Seconded.
B5 had all the stuff that makes sci-fi television great. Big bad guys, lots of conflict, flawed good guys who make mistakes, but also a rock-solid sense of hope that things would get better if the good guys just worked hard enough/were smart enough.
I agree, but only as long as some coked up studio fuck isn’t allowed to mess with it.
See Also: Crusade.
I agree. Dark and gritty is soooooooo overdone. ST had plenty of conflict without being Dark and gritty.
I honestly don’t know, neither discussed the matter with me. My interactions with the man “Buck Godot” largely involved a group of us that happened to include him going to a restaurant and stuffing our faces with yummy food and casual conversation.
I met Phil Foglio because I used to work for/help out the artist who was doing the inking on Psmith. I have no idea if Phil would remember me or not but he was certainly an interesting character. Most of my interactions with him and his buddies were on a purely social level so business was not discussed.
I think the OP was talking about TV SF. But if we’re including book series, I’d add Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series as an example of optimistic science fiction.
I think NCB was making a joke: A Piece of the Action (episode) | Memory Alpha | Fandom
I’d settle for a show that inspired youngish people to be interested in space flight as a viable thing that we could be exploring if we really wanted to, instead of a boring footnote of history that is only thought of as a quaint idea, if it’s thought of at all.
Depends on your sci-fi preferences, I’d say, though tv doesn’t lend itself to the sort of hard sci-fi that print has made interesting for almost a century. I’d be interested to see a good Utopia since, like Agent Smith, I think it’s something we talk about wanting but don’t really want, kinda like when 20-something women say they want a nice guy. 
It was the Chicago ref that set it up
:dubious: - Fizz Bin?
I’ll definitely have to check him out, thanks, like the OP I’m so done with depressing science-fiction, British authors especially seem to thing we want to read about a bunch of self-centred cynical jerks in a horribly nightmarish future.
Surely the wild success of Star Trek and Star Wars (granted the latter is as much fantasy as sci-fi) proves that that is not necessarily the case?
The movie Prometheus popped into my mind when I read your post, my god I’m not difficult to please but its probably the epitome of depressing modern science fiction, and its a terrible movie to boot.
True, something with a more realistic bent could be interesting if well done. When I was growing up the astronauts/cosmonauts were my heroes, but this was the 1980’s and I was probably already behind the curve even then.
On re-reading the OP you may be right, but the television series pickings are pretty slim and I personally haven’t seen many of the more recent ones. The ‘Wild West in Space’ thing has never did it for me. Why rehash an earlier historical era, think of something new.
Like Horatio Hornblower? 
The idea was that a frontier is a frontier no matter when or where, which I thought was clever, especially since the advanced places were typical sci-fi mega-cities. Heinlein played with the same idea in his universe, iirc - I definitely recall some other settlers giving Lazarus Long some guff about building a cabin with indoor plumbing rather than using an outhouse.
Sure, but if I want to watch/read about frontier life I can read about the American colonisation period, I don’t particularly want to read about someone building a log cabin in a gee-whiz sci-fi universe, I want to read about the gee-whiz stuff. It just seems to defeat the purpose as far as I’m concerned.
But this is entirely a personal preference and Wild West stuff in general never really interested me.
FWIW I wasn’t only talking about Television. Discussion of any medium is fine.
Also I don’t think it’s impossible to have conflict in an optimistic setting (almost fifty years of Star Trek prove that). It’s just harder to do.
I also reject saying “That’s what audiences want now”. Since that is essentially all we are getting, that is circular logic. Optimistic settings still work in fantasy (Harry Potter for example. It has its dark moments but I don’t think anyone would call it “Dark and Gritty”) so why not Sci Fi? I think it’s more an issue with creative laziness and pervasive cynicism.
Anybody watch Almost Human*? It doesn’t portray a future utopia (it is a crime show after all), but it definitely isn’t a dystopic wasteland either.
Yes, I’m enjoying it.
It has a Trek connection with the lead dick being Bones from the reboot.
Heh heh… Dick… Bones…
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I’d say the universe in Mass Effect is generally pretty optimistic.
Of course, the player deals with a lot of crap, seedy individuals, corruption, and so on. But the player is a hybrid of military and interplanetary cop (and part of a small radical human splinter cell in the second game). Of course the player is going to see a lot of crap, because that stuff is interesting. Overall, though, I felt like the games had a generally optimistic view of the future. It’s just the tenor of the games, behind some of the racial tensions and corporate politics, behind the crap the player has to deal with to keep it peaceful, it felt like the modern day world, except with awesome spaceships and less disease and so on. (This applies to Citadel Space more than the Terminus Systems)
I mean, okay, there’s a cycle of doom in the universe about to tear down the entirety of civilization. But that’s an external threat, the civilization actually crafted was pretty sweet despite a few rough spots.
I agree about Mass Effect. In fact, in many ways it’s the spiritual heir to B5.
I can’t believe I forgot about Mass Effect, I agree with you except I think the atmosphere was more ‘real world’ than optimistic or pessimistic, kind of ‘this is how it is, now we have to get on with it’ and that how things turned out was very much in the hands of individuals, humanity and the wider multi-species civilisation.
But I did love the story-universe that was crafted, one of my favourite in any medium.
I do think it did an excellent job of showing characters and civilisations in shades of grey, nobody was entirely good or entirely evil. Take the Asari for instance, it would have been easy to throw human conceptions of an entirely female society onto them but the game producers avoided that, they were depicted as one of the leaders of galactic civilisation, powerful and generally benign but with hints that they were falling into stagnation and may be overtaken by more ‘youthful’ and energetic peoples such as humanity.
I also thought humanity was depicted well, you can just see humanity finding the wider galactic society, putting our collective feet up and saying, “Oh, hey, nice place you’ve got here, mind if we move in?”, and winding up other species by doing so.
Yes, to recap, good choice Jragon!
It was optimistic in that it was, in the end, a story about bringing people together, humans and aliens all setting aside their grudges to stand shoulder to shoulder against the darkness. If that’s not optimism, then I don’t know what is.