Why isn't there another BSG

asks io9.

Now admittedly, I don't watch TV. I mean, other than Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Dollhouse, Doctor Who (classic), Doctor Who (2005-), Battlestar Galactica (reimagined), and Babylon 5. None of which I saw while they were originally on the air, with Dollhouse (kind of) and New Who being the exceptions (and even then I have yet to see anything from Season 33/Series 7 yet, because Season 32/Series 6 was so bad I went out and bought the entire Battlestar Galactica boxset halfway through just to get some good science-fiction and I haven't found Doctor Who worth watching since then).

So I might not be in the best position to comment on this. But here's my guess.

1) You Blew It.

Let's take a look at Dollhouse, because I can pretty safely say that Whedon was trying to make his own BSG. And no, not just because Helo was in the cast and Apollo and Tigh were guest stars. But you've got this whole backstory to unravel, and the fact that pretty much any character can be a Doll. (Though actually with "Epitaph One," you could say that there's more than a bit of B5 influence on this show, too.) Now I'm certainly not going to claim that BSG was in any way good with its Cylon reveals. Four of the first seven Cylons to be revealed were revealed in their first episode; the other three were unmasked in their second. It got to the point where just about any new character who wasn't the Baddie of the Week had a 50/50 chance of being a Cylon. And don't get me started on the faces-on-a-dartboard method of determining the Final Five. But despite that, one thing BSG really had going for it was that there were only 12 Cylons. (Blah blah red herring blah blah Starbuck blah blah Daniel blah blah.) With Dollhouse, there's no limit. And because there's no limit, it feels more stale. With Battlestar you could at least kid yourself into thinking the writers had the whole thing planned out from the beginning, and with a massive cast you knew that there would still be a huge number of people who weren't Cylons.

Or look again (God forbid) at Doctor Who's attempt to do Battlestar-type episodes. You can interpret this to mean are-you-real-or-not episodes like "The Rebel Flesh" or Arc Episodes like "A Good Man Goes to War." These were both tremendous mistakes, but not because the writers were trying to graft something else onto Doctor Who. Doctor Who's entire history has been nothing but that. They were mistakes because Battlestar had done it first and best. (Unless you count Blade Runner or Babylon 5 respectively.) The first two seasons of Battlestar were such a high-water mark for science fiction storytelling that it's practically impossible to top.

So the attempt to make another Battlestar Galactica was silly from the beginning, and not just for that reason. Let's be honest, Battlestar's finale kind of ruined everything for everyone. Never again would we trust a showrunner who promised that everything was plotted out in advance.

2) There Can Be Only One.

So back in the 1990s there was exactly one show that was doing the sort of thing that Battlestar would be doing. Babylon 5, the show that nobody thought would last five years.  Then during Battlestar's run there was only Battlestar. Now, according to io9, it's Game of Thrones.  Why is there only one show like this at a time? Because there is a very limited number of people who a) like science fiction and fantasy, and b) are willing to patiently wait for a story to unfold week after week.  These people have lives, believe it or not. There's not that big a market for those kinds of stories. (By the way, if there were, Christopher Nolan would be famous for Momento, Inception, and The Prestige instead of the Batman films, and the Star Trek reboot would be pitched at Star Trek fans instead of mainstream audiences who vaguely remember the original show, and the Star Wars prequels would never have been finished because Episode 1 would have been a box-office flop.)

There's a reason it's called "genre" fiction, folks.