone put a planet between the Earth and Moon? I can think of better ways to spend my time, personally.
Home Boys in Outer Space
Lexx
Cleopatra 2525
Those are truly the awful ones but there were plenty of mediocre shows I sampled and quickly abandoned--Surface, Invasion, Flash Forward, The Event, V 2.0, Hercules, Xena, Painkiller Jane, SGA, Smallville, post S1 Heroes etc
Lexx
Cleopatra 2525
Those are truly the awful ones but there were plenty of mediocre shows I sampled and quickly abandoned--Surface, Invasion, Flash Forward, The Event, V 2.0, Hercules, Xena, Painkiller Jane, SGA, Smallville, post S1 Heroes etc
After reading through this thread, all I got from it is that calling something 'worst' is very subjective. Every show has it's fans, no matter how 'bad' one might think it is.
If you want to list something as 'worst,' try listing something no one could ever say is good. Removing it from your personal opinion might actually make it worthwhile.
Personally, I don't see any series hated by everyone.
Except Black Scorpion.
If you want to list something as 'worst,' try listing something no one could ever say is good. Removing it from your personal opinion might actually make it worthwhile.
Personally, I don't see any series hated by everyone.
Except Black Scorpion.
I am sorry but you are just being contrary. New BSG is flat out on of the best TV shows ever made. Even if you don't like adult themes and drama the acting and production values by themselves would make it one of the finest science fiction shows ever made.
nBSG is overrated. It is really good for the first season and the first half of season two after that the show had too much boring filler, stupid love entanglements, angst, aimlessness, the Cylons became bores, the mythology was botched, the show became pretentious. The show somehow despite the problems in the later years managed to pull off an excellent series finale though.
So a good season and a half doesn't make a great series IMO.
So a good season and a half doesn't make a great series IMO.
I'd echo the assertion that the new Galactica is one of the best sci-fi series - in spite of its flaws in execution, there's still a lot about it that stands head and shoulders over much of the competition. Sure, the mythology is unsatisfying, and the series kind of unspools in the third season, but I enjoyed the first two seasons, the tail ends of the third season, and the fourth, by and large, so yeah, good show.
The old show, not so much. To suggest it was one of the best sci-fi series of the seventies does say more about its competition than it does about the actual show, frankly, but it was nice to look at and listen to, at the least.
I've never heard of Homeboys from Outer Space fans, and until this thread had no idea people actually liked Cleopatra 2525, but point taken.
And in the spirit of such:
Sure, the basic premise of Space:1999 has what I could charitably call 'dodgy' science (and perhaps more accurately term as 'completely unrelated to anything remotely resembling science'), and any sense of how exactly the Moon is moving through space - apparently shooting off at FTL speeds through the cosmos, slowing down to orbit around a star before whipping off again - does not have even the most slender connection to science.
...but it was still a sort of cool premise.
What?
You get to have your base on the moon series and your flying through space series. Take that cake and eat it, Gerry Anderson, you've earned it.
It's easy to think of it as a cut-rate Farscape even though it predated that show by a couple of years, but I'll admit to liking both episodes and entire arcs of this series - something about a show which throws a musical about the death of an ancient society as the universe is being devoured by one-armed robots just rubs me the right way, I guess.
I basically stopped watching after season two, and can only count a handful of season three and four episodes watched after that point, but eh, what the hell.
It's probably difficult to even remember the kind of hype this show opened with: A DS9 staffer was helming a brand new space opera series! It'd surely be cooler and more ambituous then the perpetually safe fare Star Trek had become!
This, of course, being exactly the same kind of pre-release hype Moore's Galactica had going for it. There was even a website showing the entire timeline for the Andromeda universe before the show's launch, showing the amount of time and effort that had clearly gone into making this program.
Andromeda never lived up to the pre-show hype - not even close - but the first season, for all the show's decidedly lousy production values and generally supbar alien work - the bug aliens looked like Halloween costumes, for god's sake - but it had some strong episodes ("Angel Dark Demon Bright" comes to mind) and was clearly seeding plot elements for subsequent development, much like another low-budget space opera series with a decidedly uneven first season - Babylon 5.
Of course, there were some behind the scenes problems, Robert Hewitt Wolfe left, and what was wrong with the show quickly overwhelmed what little had gone right with it.
The old show, not so much. To suggest it was one of the best sci-fi series of the seventies does say more about its competition than it does about the actual show, frankly, but it was nice to look at and listen to, at the least.
I've never heard of Homeboys from Outer Space fans, and until this thread had no idea people actually liked Cleopatra 2525, but point taken.
