20 years ago already

Hard to believe that this fall, this show will be 20 years old. A good number of college students weren't even born at the time. It really doesn't feel like that long ago. Time flies.

Looking back, I remember it seemed to hold some promise, particularly with Spielberg involved, even though his previous TV show Amazing Stories was a mixed bag. The first season wasn't bad. Not great, but there was room to grow. I tried watching both Seaquest and its competition, Lois & Clark, and gave up on the latter after a few episodes as poorly written melodramatic superhero romance fantasy claptrap. I stayed with Seaquest. But then came the changes for the second season. Ouch. I imagine Bob Ballard must have been very sad about how they had completely forsaken even the pretense of relevance to science. And just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, they hit us with an even more radically changed third season. The Web wasn't around back then, only some bulletin board services like Compuserve and GEnie, so there weren't a whole lot of information sources about just how this disaster happened. Just read the Wikipedia article on the show and I can now understand how it got all screwed up. Network interference yet again. Roy Scheider was wrong about the second season, though. "It's childish trash... I am very bitter about it. I feel betrayed... It's (the new season) not even good fantasy. I mean Star Trek does this stuff much better than we can do it. To me the show is now 21 Jump Street meets Star Dreck." Roy, you were much too kind.