seaQuest DSV falls into a category of programmes I like to define as "no, there's no possibility such a show exists".
I have all three seasons on dvd. The third season (the reboot -
seaQuest 2032) is a Region 4 dvd I bought off some bloke in Australia on eBay because it was never officially released here.
Here's the rundown:
Season 1: a fairly good science-fiction show set in the near-future of 2018; Roy Scheider is Captain Nathan Bridger, a scientist and commander of the experimental deep-sea-vehicle
seaQuest; every episode ended with a clip of a real-life marine biologist or oceanographer (I forget which) explaining the underwater phenomena the crew had dealt with that week.
Season 2: a completely fucking insane attempt to retool the show as
Star Trek: The Next Generation BUT UNDER THE SEA!!!!; Scheider is now visibly pissed off by how much he hates being on the show in most of his scenes; the season opens with a community of genetically-engineered super-soldiers attempting to stage a rebellion; Michael DeLuise plays a crook who's been genetically-modified with gills; Stephanie Beacham leaves the show and is replaced as ship's doctor by a woman with psychic powers; one episode features
a guest appearance from Mark Hamill playing a blind astronomer who is actually an alien fugitive hiding on Earth; and then the final episode of the season ends with the submarine being transported thousands of lightyears to an ocean planet in the middle of an alien civil war.
Season 3: retooled as
seaQuest 2032, the crew is returned to Earth in the year 2032; Roy Scheider by now has lost all interest in the show and quit, though he appears in a couple of episodes as a very obviously bored out of his skull special guest; he is replaced as captain by MICHAEL IRONSIDE, who insisted in interviews that he intended to interact with Darwin the talking dolphin as little as possible; the show now tries to be this underwater military science-fiction show where the new
seaQuest goes up against the world's newest superpower, the Federated States of
Macronesia, whose president is Michael York and have all this weird Orientalist stuff around them; I literally can't remember how the series ends but I presume it is disappointing.
Fun fact: the show was created by Rockne S. O'Bannon, who subsequently created
FarScape and other shows. Steven Spielberg was a producer in the first season (I think it was an Amblin production) because this was toward the end of the period (he co-created
E.R. with Crichton only a year later) when he was really interested in television production.
seaQuest DSV featured in the Turtledove Award-winning timeline
The Doctor Is Who? by
@Heat.