10 TV Shows That Failed To Stick The Landing

In the era of prestige telly, when the small screen is something more than mindless entertainment, something with a bit of weight, it’s fine to take your TV show seriously. When it started, the rebooted Battlestar Galactica was something of a revelation - sci fi with some depth, asking the big questions. Unsurprisingly, it scooped up the plaudits from the off. And what happened next was it got crushed under the weight of them.

In the minds of the creators, it seemed, Battlestar had gone from a grown up science fiction series to a treatise on all humanity. After many years of the crew floating around desolate space, they won the war with the anti-human element of the Cylon forces, and ended up on… Earth. After endings of various qualities for each of the characters, we flashed forward an indeterminate length of time to the modern world as we know it.

Apparently somewhere down the line it was decided that a story about survival in an unforgiving world wasn’t enough, and a warning about the dangers of technological over reliance was passe. They’d settle for nothing less than the tale of how all humanity began.

There were angels, there was quasi-religious stuff. There was speech after speech after melodramatic speech (mostly delivered by Edward James Olmos, who seemed to have an awful lot of sway in that writers’ room by the end). It turned out half the cast were, in fact, robots. The whole thing turned awfully confusing. While it’s easy to applaud the ambition, it outweighed the execution. George R. R. Martin described the ending as “God did it” - for an incredibly human story about robots, that’s quite the damning critique.