15 Sci-Fi TV Shows That Define The Genre

Television and science fiction, as a medium and a genre, respectively, share a curious, even contradictory relationship to the idea of highbrow vs. lowbrow culture. Yes, TV is where we unplug to watch trashy reality shows, and yes, sci-fi is where things like Ed Wood’s movies exist. But TV is also home to some of the great, contemporary works of art, and sci-fi is where some of the most iconic pop culture exists. So, what happens when you mix the two?

You get one of the most explored and beloved forms of mass media: the science fiction television show. Over TV’s history, sci-fi has long captured the hearts and minds of viewers. Its humble beginnings are sometimes predicated on the cheapness of its production, but when creative teams work past this budgetary constriction — or, blessedly, are given ample resources — powerful shows happen.

To celebrate all things intergalactic, let’s take a look at 15 sci-fi TV shows that define the genre.

“Astro Boy,” based on a manga series by Osamu Tezuka, is arguably the form-codifier for anime, one of the most globally popular forms of science fiction television.

The original anime series, which ran in Japan and the United States from 1963 through 1966, stars Mari Shimizu as the title role. Astro Boy, aka Atom, is the product of grief. His creator Dr. Umataro Tenma makes him as, essentially, a robotic version of his deceased son. But when he’s unsatisfied with Atom’s inherent lack of humanity, he sells him to a near-future version of the “circus” where robots fight each other like gladiators. Great parenting, Dr. Tenma!

Atom, becoming known as Astro Boy, doesn’t want to participate in this bloodsport (er, oil sport). Instead, he becomes a figure for peace, an artificially intelligent superhero that inspires robots and humans alike, especially his new, kinder human mentor, Dr. Hiroshi Ochanomizu.

Without “Astro Boy,” there are no other animated sci-fi marvels like “Dragon Ball Z,” “Gundam Wing,” or another show later on this very list. It’s a gamechanger, and it’s charming as heck.

In 1978, creator Glen A. Larson debuted “Battlestar Galactica” on ABC. It was similar to titles like “Star Trek” and “Star Wars,” to the point where 20th Century Fox sued Universal Studios for allegedly pilfering ideas from the latter. “Battlestar Galactica” was canceled after one season, but not before becoming a cult hit.

More than 20 years later, Ronald D. Moore reimagined the property for the 21st century on SyFy, crafting one of the great and most influential sci-fi series (and pilots) in the process. In the rebooted series, an endangered human group lives in the intergalactic Twelve Colonies of Kobol. When the vicious robot race known as Cylons attacks and devastates the Colonies, a group of enterprising individuals led by Commander Bill Adama (Edward James Olmos) and President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) board the newly recommissioned Battlestar Galactica and head into the cosmos to find a mythical planet called Earth.

This new version of the show was suffused with social commentary, rich storytelling, and carefully crafted production value. It raised the bar for sci-fi television and not much has reached its pinnacle since.

Creator Charlie Brooker, known primarily as a humorist and satirist, created one of the most well-known and influential works of contemporary science fiction with “Black Mirror,” an anthology series that debuted on Channel 4 in 2011 and eventually become more closely associated with Netflix. While many of the episodes certainly have a black sense of humor, the show is also suffused with bleakness and paranoia befitting these uncertain technological times.

In “Black Mirror,” the title of which literally represents the black, pseudo-reflective surfaces of our screens (and metaphorically describes how the show presents nightmarish analyses of modern society), you’ll see social media networks that lead to despair, robotic avatars of deceased loved ones, embittered villains imprisoning the consciousnesses of enemies, and in the very first episode, a Prime Minister debating whether to have sexual intercourse with a pig on live television.

It’s not for the faint of heart. But it certainly is a television sensation that flings the always speculative nature of sci-fi into our gripping, dangerous present.

Airing on the now-defunct DuMont network from 1949 through 1955, “Captain Video and His Video Rangers” is arguably the very first American science fiction television show, making it an obvious benchmark for the genre’s history.

Richard Coogan and Al Hodge shared the title role of Captain Video, a space adventurer who worked with a group of teenage Video Rangers to fight nefarious forces like Doctor Pauli (Hal Conklin) and Nargola (Ernest Borgnine). Of the show’s other notable characters, one of the first TV robots, played by David Ballard and named I TOBOR (which is “ROBOT I” backwards), was a mainstay, introducing American audiences to a key type of sci-fi character.

“Captain Video and His Video Rangers” was a colossal hit, airing live at least five days a week. Its influence shows up in literally every single science fiction show afterward, and another iconic early show, “The Honeymooners,” paid eternal tribute to it when Ed Norton (Art Carney) wore a space helmet while watching it.

“Cowboy Bebop” aired in Japan from 1998 through 1999 before crossing over to the United States, providing a gateway to anime science fiction for countless viewers. And the cultural remixing is mutual, with the show getting much of its mojo from Western influences like jazz and, well, Westerns.

