The Computer: Male or Female? -Joke

[Jason]

"Why, sir?" said Lucy. "I think - I don't know - but I think I could be brave enough."
"That is not the point," (Father Christmas) said. "But battles are ugly when women fight."

Of course, the Chronicles of Narnia were written in the fifties, and aren't exactly representative of modern gender attitudes.

[Jason Thompson]

Dec 15, 2010 1:10:24 GMT -4 PhantomWolf said:

Sam Carter... the longest running Sci-Fi character in any show after heading over to Stargate: Atlantis and having cameo roles in Stargate Universe.

I'm pretty sure there was a show with a Time Lord that had the same character for a lot longer...

This is actually a minor peeve of mine. I have recently heard Stargate and Star Trek both described as the longest running sci-fi series in the world (Stargate even got into the Guinness Book of Records with that dubious claim a couple of years ago!), and it bugs me because we have a certain sci-fi show here in the UK that started in 1963 (so three years before Star Trek and about three decades before Stargate) and ran for 26 years non-stop before a brief failed revival attept in 1996 and a higly successful one in 2005, and it is still running now 47 years after the first episode was shown. Despite this, people still think some American series have outlived this strange 'Doctor Who' show....

[Jason]

Maybe Phantom Wolf doesn't consider all of the various Doctors to be the same character.

[PhantomWolf]

Perhaps I should have said "character portrayed by the same actor."

As to the longest running, depends on how you measure it. SG-1 has more contiguous episodes and more story-lines, though Dr Who has more seasons and episodes.

[Jason Thompson]

I'll grant you the character portrayed by the same actor thing. There were of course recurring characters in Doctor Who, but none who appeared continuously in the show for more than two or three years before being relegated to occasional stories. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart comes closest, I think.

How do you mean 'more contiguous episodes'?

To be honest, the 'depends on how you measure it' argument seems like a way of inventing technicalities to get a shorter series up the ladder. I'd say that the fact that there wasn't a single year between 1963 and 1989 when Doctor Who was not in production or on air gives it a loooooong lead in terms of any 'longest running' stakes. Between 1963 and 1969 Doctor Who was on air for about 40-45 weeks of the year.

[echnaton]

All this raises the question. When will Doctor regenerate into a woman and what would happen to the show's popularity if that occurs?

[gillianren]

Now, that is an interesting question. As is how they'd dress her.

[Jason]

But he already did, during Curse of the Fatal Death.

[Jason]

Well, if you count episodes, Doctor Who has 769 according to Wikipedia, and Stargate SG-1 has 214. Add both the Stargate spinoffs and that's still only 344, and if you add the Doctor Who spinoffs then it gets another 78.
Star Trek has 79 of the original, 22 of the Animated Series, 178 of Next Generation, 176 of Deep Space Nine, 172 of Voyager, and 98 of Enterprise, for a total of 725.

Doctor Who even without its spinoffs obviously has the most episodes.