It's Star Trek, UNDER THE OCEAN!!

Set in "the near future" (the year 2018 in the first season)

Uff.

The 90's were peak optimism. It's all downhill from there
- Yeah binging 90's scifi is very soothing.
  
  Until you hit those depressingly real near future depictions.
The third season was a skip forward to 2032 and it was somewhat better, but still pretty stupid.

Like they had an android character who was a great big guy but had a simple, child-like brain. What the hell was the point of that?
- Like they had an android character who was a great big guy but had a simple, child-like brain. What the hell was the point of that?
  
  I'm sure there's a contract that says if you employ one DeLuise brother on a show you need to give the other one a bit part.
  
  It would explain Wormhole Xtreme
- android character who was a great big guy but had a simple, child-like brain
  
  kind of AI like, when you think about it.
- I didn't read that whole comment, because I don't want any spoilers as I might try this show as it's one of the rare 90's scifis I don't think I've seen.

The reason it failed was that it didn't mimic Star Trek enough, with geopolitics and court room episodes.

But Star Trek could learn something by having an astrophysicist come on at the end of the show and talk space science like this show did with Robert Ballard.

Also, I had no idea that his bit at the end of his 30 Rock episode was satiring that in particular.

I preferred Sealab 2021

Pudding can't fill the emptiness inside me! But it'll help.

how.. ho wwas this?

This show is pretty fire back in the day, they had some hyper intelligent dolphin doing recon for them
- Named Darwin. They had some way of translating his dolphin sounds to a weird synthesized voice that was probably voiced by an actor.
  
  I only watched it because I fell in love with Stacey Haiduk watching her as Lana Lang in Superboy
The first season was really good. The second was labored at times. The third was... something else.
- But it's got Mark Hamill so that's not nothing.
i just recently downloaded this/added it to my library last year. it did not age well. it was pretty awesome back in the day, but its kinda hard to watch now
- I did exactly the same thing.
- I've been wanting to as well out of nostalgia but I know it will be bad by today's standards, or even adult standards in general.
  
  So I'm not going to do it.... Yet.
- I feel obligated to subject myself to this. But I appreciate the warning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaQuest_DSV
- I remember being fond of the first season, but it was definitely "wet star trek," complete with a Tiger Beat suitable version of Wesley (RIP Jonathan Brandis, who got chewed up and spit out by Hollywood), especially by the end of season 2 when I stopped watching, apparently along with everyone else.

This would have been a great show ....... because we haven't really explored the ocean depths in real life ... I think only 20% of the ocean floor has been mapped so far and of that mapping it wasn't very detailed.

Nah that's a common misconception, a lot of the ocean is mapped to enough resolution to know there's basically nothing there. A lot of the ocean floor is a barren desert with nothing much going on. Some parts have been thoroughly studied, where interesting stuff is going on and where we've put infra like all of the undersea cables (which are a lot). All of it is mapped to some resolution and some parts at higher resolution (you can see on Google maps lines where ships have gone through with better mapping abilities). So saying it hasn't been "explored" or "mapped" is simply false, it has been mapped and has shown to be not interesting. So no nobody went down there, nobody got pictures or centimeter level mapping, but we know how water and sand looks so why bother? It's this implication of something unknown and mysterious, whilst in reality we've just been efficient in what to find. And yes there are new species found in the ocean every day, but you'd need to be an expert to even tell them apart from other species we already know about. There isn't something big and interesting we don't know about. It's a nice story to tell, but it isn't real.
- That said, we still get surprised.
  
  https://abcnews.go.com/International/worlds-largest-coral-reef-discovered-off-solomon-islands/story?id=115927437
This is a myth, and my heart aches for this show might have contributed to it. We have detailed maps of all the ocean floor, with more or less the same variance as our dry surface maps. We have been to most of the more interesting, extreme and dramatic parts of the depths. Hell, there are oceanographic channels that live stream from deep under on the regular. Sure, there are surely still some things we haven't found, thousands of sunk ships too small to know exactly where they ended up in, or natural phenomenon we probably haven't documented yet. But, on the grand scale of science, we know the ocean floor rather well.

Shout out to EVNautilus.

Here's a neat podcast that talks about this specific myth.
- I don't think it's a myth. It's just boomer-era info that kept getting repeated until it was out of date.

The episode where Roy Scheider talks to Jonathan Brandis about using a condom was one of the most cringey things ever put on American TV.

"Darwin hates Brandis. Please, kill Brandis or kill Darwin."

I have never seen this show.

Live action Sealab with joxer/ted raimi

That's Countess Regina Barthalomew front row second from the left.

So this is what she and Moriarty got up to.

She left Moriarty to become a doctor and he was so crushed he decided to become a butler for a Broadway producer and his vociferous nanny.
So it is! And Jonathan Brandis on the right...I rember him from that awful Rodney Dangerfield movie Ladybugs. Brandis died not long after.
- Also from a crappy Neverending Story sequel.