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Antonio Brittenham
UPDATE 12/1/2021: While Stargate SG-1 and Universe have now left Hulu as scheduled, Atlantis is still available on the service and its expiration date has been removed. SG-1 has also won a late reprieve on Netflix, and remains streaming as of December 1.
The Disney majority-owned streaming service has been the last place where fans could stream all three shows from the long-running Stargate franchise, after the shows left Amazon Prime Video (most recently in February of 2021).
The MGM sale is nearing completion and according to my sources part of that deal is to let the MGM contracts run out on other streaming services as Amazon have a streaming platform and will not share content where possible. Your comment seems most likely and gives a bit of hope to us all.
It obviously warrants the rating on the pilot episode. But MGM has every individual episode of the series rated, and the other 212 hours are all TV-PG and TV-14. Netflix ignores the per-episode data and just assigns the highest rating to the entire series.
I was late coming to the Stargate series on TV. I came across it almost by accident one day when the series was well under way but I had been a MacGyver fan from way back and really liked Richard Dean Anderson, so I watched and became hooked. I had never seen the movie or the pilot to the series. A number of years ago, I bought the set and the original movie with Kurt Russell and had actually removed the cellophane but still had not watched any of it. Last night, I decided the time had come. I started at the beginning with the movie.
That said, for all the enjoyment of the memories of watching it at 5pm (or thereabouts) every night after school, one huge issue becomes quite glaring as the seasons roll by. As the premise becomes established in its own universe, the risk factor diminishes because the good guys keep winning and keep getting further and further away from the original idea of a clandestine military group, way over its head, operating to protect Earth. The plots become complacent, as do the characters, and it loses the risk factor which made the show great to begin with.
It also showed just how far removed the series had come from its more serious beginnings. A persistent argument even endures among fans that the show had been a comedy all along, and there is a certain truth to this which neatly accounts, later on anyway, for it drifting more into convenient solutions and jocularity.
The less said about Stargate: Universe the better because, while its premise offered great promise to restore the show to its heady early days (even starting out with a romp in a cupboard between two young characters), it was too bogged down by a mythology that required you to have a working understanding of about 280 hours of television from the other series and their wildly different tones. Even Robert Carlyle offered little salvation and the show ended in 2011 in the ignominy of belonging to a franchise which had two of three of its official series cancelled.
Longevity can be a curse and in the case of Stargate SG-1 and the franchise it spawned this became evident. Every spin-off, including the non-canon series Infinity has ended in cancellation and it seems that none of them ever caught the imagination of the original series. Even the beautifully mysterious music failed to ignite the sinews again. Or maybe it was MacGyver leaving. Maybe it was the wonders and mystery of Ancient Egypt being brought to life as an alien race that made it great and all other plots were a bit perfunctory in the end. Something was lost and as time went by, the show never got it back.
The great rumor of modern times is that Independence Day was meant to be the sequel to Stargate. Roland Emmerich apparently created the concept when working on Stargate and many of the original production team returned, including writers Dean Devlin and composer David Arnold. When you watch both together there are stark similarities which makes the promise that Emmerich and Devlin are involved in the Stargate sequel/reboot an exciting possibility.
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