Mild, general spoilers re: Baltar: As much as things change, he kind of stays the same. In D&D terms, I’d say he’s neutral neutral. Sometimes he does something that winds up being good, sometimes he acquiesces to evil. But it’s always because it is most expedient, or it’s a response to a momentary emotional impulse. He isn’t evil like the Cylons, but sometimes he’s the most evil character because he is purely selfish.
Cancellation? Pft… SciFi would have been mad to cancel their flagship and most highly-rated show. Moore & Co. are going out on their own terms.
I’ll throw in my “Ooh, you get to watch this anew”… I think the last 13 minutes of S3 (the end of Crossroads pt II) are amazing, and to this day I’ll still re-watch it.
While this is true, I still hate the little twerp.
Omi, Do you happen to listen to a lot of Hendrix?
Not much at all, I’d say. A lot of the basics of the premise, and some of the main characters, are carried over, but the details are very, very different – even the fundamental premise of who the Cylons are is very different from the original series.
The same madness that led them to cancel Farscape? Stargate SG-1? Stargate Atlantis? 
Or Dylan?
The original series to me could be summed up with the idea, “Humanity just got wiped out and we’re all on the run from a genocidal bunch of - let’s stop off for some R&R at the casino planet!”.
-Joe
The basic plot (Colonies destroyed by Cylons, humans flee for Earth). Some basic character sketches (Adama, Apollo, Starbuck a little less so-- not just because she’s a she). Basic chrome (Galactica, ragtag fleet, Vipers, Raiders, Centurions, Base Stars).
But you pretty much run out of similarities after that first paragraph.
RE: why not just do a new show-- well, they could have done an entirely original show, but the basic structure of the original lends itself well to the themes explored in the new series: man vs. machine, machines discovering their humanity while men discover their inhumanity, desperation on both sides, and engaging character dynamics-- all wrapped up in a cloak of the original show, i.e. something familiar but very, very different.
Personally, I’ve always compared it to a modernist retelling of Shakespeare: Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Othello. . . all of these have been retold/reimagined in modern eras, with new modern trappings. The “stories” are the same, but the new trappings convert a timeless tale into something different.
Now, BSG ain’t Shakespeare, but that’s what Ron Moore and company did-- they took something that was very, VERY different, and used it to tell their own story.
BTW, this is why I’ve had such little patience for the “Old BSG rules/New BSG sucks” crowd. Even if you ignore the objective differences in quality-- the old show is really, really good when you’re 9 years old, but seen now, it’s painfully bad-- the new show isn’t a remake of the old show. Back when the new show was first announced, a lot of fans hated the fact that Starbuck and Boomer were now women, the Cylons looked human, etc. If these were the only changes, they would have been stupid and unneccessary, because it’d just be cosmetic stuff. Instead, what those intial announcements didn’t capture was that the whole show is different, in every respect that counts.
Some people don’t like it. Oh well, that doesn’t mean I don’t.
I used to listen to Hendrix, never was much of a Dylan fan… I prefer Clapton.
Why do ya ask, though?
No, just *the names *of some the main characters.
Sigh, if only that were true. The show is at least one season, as many as three seasons, shorter than Moore & Co. originally expected/desired. They got the news “you’ll only go to the end of Season 4, time to wrap this up” at the end of Season 3.5.
What’s funny is that the ratings for the show took a strange curve. Highly rated at first, then it dropped-- so Sci-Fi thought the show was dying off, and started treating it like crap (all the season breaks, for instance). Eventually, they cut it short-- just as the ratings start to pick up again, because BSG benefits so much from the sale of DVD sets (not to mention a bigger marketing push at Season 4.0).
Bet that NBC/Uni wish they had their decision back.
Funny, I thought Apollo was the son of Adama (the boss) in both shows. And that Boomer was a pilot. And Starbuck was a party-hardy type.
Must have missed that.
If only they’d had Centons and Microns it wouldn’t suck nearly so much!
-Joe
Oh, and another point: ratings are important, but ratings/cost is more important. BSG was an expensive show, especially in comparison to the crap that Sci-Fi usually shovels: Ghost Hunters, wrestling, and those $1 million monster movies they do ever Saturday night.
Believe it or not, those crap movies (like Mansquito) make a TON of money for Sci-Fi: they’re cheap to produce, and they’re easy to market overseas, either in DVD or even in theaters.
The quality stuff, the stuff that you and I may love? They’re seen as loss leaders at best.
You’ve just been spoiled, here, for stuff much later in the series.
Kind of a crappy thing to do to someone, when there’s entire other threads for such things, but such is the Internet.
No, they most certainly have not.
Overall, I love it. At times, it is painfully clear that the writers have no grand consistent story arc planned and are making it up as they go (e.g. Lost), but the consistently superb acting and production gets one through the wonkier plot twists.
You don’t want to know. My suggestion would be to stay out of any Galactica threads, including this one, even though you’ve started it yourself. Stay unspoiled.
Soylent Tylium is made from people! FROM PEEEEEOPLE!
-Joe
That’s why Farscape got canned, for sure. It was SciFi’s highest-rated show at that point in time…but expensive to produce (even though they were doing it co-operatively with an Australian network). So, goodbye. 
Had a good discussion with the GF this weekend on this same subject-- would BSG have thrived on a broadcast network? There was talk in the beginning of it being first-run on NBC.
The extra money would have helped, but the ratings brutality might have killed it years ago-- a hit on Sci-Fi is a flop on one of the still-sorta-Big Four.
Also, while it’s been frustrating for many fans (including-- especially-- me) to have to watch the show get dragged out over multiple half-seasons over many years, from a dramatic standpoint the real time elapsed has done the show some good: not only have the characters aged, but the actors have, too. If you haven’t seen it in a long time, fire up the miniseries and look how young some of the actors are-- heck, Jamie Bamber (Lee Adama) looked all of twelve years old ;-).
Do I wish the show had lasted longer? Yes. Am I glad the show is finally wrapping up? Yes. I can reconcile both ;-).
Same response, but with less snark. 
I would argue that the new show is much truer to the original show’s premise while not being true to the original show itself. In other words, the original show was not true to its own premise.
That premise being, MASSIVE GODSDAMNED HOLOCAUST.
There is no sense in the original show, no emotional undercurrent, that billions and billions of people are dead, and the remaining thousands are teetering on the brink. That’s the show’s setup, but they do not follow up on it at all. It’s basically the Mormon wagontrain to Utah, but minus any sort of awareness that everything between the Mississippi and the Atlantic Coast has been turned into radioactive glass. They’re just rolling along on an adventure in the wilderness.
It’s a semantic argument (faithfulness to the premise versus the execution) but I think it warrants consideration.