Er, no. It failed because the writing sucked and the actors weren't much better. Compare the 2 hour series premiere of Firefly with the entire first season of Stargate Universe. The first half season they do pretty much nothing at all. They spend most of it just getting safe drinking water and air over the course of something like 6 extremely boring episodes in which the only exciting bits in which people die are rendered moot due to time travel deux ex machina. They get nothing done and aren't even entertaining in the way they get said nothing done. It was as if the series was indefinitely waiting for something awesome to happen which never did. The first 8 episodes can be described as "We replaced the filters, refilled our water bottles, and didn't crash into a star we were never going to crash into in the first place." And don't even get me started on the horrible plot filler devices which were the communication stones.
Then there was the absolutely scattered character development. It was like the writers couldn't decide whether most of the characters were supposed to be passive-aggressive villains or characters the viewers were supposed to empathize with. A quote from the show itself seems to be most applicable description of it: "We weren't supposed to be the ones here."
Although granted I haven't watched more than a couple episodes of season 2, but I would assume it hasn't gotten much better based on the cancelling of the show after season 2 due to low ratings.
I'm currently grinding my way through SG-1. Just reached Season 8, and enjoying every minute. I'll be back once I've powered my way through the rest of SG-1, Atlantis and Universe. I'm looking forward to it!
There are some pretty good Atlantis ones, but I would suggest letting your expectations of Universe down slowly before you get to it.
Then the ship was saved by a deus ex machina. Turns out it wasnt the clever beggining of the series, but an one-episode disaster from Lamegate-Failverse.
Actually, it wasn't a one-episode disaster. They managed to waste 2 full episodes on it. It was originally going to be 1 episode, but it ran over by 20 minutes apparently, so instead of doing what a good writer would do and cut the crap it had been stuffed full of, they decided to add in another 23 minutes of crap to make up the difference and turn it into 2 episodes.