As sometimes silly and campy as it was, Farscape was a speculative fiction masterpiece. Outside of hard sci-fi books I’ve never experienced more engaging world building. Even if the individual characters sometimes weren’t engaging, the backdrop was rich enough to make up for it.
Watching it a few days ago for the first time, I was taken aback myself by the beautiful and detailed environment/world. Not at all what I was expecting from a seemingly B-grade budget 1999 show.
Then don't watch the original Trek, or B5, for Stargate. Farscape was far from b-grade budget. That was as good budgets ever got for TV in the 90s. Definitely in the A-grade budget of the time. For b-grade, look to Space:AboveAndBeyond or even SeaQuest:DSV.
First season seaQuest wasn't B-grade either, unless you're overly influenced by the use of mid-nineties CGI. Just look at the interior sets and how much water they use! Add to that the sheer amount of CGI they used (anything happening outside the ship) and there's no way that show was cheap. Of course, once they lost their major producers in season two and three there was a definite drop in quality, but season 1 was definitely up there.
CGI looks expensive because of the nature of how it is billed: one big cost to a CGI studio. But in television a much greater expensive is on-location shoots. A few thousand or tens of thousands for a CGI sequence is nothing compared to keeping a hundred people fed and working at a remote location.
