In his mischievously named book Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making us Smarter, Steven Johnson argues that TV programs have gotten immensely better and more complicated.

Today's tube tales, he says, have long narrative arcs, dozens of characters and subplots galore. Forget Gunsmoke and Charlie's Angels. Think The Sopranos, Six Feet Under or The Wire (all HBO fare). Or, for Canadian content, consider The Border and Da Vinci's City Hall (CBC).

Nico Cortez plays Young Adama in a scene in Battlestar Galactica. (Sci Fi/Associated Press)

Movies, on the other hand, because they are intended for international sales, are often compacted, relying on special effects, stripping storytelling to its minimum. (Think the moronic Kevin Costner film, Waterworld, which cost $200 million and could have been written by a $5 hack with a six-pack of beer).

But a quality television series, with its extended multi-year run, partakes of two genres that gives it heft: the daily soap opera, with its multiple, quarrelling characters and the 19th-century novel with, its vast narrative scope.

It's like War and Peace meets The Days of Our Lives. Or General Hospital by a Tolstoy wannabe.

The shrunken novel

Tom Wolfe, the dapper American writer, once called for the reinvention of the novel, arguing that it had become too domestic, too small and too literary. Endless stories about bickering couples and self-conscious people headed for divorce proceedings.

He may have been unfair to the late-20th-century novel and to a vast, international writing scene packed by South American fabulists and boisterous, inventive South Asians.

Still, Wolfe had a point. In our entertainment, we hunger for meaning on a grand scale. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, the decrepit, silent screen star in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard: She was still big; it was the pictures that became smaller.

I say this all in preface to my latest enthusiasm, which is entering its final episodes: Battlestar Galactica, or BSG, as it's known to its fans.

Don't laugh, ye who haven't seen it. The current version is nothing like the original 1970s series with its silly Egyptian costumes. Nor it is Star Trek with its high shlock.

It's a very smart show, in my opinion — "television literature," as one cast member called it (James Callis, who plays the narcissistic, slimy genius Gaius Baltar).

In its four seasons on air, it has won Emmys as well as the prestigious Peabody award in 2006.

What's more, it was filmed in Vancouver and has employed a full cadre of Canadian actors.

Millennial obsessions

If you simply happen on the show, as I did before I watched it from the beginning starting in the fall, you might be both bored and puzzled.

What are all these moody characters doing, endlessly flapping their gums? It's like stumbling on a long-running soap where the characters have enormous back histories, and you haven't a clue what's going on.

Let me fill you in.

Essentially, the human race has been attacked by robots it once created as servants. The robots are called Cylons. They have nuked numerous human planets (colonies). A rag-tag fleet, headed by the aging ship Battlestar Galactica, escapes the destruction and stays one step ahead of a gang of murderous robots who want to finish the job and destroy humanity.

Murderous intent aside, the Cylons are complicated robots that come in different models.

There are the terrifying, metallic Centurions with guns sticking out of their fingers and a single, menacing light beam as a roving eye. They are cold-blooded, machine killers.

But other models exist that are made of flesh and blood. They are called "skin jobs" by the humans (the whole lot are referred to, disparagingly, as "toasters").

The skin jobs are machine creations. But they are also beginning to evolve. They fall in love with humans, conspire with them, give birth to hybrid babies and conduct civil wars among themselves.

Over time, some human crew members learn they are actually Cylons. They undergo identity crises worse than any experienced in adolescence.

People with skin and sinewy muscle and personality tics actually find out they have a mysteriously programmed history.

It's like going for genetic testing and discovering you are something utterly foreign, completely "other," in spite of your parents and your upbringing. How should I conduct myself, they ask. Where are my loyalties?

No potted plants

Another thing: the Cylons are monotheists and believe in the One True God. The human beings believe in a pantheon of gods like the ancient Greeks and Romans. They also have books of arcane prophecy and a priesthood.

And both human and Cylon are looking to return to their supposed ancestral home, the planet Earth, that glimmering ball of blue floating somewhere in deep space.

It's a marvelously complex series; I've just touched on it. Atmospherically, it's grim and claustrophobic.

The humans work and live in locker-room quarters. The whole set resembles the worn down gym I used to belong to once. The characters lift weights to keep trim and to try to keep out of trouble just like human beings do at gyms across the country.

If that doesn't work (and it doesn't), they drink and pick fights with each other.

There's hardly a potted plant anywhere. The natural world has been banished from the lives of humans (and Cylons). Nevertheless, it still exists in their imaginations, as they long for Earth.

Keeping hope alive

In the show, both humans and Cylons have prophetic dreams. The series is really about keeping hope alive through the innermost cycles of a dark, brooding history.

It's actually the perfect show to parallel the emergence of a Barack Obama presidency.

In one remarkable scene (I don't want to give too much away), even the stalwart military leader, Admiral Adama, falls apart. People lie in corridors, depressed and drunk. Authority is beginning to crumble. How do you go on when your dreams are dashed? (Some don't.)

In this episode, we, the viewer don't know whether we're seeing the past or the future. There have been hints all along in the series that present-day humans (by extension, you and me) originate from a hybrid race.

Certainly, the Cylon "skin jobs" pass the Turing Test meant to distinguish artificial from human intelligence. You can't tell them apart. Humans and robots live in a cosmic embrace and begin to resemble each other, like old couples.

In Battlestar Galactica, we have a "space opera" about the evolution of the human race. It reaches beyond the usual tropes about our over-reliance of technology and our fear of technology even as we queue up for artificial hips and pacemakers and the latest cellphones.

BSG asks: How can humans cope with an apocalyptic future? What do they hope for? And when do machines, our creations, come alive with their own special consciousness? Do they have free will? Do humans? Can machines and humans defy their internal programming as they stumble into whatever future awaits them?

Come to think of it, am I a Cylon? A hybrid? Half free will and half hard-wired. Are you? That could explain a few things. Maybe we should have a little chat about our origins.