Boston.com has a feature on the fifty best Sci-Fi shows of all time, and of course, I've got to comment.
I was a big fan of The Greatest American Hero while it was out - you know, the show about the teacher who's given a supersuit that grants him powers and then loses the all-important instructions? I loved that show.
I also liked Alien Nation a lot. The premise: a huge colony ship, populated by a race of escaped slaves, lands in Los Angeles. The 'Newcomers' are accepted into human society, although there is a lot of prejudice. They are smarter and stronger than humans, but they get drunk on spoiled milk, and salt water is like hydrocloric acid to them. The show focused on George Fransisco, who becomes a police officer and is paired with a man who overcomes his xenophobia. It played out like a cop show, but in a sci-fi world. Good show.
Quantum Leap is another show I loved. It reminded me a bit of "Voyagers" in that the protagonists leaped into different periods in history, although Quantum Leap's Dr. Sam Beckett was limited to leaping within his own lifetime. The show also included Dean Stockwell, which was also a plus.
Anyone remember 'V'? Looking back, the special effects are laughable, but I remember loving the show. It's a good old alien invasion - the aliens want to steal the planet's resources. But the lizardlike aliens disguise themselves as humanlike. I remember that the human rebels' main goal was to expose the lizard-faces rather than exposing their evil goals. Seems odd.
Everyone is raving about Firefly right now, due to the Serenity movie, but I could never get into the show. I guess the space-western thing just doesn't do it for me. You can move the New Englander to the Western setting, but you can't make the New Englander like Westerns.
Xena is a show I only ever watched because I was forced to. And I was forced to in a way few people are: it was my job. I worked at the FOX affiliate in Hartford and broadcast the stupid thing. No, I don't like Xena. But apparently some astronomers do - scientists recently named the 10th planet 'Xena', and named its moon 'Gabrielle'.
It's nice to see that Lost made eleventh place, but I'm a bit sad that The 4400 didn't make the list.
Battlestar Galactica is one of my favorite shows, and I think it's awesome that it made #2 on the list, despite the tendency of some to refer to the show as GiNO. They've really done a lot of excellent things with the show, and I'm very much looking forward to its comeback from its mid-season hiatus.
The only Star Trek I've ever been a huge fan of was Next Generation. I got a bit into Deep Space Nine at one point, but never as much. I might have gotten interested in Voyager, but what really ruined it was when they took the Borg, which was Star Trek's biggest baddest most undefeatable enemy, and turned them into wusses. All the crew had to do to beat them in Voyager was invert the polarity on the warp coil or reconfigure the nassels to emit a inverse tachyon field. Meh.
And where the frell is Farscape??
The term "Sci-fi" was originally coined in 1954 by Forrest J. Ackerman (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-fi), who thought it was a Good Thing. To most professional writers and fans, however, "Sci-fi" is synonymous with "drek" (if you don't speak Yiddish, look at http://pass.to/glossary/#letd). So, that pretty much includes 90% of everything on television.
That said, there has been some pretty good stuff on the air over the years. I don't expect, however, that you're ever going to get any two people to agree on what's good and what's bad, though.