Plinglebob said:
I've heard of Andromeda before, but only the name. How does it stand in tone compared to other Sci-Fi as I'm looking for something new to watch now I've finished Quantum Leap.
*jumping in*
Andromeda is probably my all-time favorite SF show, so I'm quite biased, but I think it's excellent. So long as you keep one rule in mind: Beware of everything after the second season. Kevin Sorbo canned executive producer/writer/developer Robert Hewitt Wolfe (who you might recognize from Star Trek), and the show went down the toilet.
I found this excellent summary elsewhere on the net: "Andromeda star Kevin Sorbo, who's an idiot, demanded that Executive Producer and head writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe be fired. Wolfe is also the developer of the show. Wolfe was the man who turned Gene Roddenberry's Arby's napkin scribbles into a television series. To quote Sorbo: "Robert is a genius, but he was writing stories too complex and too complicated for the rest of us to follow." In other words, the head writer and man responsible for getting the show on the air and making it the "Highest Rated syndicated action show" as it was advertised, is now suddenly wrong. To put it in more words, Wolfe was writing stories that viewers could follow but Kevin Sorbo couldn't, and he had him fired. Needless to say, after the removal of Wolfe, the program received "record lows" in the ratings. Or to quote Media analyst Marc Berman: "The ongoing erosion of sophomore Andromeda this season was the biggest surprise of the first-run weekly hours." Well, it wasn't a surprise to all the upset fans."
I loved the early show, though, and the complex relationships between the characters as they followed, for their own reasons, the mission of a man who had been stuck in time for 300 years to restore the galaxy's lost order and government. I would put up the episode "Angel Dark, Demon Bright" against just about anybody else's good SF, so when Andromeda is good, it's very very good. Just... avoid the later stuff.