[quote name='Khaiy' timestamp='1305245237' post='4810015']
[quote name='ChaosEngine' timestamp='1305239577' post='4809988']
I must be on the wrong forum. A board full of geeks and no-one mentions firefly?

More mainstream, I've also really enjoyed West Wing and the Sopranos (although I've only watch a few episodes of each as I want to watch them from the start).

BTW OP, I'm currently re-watched BSG again. The first 2 and a half seasons are so good it's actually depressing me to think of how much the completely ruined it in the end.

Firefly didn't last more than one season, so it didn't fit the OP's criteria.

I agree with BSG (I'm most of the way through season 4, and haven't been able to motivate myself to watch the rest yet). I wish that American shows that want to do big story arcs would pick a set number of seasons they wanted and then write a story that would be told start to finish in that time. Stringing the story along for as long as the show is profitable enough in a company's eyes just leads to endless plot stretching and irrelevant situations, inconsistency and retrocons, and then a jumbled rush to tie up loose ends. Unless they want to someday go for a movie, in which case they'll leave a few strands dangling. Greedy bastards.
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That's not really what happened to BSG, though. They were planning for "the end", they knew exactly how long it would be. But they didn't plan on a writer's strike that would cut many, many episodes out of the series. It was rushed and messy because they had to rush it.

That said, I wish they had said "writers strike? Fine, we'll add another half-season so we can finish it right" instead of just rushing it out the door.
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Were they planning the end though? All through the seasons we were told "there are 12 cylons.... and they have a plan". I have yet to figure out what that plan was.

And don't get me started on the whole "god did it" rubbish..

BSG went south in a bad way. I am not even going to bother wasting too much time talking about it.

Two shows that doesn't quite fit your "more than one season" criteria, but definitely are worth checking out anyway are

The Walking Dead - Modern zombie horror in TV series format. Very cool, high production values. Season one is complete, they are working on season two.

Game of Thrones - Medieval/fantasy show with lots of political scheming and double crossing. Very high production values, on par with Hollywood. They are still on season one, just four episodes out so far though.

My personal stash.

The Wire
Dexter
Breaking Bad
Band Of Brothers
Spaced
The League Of Gentlemen (hilariously creepy English comedy).
Rome
Red Dwarf
Battlestar Gallactica
And of course, Firefly... Note that it's an incomplete series, but if you've seen the movie Serenity, should give you some pointer to where it was heading

Game of Thrones - Medieval/fantasy show with lots of political scheming and double crossing. Very high production values, on par with Hollywood. They are still on season one, just four episodes out so far though.

I'd suggest you don't watch this without reading the books first, though. You'd be doing yourself a disservice. They are among the best books I've ever read, and that's coming from someone who reads a lot more than fantasy series.

I must be on the wrong forum. A board full of geeks and no-one mentions firefly?

He said not corny. I don't care whether you think Firefly is good or not (I for one think it's utter crap, and I can't understand why anyone aside from a 13 year old girl would like it or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but that's just me), but you have to admit it's corny.

Breaking Bad. It's simply awesome.

Also, stop talking about Dexter plot lines, I have to skip posts with my eyes half-closed - other countries are typically a season behind or don't show things except on expensive packages so we watch boxsets. Like House... only made it to season 4 on regular TV and I don't think S7 has aired at all here yet.

That's not really what happened to BSG, though. They were planning for "the end", they knew exactly how long it would be. But they didn't plan on a writer's strike that would cut many, many episodes out of the series. It was rushed and messy because they had to rush it.

That said, I wish they had said "writers strike? Fine, we'll add another half-season so we can finish it right" instead of just rushing it out the door.

Any show that has something like BSG season 4 doesn't get to blame things on a writer's strike. If you suddenly have fewer episodes to work with, you ditch out on less plot-relevant episodes in favor of others, you cut back on side plots, and you avoid like the plague episodes that "focus on the characters" to the exclusion of the big story arcs you've been working with for the entire series so far, especially without the side-plots to give them a little more structure.

Each season has the same number of episodes, saving for season 1 which was more testing the waters. The writer's strike happened between season 3 and season 4, only affecting season 4 (and even then, over half of the episodes were already filmed before the strike began). There were ten episodes after that even might have been affected by the strike, and even then the original order for episodes was 13, not 22-- there were more episodes than initially expected, not less. The episodes may have been rushed, I don't know, but they had as much time to make them as any other episodes when SciFi pushed their air dates back almost a year.

The issues with BSG are ones that I see with most shows that end up having more episodes than they expected. They planned a story (at best), and suddenly have a lot more air time to fill, so they cram in stuff that tends to throw of the flow of the planned series, if nothing else. They can't have planned for there to be more episodes than they were expecting to write.

But it doesn't matter. The episodes in question represent about 7 hours of screen time out of about 52.5 total hours of canonical show (not counting the miniseries, because I forgot how long that was), or something a bit less than 1/7 of available screen time. That's not an insignificant amount, but if they had planned out the ending, there's no reason that they couldn't have sewn things up, or at least planned to, in that time. But instead it's a mess that doesn't answer the questions it ought to. They needed more episodes not because that's how they had planned it and they got jammed up by circumstance, but because they got sloppy with their plot and story telling beyond their ability to get out of it in 7 hours. And being in that situation has nothing to do with a writers' strike.

It's not like with Carnivale (another show the OP should look at, by the way), where they were planning for more than 2 seasons but then found out they weren't being renewed and had to rush out a conclusion for their viewers.

Were they planning the end though? All through the seasons we were told "there are 12 cylons.... and they have a plan". I have yet to figure out what that plan was.

And don't get me started on the whole "god did it" rubbish..

BSG had nothing to do with god, it was just the uninformed's way of explaining the fact no one knew how the first five were and what they were doing. They're plan was to create a hybrid race of machine and human to stop the cycle of hate.... humans evolve, machines evolve, they destroy each other... rinse and repeat. And I believe the writers strike had nothing to do with the crappy end, it was syfy cancelling the show and saying this is the last season, so wrap it up.

I did start watching that show Psych, and yeah it is pretty funny, but extremely sitcomy, in the sense it's a different story everytime, and aslong as you watched the first episode you can jump in at anytime. Since they're really doesn't seem to be any ongoing story.

[quote name='Promethium' timestamp='1305277621' post='4810133']
Game of Thrones - Medieval/fantasy show with lots of political scheming and double crossing. Very high production values, on par with Hollywood. They are still on season one, just four episodes out so far though.

I'd suggest you don't watch this without reading the books first, though. You'd be doing yourself a disservice. They are among the best books I've ever read, and that's coming from someone who reads a lot more than fantasy series.
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yes. the audiobooks are also really well read.