Continuing the previous two day's posts, here are positions four thru two on my Top Ten Sci Fi Shows of All Time, in response to the Newsarama list and the Fusion Patrol Podcast.
4: Land of the Lost - It's very easy to dismiss this show simply because it was saturday-morning "KidVid." Even if you look past that, there's the campy over-broad acting and the jerky stop-motion dinosaur action and grainy blue screen chromakey compositing. But somebody smuggled some adults into the writers' room (like "Star Trek" veterans David Gerrold, D.C. Fontana, Norman Spinrad, Walter Koenig, and Theodore Sturgeon, as well as noted SF literature authors Larry Niven and Ben Bova). The results in terms of storytelling were considerably above what should have been expected.
NBC probably would have been happy with any random stream of clips depicting third-rate actors being terrorized by dinosaurs, anything to put between the commercials for Sugar Smacks and GI Joe's with the kung-fu grip. But, for the first two seasons anyway, the producers trusted that pre-teen kids would tune in and actually REMEMBER what they learned in previous weeks about the rules and physics of the Land of the Lost. If you didn't remember that pylons control the weather, you might be lost a few weeks later when were looking at the pylon that controls gravity. This show gives kids a lot more credit than do modern offerings like, say, SpongeBob.
Special effects technology of the day was pushed past the breaking point, and to this day, I find it jarring to go back and forth between the videotape of the actors, and the stop motion film of the dinosaurs, but if the story is actually making you think a little bit, maybe those things aren't quite as noticeable. Every answer revealed about the Land of the Lost led to another question, not the least of which is why Holly didn't grow completely out of her costume after the first season. To my knowledge, there was no pylon that opened a doorway to K-mart.
You know, "Land of the Lost" would be a great premise for a movie. Who would play the father? Maybe Liam Neeson? Anyone but Will Ferrell. . .
3: Nowhere Man: -
There was not room for both The Prisoner and Nowhere Man in my top ten. So I had to choose. When I first saw "Nowhere Man," I thought, "gee, this is a lot like "The Prisoner." There are subtle references to "Prisoner" throughout, and one episode, "Paradise On Your Doorstep," while not a shot-for-shot re-make of Prisoner Episode 1, ("Arrival"), would have fit right in with Patrick McGoohan's show from the 1960's.I chose "Nowhere Man" because of it is more contemporary and because it is set in "the real world" rather than what is to US viewers an otherworldly landscape. I may also relate to Thomas Veil more than Number Six because Veil is, like me, a photographer. There is, however, an annoying continuity problem in that the producers couldn't seem to decide if Veil used a Canon F-1 or a Nikon FM-2. (I'm a devoted Canon guy now, but I admit I did once have an inappropriate relationship with a Nikon.)
Both shows deal with a man deprived of his personal identity. While Number Six is abducted from his natural environment and incarcerated in The Village, Nowhere Man's Thomas Veil is "erased," all traces of his identity are deleted and he is set adrift with only a single strip of negatives to prove he has ever lived and breathed in this world. Where Number Six was taken away from his life, Thomas Veil's life was taken away from him. This enabled Veil to move around in any environment, while Number Six was stuck in The Village, unless there was an unusual plot device at work.
There was a heavy X-files influence on Nowhere Man. The show was filmed in Vancouver, just like X-files, and a conspiracy, either by the government or possibly something else much more organized, is the center of the plot. Both shows also have atmospheric music by Mark Snow.
This was another one-season wonder, and while I'm sure the season closer was intended to be a cliff-hanger leading into a season two, it holds up surprisingly well as a series finale.
The DVD set for this show is unusually rich in special features and commentary, and I recommend adding it to your Netflix queue.
2: Star Trek -
Two reasons this show rockets directly to the Number 2 spot. First, it was great during the 1960's as the first "adult Sci Fi" in a time of "adult westerns" and is still great almost five decades later if you just look past some dated-looking technology and dippy costumes. (Dave Barry once said the uniforms looked like pajamas.) Sure, there are some '60's clinkers, like the line in Turnabout Intruder about, "Your world of starship captains doesn't admit women." Obviously, at least in that one script, there was a failure to foresee the strides women would make in subsequent decades toward equality, but for the most part, considering these episodes are nearly 50 years old, the writing holds up tremendously well.And second, without the enormous success of Star Trek, Sci Fi would possibly never again have gotten any kind of toe-hold on television. The track record of sci-fi failure through the 70's would almost surely have been death to the genre on TV if Star Trek had not been racking up killer numbers at the same time in syndication. Without the networks trying to re-capture this lightning in a bottle, we might never have had several of the shows on this and other top-ten lists.
Nobody put any of the other four Star Trek shows in the top ten, even though surely at least one of them would be worthy. Obviously, Star Trek could take five of the top ten, but in my opinion the other shows, while still good each in their own way, did not break significant new ground not already broken by the one that started it all. I feel the original series is by a significant margin the best of the bunch, but those who grew up in the 80's/90's instead of the 60's/70's like me often would put Next Generation at the top. It's generational. Deal with it.
Tomorrow: What else? The number one best Sci Fi show ever. The Fusion Patrol's Ben and Eugene ain't gonna like it.
