It absolutely gets better. The miniseries is good, and necessary to watch since it sets up the premise of the series, but it doesn’t start getting really good until the actual show starts.
The Expanse is really great, but I still think the BSG reboot is still one of the best sci-fi shows ever made. The prequel series Caprica wasn’t nearly as interesting and I eventually lost interest in it.
I’ll go further and say Battlestar Galactica is the greatest show of all time.
I can’t quite go that far, with shows like The Wire and Breaking Bad out there. BSG unfortunately declines somewhat towards the end.
I agree that they did not quite stick the ending. I was hooked from the mini-series on and I quite liked that they kept continuity with the problems they had from one episode to the other. Things were not magically solved, and resources not automatically replenished. I was able to binge watch it which was great especially at the end of some of the seasons.
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I dunno- the series with Richard hatch and Lorne Green was fun and watchable, but hardly “great”. 
I really loved that aspect. It did a great job in showing the deterioration of the ship and fleet over time. They were facing constant threats and were always on the run, so they had nowhere to go to fix their ships and replenish their crew and resources and it showed the consequences of that well.
It’s like if Star Trek: Voyager took the Year Of Hell two-part episode and made the entire show like that. Which I always thought would be much more interesting than what we got.
Today, I binge-watched the first eight (of nine) episodes of the third season of Hacks on Max. Really good show and I look forward to the final episode being released in a week.
I felt that way until The Expanse.
Baltar is the cringy part of BSG but everything else is gold.
And I agree it really doesn’t get good until the series starts.
I’d say Expanse S1-2 or possibly 3 are near that level, but not the show overall. Good show, though.
Maybe I’m a sap, but I never fully recovered from:
Death of Miller
Started watching The Irrational, starring Jesse L. Martin (Detective Green from L&O). Only on the second episode, but it’s okay so far. Kind of like House but for crime, or a combination of Lie to Me, Elementary, and Numb3rs. If you ever liked any of those shows, you’ll probably like this.
Well, on the strength of y’all’s various recommendations, I’ve decided to give the regular season episodes of Battlestar Galactica a chance, and I agree the first one is definitely better than the miniseries and I do plan to stick with it, but…
The “fracking” is getting frackin’ annoying. I get that early 21st century America, mired down as it was in two land wars in Asia, wasn’t ready to hear F-bombs dropping on basic cable, but the way to handle that is to just not have the characters dropping F-bombs, not to replace the F-bombs with a made up baby language word that is supposed to convey the same thing.
I finished watching Twisted Metal and I really enjoyed it. I liked it more than the kinda similar show Blood Drive (which I also enjoyed, but it was more hit-or-miss). Wikipedia claims that Season 2 is scheduled to film in Toronto later this year, so I’m glad there will be more episodes coming out (Blood Drive didn’t make it to season 2).
Just wait till they say ‘feldercarb’.
Ripley. Recommended. Extremely well-done series in all respects. Performances, cinematography, and effective story-telling. There’s even some dark humor involving two of the the more ghastly episodes. The ending, which I will not reveal here, might leave the series open for a second season, but just as effectively closes it. I see no reason to go further.
I love Steve Gerber comics, but nothing annoyed me more as a kid, than every character using the exclamation, “Spit!”.
I watched the STAX: Soulsville, U.S.A documentary series on MAX. I came for the music, but was intrigued by how an interracial company came to develop and prosper in a racist place like Memphis in the early 1960s and how fragile and rather ephemeral that dynamic was.
The music clips and concert footage in this doc are fantastic. The makers don’t seem to have been constrained by any license or copyright limitations and we get to hear more extended clips than these sort of docs usually contain. The extended clips of Sam & Dave, and Otis Redding during the 1967 European tour are so exciting to watch I flipped back to watch them again. The same for the Monterey Pop footage of Redding.
Finally, the interviewees. Who knew (Stax founder) Jim Stewart was still alive up until about a year ago? Steve Cropper, Booker T, Carla Thomas, David Porter, and a lot of the other talent are heard from throughout as well as the “suit” Al Bell who comes off as both savior and villain.
I haven’t enjoyed a music doc this much since Get Back.
The use of frack is a send up to the original series from 1979 where they needed to use it to get around the FCC rules at the time. Yes, it can be a bit annoying but at the same time, it is easy enough to substitute in you mind.
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It’s not my mind that is having difficulty parsing. I know what it’s supposed to mean. But the visceral, gut reaction is to cringe every time. Because it’s so stupid.
I just finished watching The Tattooist of Auschwitz on Peacock. Pretty powerful, I thought, and very well done. Anybody else seen this?
No, but I saw a poster advertising it. I admit, my thoughts was, “Man, who is there left to tell their Holocaust story? Now we even got the guy doing the tattoos?”
Is it a true story about a real life tattooist from the Holocaust? I’m not making light of it at all, but it felt like, “Hey, who hasn’t had a Holocaust movie yet? How 'bout the guy doing the number tattoos? Sure!”