Best show on television

As of last Friday, it's official. With Deadwood now defunct, and Lost digging itself into a labyrinthine trench so deep it seems nothing short of hitting the big red “it was all just a dream” button can save it, one show now rules the air.

Literally.
Frak me.

(Yes, Heroes is looking strong out of the gate, and I'm completely enamored of Studio 60. But I have lingering doubts about the ability of the former to maintain its current momentum, as I do about the latter's chances of gathering enough lift to offset its weighty production costs. They both have a lot of ground to cover if they're going to catch up to Battlestar Galactica.)

I am a big fan of the original Galactica, a lifelong loyalist who still has the entire run of comic books and dutifully bought the DVD set that came in a big plastic Cylon head. Even so, I never once, not even at age 8, suffered under the delusion that it was a show of of any real dramatic quality. It was just cool. Cool ships, cool robots, cool music, cool Dirk Benedict. But dramatically speaking, I knew it was no Dallas.

That anything even remotely as good as the new Galactica could issue from the union of Glen Larson's 1978 series and a (one-time) crap factory like the Sci-Fi Channel is nothing less than stunning. Epiphanous. Paradigm-shifting.

This weeklong euphoria after watching Adama pull off his plummeting atmospheric “jump-launch-jump” maneuver, and Pegasus taking out three (or was it four?) base stars in its death throes, has been tempered with feelings of real dread and worry over Gaeta. As with Chief and Sharon (and the late Billy), he's been one of my favorite characters all along. Of all the show's “one year later” twists, his character's mutation from highly efficient Tactical Officer to George W. Baltar's Chief of Staff was hardest to swallow.

Now the occupation is over and it's time to tar & feather all the Cylon collaborators (according to the previews of tonight's episode, and the Chief's foreshadowing). Which means it's not looking too good for Gaeta right now. I just hope he lives through tonight... and somehow finds his way back into a colonial uniform.

He's like the Colin Powell of the Baltar Administration — should've kept away from politics and stuck to what he knew, which is reading DRADIS and spinning up FTLs.