SeaQuest DSV - Season One

That's Scheider's best Freeman's catalogue pose...

1990's US TV schedules were littered with sci-fi shows that never made it past their first season. Earth 2, Dark Skies, Harsh Realm, Space: Above and Beyond and VR.5 are now only recalled by rabid fans and uber-nerds (which probably tells you all you need to know about me!), and are generally considered failures because of their one-season-wonder status. True, there were some shows that carved a minor niche in 90's TV history - the Trek franchise alone managed to have three shows within the decade (although each had their own faults), and you had the likes of Sliders and Babylon 5 that didn't rely on franchise familiarity to reach the heady heights of five seasons. But SeaQuest DSV is something different from any of those. This show lasted three seasons, more by good luck than good judgement, and even with the headline names attached (star Roy Scheider and executive producer Steven Spielberg), has the reputation of being a stinker. Hell, at 57 episodes, it must have done something right. Right?

Starting in the then-distant future of 2018(!), the show follows Captain Nathan Bridger (Scheider), designer and captain of the United Earth Oceans Organisation submarine SeaQuest and his multicultural (through American eyes) crew as they try to bring peace to the new frontier of the 21st Century, the oceans. Naturally, starting off as a high profile prime time TV show, the producers go for every available demographic (hence the casting choices) and whilst this means the show has relatively high production values (though at times, it does look cheap, which I'll get to later), it also means that the writers have to pull their punches due to the time slot in order to keep every viewer happy - and as the saying goes, try to keep everyone happy and you end up pleasing no-one...

Premiering in 1993, SeaQuest used the then new and exciting field of CGI to portray the undersea actions and yes, it hasn't aged very well at all. At the time, the graphics were considered decent but murky and viewing on DVD today confirms that, though they are not as bad as I recall. You have Dr. Bob Ballard (he who led the expedition to locate the Titanic) as a technical consultant and, at least for season one, talking head at the end of each episode - more on him in a bit. Unlike some TV shows of the time, there is a sense of some continuity between episodes, but only where it suits the story, and usually you can, like the network did, treat each episode as a standalone story. This doesn't work when the broadcast order is scrambled (as mirrored by the DVD running order), with one character moving from Admiral to President then back to Admiral again within three episodes. The fact that the network was screwing with the play order tells you pretty much what they thought of the show.

So, does the show deserve it's reputation. Well... not quite... ish...

Where to begin? First up, SeaQuest season one has an identity issue. Many a first season of any show is uneven - after all, they are trying to find their feet and figure out what does/doesn't work whilst trying to get that all important second season renewal. You just have to look at Star Trek: TNG to see how long it can take, where it was well into its third season before the show started to work. With SeaQuest, however, you can see the initial goal for scientific accuracy and realism but the seemingly ever present drive of American TV shows to add "humour" brings up some really stupid stories; The Treasures of the Tonga Trench being a really, really poo (literally) episode. Then there is Knight of Shadows, a Halloween episode that, aside from one decent scare, shows how silly and vapid the show could get (and that's only episode eight...). Later episodes rattle from serious geo-political intrigue to war criminals, mermaids and aliens. Tonally, this show is all over the place.

Realism suffers a lot even when you have the respected Bob Ballard doing his piece to camera during the end credits, linking the episode's story with a real world (or frankly ludicrous predictions of what the future holds for humanity and the oceans). You see, it looks like he's been press-ganged into doing them, held at gunpoint, fitted with an overly small SeaQuest DSV baseball cap and marched around the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to sprout word salads to make you feel that the show is more science fact than fiction. Yet by the time you get to Knight of Shadows (which has ghosts on a hundred year old sunken liner), you can see the desperation in his eyes, the sheer panic at wondering why he has to say such things on camera, the pleading to the viewer to call the cops. Seriously, watch him, watch his eyes! Fortunately for Bob, he was rescued by the end of season one and we never see him again on SeaQuest.

Casting did a decent enough job with most of the actors, I have no issue there, but some characters are poorly handled and, dare I say, miscast. Scheider is always good value and as the season progresses, you can see the other actors becoming more comfortable in their roles; Stacey Haiduk as Lieutenant Commander Hitchcock (younger lady eye candy) and Don Franklin as Commander Ford (supposed foil to Scheider) in particular but really, the casting choices of Stephanie Beacham (Dr Kristen Westphalen - thinking man's totty) and Royce D Applegate (Chief Crocker - to get your Grandpa interested) are puzzling. Beacham, for one, comes across as rather too plummy and is pretty much an exposition machine (apart from the last two episodes when an out of the blue romance with Bridger appears because... the writer's needed something to do???), though her turn in Knight of Shadows is particularly cringe-worthy. John D'Aquino (Lieutenant Krieg) is suitably annoying and the source of much of the (American) humour - think Sgt Bilko and you have the right idea, whilst Ted Raimi (Lieutenant O'Neill - he's the awkward nerd) and Marco Sanchez (Sensor Chief Ortiz - Cuban, so we're going for ethnic minority eye candy) are suitably decent in their limited roles. The last two main characters... well...

