I’m willing to give a little tit-for tat. Most of the time. And I like good TV shows. So here is my thread for people who have viewed a TV show for the first time and have no idea what is going on.
I have seen almost every episode of several TV shows. If anyone has any questions about the tv shows “Remington Steele”, “The Invisible Man”, “Seaquest” (these three are no longer creating new episodes), “Farscape” or “John Doe”, ask me. I’ll probably know. I love these shows with a passon. I also know a fair bit about “Star Trek- Voyager”.
In exchange, I’d like someone who knows about these shows to tell me a little about the base plot, the characters and what is going on right now with the show. I have just seen one episode of “Angel”, and this chick called Jasmine was eating people, and someone named conner was viewing a woman who looked dead in an empty church. I have also just seen my first episode of “Stargate SG1” which looks fairly interesting, (I think it is a repeat, had to do with some guy getting radiation poisoning) but I have NO idea what is going on, or even what a stargate is.
So, can anyone help me out? Can I help anyone else out? If anyone has any other TV shows they want to share knowledge about or want to know about, feel free to bring it up here.
Merla
Sorry, Merla – I haven’t watched either of those two shows (Angel and Stargate), but I have some tat, and am willing to trade… :::ducking::: 
I watched “Seaquest”, also – and enjoyed some of it, although I must say the second season got really lame really fast.
If you’re looking for any others to try out – I’m addicted to “24” now – I’d highly recommend it! I started watching in season 2 and was hooked very fast. Currently going through the Season 1 DVD set.
Ooookay, look, see, the Angel storyline isn’t going to make a whole lot of sense, because it sort of developed over the four years (well, seven, counting the Buffy years) that it’s been on the air. Couldn’t you have picked something easier, like nuclear physics? But I’ll try, in small bits that are easy to grasp, I hope. Oh, and there will be spoilers for pretty much all of Angel before the season finale.
Angel’s a vampire with a soul. He became a vampire when a woman named Darla turned him about two hundred fifty years ago. They (Angelus, as he’s known when he’s evil and Darla) rampaged across Europe and Asia as lovers and killers for a hundred or so years, until Angel was cursed with a soul by a gypsy clan. He loses said soul any time he “experiences a moment of true happiness,” i.e., boinks Buffy.
Doyle was a half-demon guy who worked for Angel for a while. He had these really useful visions that told him when people were in trouble, and Angel used said visions to find the people who needed his help. When he died, he passed his visions on to Cordelia.
Cordelia was a chick who went to high school with Buffy, but ended up broke and in L.A. Meeting Angel on the scene and feeling, for some reason, a sense of duty to those less fortunate (not to mention needing a paycheck), she started working for Angel. At some point she developed a conscience and thought that fighting the good fight was more important than getting paid, or something. However, those visions that Doyle gave her ended up hurting her, because she was fully human. Turns out, Doyle’s demon half was saving him. So Cordy goes and becomes part demon.
Wesley is, well, for all intents and purposes, just some guy who has been working with and for Angel since right after Doyle died. He started as a pansy and then achieved badassitude essentially through ceasing to have morals and growing facial hair. He’s also really smart and (sort of) good at translating ancient prophecies.
Wolfram & Hart has been the uberbad since the series began. They’re an evil law firm (sorry for the redundancy) that consists of mostly humans who traffic with and assist demons, mages, and sorcerors.
Connor is Angel’s son. He had this son with Darla (remember? His sire, or would that be dam?), whom he had killed and who was brought back by Wolfram and Hart to mess with Angel’s mind. The bit about Darla’s not important, except to say that Connor was sort of a miracle, in that he was the human son of two vampires. Should have never happened, and yet did. Now, Connor is the most royally screwed up person on the planet because of all the things that have been done to him. I’ll attempt to be brief but clear.
Before he was born, Darla, still carrying him, started to develop a conscience because she was sharing in his soul. In what was one of the high points of the show, she killed herself so that Connor could live (she knew that she would kill him as soon as he was born and they no longer shared a soul). So, screwed up thing number one: Mother kills self so you can live.
Then, well, Angel’s all happy, he’s got a son, la la la la la, but Wesley reads some prophecy left by a time-travelling demon (it made sense at the time) stating that “The father will kill the son” or something like that. Knowing Angel’s ability to go evil, Wesley thinks the only way to save Connor is to kidnap him, which he does. Unfortunately, Connor is stolen from Wesley, who gets his throat cut in the bargain, by a side character named Holtz, who really, really hates Angel because Angel killed Holtz’s family (when Angel was evil). Holtz takes Connor into some hell dimension to raise as his own son, thinking that he’s finally gotten his vengeance on Angelus. So, fucked up thing numero dos: Taken at the age of a couple weeks from your real family to be raised in a hell dimension by a crazy person.
