In Defense
A few weeks ago, the trades shipped issues with hard black covers bearing critical blurbs praising an unnamed TV show. The gist:
"One of the best shows on TV. … [T]he toughest smartest show on television …" — Rolling Stone"… one of the best shows on television …" — The New York Times
"… much much better than you can possiby imagine …" — Salon.com
"… one of the most original and provocative programs on television …" — Newsday
And so on in the same vein. The hard covers contained a perforated circle in the middle, behind which was an Emmy consideration DVD. I was curious as to which show could draw such praise from so many critics and have its title go unmentioned anywhere in the ad. I punched open the cardboard and pulled out the contents, which turned out to be a disc with three complete "Battlestar Galactica" episodes and a few selected scenes.
My knee-jerk response was one of mild disappointment, which was exactly what the nameless ad had been so desperately trying to avoid. The marketing department behind "Battlestar Galatica" surely knows this: You can't just go spring a sci-fi show on somebody, especially if you're trolling for mainstream awards. No, you have to slip it in the back door, make people read the critical acclaim before opening the box. And that's a shame.
It's a shame for many reasons, because after viewing the first season of "Battlestar Galactica," I can tell you honestly that it's an amazing show, full of drama and pain and heartbreak and sex and violence and betrayal and death and death and death and everything you could want in a drama. And it happens to be set in outer space. This reborn version of the 1978 series has nothing in common with the original except its name. I saw a few episodes of the original when I was younger, and even back then I knew it was campy, cheesy, and unbelievably stupid. (Now that I'm older, I can also see how it was really, really gay: Men with feathered hair who wear capes and pilot phallic spaceships into long metal tubes all day. I mean, come on.) But this reimagining of the show is infinitely superior to the first, so much so that it's impossible to even compare the two. The first doesn't even exist, as far as I'm concerned. Think of the creative leap between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and multiply it by something like 19 and you'll begin to understand how much better the new "Battlestar Galactica" is compared with the old one.
But I was reluctant to check out the show at first. For starters, it's an original production from Sci Fi Channel, and their raison d'être seems to be creating and airing some truly godawful programming. Their made-for-TV movies are a joke in everything from effects to casting to story, and their original shows tend to err on the side of alienating anyone who wants a sharp drama in favor of people who prefer cold facts and random scientific-sounding jargon. I therefore figured that "Battlestar Galactica" would surely fall into the latter camp. I've found myself writing off a lot of sci-fi sight unseen — I'm almost reluctant to do all this talking about sci-fi, period — but that's a dangerous habit to have.
Every genre has its successes and its failures, and to wall yourself off from a certain type of film because of prejudice toward the genre just doesn't make sense. A lot of dramas suck. A lot of action movies suck. A lot of romantic comedies suck. I'll save us all a lot of time: A lot of movies just plain suck. But it would be foolish to avoid all films because some of them were of low quality. No film is automatically good or bad by virtue of its genre. That's like saying "All Westerns suck" or "All World War II films are great," and those are the kind of broad, sweeping statements best left to wayward undergrads, and I think we're all past that.
So I gave "Battlestar Galactica" a chance, and discovered a truly great show. It's a tightly woven, compelling drama about what it means to live in a free society and the importance of justice in the presence of chaos; the sci-fi setting is the backdrop, not the focus. It's shot in a hand-held, documentary style, and the sets have a wonderful lived-in feel, as if the characters actually inhabit that fictional universe, as opposed to the clinically sterile feel of better known but vastly inferior shows. It's already been proven that an honest, character-driven drama set in space can work. "Battlestar Galactica" is another entry in that field, and it would be unfortunate if people avoided it just because of its genre.
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