Hacker Cinema
seaQuest DSV
1993 · TV series · 45 min episodes · 3 seasons
Created by Rockne S. O'Bannon
Science FictionFantasyActionAdventure
In the early 21st century, mankind has colonized the oceans. The United Earth Oceans Organization enlists Captain Nathan Bridger and the submarine seaQuest DSV to keep the peace and explore the last frontier on Earth.
2 negative1 mixed7 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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11 comments on Hacker News
This might sounds snarky, but I'm serious when I say if we want to know more about the oceans, Hollywood is going to have to come up with a better ocean competitor to Star Trek than 'SeaQuest DSV'. For better or worse, public interest is driven by popular entertainment, and there's maybe one interesting under the water movie once a decade.
Sounds like an episode from Seaquest DSV. The glowing orbs turned out to be phosphorescent feces.
In the 1990s show seaQuest DSV, there was a "talking" dolphin that spoke to the humans via a computer interface that the boy genius character had created.
In one of the episodes, the ship's computers get wipe so the boy has to rebuild the dictionary of the translation system by showing the dolphin flash cards.
I remember thinking that was an interesting way to build a translation layer between two different species with a BIG assumption that the dolphin could understand the symbols on the flashcards.
The internet, being what it is, even has a Wikia link about this: https://seaquest-dsv.fandom.com/wiki/Vocorder
How viable would drones travelling in front of the sub like the whiskers in the TV show seaQuest DSV
Anyone remember or watch 90's TV Show Seaquest DSV. its timeline had us living in underwater stations by now.
Hmm, a few years late per SeaQuest’s timeline… I just hope we have a SeaQuest 4600 class sub handy to sacrifice in order to plug the lava flow when the turbines cause the ocean floor to break apart!
Ironically, in the SeaQuest timeline, SeaQuest DSV itself would have been abducted by an alien ship just a few weeks ago. Maybe there’s still hope that Mark Hamill is actually our first contact with an alien species?
Makes me want to go rewatch 90’s sci-fi: Babylon 5, Space Above & Beyond, SeaQuest (season 1 at least), TekWar, TimeTrax, etc.
Since the “SeaQuest” is from circa 2000, surely it is a reference to the TV show SeaQuest DSV, which aired on NBC from 1993-1996.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaQuest_DSV
There are some fun episodes but the show is not very good and has not aged well.
The short lived tv series SeaQuest DSV suffered terribly from the need to have believable science but at the same time the need for fantasy to make the story interesting. After the first few episodes, they mainly failed and started finding excuses to shoehorn outer space into plots. I loved the idea of the show but the execution makes me wonder if the problem was with limited talent or if hard sci-fi is just very difficult, especially for the visual format.
I suspect this is more a matter of what "sci fi" you like. The 1990s had lots of sci fi TV shows, including, among others:
X-Files
SeaQuest DSV / SeaQuest 2032
More Star Trek than you can shake a stick at (TNG, DS9, and VOY cover the whole decade, with most of it having two at once)
Babylon 5
Sliders
Stargate SG-1
Farscape
I think there's a better case that the 1990s were the high-point of sci fi popularity on TV than a particular drought (though I can see a case that there was something of a drought starting sometime in the mid-1980s through 1993.)
"I'm generally not very receptive to arguments along the lines of "OK, this show isn't great now but you owe it to the universe to give it six months" but I also don't really disagree."
That's not really the argument I was trying to make. I apologize if I wasn't clear enough! Usually my fault. Rather, what I was trying to say is that hindsight is 20/20, and at the outset, nobody at the network -- hell, nobody in Hollywood, including Tina Fey herself -- would have imagined that 30 Rock would outperform Studio 60. I was simply making a broad illustration of the difficulty of predicting winners, even based on (ostensible) quality of a script.
"Are there good examples of a really "knock them dead" pilot that didn't translate into a halfway decent show. Smith might be one possible candidate although I liked the show as a whole more than people in general apparently did."
There are some fantastic pilots that never even got made for various reasons. As for "best pilot that became a bad series," I think Studio 60 is up there. I'd also nominate The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a show with an ostensibly built-in fanbase and a great pilot that just ran out of places to go. Also, call me completely f'ing crazy, but I thought the pilot for SeaQuest DSV was really solid. The show itself? Kind of a massive, bloated embarrassment for all concerned (including Spielberg, one of the show's executive producers).
I'm sure there are plenty of others, but the problem is that -- as with most instances -- we suffer from a bit of a hindsight issue here. Also a bit of a selection bias. Because a lot of good-pilots-turned-crappy-series got canned after a few episodes, we don't remember them as much as we do the shows that lasted a season or longer.
"Related question. For a relatively big budget show, how expensive is making a pilot relative to non-pilot development costs?"
Pilots are usually more expensive than episodes of a show, for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is economies of scale. A running show has its scripts planned out in advance, a regular staff, a cast, and a series of continuously operating parts that reduce the marginal production cost of each episode over the course of a season. A pilot is more like making a small movie: you incur a lot of ad hoc and one-time costs to build something, and you gain no economies of scale. You set up the production, make the episode, then tear everything down and put the whole thing on pause until May.
Another big reason is talent costs. It's not uncommon to convince a prestigious film director or major actor to work on the pilot of a show to help sell it to advertisers and audiences. These folks won't stick around for the show itself, but spending money on them for pilots -- basically, as a form of insurance -- is an age-old tactic.
I remember watching an episode of the defunct show Seaquest DSV as a kid, and this was partially there. It was an automated checkpoint that recorded the 'speeding,' but the ticket/payment/etc all happened automatically with a notification to the user.