Then Connor returns, calling himself Stephen and being a teenager, even though only a couple of weeks before, in our world, he had been an infant. Time moves differently in hell dimensions, they say. Anyway, Connor can pretty much kick a lot of ass, despite looking like a normal, thin teenager. At first this is chalked up to his being raised to fight for his life every day, but eventually it turns out that he’s some kind of superperson. It’s never clear exactly what he is, but it was probably caused by his spawning from two vampires more than the stay in Hell. Anyway, Holtz has been busy, renaming Connor and making him hate his birth father. Evidently, Connor was taught about the soul, but also that it didn’t matter, and that Angel was a beast that had to be put down. So, for those of you keeping track, number three is that, even though he was taught to hate his real father by the guy who kidnapped him, he soon learns that his real dad isn’t such a bad guy, in that he helps innocents and stuff.
So Connor and Angel are really never very comfortable with each other, but that really came to a head at the end of last season. Holtz returned to our dimension as well, and, though he seemed to make every effort to make amends and let his “Stephen” be with his birth dad, he also had one of his lackeys kill him in a way that make it look like Angel did it. So Connor finds the body and assumes that Angel killed Holtz. Connor, having inherited his parents’ sadistic streak, then dumps Angel in the bottom of the ocean. I’m done counting how screwed up he is, and I’ve only just begun.
So Wesley fishes Angel, who has, in all this meanwhile, figured out that he and Cordy are in love with each other, out. Cordelia, meanwhile, has ascended to a higher plane to be, essentially, a goddess. There’s a lot of schlock about why this is done, but it’s essentially 'cause she’s kinda cool and done a lot of good and she’s a part demon. Or something. Anyway, she spends some time in heaven and comes back to earth, all amnesia’d-up. Well, then, Cordy gets her memory back and boinks Connor. Don’t ask, it didn’t make much sense to us at the time either. The ostensible explanation was that there was this major beastie terrorizing the city and she wanted Connor to have one thing he could, I dunno, remember or something, if the world were to end that night. So, well, imagine how screwed up you’d be if this person who was recently changing your diapers and being all surrogate mom ended up sleeping with you… Told you he was screwed up.
Anywho, Cordy gets pregnant (of course. This is TV, y’know). She starts acting shady and telling Connor that their baby is going to be unique, what with the bits of demon from both of them, and that Angel and the others (there are others, they’re just not that important) wouldn’t understand. She twists his mind into thinking that he must protect her and the baby at all costs. Somewhere in this, we get the backstory that something is controlling Cordelia and that it’s been manipulating pretty much everybody in order to get, well, born into this world. Anyway, Connor alienates everybody, mostly through fisticuffs, and, here’s the crowning glory, is so twisted up by Cordelia that he brings a human sacrifice for her to use to sort of speed up the birthing process. He’s, essentially, an accomplice to murder because he loves Cordy and his baby so much.
Turns out (surprise!) his baby is a former goddess who thought she could take a more hands-on approach. I swear we’re getting near the end, here, people. Anyway, the baby gets named Jasmine, and she just wants everybody to love each other, which they do, and her, which they do, too. World peace becomes, well, doable. Everyone thinks she’s beautiful and lovely, and, whoops, Angel and the gang (sans Connor, who’s still on his baby’s side, and Cordy, who’s in a coma) realize that she’s really some kind of creepy maggot creature and that she’s taking everyone’s free will, so they try to stop her. Having the entire City of Angels against them, though, they fail and go into hiding, hoping to find an easier way. Connor leads the party that comes to find them and, though he wants to kill them for betraying Jasmine’s love, she stays his hand. See, she really does want everyone to get along. She also wants to eat a few of them.
Anyway, this is essentially where you picked it up. Angel’s in another dimension (a dimension to which Jasmine has been before) looking for a way to stop the love-in. The rest of the troops are locked up, waiting to hear their fates. Cordelia’s coma-ridden body is hidden away in a church (her blood was dangerous to Jasmine), and Connor found her and is trying to decide what to do. See, he’s known all along that Jasmine was Ms. Maggot-Head-Eats-People, but he thought that her lie was better than all the other lies he’d been told in his life. At least hers was pretty and people would get along…
So that’s as far as I’m willing to go. If you’re still reading this far, the rest of the season is fan-damn-tastic, so you should watch it and be impressed.
As opposed to what he’s known as when he’s just Darla.
Ah, what difference a missing comma can make. 
I see your Farscape and raise you a Babylon 5…
OK, how about a Stargate?
Early in the last century, an archaeological expedition in Egypt uncovered a mysterious artifact known as a “Stargate”. With the help of Egyptologist Daniel Jackson, they were able to figure out how to operate it.
The Stargate is capable of containing a controlled wormhole. When established, the wormhole will connect the Stargate to another Stargate elsewhere in the galaxy. If someone steps into the first Stargate, they are (more or less) instantly transported to the other.
