In the wake of the successful relaunch of Doctor Who in 2005, the BBC briefly seemed enamoured of science fiction again. It wasn’t going to last but for a while there things like the Doctor Who spin-offs Torchwood (2006-2011) and The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007-2011), a remake of Terry Nation’s Survivors (2008-2010), another adaptation of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (2009), underwater snoozer The Deep (2010) and time travel/are-they-just-hallucinating duo Life on Mars (2006-2007) and Ashes to Ashes (2008-2010). One of the more infuriating examples was the very short-lived Outcasts, created by Ben Richards and running to just eight underwhelming episodes between 7 February and 13 March 2011.

The basic premise had promise. In the year 2060, the human race has largely abandoned Earth following a nuclear war that has devastated the planet and spread out across the universe. One settlement is on the planet Carpathia (named after the ship that came to the rescue of the survivors of the Titanic. The colonists mainly live in the pioneer town of Forthaven and the story picks up a decade after the first settlers arrived. They have no idea of the current state of the Earth, only picking up scraps of news from other settlers who are still finding their way to the planet – and then only if they survive the treacherous descent through Carpathia’s atmosphere. The bulk of the stories revolve around the current president of Carpathia, Richard Tate (Liam Cunningham), his Head of Protection and Security Dr Stella Isen (Hermione Norris, lately of spy drama Spooks (2002-2011)), her staff Cass Cromwell (Daniel Mays from Ashes to Ashes) and Fleur Morgan (Amy Manson) and a handful of Expeditionaries led by Jack Holt (Ashley Walters), explorers who roam the planet scouting for resources. As the episodes plod along, in the background we hear of the imminent arrival of CT-10, a mysterious transport ship from earth, Tate has to deal with a rebellion against his rule and trouble brews with the Advanced Cultivars, genetically enhanced humans designed to survive harsh conditions.

Which all sounds reasonably interesting. But for some reason, much of the science fiction is pushed into the deep background to make room for not terribly interesting stories which could, with a few words of the script changed, have been set in the Old West or any other frontier. The bulk of the stories keep revolving around the interpersonal and political relationships in Forthaven but, despite a strong cast doing their very best, the characters just aren’t interesting enough to sustain such an approach over eight often very dull weeks. Despite some picturesque South African settings, Forthaven is a very drab place and viewers proved to be resistant to the whole sorry tale. After an initial very low viewing figure of just 4.5 million (that year’s series of Doctor Who, which kicked off just over a month after Outcasts finished with The Impossible Astronaut, started with 8.86 million) audiences dwindled to just 1.56 million, by which time the BBC had long since lost patience with it and had moved it from its initial Monday and Tuesday night slots at 21:00 to the late-night graveyard slot on Sundays.

All of which meant that the show was inevitably cancelled, news of its failure to survive being released on the Monday morning after the final episode went out. It was hardly surprising though it was exasperating – in the dying moments of the final episode, the CT-10 finally approaches the surface of Carpathia and the big secret that had been hinted at and promised for two months was about to be revealed. And then the plug was pulled so we never did find out what it was all about. Richards had plans for the second series which he has since talked about, but it wasn’t to be, the people of Forthaven having survived po9litical dissent, plague and natural disasters only to be struck down by unsustainable production costs and an audience that had given up on them.

So we were stuck with eight episodes of hints and promises that eventually went nowhere. The final episode cantered through bits of business that were unexpectedly interesting and one can’t help but wonder why some of the endless arguing and in-fighting from earlier episodes hadn’t been cut (along with two episodes perhaps) and this more interesting stuff spread out throughout the series. Good CGI, lovely landscapes and an interesting cast could ultimately do nothing to save a series that flaunted its science fiction settings but had no idea how science actually works, and which had even less of a clue about makes good SF.

Outcasts was one of those shows that promised much but ended up fizzling out and vanishing into obscurity, beloved by the handful of fans it had made who stuck with it to the end but otherwise forgotten by the general viewer audience, many of who probably never even got to the final episode. It’s a shame as it had so much going for it but there was something about it that proved resistant to the non-genre viewer even from the start and poor reviews and word-of-mouth probably sealed its fate very early on. Its core ideas remain serviceable, but it needed a tighter set of scripts and, crucially, better developed characters for it to have survived. It remains a one-and-done series, little more now than a footnote in the history of British science fiction television.