Stargate: Universe – the new Battlestar Galactica?

You're probably aware of Stargate. There are several films, TV series, animated series, novels – you might have watched and read them all. Or you might just have watched them go by in the distance and thought they probably weren't for you. As with a lot of genre TV, people who like it tend to really, really, like it – while people who haven't ever sat and watched anything branded "Stargate" will assume they're too late to the party to bother and not watch it.

According to the producers of Stargate: Universe, which starts on Sky1 tonight, the new show is an attempt to appeal to both camps: bringing in new viewers while attempting not to alienate fans of the franchise.

And so we'll see a move away from the weekly adventure format towards slower, multi-series arcs, with characters who are apparently less black and white: flawed, complicated and more human than hero. It also sports Robert Carlyle – the latest British actor running away, he claims, from the ailing British film industry – as some kind of tortured scientist. Whether Carlyle, a brilliant character actor with a bundle of heavy dramas under his belt, can throw himself into the genre wholeheartedly remains to be seen. He certainly looked bored and grumpy at the comic con panel I went to.

Universe has the following premise: when their secret base starts coming under heavy fire, a group of scientists and military people leap through a Stargate and find themselves on a ship called the Destiny, built thousands of years ago by a people called the Ancients and now drifting in far outer space. They can't seem to steer the ship, or work out how to manoeuvre it back toward earth, but discover it will slow down when it's near enough to a planet that contains something that might help them.

The story of a long journey home and the complex interplay of personalities on a slow-moving ship just hoping to reach the Earth at some point has, it turns out, rung a lot of bells. Some say it's Battlestar Galactica mixed with Lost, or BSG mixed with Star Trek: Voyager – or just BSG with a big watery hoop thrown into the middle of it.

If you like one part of the Stargate franchise, it doesn't necessarily follow that you'll like this just because it's got the good old vertical duckpond in it – especially when the producers are claiming it to be so very different from the other parts of the canon. You'll probably just want the ones you DO like not to have been cancelled in the first place.

Or, as someone put it in the comments of ace Sci-Fi fan site io9 (warning: as the show was shown in the US last week, there will be many spoilers for people who haven't seen it yet):

Cash907Censored: So, basically what I am gathering here from all the comments, is SGU is Stargate for people who don't like Stargate.

So there you go. Stargate for people who don't like Stargate. And quite possibly not for people who do. And judging by early reviews, it might not be terrible. Who's in?