Darwin the (f***ing) Dolphin is a Marmite addition to the crew - you'll either love him or hate him. Guess which camp I fall into... It's not the idea of a dolphin in the crew that's an issue, it's the way he's brought to life, with annoying speech effects by Frank Oz and those bloody pan pipes. Yep, pretty much every time he appears on screen, you get bloody pan pipe music! Arrgghhhhhh!!!

Finally, you have Jonathan Brandis as child prodigy (and border line sex pest) Lucas Wolenczak. Oh. Dear. Lord.

Look, I get it. I really do. Wolenczak is a teen genius who happens to be easy on the eye for those who like the blond floppy hair look. As a network TV exec, you want your teenage male audience to want to be him, and your teenage female audience to want to date him (this is the early '90's, that's how binary the TV networks looked at their audiences). Not calling Brandis out here (because his personal struggles both during and after the show are well known, leading to his untimely suicide), but the handling of his character ranges from heartfelt (he was effectively dumped on the SeaQuest by his parents) to the aforementioned sex pest. In one episode, he is in the gym with Hitchcock and notices her chest. He starts staring with an expression that defies polite explanation. Being a TV show from the past, the director then cuts to a few seconds of Haiduk's chest moving up and down due to the exercise. Yeah, they did that back then in family TV shows and is about as subtle as a diver's boot to the bollocks... In another episode, he get's to re-use that look with another crew member who, to put it politely, is old enough to be his mother. Cue another few seconds of uncomfortable viewing. And that's not even to mention the safe sex/abstinence message at the end of "Abalon". Just wow...

Like most TV shows, SeaQuest has its fair share of guest appearances, and like most TV shows, these are variable in quality (I'm looking at you, Murder She Wrote. You lived (and died) by your guest actor casting). You get William Shatner as unshaven despot Milos Teslov, complete with "accent". I don't know what accent, so we'll just go with "accent". Then you have Charlton Heston as some kind of Dr Moreau character - though he obviously believes he is in a different TV show and out-acts pretty much everybody else on screen with the exception of Scheider. W. Morgan Sheppard is given little to do as the submarine's hologram, which is a shame, whilst Richard Herd is dependable as Admiral/President/Admiral Noyce (that bloody running order thing again!). Kent McCord rocks it as an astronaut for two episodes, kind of like a '90's Anson Mount (no disrespect to either actor meant in that comparison), whilst James Shigeta gels nicely as a confederation President, even if it does look like he's just walked off the set of Die Hard (pre-gunshot to the head, obviously). We even get Seth Green in the painfully technologically dated episode Photon Bullet, where he plays... Seth Green. To top it off, we have David McCallum. In the '90's, he scored gigs on Murder She Wrote, Babylon 5, VR.5, The Outer Limits and Team Knight Rider. Alongside the similarly talented David Warner, it seems you weren't a '90's show without one of these two actors. Warner's '90's run included Murder She Wrote, ST: TNG, Wild Palms, Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Babylon 5, The Outer Limits and Total Recall 2070. Kudos to Babylon 5 for snagging both, albeit in separate episodes. Anyhoo, back to McCallum in SeaQuest and... it's not good. Set in an outpost called Broken Ridge, McCallum plays an Australian, but in no way gets the accent. In fact, his accent does a Grand Tour to anywhere but Australia during the course of the episode. Lord knows why he was cast here, but it was the wrong choice.

It's a shame then that most of the stories in season one are pretty forgettable and that the world-building was so haphazard. Indeed, apart from the episodes already mentioned, it's difficult to recall many of the others. What should have been exciting and dramatic often falls flat, much like the cultural approach to humour. Above all, this show feels like it is going through the motions, meaning most of the episodes come across as generic retreads of familiar themes, and that's before you get to casting choices and slightly dodgy production values (one episode with astronauts uses barely disguised motorcycle helmets that look more like something out of Blakes 7 than a prime time US TV show - and yes, I have just finished watching the four series of B7 and know exactly how cheap it could look!). Given a bit more depth (yes, I went there), this show could have been a ratings success in the long term. As it was, it was an expensive show to make and expectations were probably set too high. In the end, no-one really knew which direction to take the show.

SeaQuest DSV season one falls into a common trap of many TV shows, both genre and mainstream, in that by trying to please network execs, advertisers and viewers, it came across as bland and boring. Bad in places, though not as terrible as many think, it demonstrated a level of promise that unfortunately, it couldn't deliver. Out of ten, I'd stretch out to a six, since there was the foundation of a decent show in there somewhere. However, the network were troubled by the ratings and this meant changes for season two...