Doctor Who: 2-hour premiere on Sci-Fi Friday 3/17 9pm
With the season finales of Battlestar Galactica and Stargate now completed, Sci-Fi Channel will now premiere the new Doctor Who series in the 9pm Friday night slot. The entire first season has already aired in the U.K., Australia, and Canada, and in fact, it has already come out on DVD in those countries.
This new series is indeed a continuation of the classic Doctor Who series that aired on the BBC from 1963 to 1989, and got picked up by several PBS stations starting in the mid-70s (and continued to be broadcast by PBS affiliates until the BBC pulled the U.S. broadcast rights to the older episodes from those stations a couple of years ago in anticipation of the new Doctor Who series). The relative merits of Doctor Who compared to other science fiction series are always debated, but IMO Doctor Who is an undeniable landmark series that featured some of the best sci-fi writers around (most notably Douglas Adams, who authored several Doctor Who episodes before writing Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy).
I hope that Sci-Fi can pull a good audience for this new series because they only agreed to an option on the second season (which is scheduled to start airing soon in the U.K. and Canada). The tough luck with Sci-Fi's scheduling is that both St. Patrick's Day AND the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament also fall on Friday.
http://www.scifi.com/doctorwho/