Where will Sopranos fans turn once their show ends tonight? “All due respect” to Tony Soprano, I’d like to recommend a TV series that’s been flying mostly under the radar, so to speak. Like The Sopranos, it’s a dark drama dealing with flawed people, their families and the people they work with. Like The Sopranos, it tackles big themes and is the visual equivalent of a layered novel. And like The Sopranos, it has won the prestigious Peabody Award.

You’d think that a series that Time named the best TV show of 2005 and that Rolling Stone called the “smartest and toughest show on TV” would get a little more respect -- and a lot more viewers. But tell people you are a BSG fan and they are apt to suspect you have a pair of Spock ears at home. Indeed, Salon termed Battlestar Galactica “the most underappreciated show in all of TV land.”

While the Sopranos’ mobsters entered their final season a smash hit, the aircraft carrier in space called Galactica -- which has survived both sabotage and nukes -- barely weathered weak ratings to get re-commissioned for a fourth season. Viewers who stay away from the show because they fear bad sci-fi clichés are missing out. Not only are there no bizarre-looking aliens on BSG, but its large cast is also “preposterously hot,” in the words of Salon. More importantly, the cast can act, including the stunning former model Trisha Helfer, who runs around in slinky dresses while everyone else is dressing sensibly. (Okay, the show is not above a little pandering.)

Space hotties aside, BSG is loved by its sometimes overly fervent fans for its pulse-pounding plots, its complex characters in a richly imagined world, and a creative team headed by co-executive producer Ronald D. Moore that takes an all-too-rare, less-is-more approach to story telling. As a big bonus for anyone interested in learning how a carefully crafted TV series is put together, Moore does an insightful podcast following each episode in which he discusses the creative and commercial decisions behind it, the little “beats” that worked well, and the occasional disappointments.

BSG has definite parallels to our own post-9/11 world, but the show is way too smart to be an allegory, as some critics have mistakenly described it. Its basic plot is that humanity’s “Twelve Colonies” somewhere in far-off space have been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust by man’s own creation, the cylons, a race of human-looking machines bent on exterminating mankind as part of “God’s plan.” (“Parents must die for children to come into their own,” one cylon tells another early in the first season.) The genocidal cylons pursue a rag-tag fleet of human survivors across the galaxy as both search for “a mythical place called Earth.” The gritty humans are led by Admiral William Adama (Oscar-nominee Edward James Olmos) and the Colonies’ soft but steely president, Laura Roslin (Oscar-nominee Mary McDonnell).

Sopranos fans may be surprised to learn that New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano and space-faring, military man William Adama have a lot in common: Tony had issues with his mother. Adama has issues with his son. Tony gets shot. Adama gets shot. Tony is responsible for his “crew.” Adama is responsible for the Galactica’s crew. In some ways, though, Tony has it easier: Adama and his crew are responsible for the safety of what is left of the human race, not just a bunch of wiseguys who hang out at a strip club. And people Tony whacks stay whacked. Whack a cylon, by contrast, and its memories simply download into a new, duplicate body. It’s enough to give a person agita. Unlike Tony, however, Adama soldiers on without psychotherapy. Adama’s second-in-command finds his solace in a bottle.

It’s no surprise that Moore himself loves what he called The Sopranos’ “morally ambiguous universe” because that’s also the world of BSG. Everyone on Galactica struggles with moral issues. For instance, should President Roslin fix election returns to prevent Gaius Baltar, her brilliant but narcissistic vice president (deliciously played by James Callis), from winning the presidency? Baltar had privately persuaded the president to outlaw abortion, arguing that the human race faced extinction unless the fleet’s birth rate increased. Baltar then turns on Roslin, publicly announcing he can no longer serve as her vice president. Freedom of choice is “what separates us from the cylons,” he declares. Baltar wins the election, with disastrous consequences.

Despite the critical praise BSG has received, the Emmy voters have stiffed the show so far, giving it awards only for special effects. I suspect a big part of the problem is that the new, “re-imagined” Battlestar Galactica is saddled with a geeky name that evokes vague memories of the cheesy original series from the ‘70s. (It’s like trying to sell people on a new, serious version of The Partridge Family.) Beyond the show’s awful name, just having to turn on the Sci-Fi Channel is too much for some people. It clearly was for the New Yorker, which grudgingly conceded that BSG’s characters are “well drawn” and that the stories are “not ridiculous.” (For ridiculous stories, check out Fox’s 24, last year’s Emmy winner for Outstanding Drama Series, where this season a man was kidnapped and power-drilled to within an inch of his life -- only to return to work 20 minutes later.) Query also whether NBC’s hit series Heroes, which is nothing but closeted science fiction (not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld might say), would have been up for the Golden Globes’ best drama series prize had it aired on the Sci-Fi Channel. (It lost out to the middling Grey’s Anatomy.)

BSG concluded its third season this past March with what may be the mother of all cliffhangers. This isn’t just your “Who Shot J.R.?” It’s more as if we had learned at the end of the last Harry Potter novel that Harry’s pals Ron and Hermione are in league with the evil Voldemort. Or that Harry is Voldemort’s son. (I guess that one has been done.) It’s the kind of cliffhanger that shakes the foundations a story is built on, completely disorienting the audience. The next season will almost certainly be BSG’s last, and it promises to be extraordinary, even by the show’s high standards. Meanwhile, the show’s fans have unhappily settled in for a ridiculously long wait because the series won’t resume until 2008.

BSG’s continuing story has made it difficult for new viewers to jump in late in the game. But while the nearly year-long hiatus is frustrating to the show’s fans, it also presents a great opportunity for new viewers to give the series a try on DVD and catch up with the story. Sopranos fans and anyone else looking for great TV may want to take advantage. It’s an offer they shouldn’t refuse.