Spike Spiegel is a bounty hunter from Mars. He’s lean, laconic, an excellent pilot and fighter, and hides a traumatic past with a sardonic sense of humor. Spike joins a motley crew of fellow bounty hunters, including the punkish Faye Valentine, the world-weary Jet Black, the unhinged Ed, and the adorable dog Ein. Together, they travel across the cosmos collecting bounties on misadventures — but Spike’s past might just catch up to all of them.

“Cowboy Bebop” is one of the coolest shows around, which is very helpful for the stereotypically nerdy genre of sci-fi. It also took the Western-influenced flavors of sci-fi found in “Star Wars” and doubled down on them.

A juggernaut of cultural influence, “Doctor Who” is a British mainstay that has traveled across various ponds to become a global sensation. It wrote the rules for TV time travel and rewrote some rules about casting and continuity that we still see ripple in contemporary sci-fi TV.

The Doctor, as played by many people over the show more than 60 years on the air (most recently, Ncuti Gatwa), is a Time Lord, an intergalactic figure that can travel through the space-time continuum in a provincial-looking TARDIS, or Time And Relative Dimension In Space. This particular Time Lord has gone rogue, and with a faithful companion, also played by many people (most recently, Millie Gibson and Varada Sethu), faces a litany of scoundrels while helping those in need.

“Doctor Who” is a powerful force in making mainstream some of the more esoteric elements of science fiction, from the inherent concept of time travel to keeping track of various folds of continuity. It’s got something for everybody.

“Firefly” is a lot of things. It’s the live-action adaptation of “Cowboy Bebop” before the actual live-action adaptation of “Cowboy Bebop.” It’s what happens when you throw Han Solo in a “Star Trek”-styled spaceship. It’s a smart work of speculation about cultural and economic globalization. It’s one of the great single-season “canceled too soon” shows and one of Joss Whedon’s TV masterworks.

Most importantly, “Firefly” is an absolute blast. It stars the always rakish Nathan Fillion as Mal Reynolds, captain of the Serenity, a spaceship populated by crew members loaded with intrigue. This includes Gina Torres as first mate Zoë Washburne, Alan Tudyk as pilot Hoban “Wash” Washburne, and Morena Baccarin as courtesan Inara Serra.

The crew gets into all kinds of intergalactic misadventures while dealing with their own traumas, especially as a result of a pre-series civil war. It all results in a form-advancing show that, like the best science fiction, borrows familiar conventions to make bold proclamations about our future.

“Futurama” isn’t just a hilarious animated comedy from “Simpsons” maestros Matt Groening and David X. Cohen. It’s also one of the most accurately constructed pieces of science fiction in recent years, a work that proves comedy can be found in the most intelligent form of stupidity possible.

Philip J. Fry (Billy West) is a dimwitted pizza deliveryman who accidentally falls into a cryogenic freezing chamber on New Year’s Eve, 1999. He wakes up on the eve of the year 3000 and makes his way into the clutches of the intergalactic delivery company Planet Express. Here, he meets a crew of misfits, including Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth (West), capable cyclops Turanga Leela (Katey Sagal), and the prickly, foul-mouthed robot Bender (John DiMaggio). Together, these newfound allies travel across space and time on various missions with hilarious, and scientifically sound, results.

Whether focusing Emmy-winning episodes on time travel paradoxes or putting a wild amount of effort into background chalkboard equations, “Futurama” pushes the “sci” part of “sci-fi” harder than most shows of its time.

One of the biggest network TV shows of all time, “Lost” smashed enigmatic science fiction storytelling and terminology into the mainstream, for better and for worse. Created by Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams, and Damon Lindelof, the ABC series took hard left turns and wild introductions of unprecedented sci-fi elements reigned supreme, with the “mystery box” becoming a neat codifier for this kind of show.

The series starts with a plane crash on a deserted island. Lots of intriguing characters figure out how to survive, including the resourceful John Locke (Terry O’Quinn), the amiable Hurley Reyes (Jorge Garcia), and ostensible leader Jack Shepherd (Matthew Fox). But slowly — and sometimes, incredibly quickly — the show reveals nothing is what it seems, folding in on itself numerous times over its six seasons.

Space-time collapses, ominous hatches, smoke monsters, polar bears — all of this and more is fair game for the wide purview of “Lost.” Your mileage may vary on the success of its eventual plane-landing (er, “crashing”), but there’s no doubt “Lost” changed the game in ways we see to this day.

In “The Prisoner,” a 17-episode series from creator Patrick McGoohan, the seeds were sown for cult objects to come. Originally released in 1967, the beguiling British show presented thematic complexities, allegories everywhere, elliptical and ambiguous storytelling, and a blending of many other genres into its science fiction.

At its root, “The Prisoner” is about Number Six (McGoohan), an otherwise unnamed secret agent who leaves his government job and is knocked unconscious and kidnapped. When he comes to, he finds himself in a mysterious, quaint, and remote town known only as the Village. Here, residents with similarly numbered names smile and live their happy little lives under the watchful, totalitarian eye of mysterious forces using any matter of tactic to control their subjects.

