As a fan project, this would be top of the line. You can tell a lot of work went into the visuals, costuming, sets, and so on. The setting is interesting and the framing of a documentary adds a lot of flexibility to how they tell the story without shoehorning in exposition dumps.
As a project that stands on its own, there's definite room for improvement. The writing and characters are a cloying mix of cliché and parody, especially in the first episode. It gets better in the following two episodes once the first one gets a lot of the character introductions out of the way.
The shot composition and camera angles don't feel like they would on a more polished production, especially during action scenes -- it feels like most of the scenes involve cutting between two or three cameras plopped down somewhere. There's hardly any movement by the cameras, which could be a function of the cramped sets and other constraints.
The celebrities they bring in from other well-known Sci Fi/Fantasy shows are a bit underused so far, Walter Koenig criminally so. I get that the series is going for a bit of a Star Trek + The Office angle, which sets him up to be Scotty mixed with Creed Bratton, but really he just mumbles unintelligibly most of the time.
All that said, I still want to see what happens in episode 4 and on. I think this is a show with real potential.
