Firefly of course. Also, if I had the power I would erase Stargate Universe from existence, and have had Stargate Atlantis continue on.
MarsProbe said:
Stargate Universe...the only SF show that was currently around that was at least trying to capture that good old sense of adventure and exploration.
It was a piss-poor kind of trying. I for one didn't see much exploring, and there was very little external conflict. We had the tall blue aliens that were pretty much the space equivalent of a bad stalker, the brown aliens that almost were enemies but then were good though don't know if it was a sincere good, and then the drone machine things. The Lucian Alliance thing was external, but since it was isolated to the ship, it was really internal after the initial gate onto the ship.
What I'm getting at is that there were two seasons, but there was no substantial external conflict. We know nothing about those blue aliens, the brown ones, and barely anything about the drone machine things. There wasn't even any good info about the ship. The only thing there was fleshing out of was the characters, but there was way too much of it and it was mostly angsty soap opera drama which also involved the most uninteresting and bland lesbian relationship ever, and it didn't even belong because it killed too much time that could have been used to push the actual show forward.
SG-1 and Atlantis worked because the characterization and interaction was kept to the proper limits, and for most episodes, didn't take over the majority of the episodes. There was always some form of arch enemy and we actually learned about each one. Plus, there was almost always some new planet or thing to explore.
SGU was basically an awful Star Trek: Voyager rip off, except in SGU the characters weren't exactly actively trying to get home. In Voyager, there was always at least one major external conflict and/or enemy per season, sometimes two or more, and we learned about each one, each alien race's inner workings. The problems I believe SGU had were, for one horrible writers, and that the premise of the show just doesn't work for the current 12 to 13 episode season set up that most hour long programs get these days, for at least two seasons. There just isn't enough space in the season to mess around with stupid and unimportant things like SGU did. It only had silly fleshed out characters, and that is it. There wasn't enough and interaction with proper sci-fi related things, like space, worlds, aliens, and the ship itself. It pisses me off that they canceled Atlantis for that SGU crap.
SGU didn't have the pacing needed to get the third season where they would be given 20 or more episodes a season. To get to that, they would have had to do the proper stuffing of the first two seasons with tons of interesting, barely main character related stuff, and flesh out and explain at least half or more of it, then when they got to a season with more than 13 episodes, they could slow down and move at a more relaxed pace. SGU had a pacing where it was like the writers thought they had at least 30 episodes in a season.
I just hope SyFy(changes back to Sci-Fi) learns what it did wrong with the show and does much better next time. Though I doubt that they did, because they did blame the shows failure on that the show was aired on a "bad night". No, SyFy, no, you alienated the vast majority of the Stargate fan base by making a horrible spin-off.