I watched the pilot of the original Battlestar Galatica the other night [in 2012]. And then I removed the series from our Netflix queue immediately. Even the completist in me doesn’t care that I haven’t watched the original before I properly watch the reboot of the show. This stuff has not aged well. It just goes to show you how much American TV standards for fictional programs have changed in the interim. Just awful. Here are some of the major problems:

Because the show was well before the golden age of television, there are some really terrible but traditional American TV faults such as:
no back story on any of the characters,
no real character development,
no moral ambiguity to speak of, etc.
one scene is shot exactly like a soap opera, I kid you not.
The effects are also pretty atrocious. The use of models is fine (and honestly no worse than A New Hope) but the moment models of ships are combined with drawings of planets (as opposed to models of planets), it becomes very obvious you are watching something made in the ’70s with a TV budget.
The effects would be excusable (as they are with the original series of Star Trek) if there was something else to gravitate to. But there isn’t. The bad guys are bad and the good guys are good. Moreover, until the bad guys did that low-down, dastardly thing, the good guys apparently experienced little conflict outside of what you might experience growing up in a 1950s sitcom.