Space Grit
Charlie Jane Anders has an excellent article on io9 about what happened to all the gritty space opera that I spent most of the last decade being wary of.
I’m generally suspicious of articles that try to paint the 2000s as some sort of pinnacle of science fiction on television, as it struck me as the decade when sci-fi shows tried to stop being science fiction. But I was as happy as anyone when I saw shows that paid serious attention to physics and using space to tell complex human stories, so an article about the Unfulfilled Promise of the period works for me.