Why BSG is (currently) the best show on television

So I've just watched the last episode of the first half of the final Battlestar Galactica season, and it was amazing. For anyone who hasn't seen it yet (4:10, Revelations), I won't include any spoilers here. I just want to take a moment to appreciate the many wonderful things about this intelligent, superlative show.

For the many people who mistakenly believe that a "genre" show is somehow lesser than a reality-based narrative, I'd like to point out that this show is built around a series of core questions that are deeper and more insoluble than any brought up by Law and Order or ER. The nature of humanity - always a slippery definition - becomes even more so when faced with a species that looks, feels, and bleeds as we do, yet is somehow separate. The Cylons, in their endless struggle to understand humans, force the humans to try to understand themselves. And while the first question is seemingly obvious: what constitutes humanity? The second question is definitely not: can you choose to be human? And the third is even more unsettling: can you choose NOT to be?

The answer to the latter questions seems, so far, to be in the affirmative. Cylon characters have made sacrifices as wrenching as any of the humans; humans have betrayed their own as they have been doing for centuries, in times and places when literally everything was at stake. Many of the characters have acknowledged this, while others refuse to face it, clinging to their own in the face of all evidence and opposition. The parallels with America's current situation in the global community are obvious, but the implications go beyond that. If peace broke out everywhere tomorrow, it wouldn't last precisely because we haven't answered these questions.

It's true that Battlestar Galactica is set far in the future, in a time of routine faster-than-light space travel and ship-mounted energy weapons. But nowadays that seems hardly more fanciful than The West Wing's benevolent, responsible Bartlet Administration. The people of the Colonial Fleet may live in more extreme conditions than the average American, but they have the same range of choices. Violence vs. peace. Trust vs. betrayal. Self-interest vs. the greater good. The choices they make are sometimes right, and sometimes not, but perhaps that, too, is an indicator of humanity.

I'll reserve my accolades for the acting and specific accomplishments in writing for another post, but I will say that I have more in common with Dee or Cally or Tory any day of the week than I ever had with Carrie Bradshaw or Meadow Soprano. And I'm proud of that, not just as a Geek Girl, but as a human being.

I think that the main reason most people dismiss "genre" shows is a failure of imagination. After all, anyone who thinks Farmer Needs A Wife and The Bachelorette are reality-based is clearly incapable of separating fantasy and reality. And we should all feel sorry for them.