Number Six fights against these forces as best as he can, especially against the Village’s Number Two, a high-ranking official played by a rotating cast of guest stars. But by the series’ end, it’s hard to discern who “wins,” so unorthodox and enigmatic is McGoohan’s vision.

Without “The Prisoner,” we might not have “Twin Peaks,” “The OA,” nor any appetite for the esoteric in the mass medium of sci-fi TV.

Another British genre-blender, “Red Dwarf” is a sci-fi comedy that takes familiar conventions, like a crew on a spaceship going on adventures, and turns them on their heads. It’s chock full of absurdism and intriguing character development, giving international audiences flavors similar to Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett in their TV shows.

On a mining spaceship called the Red Dwarf, Dave Lister (Craig Charles) is brought aboard as a low-ranking technician. He sneaks a cat onto the ship and is sent into suspended animation as a punishment. During that suspended animation, a radiation leak kills everyone aboard except Dave, who awakens millions of years later to find he is the last human alive.

His only companions are the ship’s computer software Holly (Norman Lovett and Hattie Hayridge), a hologram of his now-dead roommate Arnold Rimmer (Chris Barrie), and the latest descendent of the cat Dave originally snuck on board — an eccentric humanoid called Cat (Danny John-Jules).

Over the long-running show’s many seasons, miniseries, and specials, this crew bends the bizarre premise as far as it will go, whetting its audience’s appetites for sci-fi that isn’t afraid to go to extremes.

There is no template for sci-fi TV without “Star Trek,” one of the most iconic and indelible pieces of American culture ever created.

Created by Gene Roddenberry and originally airing from 1966 through 1969, the original “Star Trek” is stuffed with iconic characters and archetypes like the roguish Captain Kirk (William Shatner), the logical Spock (Leonard Nimoy), the enchanting Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), and the multi-faceted Sulu (George Takei). They’re all members of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise, and their goal is to “explore strange new worlds” and “boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Roddenberry presented and popularized an idealistic and erudite form of science fiction to the masses. “Star Trek” wasn’t always a show of brawn, often favoring messages that captivated the brain and heart. It broadened the scope of genre storytelling and changed the world forever, inspiring a litany of spin-off series (including the essential “Next Generation”), films, and fans.

A Netflix juggernaut that captured the world’s imagination over five seasons, “Stranger Things” took many of the most pleasurable aspects of science fiction and fantasy — Dungeons & Dragons, 1980s nostalgia, Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, just to name a few — and remixed them into one of the most accessible pieces of storytelling in recent years. It’s the biggest sci-fi show in years, for good reason.

Taking place in Hawkins, Indiana in the 1980s, “Stranger Things” follows a group of dorky boys who love playing D&D. Their lives are forever changed when their friend Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) is abducted into a shadow realm called The Upside Down. How do they get him back? Well, a mysterious young girl known only as Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) may hold the key with her psychic powers and traumatic backstory. And the adults in the town, especially Will’s mom Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Eleven’s father figure Hopper (David Harbour), begin to play essential roles, too.

“Stranger Things” is a blast, a piece of sci-fi entertainment with an enormous amount of craft, care, and money thrown at it. It’s proof of the genre’s popularity, and a recent benchmark for where the genre can go from here.

Created and hosted by Rod Serling, an acclaimed television writer who used the anthology series format to explore the darkest and most knotted aspects of human nature, “The Twilight Zone” is one of the greatest TV shows of all time, sci-fi or not. But as a piece of the genre’s history, it opened the doors for an audience’s acceptance of complications, brutality, esoterica, and commitment in performance.

Serling begins each episode by intoning that the audience is about to enter a “fifth dimension,” a “middle ground … between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.” In this titular Twilight Zone, Serling and his team craft self-contained stories poking at national traumas, paranoia, dehumanization, and evil itself. These stories are marked by intense actors wearing their hearts on their sleeves, beautiful black-and-white presentation, and often an ironic twist that recontextualizes everything we’ve just witnessed.

“The Twilight Zone” is a keen bridge of sci-fi in literature to sci-fi on TV. It assumes its audience’s intelligence, and we’re all the better for it.

The truth is out there — and it’s stranger than we thought.

Created by Chris Carter, Fox’s “The X-Files” is a work of iconography in the science fiction, horror, and police procedural genres. It platformed some of the wildest storytelling moves and conspiracy theories, introduced audiences to the idea of an overarching mythology, and carried the mantle of “The Twilight Zone” with gripping self-contained stories.

FBI Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are assigned to the X-Files: a group of cases so bizarre that they allegedly include paranormal or supernatural forces. Mulder is a believer; Scully is a skeptic. Together, they travel across the country in search of some kind of truth among the unexplainable and terrifying.

With playful episodes like “Jose Chung’s from Outer Space,” horrifying episodes like “Home,” and iconic antagonists like the Cigarette Smoking Man (William B. Davis), “The X-Files” cemented its spot in the sci-fi TV canon.