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I watch a lot of television. And not just the intellectually challenging stuff, either. To be honest, I enjoy "bad" television, at least within certain limits. Now, I don't have much use for reality shows, which I believe constitute not "bad," but "truly wretched" television. The popularity of most reality shows seem to prove a pair of well-known axioms once spouted by P.T. Barnum and H.L. Mencken: "There's a sucker born every minute," and "You can never go wrong by underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

But I do enjoy a lot of what passes for dramatic programming, including many of the more bizarre offerings. "Alien Nation" was a favorite, and so have been most incarnations of "Star Trek," starting with the original, and including the current one. I enjoy both good science fiction and, nearly as much, bad space opera, and will happily point out that there's a direct connection between the old Guy Williams space opera "Lost In Space" and "Star Wars" (John Williams wrote the music for both).

Comic book based shows have also been favorites, from the original George Reeves "Superman," to "Spider-man," to "The Incredible Hulk," to "Smallville." A friend of mine at the local TV station used to run "Isis" for me late Saturday evening. That was another comic-based show—or, possibly, show-based comic, I was never sure—a live-action Saturday morning kids adventure show that was probably more popular with the kids' fathers every time Joanna Cameron put on that costume. And I will generally watch, at least once, updated versions of older shows.

There are times, though, when the updates, either of old shows or old concepts, don't quite work. Change isn't always good.

The recent remake of "Battlestar Galactica" was one of those cases. As usual, there are minor changes that hardly matter, and other that are so completely wrong that they make it hard to enjoy the show. CGI special effects, and even turning Starbuck into a girl, fit the "doesn't matter that much" category. The changes to the Cylons, on the other hand, are more in the terrible choice category.

I don't have any particular problem with the CGI Cylon Centurions. On the old show, the outer form was dictated by the need to fit a living actor inside the "mechanical" body. With computer generated imaging, this is no longer necessary, mechanical objects being one of the things CGI handles best. The problem comes from their origin. In the new version, the Cylons are hyper-intelligent machines, originally built by human as relatively simple servant robots, and which have evolved their own mechanical intelligence and created their own, separate society based on mechanical perfection.

But that's not how it's supposed to work. The original Cylons were not the result of human electro-mechanical tinkering. Rather, they were a reptilian species that had evolved separately from humans, then carried their quest for physical perfection to such a degree that most no longer had physical bodies. The Cylons were cyborgs, not robots or androids, an organic brain in a mechanical body.

Some, the leaders, had more than one brain. The Cylons lacked the collective consciousness of "Star Trek's" Borg, but certainly shared their quest for perfection through mechanical augmentation of the biological intelligence. (Whether Rodenberry had any Cylon flashback when he created the Borg, I have no idea. The cyborg idea certainly wasn't new with Glen Larson, either.)

Also, in the old show, the Cylon's animosity to humanity didn't come from former servitude, but from a more basic motive, competion for dominance. The Cylons didn't believe humans were useful in any way, as humans didn't easily accept slavery, which was the only status a Cylon would consider fitting. I've always suspected there might be a touch of Dalek in the Cylons. "We wish to destroy you because you are not us, and you make our slaves restless."

I found the new Baltar a bit disappointing, too. John Colicos played a fairly pure villain, a megalomaniac who was entirely willing to trade the destruction of all the other human colonies for the reward of domination of his own world. Like Quisling in Norway, he would rather be a sub-dictator under an overlord than a mere subject, or the victim, of a conqueror. In the original incarnation, too, the character wasn't intended to live past the end of the TV movie pilot, though, like Doctor Smith on "Lost in Space," he proved to be so popular that he was kept around.

The new Baltar is just a dupe, tricked into revealing the secrets of Colonial defenses by a beautiful, human-appearing Cylon.

Honestly, it's just not as much fun.

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