no Enterprise, just a car. Now imagine it with no alien worlds, just random backlot towns. Now imagine the Magnificent Seven of the original Trek replaced by just two wooden actors who were allegedly in love, yet shared no chemistry whatsoever, and an early sort of tumbledown version of Mister Data. There you have Logan’s Run, a show with not a damn thing to recommend it. Allegedly a spinoff of the 1975 movie of the same name (Which itself was pretty crappy, but at least had Michael York and a mostly-naked Jenny Argutter), the series actually changed the ending of the movie so they could justify the lame-ass premise of the show. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run#TV
4) Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda (2000-’05) This show actually had a lot of promise in the first season. Allegedly based on notes Roddenberry jotted down in between orgies in the ‘70s, the show was actually created out of whole cloth by Robert Hewett Wolfe, who evidently approached Majel Barett about slapping Gene’s name on his concept so he could actually sell the damn thing. While low-budget and clearly derivative of the basic concept of Trek, the show had an apocalyptic outlook and was all about trying to rebuild civilization. Furthermore, for the first season and a half, the show managed pretty consistently to be unpredictable: while never great, it was interesting if simply because it never went where you expected it to, and it was clearly building to a huge climax. Alas, halfway through the second season, Kevin Sorbo (the star) got Wolfe jettisoned from the show. From that point on – literally episode 13 of season 2 – the show became an incoherent, unwatchable piece of crap that was so self-righteous as to make Trek itself say, “Damn, but you’re preachy!” Never quite able to decide on a format – one season they were establishing a new government, the next they were on the run from the government, one season they were mostly planetbound, sometimes the ship was mostly empty, sometimes it had a crew of thousands who never seemed to have anything to do – the entire thing collapsed in on itself and ultimately became yet another SF show that no one gives a damn about. Which is maddening because for a little while there, it really looked like it was going to be something great. Inexplicably, the damn thing ran for FIVE years! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Roddenberry%27s_Andromeda After the series ended, Robert Hewett Wolfe wrote a one-act play about where *his* story was headed before it got shanghaied, and it’s actually pretty good. Had he been able to pull it off, it would have made Babylon 5 look like a minor family tiff by comparison. You can read that here http://web.archive.org/web/20060621045350/http://rhwolfe.com/Coda/Androm...
3) Space: Above and Beyond (1995/96) What do you get when a couple hotshot writer/producers from The X-Files decide they want to go solo and make their own show? You get Space: Above and Beyond, a series so ensconced in feculence and yet so expensive that it made people forget all about how Galactica had bled money in the seventies. The budget was between two and three million dollars per episode, and yet the story they chose to tell was about some twenty-first century fightin’ leatherneck infantry who inexplicably were also fighter pilots in a war against the amazingly boring “Chig” aliens. Uncompelling characters uncompellingly told, boasting of a complex backstory that was, nonetheless really dull, the show was all tease and no payoff. For instance, in one episode the Marines are given leave on a “pleasure ship.” Coolio comes in to inform the Marines about the nature of the vessel – that it is beyond the law, that it is beyond morality, that it can sate all their desires both subtle and gross, that they are welcome to avail themselves of all the sins and releases imaginable to man. Sounds pretty wild, right? And yet the inside of the pleasure ship seems to consist only of a country bar and one hooker. The whole damn show was like that. And as usual there’s just something irritating about characters who are ostensibly in the military, and yet behave in no way like anyone in any military ever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_Above_And_Beyond
2 )Sliders (1995-1999) The basic concept was brilliant: a handful of people have traveled to a parallel earth – same time and place, different history – and have gotten lost. They’re trying to find their way back to their own version of Earth, en rout meeting strange variations of themselves and worlds
>>3) The Starlost - So bad even its creator disowned it.<<
Eh. Harlan disowns a lot of stuff. He's made fun of "The Oscar" and his story about the ants to me on at least one occasion.
>>>4) Dollhouse - Whedon obviously got ahold of the brown acid.<<<
I hated the first six episodes of it, but grew to really like it, even if the conclusion was a bit rushed.
>>>5) Star Trek: Enterprise - The less said about this, the better.<<
Never saw it. Never felt the need, though a few people occasionally made half-hearted attempts to get me to do so. I kind of drifted away from Trek in between the 1st and 2nd seasons of Voyager, I think...
I'm gonna' throw "Space Precinct" on here as an honorable mention.
The Artist Formerly Known As Republibot 3.0