The return of Blake's 7
It's been a good twenty years (maybe, depressingly, more) since I saw Blake's 7 on late-night PBS, but my recollection was that it was a damn good show if you saw past the cruddy sets and the BBC-black-screen (I've had it explained to me that British shows were as well-lit as anyone else's, and they only looked darker because of something in the PAL-to-NTSC conversion process, or maybe it had something to do with improper tint correction. All I really know for a fact is that when you used to watch BBC videos at school or on PBS back in the '80s, they all looked like they'd been lit with flashlights. I always imagined actors falling over when taking their places or sets being built in converted air raid shelters from WWII.)
Anyway, my recollection is that Blake's was kind of out there as far as science fiction shows were concerned: character-driven (as opposed to scenario-driven), willing to kill off major characters to further the plot (no last-minute reincarnations of the bridge crew here), and sort of high-minded in the premise (the heroes were sort of the bad guys in a good cause). If I'm misremembering, don't correct me--I'd like to think that it was one of the first truly good SF shows made, the spiritual predecessor to shows like Firefly and the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, the proverbial "good" science-fiction show (to paraphrase Clarke and Kubrick, i.e. something that hardly existed in reality and was possibly wholly imaginary).
Comments
Blake's crew were a pretty disparate and interesting lot, and as for getting rid of major characters - they did away with the fucking TITLE CHARACTER. Yeah, that's right, in later episodes there kinda was no Roj Blake, and most of the 7 were dead. The effects and sets could be sub-Dr. Who, sometimes, though, so "distracting" is almost an understatement.