And in the spirit of such:
Sure, the basic premise of Space:1999 has what I could charitably call 'dodgy' science (and perhaps more accurately term as 'completely unrelated to anything remotely resembling science'), and any sense of how exactly the Moon is moving through space - apparently shooting off at FTL speeds through the cosmos, slowing down to orbit around a star before whipping off again - does not have even the most slender connection to science.
...but it was still a sort of cool premise.
What?
You get to have your base on the moon series and your flying through space series. Take that cake and eat it, Gerry Anderson, you've earned it.
At its worst - which is frequent enough -Lexx is easily the worst sci-fi series I've seen. But... I don't know. It's so aggressively, idiosyncratically weird in its surreal sort of way I kept watching.
It's easy to think of it as a cut-rate Farscape even though it predated that show by a couple of years, but I'll admit to liking both episodes and entire arcs of this series - something about a show which throws a musical about the death of an ancient society as the universe is being devoured by one-armed robots just rubs me the right way, I guess.
I basically stopped watching after season two, and can only count a handful of season three and four episodes watched after that point, but eh, what the hell.
It's probably difficult to even remember the kind of hype this show opened with: A DS9 staffer was helming a brand new space opera series! It'd surely be cooler and more ambituous then the perpetually safe fare Star Trek had become!
This, of course, being exactly the same kind of pre-release hype Moore's Galactica had going for it. There was even a website showing the entire timeline for the Andromeda universe before the show's launch, showing the amount of time and effort that had clearly gone into making this program.
Andromeda never lived up to the pre-show hype - not even close - but the first season, for all the show's decidedly lousy production values and generally supbar alien work - the bug aliens looked like Halloween costumes, for god's sake - but it had some strong episodes ("Angel Dark Demon Bright" comes to mind) and was clearly seeding plot elements for subsequent development, much like another low-budget space opera series with a decidedly uneven first season - Babylon 5.
Of course, there were some behind the scenes problems, Robert Hewitt Wolfe left, and what was wrong with the show quickly overwhelmed what little had gone right with it.
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Outside of Colicos and Greene, BSG had a cast of good-looking people without notable acting talent. It was dreadfully, pathetically thought out and written. It was pretty, due to the efforts of good artists who had no input at all, of course, into casting or writing. As a result it's a visually attractive, vapid and awful TV series. There's no mystery at all as to how it might wind up on a reasonable person's list of Worst SF Series.
Of course, if one encounters it for the first time at the age of eight or nine one might develop a fondness for it.
Of course, if one encounters it for the first time at the age of eight or nine one might develop a fondness for it.
Well it's made very clear in the first season that it's all going according to some kind of cosmic level plan and that some kind of "cosmic intelligence" is behind it all.
Which I had totally not caught on to, or had forgotten when I watched it as a kid, but was surprised at when I watched them as an adult. So part of the show where you would say "But realistically...." just insert vast cosmic intelligence to explain it away. At least I do, and it works surprisingly well.
Is it still a bit dodgy? Sure. But IIRC nuBSG had a similar "God did it" or "Part of something larger than your ability to understand" vibe (not to mention 3 or at least 2 planet Earths that looked exactly alike). I think I can cut Space:1999 a little slack in that department.
Plus the model work, alien worlds and sense of space being really vast and mysterious were all very well done. Those aspects of the show made a bigger impact on me than Trek's.
What about the various "Knight Rider" spinoffs?
They did the two planet Earths on original BSG as well.
Well it's made very clear in the first season that it's all going according to some kind of cosmic level plan and that some kind of "cosmic intelligence" is behind it all.
Which I had totally not caught on to, or had forgotten when I watched it as a kid, but was surprised at when I watched them as an adult. So part of the show where you would say "But realistically...." just insert vast cosmic intelligence to explain it away. At least I do, and it works surprisingly well.
Is it still a bit dodgy? Sure. But IIRC nuBSG had a similar "God did it" or "Part of something larger than your ability to understand" vibe (not to mention 3 or at least 2 planet Earths that looked exactly alike). I think I can cut Space:1999 a little slack in that department.
Plus the model work, alien worlds and sense of space being really vast and mysterious were all very well done. Those aspects of the show made a bigger impact on me than Trek's.
There were some mumblings about alien signals from Meta, but I don't recall that being picked up again beyond the pilot episode (it's been a while, granted).
Oh totally. Modelwork is obviously one of Gerry Anderson's strong points (from Thunderbirds to UFO), but I've always been especially fond of Space:1999, from the eagles to Moonbase Alpha. And those interiors! It was as the future ought to look.
LEXX was a show that I always wanted to like more than I did. On paper, it sounded right up my alley: quirky, irreverent, idiosyncratic. But the execution was off somehow. It never quite worked for me.
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