Politics in Sci-Fi TV

So, do you prefer your TV with or without politics? Rewatching Babylon 5's award-winning episode "Coming of Shadows" and later "Acts of Sacrifice" has reminded me again how very few genre shows manage to make politics essential to their drama. Farscape comes close, with the Peacekeepers and the Scarrans, but there's a different quality here I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe it's because while we see how the Peacekeeper/Scarran conflict affects our regulars, the status quo of the societies themselves does not change. In other words: after four years, John Crichton is very different, Aeryn Sun is very different; Crais changed as much as Aeryn; whether or not Scorpius has changed is debatable. But the societies Crichton (and with him we, the audience) found when the show started are pretty much as they were.
(Well, except for the Scarrans now being deprived of a certain flower, but that's not exactly what I'm talking about.)
Babylon 5, on the other hand, married personal drama with political drama in a quite different manner, in all of its plot threads. In more than one case, the political change causes the personal change.
( Details here )