I have a bittersweet relationship with science-fiction television. It has been my favorite genre since my younger days playing with Capt. Kirk action figures and building "Lost in Space" models. OK, that was more like last week.

But lately, science-fiction shows have disappointed me to no end -- enough to make me want to beam myself to a far-away planet.

I hated all of the "Star Trek" series since the classic original. I didn't like the "Stargate" series or the revamp of "Battlestar Galactica."

I lost confidence that network TV could ever make a decent futuristic series. Kirk was wrong. Banality is the final frontier.

ABC's new space-bound science-fiction series, "Defying Gravity," doesn't

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improve that track record.

It's an intergalactic story that is half space opera, half soap opera. Merge "2001" with "thirtysomething," and you get this ugly mutant offspring named "Defying Gravity." It premieres with two back-to-back episodes Aug. 2 on KTVX Channel 4.

For one, it's a near-exact copy of an earlier Fox science-fiction movie called "Virtuality," the pilot to a scrapped TV show.

In both, a spaceship full of astronauts is headed to the far reaches of our solar system. And in both, the crew members are a little bit nuts.

In "Defying Gravity," they also have relationship issues. The commander of the ship and a scientist who are married have a little zero-G hanky panky on the bridge. The

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second-in-command has the hots for another astronaut (played by Ron Livingston of "Office Space"). And that astronaut has a thing for another female scientist who he keeps dreaming is flying naked through space. When do these people have the time to do, you know, research?

In one particularly absurd scene, a suicidal astronaut sits on the edge of the ship in his space suit, waiting to die. Another astronaut flies up next to him in a space shuttle and literally tries to talk his suicidal colleague off the proverbial ledge tens of thousands of miles above the Earth.

Meanwhile, there is some mysterious motive for the team traveling in space that the mission directors haven't told them about, a well-worn cliché of anchoring the whole show with some secretive subplot.

What "Defying Gravity" doesn't have is thought, a sense of wonder or an intriguing premise. Just as space has no atmosphere, the show is devoid of ideas, and viewers are left with the hope that the two most attractive people will have sex while space walking. At this rate, that just might happen.

Vince Horiuchi 's column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at vince@sltrib.com or 801-257-8607. For more television insights, visit Horiuchi's blog, "The Village Vidiot," at blogs.sltrib.com/tv. Send comments about this column to livingeditor@sltrib.com.