BSG and politics – Variety piece by Steve Benen!

My Poli-Sci-Fi Radio co-host, Steve Benen, wrote a short piece for Variety that’s out today (coinciding with the beginning of BSG season 4.5) about the fact that Battlestar Galactica is the most overtly political TV show since The West Wing. He writes…

no program in recent memory has covered such explicitly political ground. It features a detailed political environment — we see a president memorizing talking points and hosting press conferences — with realistic institutions and competing branches. It has explored, in depth, issues such as torture, civil liberties, separation of powers and even the line between church and state.

Nice job, Steve! I hope this season doesn’t suck as badly as I fear it will…

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On January 29, 2009, Lev said:

Sure, there is political process going on, but it feels like a while since the show has actually tried to bring up a contemporary political issue. I think the secret tribunal episode was the last time the show even bothered to try.
On January 29, 2009, billsimmon said:

Thanks for commenting, Lev.

You don’t think this recent thing with Zarach being accused of selling seats on the Quorum is a reference to the Blagojovich stuff?

Anyway, the claim is that it’s overtly political, not that it deals with contemporary political issues per se. West Wing didn’t always do that either, but it was certainly political.

I would argue that HBO’s Rome was more overtly political than BSG. But maybe Steve was omitting pay cable shows in his reasoning.
On January 29, 2009, Lev said:

Fair point with the Blagojevich deal, although it was kind of a glancing blow. I’m talking about stuff like the Admiral Cain episodes, where I thought the show really tried to say something about what adoption of a Bushian worldview leads to, and I thought it was quite successful in showing how torture, autocracy, casual cruelty, etc., basically transformed the Pegasus crew: most became monsters and some were decent but frightened people who feared speaking out (like the XO). Those episodes really threw me through a loop–it was a pretty sound argument, I thought.

I actually agree with Steve that the show pays a lot of attention to the internal politics of the BSG universe and always has. What’s changed, I think, is that the politics of the BSG universe have stopped mirroring our own as much. I mean, the biggest political thread in the last season was the constitutional crisis over Zarek taking over when Roslin disappeared, which really didn’t speak to anything going on in the real world (and Zarek just voluntarily giving up power was really ridiculous). Like everything on BSG, the political angle has become more insular and less relevant to anything outside the walls of the show, so to speak.

And you’re definitely right about Rome. BSG, though, was following in the footsteps of Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine, which were both very political. Neither show really tried to comment on the politics of its time in the way that Galactica has, though I think B5 and DS9 were ahead of their time (the DS9 two-parter where Sisko has to stop a coup after a changeling suicide bombing, for example), while BSG already feels dated, in my opinion. So it goes.