Time Names Battlestar Galactica Show Of The Year

szyzyg writes "Time Magazine's Television Critic James Poniewozik has put Battlestar Galactica at the top of his list of the Best TV Shows from 2005. His summary starts off 'Most of you probably think this entry has got to be a joke. The rest of you have actually watched the show.'"

Comments

And most importantly...

[Tackhead]

> Adapted from a cheesy '70s Star Wars clone of the same name, Galactica (returning in January) is a ripping sci-fi allegory of the war on terror, complete with religious fundamentalists (here, genocidal robots called Cylons), sleeper cells, civil-liberties crackdowns and even a prisoner-torture scandal.

...and most importantly, instead of being guys in clunky robot suits who sound like they're talking through fans, many of the Cylons are teh hawtness. Who is Number One? She is Number Six, and she beats Seven of Nine hands-down.

Attention authors of lesbian slash fanfic, that is not an invitation to depict... or is it?

Re:And most importantly...

[MSG]

aggressive "sex sells" nature of the character makes me resent the makers for attempting to influence me in such a base way

They're not trying to influence you. The character is manipulating humans, particularly Baltar, and using their human instincts to do it. You should feel like it's manipulation, because it is. It just doesn't happen to be directed at you.

The whole human-form cylons thing rankles me, too

You don't "get" the show, then. It's not a cost-saving measure. It's the essence of the show. The cylons are biological. They think and breath and live. They profess a belief in a God that gives them life, and that they are our successors. Are they right? Do they even really believe that? As characters, it's those questions that give them depth in intrigue.

the camera would zoom in on their face

That does bother a lot of people, but as far as I can tell, the crew is trying to imitate the way real humans view the world. The camera focuses narrowly when a human watching would feel tense, because that's what a human does. The camera shakes and darts, because that's what our eyes do. You're not accustomed to seeing a camera do it, and it may never catch on as a technique (many will appreciate that), but it's interesting to see it done, when you understand what's happening.

A pleasant suprise

[ChowRiit]

This is definately a pleasant suprise - I personally think that Battlestar Galactica was remade with class, care and just the right ammount of respect. The show neither attempted to please everyone like so many do (then fall on their faces as bland clones), nor did it attempt to remain 100% true to the original and thus dated itself. It was a well deserved award, for a good peice of science fiction.

Re:Maybe now they'll get more than 10 episodes/sea

[Wyatt Earp]

Uh...Season 2 has 20 episodes. They started on the second season so soon after 1 that there needed to be a break to catch up.

Lost?

[antdude]

Where's Lost? That's another great show! :(

Re:Lost?

[Dadoo]

Where's Lost? That's another great show!

Umm, yeah, whatever.

I watched every episode in the first season, where they built up mystery upon mystery upon mystery. That's fine, but at some point, you have to solve the mystery. I figured they'd answer most of the questions in the season finale, but no, they just made up more questions. At this point, we still don't have any clue what's going on - whether the doctor is dreaming the whole thing, or they're subjects of an experiment, or they're actually lost on a tropical island.

Personally, I think the writers don't have a clue, either. They probably only wrote enough for the first season and they didn't expect the show to become popular. When it was very popular, they got caught off-guard and now they're scrambling to keep up.

$6 million man

[rodentia]

I wonder when the six million dollar man remake comes out?

We can rebuild him.

Love the show, no rewatchability

[rwhamann]

I love the show and catch every episode, but many episodes just don't stand up for a second viewing. Not all of them - 33 and Water I must have watched 5 times the first week after I saw them the first time. Others - eehhhh, not so much.

Someone else mentioned Simpsons. The first season, my roommates and I recorded every episode. As soon as the episode finshed, we would rewind it and watch it again. We must have watched "The Babysitter Bandit" episode 4 times that night.

No show since has had that level of rewatchability, and I doubt another one will.

THAT

[Mad Ogre]

That is what they should have said about "Firefly".

Re:Another Note About The List...

[Scrameustache]

It's about risk taking. The major networks simply aren't willing to take risks.

The guy that OK'd Lost's very expensive pilot episode was sacked for it.
And then the network made a fortune. As far as I know, they didn't hire him back.

Re:Could you say that again?

[Mr_Huber]

No, it is not that the acting pre-seventies was universally piss-poor, but the style of acting was different. Dramatical tastes differ for different periods.

In the thirties and forties, acting styles seem to have been more heavily influenced by stage acting and being able to project emotions and actions broadly enough for those in the back rows to relate. The epics of the fifties seemed to require a larger than life stance to live up to the broad material. In the sixties and seventies, the cultural revolutions playing out in society as a whole seem to have seeped into both scripts and acting. Scripts ceased to focus on epics and refocused on individual struggles and personal drama ("I *am* big. It's the *pictures* that got small." - a perfect lament for the death of epics.). Such scripts required a more natural acting style. The eighties brought us action heroes, with their odd mix of broad and natural styles capped with one liners. The nineties brought us blue screen acting, trying to combine any of the above styles whilst playing to nothing.

To return to our topic, Battlestar Galactica is trying very hard to stay with the modern, naturalistic style while incorporating a notion of naturalistic production. The idea for the look of the show is a war documentary. The acting style is as natural as possible and the camera movements are, by and large, an attempt to replicate the feel of a handheld or shoulder mounted camera. Effects shots seek to replicate Gulf War footage and acting tries to replicate human emotional response under massive pressure. For some, this succeeds admirably, feeding the show's atmosphere. For others, it just looks like bad camera work to hide the lack of a budget and mopey, neurotic characters portrayed by actors who run the gamut of emotions from A to B, as Miss Parker would say.

Re:Umm, Stargate?

[Dadoo]

Personally, Stargate beats BSG anyday.

Not the last season, that's for sure. I don't know what they're trying to do, introducing another "invincible enemy", at this point.

Come on, Stargate writers, it's time to reveal the stargate to the public. All the social, political, and economic fallout would give you at least another two seasons' worth of material. Then, re-visit a bunch of the planets we've been to before and let's see if SG-1 made things better. (What happened to O'Neil's child, for instance?)

Anyway, I'm afraid this might be the last season for SG-1, and that would be disappointing.

Re:Another Note About The List...

[ajayrockrock]

The guy that OK'd Lost's very expensive pilot episode was sacked for it.
And then the network made a fortune. As far as I know, they didn't hire him back.

You're talking about Lloyd Braun. From the bio: "During his tenure with the ABC Entertainment Television Group, Braun initiated and oversaw the development of such successful programs as "Alias", "Lost", "Desperate Housewives", "Grey's Anatomy", "Extreme Makeover", "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" and "Boston Legal".

ABC fired him before his shows were aired and put the network in the #1 slot. He's now at Yahoo.

--Ajay