Feels exactly like Stargate formula with similar issues (no surprise, with Jo Mallozzi and Paul Mullie). Not a bad thing as is being a huge Stargate fan. Quite the opposite actually, it feels kinda like "home", familiar so to say, although the cast is completely different and there's no Stargate anywhere whatsoever.
Now, this is not SG by a long shot BUT it shares some of the longest writers/exec producers of SG which is a good thing.
Personally, I couldn't be happier about Jo making a new SciFi show in space. It may or may not work out but so far, and we're just 3 eps in now, I genuinely enjoyed it. It doesn't reinvent the wheel and I see issues (clichés) but is by far not the worst effort of a new show I've seen the past seasons (DIG/American Odysee) and has room for a lot of exploration and I do trust Jo to be at least able to make this a greatly enjoyable show given time. Question is, if he is given the time he needs.
Considering the low acceptance of "SciFi" these days I won't hold my breath no matter the journey in S1 but we'll see.
I have been watching the big bang Theory ever since it first aired. Being an IT student at the time, the uncomfortable social situations and nerdy jokes spoke to me. However, much has changed throughout the seasons, more about that later.
We start out with our four nerdy main characters. There is the recognizable fact of the three people with higher degrees (PHD holding Sheldon, Leonard and Raj) who make fun and feel themselves better than "simple" engineer Howard. There is the desperate search for love coming from both Howard and Raj, and the differentiation between the confident yet single Howard and the timid, uncertain just-as-single Raj. Sheldon is the one who has no sense of what's going on around him, and is only interested in his own world. Leonard is the humble cute guy who manages to get a date from time to time, an inspiration to Howard and Raj, although his on/off fling with Leslie gives us the impression that he isn't really that successful after all.
Then we have the obvious babe, Penny, the complete opposite of our four nerds. She makes something stir in all three of them, but follows the cliché of going out with the "wrong" men, being dumb, and ignoring their advances.
Even though these are all cliche’s, the inside jokes and the disarming clumsiness of the four guys made the first seasons well worth watching. Gradually however, as the show became more popular, the writers started to abandon what once made it so.
With the introduction of Bernadette and Amy the female characters are drastically expanded, but they don't add any real value to the show. Bernadette is the caricature of Howards mother, where as Amy is an attempt to make Sheldon look more human. At the same time, we go from a show with it's own flair to a one-in-a-dozen sitcom. The laughing tape went from being an accessory to being the main engine of the show. The characters became aware they were going to make a pun and started smiling like idiots before they said it, and laughing like people high on weed after someone made it. The longer this series continues, the more painful it becomes to watch. The lines that are supposed to be jokes are simply not funny. The acting and stereotyping are more bearable in a highschool play. And, as stated in another review made before this one, the show changes from laughing with the characters to laughing at the characters. From a nerdy show to a show about nerds.
Conclusion: if you're looking for some nerdy fun, watch the first three or four seasons. After that, it gets the same illness so many American shows suffer from, namely that it becomes a cash cow for the producers and starts a long, painfully slow, continuously prolonged process of dying a silent dead.They never seem to know when to end something great instead of going on to make it something mediocre.
This show absolutely brilliant. Not only do we get to see the difficult decisions an secretary of state has to make, we can understand and sympathize on an emotional level that not many tv shows have the choices that Elizabeth McCord (played by a phenomenal Téa Leoni) has to make between doing what is the best thing for her country, and what is the right thing to do....
I especially like the fact that this is not just a tv show about the secretary of state, even though Téa Leoni is without a doubt the star that makes this tv show better by a factor of 10. No, its the supporting cast around her that makes this one of the better political drama tv shows i have seen in years. I can definitely see some love chemistry between Téa Leoni and Tim Daly (the husband Henry McCord). And the characters of the staff of from secretary are definitely being more developed over each episode.
This is absolutely one of those shows you need to keep an eye on. It has an intelligent script, an awesome cast, and a subject that is very interesting seeing that there is always something going on in the world, and the USA is always poking its nose where it (more often than not) does not belong....
