Since we're heading into the thick of the holiday season when the majority of regular TV shows are on break, I thought now would be a good time to revisit a slightly smaller version of TV World's summer series, Catching Up. My first selection is a bizarre sci-fi series from the late 1990's called Lexx. When Lexx first came to the United States it wasn't exactly in its original form, in a lot of different ways, too. The Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy) bought the US rights to the show in 2000 but only ended up airing edited versions of Season Two episodes. This was mostly because Season One consisted of four contiguous movies rather than a series of stand-alone episodes, but also because Season Two has a plot that was relatively friendly to the tone of Sci-Fi viewers at the time. Lexx is a controversial show, with some people lauding its weirdness and others calling it a fiasco. I'm going to be watching Season One in its entirety and I'll come to a conclusion later about whether or not to follow the rest of the series.

After all I had heard about Lexx over the years, I wasn't all that thrilled with it in until about a half hour into its premiere. The first of the four Season One movies, "I Worship His Shadow", started off as a rather conventional sci-fi story, which disappointed me after all the flack the series got over the years for being strange. All I saw was an unambiguously evil empire, a sprawling dystopia and a series of sympathetic misfits. Even ten years ago this had already been done before, and better.

Then I saw Barry Bostwick in a colorful, sequined skirt.

Lexx is by no means a truly serious production. It's bawdy, full of unflinching sight gags and is really more indebted to the cheap B-movies of the 1950's and 60's than to any hardcore science fiction. The universe(s) in which the story takes place isn't just alien, it's utterly absurd. Within the first hour of the series, creator Paul Donovan has posited our villains as a cadre of stationary, disembodied brains, asked us to root for a cannibal who wears a jacket made of human faces, and unleashed giant snakes on a crowd of school children. At that point is it really wise to treat the Big Epic Science Fiction Plot as if it's really the point of the series?

Lexx is also fundamentally Canadian. This is important because I feel like a lot of reviews were written with a decidedly American expectation for the show's overall tone. While it would take a lot more space than I have to explain just what makes a show feel "Canadian", I can summarize by saying that the humor is considerably more dry, the blue content less suggestive and more overt, and the production value more to the shoestring end of the spectrum than the typical US production.

By the end of "I Worship His Shadow" we have our central characters and main premise, which is all one can really expect from a series debut. We've got a dark hero (Kai), a walking sex comedy (Zev), an audience stand-in slob (Stanley) and, uh, a robot head that was accidentally made for love. Also, our requisite Unusual Space Ship. Though Lexx did the whole "living ship" thing a couple years before Farscape, I generally think the latter did it, and everything else, better. Still, I'm going to do my best not to draw too many comparisons between the two. I'll just think of them as cousins.

I'm not entirely sold on Lexx yet, but I'm intrigued enough to give it a shot.