People only remember (if they remember this show) how incredibly schlocky and terrible this show became. Granted, it had more seasons being a trainwreck than being watchable.
The TLDR of the production is that a regular writer on Star Trek Deep Space 9 was made the producer of Andromeda at the start. He wanted to create something alternative to Star Trek, but that, budget permitting, was as good. There were tussles behind the scenes for control between him, and the executives & Kevin Sorbo who wanted the show to be louder, angrier, and have access to a time machine.
Eventually during season 2, the TV executives were brave enough to ask the question “What if we fired this experienced writer and put Kevin Sorbo in charge?”. The rest is history.
That all aside, the early stories in Andromeda showed a kind of interesting puesdo-Trek universe that had fallen into piracy and disorder, but the show was still optimistic that the spark of the old civilization could be rebuilt.
I await your jeers.
Despite being a huge Trek fan, I forgot all about this show, having only seen a handful of episodes. The reviews here kind of have me wanting to actually watch it and see the slow motion trainwreck for myself.
That’s the wild thing; it’s not in slowmotion! As soon as purple Trance turns gold you just walk off a cliff.
The Systems Commonwealth (Federation analogue) is neat, run by a superior race (Vulcans?) that disappear completely as soon as the government collapses. The ships from the old Commonwealth have true AI, and that’s probably my favorite thing about the setting. I also love the slipstream (natural transwarp conduits?).
There are a few, seriously, a few just excellent episodes, 1 of which is in s3 iirc.
The early episode about the battle of witchhead, harper 2.0, and the s3 episode with the first officer rhade, all solid.
But otherwise, wow, totally unwatchable. Maybe I’ve missed an episode or 2, I think there was one with the ships breaking out of a prison, but so damn many unwatchable episodes I feel bad for most of the cast.
Yo fwiw I have incredible fond memories of andromeda, cleopatra 2525, Xenia warrior princess (them sexy ladies in those costumes 😍 no wonder I’m not straight!), Hercules, Xenia and Hercules, etc etc. 90s-00s sci fy was trash but scratches such an itch now!
The shit they used to air in late night tv after the normal scheduled broadcast ran was the best of tv.
I have a full copy of andromeda in my media self host, along with the others mentioned, cuz while it is cheesy af -today- it was better/not shit/no extra context in its own time.
But also Kevin sorbo is a train wreck in his own rights… so like… anything touched by that hand was doomed anyway.
Heck yeah, watched all of those, they were so fun. Cleopatra 2525 is one I had almost forgotten about, thanks for reminding me!
I am trying to be a treasure trove of nostalgia. I’m 36 and doing my damndest to maintain media from my childhood (anything I was exposed to, not just stuff from my time)
Do you remember dinosaurs? (If it was during your lifetime, now you do!)
Andromeda had such promise for a low budget SciFi show. The writing started out pretty good…then purple went gold and the writing IMMEDIATELY went to shit, no slow downward slide or anything. It was like a totally different show midway thru season 2, have never seen anything like it before or since.
That’s what happens when they fire the producer/head writer, and replace him with Hercules. The purple to gold was pretty much the moment they tossed out all the old producer’s notes and rebooted the show.
DISAPPOINTED!
Stupid Sorbo ruined it.
Sorry no, it never was good. I couldn’t get through the first season even.
It had some potential. Knowing the first seasons of Star Trek are often the weakest, I gave it a solid try. But no.
I’d rather watch the second season of Space 1999 than any Andromeda if we’re looking for benchmarks of good concepts badly delivered.
Totally agreed. I really enjoyed the first two seasons. Very thoughtful seasons. I didn’t realize it at the time but I just slowly stopped watching and now I realize the content had slowly changed into more TV trope territory
Remember before we knew Kevin Sorbo wasn’t playing with a full deck?
I listened to his autobiography years ago. I thought he sounded like he’d mended his alpha bro self delusion after nearly dying. The book ended, iirc, early in the Andromeda run. Then covid came, and I think he’s landed a couple keys shy of a full keyboard. Bless his heart.
Bless his heart.
This roughly translates to common English as “this amoeba isn’t worth the effort of an insult”
Source: worked in Georgia, USA for a year. Got my heart thoroughly blessed.
I always kind of thought that was obvious.
I remember back when this was coming out the rumor was this was originally a Will Riker driven Star Trek TNG spin off.
I almost started this on Amazon the other day because it’s one of the few sci-fi series I’ve never seen, but I just can’t stomach Sorbo so I started rewatching Lexx instead.
Lexx is wild. I watched it originally on a pay tv channel that had cut the episodes up into ~25 minute blocks.
I first dropped into late season 2 and occasionally I’d miss an episode.
So, combined with the weird cutting, the no context and the standard Lexx craziness, I had NO idea what was happening. The whole thing was a fever dream. Highly recommend!
I actually think it’s was the best way to watch it first go round! Then, when I came back and do the whole series in order and it was almost as much of a surprise.
I caught it first on nflix and then bought the seasons on google play and of course now they’re free with ads on youtube and for some reason even logged in it makes me watch ads…
It’s hard to imagine how that show would have flowed broken into 25m segments. It’s weird enough as-produced.
I bought the series on DVD a number of years ago. I don’t think I made it through the first disk. And I think that’s a shame, because it seemed like so full of potential for the first handful of episodes.
