As part of Variety‘s 100 Greatest Television Shows of All Time issue, we asked 12 of our favorite creators of television to discuss the series that inspire and move them. Check out all the essays, and read our full list of the best TV shows ever made.
Halfway through the pristine miniseries that precedes the most incisive show about post-9/11 America you realize this is your Battlestar Galactica now. Not the bubblegum, brightly lit ’70s classic, but this, the gritty, claustrophobic, white-knuckle reboot that looks nothing like the original boot.
The core idea is the same. The last remaining human survivors of an unimaginable tragedy race to find a new home while staying a hair’s breadth away from their Cylon pursuers, a race of sentient, self-aware machines who are unrecognizable from their fellow man. On each step of the journey, they’re forced to make the kind of decisions you only make in wartime. None of the options is good, and the creator Ronald D. Moore never lets any of his characters off the hook. The trauma of the choices they make stays with them for the run of the series. The question beating at the heart of every episode was this: Can a group of flawed people save mankind without sacrificing their own humanity?
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The action is intense, and the special effects are great, but what separates it from its peers is the grounding of the characters. They’re not all heroes. Some are cowards, some are drunks, some are undercover Cylons who don’t even know it. Watching them figure out who they are and what roles they play in this new reality is the great joy of the show.
Edward James Olmos as Cmdr. William Adama and Mary McDonnell as President Laura Roslin are familiar faces, as good as you’ve ever seen them. Everyone else is a revelation. James Callis shines as a sniveling Dr. Gaius Baltar, Michael Hogan’s Col. Tigh is the most deliciously grizzled XO to step foot on a ship, and with all due respect to Don Draper, when it comes to hard-drinking, promiscuous, thumb-your-nose-at-authority hotshots, I’ll take Katee Sackhoff’s Capt. Kara “Starbuck” Thrace any day of the week.
And the theme song! Does my heart still race every time the drums kick in? You better fraking believe it does.
If you start watching this show, you won’t stop (a point made hilariously well by the best sketch ever written about binge-watching, “Portlandia’s” “One Moore Episode”).
So say we all.
Emmy winner Seth Meyers is the host of NBC’s “Late Night” and a former head writer of “Saturday Night Live.”