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The 8 best sci-fi series of all time
Imagining — and fearing — the future continues to give us compelling and thoughtful television
A generation ago, sci-fi aficionados were lucky if there were one or two remotely watchable shows released a year. Today, the streaming economy serves up a reliable supply of lavishly produced, inventive science fiction. It includes many shows, like the tremendous new Apple TV+ release “Pluribus,” that carry on the tradition of great speculative storytelling.
Rod Serling’s sci-fi anthology series is one of the few shows from the early television era that maintains a lasting cultural footprint. Many of the best episodes are remembered for their final act twists, like a third-season classic in which two people traveling to the home world of seemingly benevolent aliens discover that their tome “To Serve Man” is actually a cookbook and that human beings are being harvested as food.
Other episodes, like “The Shelter,” tackled fears of the still-new nuclear age, with neighbors turning savagely against one another to get into a bunker only to discover that the nuclear attack warning was a false alarm. A show that “belongs in some ways to a golden age of its own,” it is “still available and watched and loved for its stories and characters and insights into human nature,” said Brian Murray at The New Atlantis. (Paramount+)
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Few of the most ardent fans of the short-lived “Star Trek” could deny that “The Next Generation” is a vastly superior concoction. Set a century after the original, its most important decision was casting the magnificent Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart as the Starship Enterprise’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard. With dazzling special effects and a stellar ensemble cast that included a cyborg officer named Data (Brent Spiner), the series offered commentary on everything from the waning Cold War to the nature of humanity and the trauma of war.
The crew’s encounters with a terrifying hive mind race, the Borg, were among the best. That’s why “almost anyone would appreciate the smart, original storytelling” of the show’s seven seasons, said Phelim O’Neill at The Guardian. It was a “less violent, more cerebral show, with a cast of rare chemistry and ability.” (Paramount+)
‘The X-Files’ (1993-2018)
When by-the-book FBI agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) is assigned to a secret unit investigating paranormal phenomena with the more excitable Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), the pairing kicks off eleven seasons and 217 episodes of case-of-the-week sci-fi mayhem that became one of the most beloved series of the 1990s. While the show had a somewhat inscrutable throughline about alien abductions and a government cover-up, the heart and soul was always Scully and Mulder navigating their sexual tension to battle everything from a mysterious outbreak on an Arctic research base to camouflaged forest monsters. It was a “well-made creep show” that “grew into one of television’s most tender love stories,” also offering “meta-fictional commentary on the formulas of science fiction and the conspiracy thriller,” said Mike Hale at The New York Times. (Disney+)
‘Battlestar Galactica’ (2004-2009)
Showrunner Ronald D. Moore’s reboot of the iconic ’70s-era show channeled post-9/11 political paranoia in the story of how a single military vessel survived a nuclear holocaust inflicted by human-created robots called “Cylons.” That ship, the Battlestar Galactica, becomes the sole defender of a convoy that contains the entire remaining human population of just over 50,000 people, led by the civilian President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), and the ship’s crew including Admiral William Adama (Edward James Olmos) and fighter pilots Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff), Boomer (Grace Park) and Apollo (Jamie Bamber).
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The third season was a particularly incisive commentary on the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A “thrifty U.S./UK co-production peppered with mostly unfamiliar faces,” the show is a cult classic of the 21st century because “something gritty, thrilling and politically resonant became part of an irresistible underdog story,” said Graeme Virtue at The Guardian. (Prime)
‘Black Mirror’ (2011-)
Black Mirror: Season 7 | Official Trailer | Netflix - YouTube
Showrunner Charlie Brooker delivers, at last, a worthy successor to the “Twilight Zone” brand of anthology-based science fiction. Over the course of seven superb seasons, “Black Mirror” has shown us the dark side of many existing or speculative technologies, and can already claim to have predicted a number of disturbing social trends, including using AI to resurrect a deceased loved one, seemingly drawn directly from the season two episode “Be Right Back.”
The show alternates trippy think-piece episodes with more traditional science fiction yarns, like the season 4 barnburner “Metalhead” about humans being hunted down by robotic dogs. Yet the series’ occasional lighter moments “suggest that there may be hope for us yet if we’re willing to learn from the mistakes we’re on the verge of making,” said Jenna Scherer at The AV Club. (Netflix)
“The Expanse” offered a novel twist on science fiction storytelling by asking “what if we reached the stars, and brought all of our problems — xenophobia, class inequities, our innate knack for self-destruction — along with us?” said Clint Worthington at Roger Ebert. In the show, humans have colonized the solar system, and the series depicts familiar rivalries between the powerful planets like the United Nations of Earth and Luna and the outer planets, whose exploited masses are called “Belters.”
Holden (Steven Strait) is the captain of a rogue ship called the Rocinante, which becomes a critical force in the battle against a mysterious pathogen called the Protomolecule that threatens to wipe out civilization. The show was cancelled by SyFy after three seasons but then picked up by Amazon for another three well-regarded seasons. (Prime)
“Andor” depicts the series of events that led to the formation of the rebellion against the Galactic Empire, creating a propulsive and suspenseful drama that now has especially uncanny resonance for viewers struggling to make sense of the political present. Stellan Skarsgard is Luthen Rael, a recruiter for the nascent rebel alliance who convinces Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) to join the growing resistance.
It is the only entry in the franchise that convincingly depicts the material conditions of authoritarianism that instigated the insurgency at the center of the “Star Wars” universe. Debuting during a “creative low point for the anemic franchise,” showrunner Tony Gilroy creates a “fiercely intelligent spy thriller that rendered a galaxy far, far away in terms you could legibly graft onto the world right outside your door,” said Nicholas Quah at Vulture. (Disney+)
A show that feels like an extended buildout of a “Black Mirror” episode, “Severance” follows Mark (Adam Scott), who works in “macrodata refinement” at the mysterious Lumon Industries. Like most Lumon workers, though, Mark is “severed,” meaning that a chip implanted in his brain separates his at-work consciousness, rendering his two selves mutually distinct.
Ingeniously setting this nightmarish premise in a bespoke version of the present, “Severance” is about Mark and his coworkers, Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Irving (John Turturro), unraveling the mystery of what they do all day and eventually grappling with the philosophical nuances of cleaving a person’s consciousness in half. The “television show of our time,” its “principal subject is theft: of time and memory, of identity and humanity,” said Rachel Cooke at The New Statesman, and it is “an arrow to the heart.” (Apple TV+)
David Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of "It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics." He's a frequent contributor to Newsweek and Slate, and his work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Republic and The Nation, among others.
