The History of the SeaQuest DSV:
SeaQuest DSV is the name of a science fiction television show that originally aired on NBC but currently airs on The Sci-Fi Channel. The show featured Roy Scheider of Jaws fame as Captain Nathan Hale Bridger and Don Franklin as Commander Jonathan Ford. Produced in 1993 by Steven Spielberg, David J. Burke and Patrick Hasburgh, the show was canceled in 1995 after 46 episodes with the original crew and was continued for one more season under the title SeaQuest 2032, with a new captain, Oliver Hudson played by Michael Ironside.
The World of SeaQuest DSV:
The show takes place in 2017, where the nations of Earth have come together to form The United Earth/Ocean Organization (UEO), sort of a United Nations with its own military power. At this point in the future colonization of the underwater world has begun and a police force is needed to regulate it. SeaQuest is sort of the flagship of the new UEO's underwater forces. The world is pretty peaceful with no real warring nations, so the ship acts more often as a research and rescue vehicle than a battleship. Their missions have included investigating mysterious ancient ruins of the Library of Alexandria and Atlantis, to the more mundane of assisting a mining colony in trouble. Eventually the crew met aliens who to took them to another world, but the show was canceled shortly afterwards.
The Ship, SeaQuest DSV:
The ship is the largest fully submersible vehicle ever and is designed with state-of-the-art technology that allows it to travel to previously unreachable depths, even to the ocean floor. It is 1007 feet long, beam of 100 feet, weighs 31,700 tons, and accommodates 232 personnel. It runs on a nuclear fusion turbines and features a wide variety of high tech equipment. It also carries a host of smaller vehicles, including the Stinger fighter ships and the WSKRS (pronounced Whiskers) or Wireless Sea Knowledge Retrieval Satellites. The crew also contains a talking dolphin named Darwin. The rest of the crew of the ship is reminiscent of Star Trek: The Next Generation with an aging captain, a female chief doctor who he is slightly interested in, Doctor Kristin Westphalen played by Stephanie Beacham, and a young boy of genius level intelligence, Lucas Wolenczak played by Jonathan Brandis, just to point out a few similarities.
Source: http://www.scifi.com/seaquest/