Sci-Fi’s The Invisible Man (hulu link), which used to air along with Farscape and Lexx, was a pretty fun series. It managed to keep things funny and entertaining, sort of in the same popcorny niche as Eureka, only better.
Is there an echo in this thread? 
Based on doper recomendations I watched the first three episodes of Farscape and I wasn’t impressed. It looked like a cheesy 70’s science fiction show. Does it get better?
I watched the Sarah Connor Chronicles and I liked it but wasn’t impressed.
I’ll check Eureka.
If by ‘better’ you mean ‘less goofy’, then no. It does have a fun storyline and character development, and the original species and abilities are, to me, refreshing, but no. It doesn’t get less 70’s-ish. 
Not really; “goofy” [Taomist TM] is a pretty good word to describe the general feel of Farscape. Many viewers liked the creatures and settings, to me it looked like Muppets in Space.
But mainly, I couldn’t get into it because Farscape was close to the Star Trek universe in one aspect: “all aliens are really human on the inside and those that aren’t better were”. (DS9 excluded)
Still, the storyline in the second season was pretty good, the writers did care about the characters and the cast sparkled.
But if you don’t care for Farscape, I won’t blame you. Not at all.
If you prefer serious science fiction shows in general, you must stay away from LEXX – that one was written by a stoned horde of howler monkeys … and their drunken brothers directed it.
In other words, it was fun, had moments of satirical brilliance, was refreshingly amoral … but if you don’t like the absurd, you will mainly see its failures – and there were plenty: cheap settings, bad performances, drunken pacing, weird dialogues, plot holes wide as a galaxy.
Some of these failures hound Torchwood too and the quality can easily oscillate from awesome to “oh, crap” between episodes … or within minutes. That’s why I’d recommend only the third season without reluctance; there is cheese in it still, but the story-line works out perfectly and it’s surprisingly adult or mature for a scifi television show.
The last cannot be said about Eureka: it’s goofy in a strictly American sense ;). It’s neither amoral and deconstructive like Lexx nor cheesy and daring like Torchwood(s first two seasons) but well produced yet harmless fun with likable characters and well done but foreseeable story-lines. If you accept it for what it is, relaxing entertainment, you’ll like it.
Well, yeah, I know it failed in some aspects, it certainly aroused wrong expectations before its start and the strike hurt two central story-lines in the first season so much that they couldn’t be recovered in time: the gradual growth towards a functional family and John Connor’s interdependent character development.
The perfect character arc Cromartie got, showed the possible; and they were back on track on John’s arc during the second half of the second season but the damage was already done.
With more episodes in the first season to establish close relationships, the later alienation among Sarah, Derek, John and Cameron would have actually felt like a breaking apart and not like continuation. The juxtaposed development of the second family (Weaver, Ellison, Savannah and John Henry) helped to make the story-line more palpable but the pacing was a bit off, so the opposing trends weren’t as clear as they should have been.
Otoh, they did it right in many other ways, and I’ve never before seen writers put so much effort into a working model of continuous time-travel … oh well, spilled milk.
At the moment, I’ve a hard time to recommend any still running science fiction show; V might surprise me, I do hope so, if only to keep Morena on my screen, but the news aren’t so good.
The Middleman is great.
Farscape is good, Torchwood is really bad, Being Human is decent.
The first season of any show tends to be kinda weak, as the actors and productions team “shake down” (to borrow some naval terminology) into a working Cast.
Looking over my Farscape Season 1, I’ll recommend the “good” ones that are interesting or advance the overall storyline:
Premiere
Throne For A Loss
Back And Back And Back To The Future
PK Tech Girl
They’ve Got A Secret
'Til The Blood Runs Clear
The Flax
Durka Returns
A Human Reaction
A Bug’s Life
Nerve
The Hidden Memory
Family Ties
Almost all of these introduce recurring characters, plot elements, etc.
Really, just Nerve, The Hidden Memory, and Family Ties are truly essential Farscape for viewing later seasons.
And instead of “goofy,” I like to think it has “quirky” moments. 
:smack::smack::smack: Damn! How could I forget “A Human Reaction?” It’s damn near the driving force for the rest of the series?!
I’m with you there. Every time I’ve tried to watch Farscape (my Tivo insists I should) I am completely distracted and reduced to mocking laughter by the cheesy rubber faces. I would much rather see a show do NOTHING with “alien life form makeup” than do it incessantly and badly.
A friend of mine once told me that my wife and I totally ruined Farscape for him, when we accentuated its intro by singing the Muppet theme song.
… Come to think of it, it’s a bit disturbing that we had the lyrics memorized perfectly.
I just wished a series would one day take “alien” a bit more serious and do something creative instead of reducing it to familiar weird figures and not exactly American behaviour.
I’ll second this, I thought it was fantastic, had a great feel to it.
I’ll second Lexx, but only the third season. Don’t worry about the first two, you’ll get it as you go.
And are we doing anime? You have to check out Planetes Good, old fashioned hard sci-fi about a crew on a space station whose job is to clean up junk in orbit around Earth.
Watch the ep named “The Way We Weren’t”, then try to see Pilot as nothing more than a Henson animitronic, that’s the episode where Pilot becomes “real” in the sense of being another actual character in the show
that said, I still can’t see Fluffy/Guido/His Lowness as anything more than “Evil-Yoda on a ThroneSled”
He’s the one character who hadn’t changed much at all throughout the series.
When nine hundred years old you reach, set in your ways will you be, too. Hmmph!
But you gotta admit, Farscape overall did try to make aliens look more alien.
When time and money permitted.
*Caprica *is looking up these days.
The pilot bored me into anger when I watched it some months ago. And at that time, I was still relieved that I had (mostly) abandoned BSG at the end of its first season when it became apparent that we were dealing with a rightfully deistic universe.
I watched some more episodes during the following seasons but they confirmed my suspicion and added a torrent of other reasons to not waste time there (and as far as I’ve heard, BSG’s conclusion was less than satisfying).
But I’ve heard good things about the writing and am tempted to give Caprica another try.