It doesn't seem right not to acknowledge Irwin Allen's contribution to the genre in tne 1960's. If for no other reason, he gets a tip of the hat for being (and someone PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong on this - I could very well be missing someone from overseas) the only producer other than Gene Roddenberry and Gerry Anderson to produce three Sci Fi programs that lasted two or more seasons. Of the three main Irwin Allen sci-fi series (excluding one season wonder "Time Tunnel," which I have never seen) this was the one that tried to be at least somewhat serious (which "Lost in Space" did not even attempt), but didn't take itself way MORE seriously than was earned by the storytelling, like "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea." The special effects were ambitious for the day and quite effective overall. This is my selection from the genre I call "60's camp."
Top Ten spoiler alert: X-files is not in my top ten for much the same reason that Twilight Zone is not here. I consider X-Files more of an anthology type show than Sci Fi. Individual episodes were clearly Sci Fi, but the majority seemed to me to be much more fantasy or "magical realism." But Space: Above and Beyond can be thought of as what X-Files might have been as pure Sci Fi.
There was at times a predictable sameness to the writing on this show, which is not surprising since the same guy wrote 90% of the episodes solo and shared credit on all the rest. Mr Straczynski should have relinquished the reigns from time to time to allow his own batteries to recharge and to let a different voice be heard from time to time. But Babylon 5, more than any other show I can think of, often captured the feel of the "golden age" of Sci Fi literature. I could see parallels to Asimov's Foundation series or the Rama books by Arthur C. Clarke.
I can already hear the howls of "that's not science fiction." Fair enough. But this show was solidly in the realm of science fiction for me with it's use of fanciful technology. Much of what was fanciful then is commonplace now. There were robotic arm manipulators, remote control flying saucers, gyro-controlled billiard balls in a rigged game of pool, computers able to defeat chess masters, felt on a poker table that could read the cards in a poker hand, and a computer that can't lose at Jeopardy.
I haven't actually laid eyes on this show outside a few YouTube clips since the '70's, and I readily take the word of the Fusion Patrol Guys' that it sucks. But for all it's faults, in the drought of TV sci-fi in the '70's, this was a cool drink of water to a very thirsty kid. This is definitely a subjective pick on my part based much more on nostalgia and the impact it had on me at age 10 than any attempt on my part to evangelize for it and say, "You've GOT to see this." It was a show I very much looked forward to every week when it was originally on the air, though I am sure I would now find it extremely cringe-worthy now. One thing I will stand by, though, is that "Man From Atlantis" had great music. See my other 
First of all, let me acknowledge the bad, BAD science in this show. The moon traveling at hyper-light speeds? Randomly bumping into inhabited planets two dozen times a year? If the moon traveled at speeds necessary to reach a different solar system on average twice a month, it would zip by them so fast there would never be time for a story to develop. An attempt was made to explain this by introducing the concept of "Space Warps" in the second season, but it's still utterly preposterous to have the moon as a space vehicle.
In the beginning, Gene Roddenberry looked upon television and saw it was void and without form. And Gene said, "Let there be Star Trek," and there was "Star Trek" and the Great Bird of the Galaxy saw that it was good.
"Man From Atlantis" theme on iTunes Music Store
I opined that Steven Hill's performance in season 1 of this series is rather underrated, and it is not Hill's fault that the actor who succeeded him, based not only on acting skill but also looks and presence, upstaged Hill in almost every way possible . . . and impossible. Hill looks positively bookish compared to Graves, who strode on to the M:I set in 1967 with no explanation as to why the original series star had been replaced. He brought with him rugged good looks, unmistakeable stature (both in terms of physical height and impressive manner), and a shock of hair that seemed spun from brushed aluminum. As was common up until the late 60's, Grave's hair was treated with the customary greasy kid stuff early on, but morphed into "the dry look" sometime in the early '70's.
While "Mission: Impossible" was an Emmy Award magnet, Graves himself never won the award until his turn as host of A&E's "Biography."
In addition to the debut of "Star Trek," 1966 also saw the arrival of "MISSION: Impossible," which remains in a close second place behind "Trek" on my list of all time favorite classic TV Series. Season 1 of this series sometimes got left out of the rotation when the show was shown in reruns in syndication on local TV stations. Channel 13 of Indianapolis carried "Mission" for many years in my home state of Indiana, but I went several years without ever seeing a season 1 episode.
In season 1, Martin Landau, who would later out-shine series star Peter Graves in many episodes of Seasons 2 and 3, made a "special appearance" in very nearly every episode. His character, Rollin Hand, even assumed a role very close to that of "team leader" in some cases near the end of the year as things got tense with Steven Hill and he was present on the set less and less. Hill, an devout jew, would leave the set at sundown on Friday regardless of the status of the shooting of that week's episode. In one particular episode, Barbara Bain received the recorded instructions (at a beauty salon, no less), selected the team, and carried out the mission (
Today in the Childhood Recovery Project we re-visit (pun alert) the mini- and TV series "V" which aired in a period spanning 1983 to 1985. This is all the more apropos in view of the fact the ABC television network has recently rebooted the show.