Run and buy. Smiley and TTSP are each £5.99 from Play.com, Perfect SPy is £10.99.

Øystein

I remember Roots was on TV when I was a kid.. violent images and the song was pretty sad. Years later, I (fully) understood why.

Though I love Battlestar Galactica and Band of Brothers, I fail to see why they are already branded as "Classic" since both barelly have 10+ years COMBINED!

Combined with other less than 10 years shows on the list and the lack of other shows like Chips, SWAT, Blue Thunder and Knight Rider (to name a few), I'd say the list is pretty bogus.

But then again, that's just me.

I find it pretty shocking that Peter the Great isn't even mentioned Maximilian Schell, Omar Sharif, Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave, Trevor Howard, Ursula Andress... As far as casts go, things can hardly get more impressive. I would also nominate The Winds of War and War and Remembrance.

As much as I like BSG, BoB and some of the other recent series in the article, they should wait a few years before they are rewarded the "classic" status. Besides, does BSG even qualify as a miniseries?

All of those were regularly recurring tv shows and not miniseries.

Yes it does because BSG was originally envisioned and created only as a miniseries. It was NOT known whether the Sci-Fi Channel would pick up BSG as a show until AFTER the tv ratings came in for the miniseries. That's why there was a full year hiatus between the airing of the miniseries and the airing of the first tv show episode. Once the ratings came in for the miniseries and the network was happy with them, THEN BSG got greenlit into a series.

Other older series that I recall being good/enjoyable:

War & Peace (BBC 1972)
Quo Vadis
Marco Polo
Against the Wind
All the Rivers Run
How the West Was Won

I watched both "Marco Polo" and "Peter the Great" when they originally aired on tv. Both are outstanding mini-series with lots of intelligence and great dialogue.

"Marco Polo" was recently released on DVD here, I've been meaning to pick it up.

I gotta get Lonesome Dove on BluRay. Pity there's no region free version yet. At least not that I've been able to find. If anyone can clue me in to where I can get a region free version, please do

The Odyssey was good. Could have been directed better, but for what looked like a fairly limited budget, I thought they did well. Despite Eric Roberts being in it. Armand Assante was a good Ulysses and the locations looked good.