An Open Letter to the Sci-Fi Channel begins "Dearest Sci-Fi, Why are you not way more awesome?" I agree with a lot of it but have some guesses at answers.
First of, yes, Battlestar Galactica is great. But why aren't you showing it more often? I've gotten a lot of friends interested in it lately and they've watched season's 1 and 2 on DVD and are stuck. Season 3 doesn't come out on DVD till March, a year after the last episode aired. I've seen movies come out on DVD while they are still in the 2nd run theaters. It's easily your premier show, why aren't you showing it in reruns? Well you are but on Fridays at 5 AM!
They also list the imported new Dr. Who as good and I agree. I like Stargate Atlantis in spite of it being called stale, and never got into Eureka. And yes Flash Gordon sucks.
The letter says, given hits like Heroes and Lost, "The audience could not be more primed for this material, so why are you offering them Ghost Hunters International and crappy "original movies" like Mansquito?" It asks: "Why aren't you adapting more classic sci-fi texts—like you did with Dune—into miniseries?" Well they also did Riverworld and Earthsea. They also turned The Wizard of Oz into Tin Man. I bet those all cost a fair amount of money and didn't do all that well on a basic channel that doesn't have a lot of money to begin with.
"Why aren't you engaging today's premiere purveyors of genre material and giving them ten episodes to do whatever the hell they want? I'd watch contained, BBC-style series from folks like Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, Warren Ellis, Charlie Huston, Neal Stephenson, or China Mieville. The names alone would attract viewers by the truckload." I do really like this idea. Let them write new material knowing they have a constrained budget.
The last idea, "Why don't you try a daily sci-fi soap opera?" is too dumb to talk about.
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