television series. The premise involved a ragtag fleet of survivors from the now destroyed Twelve Colonies of Man fleeing an attack from a destructive cybernetic race called the Cylons, hoping for a utopian thirteenth colony called Earth. The series starred Lorne Greene of Bonanza fame. The series was cancelled after one season due to rising budget costs but spawned Galactica 1980 a year later, and a reimagined version of the series on The Sci Fi Channel which garnered much more recognition, critical acclaim, and a longer run than the original series or Galactica 1980. By this time, television series were 26 weeks per season with hiatuses now in both the summer and winter. In the 1980s, both serials and story arcs made a comeback with hit primetime soaps Dallas, its spinoff Knots Landing, and their sister show Falcon Crest (all three series were produced at Lorimar) along with the Aaron Spelling–produced Dynasty; in spite of their mass appeal, campy nature, and sensationalism, these shows prompted more primetime dramas to use the serial format. Among these were dramas such as the Steven Bochco–produced shows Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, L.A. Law, and later NYPD Blue and Wiseguy. These latter dramas were known for their deep characterization and multiple narrative threads. These serialized dramas without the melodramatic trappings of a soap opera helped popularize the term story arc. In the 1990s and 2000s, a new model of television storytelling began being used in some US television programs such as Oz and The Sopranos, and later on with shows such as The Wire and Six Feet Under for HBO which adopted a business model of producing 13-week dramas over the course of five years or so. This was a marked departure from traditional network dramas which would start with thirteen episodes at the beginning of the season with another back nine episodes to finish the season, and allowed these cable dramas to have a shot at succeeding by not cancelling them within a year, but concluding them before they moved past their prime. These shows were darker and occasionally more graphic than the typical network drama, establishing dramatic television on cable as a solid alternative to network television. In the years following the end of the run of The Wire, several colleges and universities such as Johns Hopkins, Brown University, and Harvard College have offered classes on The Wire in disciplines ranging from