Which gate the Stargate connects to is determined by a sequence of seven codes. The first six determine the other gate but the seventh is always a unique code identifying the originating gate. (It took years to figure out how to operate the gate as they did not realize the significance of the seventh code.)
When the gate was first used a team led by Col. Jack O’Neil and containing Dr. Jackson were transported to the planet Abydos. Abydos was found to be inhabited by a small group of humans who appeared to be descended from the ancient Egyptians. They were ruled by and lived in fear of a being known as Ra, a powerful alien who posed as a god.
O’Neil is somewhat unstable and has been on leave for some time because of the death of his son. His son found one of O’Neil’s guns and accidentally killed himself. O’Neil blames himself for his son’s death. He forms a close bond with a local boy named Skaara.
Ra captured and took over several of O’Neil’s men but O’Neil and Jackson were able to convince the locals to rebel against Ra. With the aid of a nuclear device they had brought through the gate, they were able to destroy Ra’s ship. Everyone returns to Earth except for Jackson, who was now married to one of the locals by the name of Sharee.
(All of the above occurs in the movie on which the series is based.)
O’Neil told his superiors that the gate had been destroyed by the nuclear device. The team was unable to connect to any other gate and so the Stargate sits abandoned in an underground facility for some period of time. Then, one day, the gate activates and a group of aliens similar to the ones who served Ra come through. They kill most of the guards and kidnap a female soldier.
O’Neil has retired but is recalled to deal with the problem. The military is planning to send a nuclear device through to Abydos to destroy what is there and O’Neil is forced to admit that he lied about what happened before. A new team is assembled and sent through to Abydos. This team includes Captain Samantha Carter, another scientist who is also an expert on the Stargate.
On Abydos, they reestablish contact with Jackson and learn that the aliens did not come from there. Jackson shows them a chamber with thousands of Stargate codes carved on the walls as heiroglyphics. Carter realizes that the reason they have been unable to use the Stargate to connect to anywhere else except Abydos is because the gate was buried for so long that all of the stars have changed positions enough that the coordinates are no longer valid. Only the relative position to Abydos is unchanged. With these codes they may be able to convert the Stargate to work again.
While they are studying the heiroglyphics, the same aliens who attacked Earth appear on Abydos. They kill most of O’Neil’s team that had been left at the gate and kidnap several of the locals, including Sharee and Skaara. Fortunately, one of O’Neil’s men sees the code they enter into the gate as they leave.
O’Neil, Carter, Jackson and several others return to Earth to report then use Earth’s gate to travel to the gate the aliens came from. There, they find another world containing humans. They are captured but do find out what is going on.
Long ago, a species known as the Ancients created the Stargate system. The Ancients are long gone.
The system is now being used by a race known as the Goa’uld. The Goa’uld are a race of parasites who look something like worms. They burrow into a human host and take it over. The visible effects of this are that their eyes glow and their voice gains a reverb effect. The Goa’uld are few in number but are able to rule large numbers because of their superior technology. Most of their worlds contain large groups of humans, all taken from Earth centuries ago and many continuing as the culture from which they were taken. The Goa’uld rule most of these groups as gods but a few have escaped and advanced, some even having higher technology than Earth.
The humans who most closely serve the Goa’uld are known as the Jaffar. They carry a Goa’uld larva within them and the larva gives them long life and perfect health. In exchange, they serve the Goa’uld.
One of the Jaffar, known as Teal’c, has become disillusioned with the Goa’uld he serves; the alien who attacked Earth and known as Anubis. When he realizes that O’Neil, Carter, Jackson and the others may be able to fight the Goa’uld he joins them and helps them to escape. Unfortunately, both Sharee and Skaara have both been taken over by the Goa’uld by this point; Sharee being the host to Anubis’ wife. They excape through the gate before O’Neil and the others can capture them.
Realizing the threat posed by the Goa’uld and the potential of the Stargate network, the military creates a series of Stargate teams. The teams will go through the network learning what they can, bringing technology to Earth and defending Earth from the Goa’uld. The first team, known as SG-1, consists of O’Neil, Carter, Jackson and Teal’c.
As they explore the network, the teams find new enemies and new allies. They encounter a renegade group of Goa’uld known as the Tok’ra who are attempting to overthrow the Goa’uld. They become allies of Earth as do the Asgard, another race even more advanced than the Goa’uld. (The Asgard are the typical Roswell “greys”.) They also encounter a new machine enemy race known as the Replicators, but the less said about them the better… 
Somewhere along the line Jackson ascended to the next plane of existence (or something like that) (aka - Michael Shanks wanted off the show) but he has since returned. There was a second Stargate on Earth for a while but it has since quit working and is currently at Area 51 (I think). They have also had some problems with factions within the government who want to shut down the project or to use it for purely military or nefarious purposes. Also, Earth has managed to build a starship which they can use to get to planets with no Stargates.
And that’s the background in a nutshell.