The new television show “Defiance” has received so much attention for being joined at the hip to a video game that the wrong questions are being asked about it. How the TV series and the online game — which share characters and stories but take place in different parts of a post-alien-invasion earth, circa 2046 — will inform each other is more than a little beside the point, especially since the show’s first season is already shot and won’t be affected by the game.

The smaller but more pertinent question for TV watchers is whether “Defiance,” which begins with a two-hour premiere on Monday night, re-establishes Syfy’s credentials as a purveyor of shoot-’em-up, us-versus-the-aliens space opera, a genre the channel abandoned in recent years as “Battlestar Galactica” ran its course and “Caprica” and “Stargate Universe” failed to catch on.

The answer is, just barely. “Defiance” is probably better than a show conceived in tandem with a third-person-shooter video game has a right to be, but that’s a pretty low threshold.

Possibly as a result of the hybrid project’s longer-than-usual development process, the show’s fictional world, in which humans struggle to coexist with seven alien races, is satisfyingly coherent and the stories are relatively crisp and well shaped. What “Defiance” lacks, though, is any shred of originality, or any of the conceptual audacity that could keep you involved in “Battlestar Galactica” or “Stargate Universe” despite their ticky-tackiness.