Finally for tonight, an entry written many moons ago and just unearthed; it appears to be complete, and I have no idea why I haven’t posted it before.
A while ago I watched Stargate Atlantis. In many ways it was not a very good show, but I watched 99% of it [*] because it was very undemanding material to stitch to, that is, I could listen and only need to look up occasionally.
[*] I skipped the season five clip show because, first, clip show, and second, its frame story sounded guaranteed to drive me up a wall.
I got into watching the show to provide context for fanfic that I more-or-less-randomly started reading, which also led me to Martha Wells’ two tie-in novels, Stargate Atlantis: Reliquary and Stargate Atlantis: Entanglement. These were terrific: the kind of exciting SFnal explorations that the show mostly did not manage on its own. Partly this is of course the greater scope a book allows, with no special effects budget or time limit, but also it’s a willingness to be more complicated and thorough that the show didn’t achieve even in multi-episode arcs. If you liked the idea of the show and the characters when they weren’t suffering from plot-induced stupidity, then it’s worth checking these out.