It's...I think what I love about Torchwood is that it IS fanfic. It is trashy, shaggadelic, silly, overblown, angsty fanfic. SET IN WALES!!!!!!
It cannot fare well if I compare it to something like Firefly, which, you know, I fucking love with the big burny hot love of a thousand exploding suns. But...it's Sci Fi. Set in the UK!!! Where people have normal accents and aren't the villain of the week!!!! (Or a Watcher. Or possibly both.)
I do understand people not loving the show, because it's flawed, and finding its feet, and in style/approach it's quite jarringly not like the shiny slick US scifi to which it aspires (UK telly tends to err too much towards the theatrical tradition, whereas US telly tends to be more influenced by cinema, and hence does realism better, much of the time).
But - you have to understand that this is the first new Sci Fi I can remember since Blake's 7 was cancelled, back in the 70s (or possibly the early 80s? I was very wee, anyway. And sad. Very sad that my big gay show was ending in a tragic pile of corpses and treachery and heartbreak...it was an early grooming for Tim and Joss and the wickedness of Fox execs, now I come to think of it).
Anyhoo, yes - Torchwood is silly like a silly thing, which puts it nicely in the tradition of UK genre shows - take a bow, Avengers, Blake's 7, Doctor Who et al. Definitely not everyone's cup of tea.