This old show starring Kevin Sorbo popped up on Amazon Prime recently. Well, the first two seasons did. I started watching it again. I had watched at least the first two seasons way back when it originally aired (or soon after, perhaps via netflix dvd rentals?). I remember really liking the show but not finishing it. After watching the first two seasons and now the first part of the third, and then reading up on why I'm utterly bored watching the third, I now remember why I stopped liking it.

It turns out after the first couple of seasons they fired all the writers and decided to make the show more "episodic" and thus easier to syndicate. The first two seasons had big story lines that spanned the entire season and it seems that they just instantly dropped the story arcs for season 3. And they also essentially snipped the most interesting character dynamic (Tyr & Dylan constantly at odds, despite being on the same "team").

It was definitely always cheesy pseudo-science-fiction, and even worse than that by today's standards, but meh, it sucks to get old, remember an old show fondly, get suckered into watching it again, and then get disappointed by it for a second time. I need a way to globally annotate videos so that if, in 20 years, I go to watch this again, a note pops up that says, "Don't bother. --Brian (2017)"

Kevin Sorbo wanted to make the series about him - more like Hercules in Space, less about an ensemble cast. The original showrunner dig his heels in, and Sorbo got him fired halfway through season 2.

Here’s a thing he wrote:

http://andromeda.wikia.com/wiki/Coda

I kinda boycotted Kevin Sorbo after God's Not Dead. Not because of the Christian chain email plot and typical evangelical treatment of atheism, but because there's a scene of abuse by a Muslim where we're apparently meant to sympathize with the abuser and see Islam as mistaken about God but respect their "religious fervor", which is utterly reprehensible. Institutionalized abuse is one of the worst aspects of religious and otherwise closed off sects.

It's like admiring Hitler for his patriotism.

Which reminds me of a Robert Mugabe quote: "This Hitler has only one objective, justice for his own people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people, and their right to their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold."

Kevin Sorbo was only an actor, so it’s silly to boycott him because of a role he played. You should boycott him because of his real-life interviews and speeches instead.

Omg am I really supposed to do research on every actor in every show I watch and boycott the show if I disagree with them? I'm going to have to boycott my own self since I disagree with at least half of the **** I said even yesterday :|

Anyway, it really sucks when they take a show that I really enjoy and they make it suck.



Grr...

No, of course not.


The studio did the same thing to Earth: Final Conflict. I don’t know any gossip about that one, but they completely retooled the series twice during its run. (Wolfe is a friend of a friend, so I’ve heard a little bit about what was going on with Andromeda.)

**** sucks, though. You haven’t even seen the worst of it yet. The last season is way out there, although at least it was more interesting than some of the filler episodes from the previous seasons.

I don't know if I'll make it that far. I really liked Tyr. Now he seems more like a lapdog. As I was watching 1 & 2 I was thinking, "why did this guy leave this show?" and now I'm thinking, "no wonder this guy left this show."

Any other decent science fiction (or even "kinda") on amazon prime? I see the second series of Humans got added. I enjoyed the first so I'll try this one. I watched the first season and a half of Orphan Black but couldn't stick with it. Not into all the Star Trek TV series either (although I did watch all the movies a couple of years ago).

If you want to see something obscure, trashy and funny look for Ijon Tichy: Space Pilot. You can probably find it with subtitles on youtube.

What I really hated about Andromeda were the constant patriotic speeches by Kevin Sorbo (who I couldn't separate from the role). It was just too much. They were just missing a Burgerboy, sorry Commonwealth, flag in the background. I didn't watch long enough to see if that was toned down a bit.

I don't think the speeches go away, but the patriotism does. (They successfully reform the Commonwealth very early in the series, but destroy it again in the next season. Then they kinda just... forgot. And the show limped on.)

I don't think I've been entirely clear about that last point. When I said the show goes sideways, I mean it goes sideways:



fwiw, Kevin Sorbo claims that he didn't want this **** in the series, but the studio overruled him.

Yes. And more. Before you're allowed to watch anything, you must go and read every biographical/news account of every person involved in production. What's worse, any of the writers/biographers might be scummy, so you also have to look for any news/biographies on them. But as well, those meta-writers/biographers might be scummy, so you have to keep going until you run out of news/biographies. Then, you must verify all of the "bottom level" people manually by playing the 7-degrees-of-connection game with people you know not to be scummy, and build a graph connecting all of the non scummy people. Build software to parse this graph, and only once you have come up with a formal proof of the political purity of the entire production crew and writers may you watch anything.

Stray from these rules and you'll be in violation of the rules. Violations are bad, as they only go to scummy people, which means to not be in future violation of the rules you must reevaluate your stances in context of being a rule-violator, then re-examine any past media you may have consumed that distorts your perspective of scummy. Any past media that you then consider to be scummy is a violation of the thought-crime protocols. Being in violation of the thought-crime protocols is a serious offense, one that will get you thrown in the purple-hair Gulag postmodern reeducation camps.



Oh, for some reason I thought he was more involved than that. But yeah, Kevin Sorbo's scum.

Also, it's not hard to boycott Kevin Sorbo as he's not actively involved in any projects I could give a **** about, so there's that.

What I really hated about Andromeda was that in the early 2000s on RTL II (or I), they seemed to air Andromeda for like 50% of their daily schedule, so there were ads for it all over the place all the time. And since I didn't recognize the show by name or anything, I thought "wow, way to air some crappy no-one-else-has-ever-heard-of-it dumb-show, Luxembourgermans!".

Aye, that as well. It was RTL II.

Oh yeah, this show came out when I was going through puberty. I honestly don't remember much. I had a mild crush on Trance, and the AI girl. I also remember there were guys with spikes on their wrists and that there was some racial profiling sub-plot sometimes.

I'm on the one in season 3 where Harper gets an alien slug stuck to his boot, accidentally brings it on board the Andromeda, and it suddenly starts acid-eating its way through the hull. Urgh....

Ugh, season 3 is worse than I expected, even after writing what I wrote above. Every episode has some "supernatural" or some unexplained weird crap happening. Like those space slugs releasing a ghost onto the ship or a giant Captain Hunt floating in space shooting at the Andromeda. It's all so stupid, like the worst episodes of Star Trek multiplied by a billion. And yeah, all the characters other than Dylan Hunt have been shifted to the background. And they totally gimped Tyr. In the last episode I watched, he was crying. Ugh...

Yeah, this is better