So, WhatCulture did a video that I caught on 9 shows that everyone should watch. Except most of them just aren’t worth watching, or weren’t back in the day. So here’s my quick look at all of their 9 shows and why even though I saw most of them, I either dropped them or didn’t care when they got canned. There are very few exceptions to this rule.

9. The Expanse.

How is this underrated? It’s the modern show that everyone talks about. I really hate WhatCulture because they tend to throw on things they personally like onto lists they simply do not belong on. That said, I very much do like The Expanse, both the books and the TV show, although I will admit that I liked them more before all of the alien stuff, back when it was a show about Earth, Mars and the belt trying to survive together. It’s one of the few places where fantasy politics is really done well. Mostly, as we’ll see as we get farther into the list, I really hate when shows try to get preachy. This is a really good show though and I highly recommend people watch it, it’s just not remotely underrated.

8. Lost in Space.

This is a show that I wrote a pretty positive review of, back in the old days of the blog. It is not perfect but the two seasons we’ve gotten so far are definitely worth a watch. Unfortunately, there is a tinge of political commentary here that I absolutely detest. If I wanted real-world politics, I’d go watch the news. The whole point of science fiction and fantasy is to escape from that. I also think the character of Dr. Smith is absurd to the point of being a caricature. If she had a mustache, she’d be twirling it. That said though, when they get to actual in-universe storytelling, it’s usually well done, the effects are good and most of the actors are doing pretty well in their roles. If you’ve got nothing better to do, catch it. You’ll be glad you did.

7. Dollhouse.

I think I got through 4-5 episodes of this before I gave up, which is a shame because I was a big fan of shows like Buffy and Angel. The problem that I had with Dollhouse was that every episode was essentially stand-alone. Every week, Echo got reset, you got a mostly new character and that character was, if you thought about it, a slave to the system. Really, Echo was a very basic character and it was difficult to form any kind of connection to her. I like Eliza Dushku in general, I just didn’t care about her character here and that’s why we took an early out. The ratings were terrible so we clearly weren’t the only ones who thought so. They got a little better toward the end but it wasn’t enough to save this show from cancellation. It could have been better. It should have been better. It was clear all along that Joss Whedon didn’t really want to be doing TV anymore. This was never a show that I could get into.

6. Killjoys.

I started off really liking this one, alongside its sister-show Dark Matter. Truth be told, I liked Dark Matter more, but both really went down the tubes as time went on. The problem with Syfy is that no show ever survives beyond 5 seasons. Their system is set up that way. If they renew for a sixth season, they have to renegotiate the contracts with the actors. It’s why everything, no matter how popular, dies after the fifth season airs. Yet the problem I had with this one came after they started dealing with aliens and other dimensions. I had zero interest in that. It was reasonably fun to watch Dutch, John and D’avin running around collecting bounties. It would have made a good episodic series with season-long arcs. Unfortunately, they decided to go for a mythology and that mythology simply didn’t keep my interest. I suppose the Hullen might have been an interesting foil  but the whole thing went over the line into science fantasy and that’s not what I want to watch. I did end up watching the whole thing but it fell farther and farther down my “must watch” list until by the end of the last season, I think we had to force ourselves to get through the last half of the season. It just wasn’t good by then.

By the same token, Dark Matter, even though it isn’t on this list, it had lost a lot of the things that the first season had made good. Once you lose the mystery behind the crew, there’s little to keep anyone interested, plus the whole magic drive system, it was a problem from the beginning and I don’t think any of the writers knew what to do with it. When it was finally cancelled following season 3, it was a good thing.

5. Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Here, yet again, is a show that started out amazing and then, by the second season, it had left the reservation. The problem with all Terminator properties, inherently, after T2 is that they are absolutely unnecessary. Just like anything past Aliens doesn’t need to exist. Those movies provided a perfect ending to the franchises and anything else is just a grab for money. I hate that. While TSSC started off good, and I think Lena Headey was excellent as Sarah Connor, there is really nothing here that we haven’t already seen before and better. The whole thing with Cameron, the Terminator, is that Arnold did all of that in the second movie. He went through the journey of self-realization, just as she did, but we didn’t have to watch him week after week after week dealing with learning how to be human. It was just unnecessary. It started off great. Then it wasn’t. That’s why it got cancelled.

4. Final Space.

This is the only show on the list that I never watched and really don’t have any interest in seeing. Then again, I’m not a fan of things like Simpsons, Futurama or South Park. I stopped paying attention to the Simpsons back in the second or third seasons, which is about as far as I got into South Park. Zero interest. I just don’t care for comedies trying to make social commentary. Hard pass on this one.

3. Space: Above and Beyond.

Here’s another one I got a couple of episodes into and gave up. There’s a reason people call it Space: Abort and Be Gone. Written by Glen Morgan and James Wong, who were some of the best writers in early X-Files, this just didn’t meet my expectations. In later years, I did go back and watch all 23 episodes and it didn’t change my opinion any. S:A&B really felt like a pile of tropes thrown into a blender. There was really nothing new here, which I think was the biggest problem of a lot of shows that came out around the same time. It was just “space is cool, let’s make a show about it,” but they never really had more than that to offer. It’s why TVTropes has such a large writeup on the show. There’s nothing there that we haven’t seen before.

2. Almost Human.

Once again, good premise, it started off good, but by the time it got a couple of episodes in, I could see that it wasn’t going to go anywhere interesting. Again, love Karl Urban but this was a show that really played it safe and because they didn’t want to spend much money on it, the futuristic stuff only came into play when they absolutely needed it. Otherwise, it was a buddy cop show and as they should have learned through things like Holmes & Yoyo, that doesn’t really keep an audience. It was a show that could have and should have been better, and maybe if it hadn’t been on Fox, it would have been, but we can only look at the shows we actually get. Still, I caught the whole thing, but I wasn’t at all broken up by the news it wouldn’t be returning. It just wasn’t good enough in the end.

1. Firefly.

I did an in-depth look at the mess that was Firefly way back when. While that look is long gone now, the failures of Firefly remain. It’s really just a western in space, done very poorly. Maybe they found some leftover western gear on the back lot and ran with it as a cost-cutting measure, I don’t know, but I never liked it. I tried to watch the whole thing twice, once in air order and the other in “recommended order” and neither was any good IMO. The setting was absurd. Reality doesn’t work that way. The Verse had five main sequence stars, around which orbit seven protostars, seven gas giants, three separate asteroid belts, seventy-five planets, and one hundred forty-nine moons. The overwhelming majority of the planets were habitable. That’s ridiculous. That alone puts Firefly in the realm of sci-fantasy. As much as I love Nathan Fillion, and I watch just about everything he’s in, the show just never resonated with me at all. I never cared for any of the characters, the stories were shallow and ridiculous, I never once felt connected to the plot and even Serenity, the movie, was awful. The Reapers are made to appeal to the same people who think the Borg are scary. They are not. So no, two thumbs down. You might like it. I didn’t. My review, my opinion. Deal with it.