Fast rewind to about eight years ago. Every geek in the world, and much of mainstream Western culture, awaited with trembling anticipation the coming of the Star Wars prequels. Star Trek: TNG was a smash hit as a TV show, and had spawned two highly successful movies. Deep Space Nine was also going strong. Broadcast TV offered up a wide range of sci-fi/fantasy, from B5 to X-Files.
Then everything descended into suck. Voyager pretty much killed off the Trek fan base, so that even when Enterprise got quite good, it was too late to save the show. Nemesis was the biggest piece of crap to soil a silver screen in a long time. Well, except for the Star Wars prequels. About the only original sci-fi to come out of Hollywood lately consists of Vin Diesel shooting things and posing for the camera.
Flipping through the broadcast channels these days, I have never seen such a vast wasteland of reality TV and painfully unfunny sitcoms (I thought "sitcom" stood for "situation comedy," but have since determined that it stands for "washed up comedian makes funny faces in artificial situations contrived by a team of talentless writers/wombats"). About the only bright spot is Fox's "House," but even that comes from the brilliantly original brainstorm of "Let's combine ER and CSI into one show!"
Don't go on about how fantastic the new Battlestar is, or about Stargate: Chthulu, or Farsrcape. If these shows were so great, they'd be on NBC in Fear Factor's slot, or on ABC, replacing any one of the crap shows they broadcast (since I can't actually think of a single ABC show, I assume that they all are teh suk).
Can you blame George Lucas and Rick Berman for all of this? Yeah, pretty much. But you have to give a whole heaping helping of credit to a culture that likes to watch bad Karaoke hacks get berated by has-been pop stars, or gym teachers shitting over a log on some desert island. There's no intelligence or imagination left anywhere. And they killed my favorite show. Morans.
Oh, and watch House. It doesn't suck. Yet.
Inspiration
