Last Updated: December 10th
As a genre, sci-fi is chock-full of imagination and adventure. We’re talking faraway planets, advanced technologies, future civilizations kind of stuff here. Most of the shows have at least one of these but they all bring something new and interesting to sci-fi as a while. Here are the series worth watching if you want to be transported to another universe — on screen, anyway.
Related: The Best Fantasy Shows On Netflix Right Now
Sense8
2 seasons, 22 episodes + 1 Christmas special | IMDb: 8.3/10
The Wachowskis’ Sense8 is about a group of people around the world who are suddenly linked mentally. Like Cloud Atlas, the disparate stories about love and relationships weave in and out of each other. For all its sci-fi flourishes, however, Sense8 is about big, sloppy profound love, and as unwieldy as the series can often be, there’s at least one moment in every episode so powerful that viewers can’t help but to feel moved by the affection the characters feel for one another. It is sometimes cheesy, and occasionally illogical, but it is also one of the most diverse, multi-cultural, romantic, life-affirming sci-fi series ever. It may require some patience from viewers, but for idealists and romantics, it’s a truly special series.
Altered Carbon
2 seasons, 20 episodes | IMDb: 8.1/10
Based on the 2002 science fiction novel by Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon mixes a few great, new ideas with a lot of derivative ones and delivers a series that alternates between frustrating and brilliant. The show is set in a future where everyone’s consciences have been downloaded into stacks, which can be transferred into different “sleeves,” or bodies. Theoretically, a person can live forever, unless his or her stack is destroyed; however, in practice, only the wealthy can afford to buy the necessary sleeves to live indefinitely. In this world, Joel Kinnaman stars as Takeshi Kovacs, a former U.N. elite soldier who returns in a different sleeve to work as a private investigator hired by a wealthy man to solve the murder of his own sleeve. The premise itself is fascinating, but the show gets bogged down in world-building before it can establish its characters. There are also a few fascinating wrinkles (clones, backed-up consciences, Blade Runner-like androids), but it’s a show that, for better or worse, requires viewers’ close attention. Unfortunately, the characters themselves are often not worth the attention required. It’s a better show on paper than onscreen, but there are easily enough interesting ideas percolating here to sustain sci-fi enthusiasts through some of the dense, slower-moving episodes and the occasionally unengaging characters.
Into The Badlands
3 seasons, 24 episodes | IMDb: 8/10
There are plenty of post-apocalyptic shows on this list but none as inventive and action-packed as AMC’s Into The Badlands. The series takes place after a great war destroyed what civil society was left on Earth, leaving behind a hierarchal system of Barons, men and women who use slaves to help them achieve power and keep a tentative peace in a wasteland known as The Badlands. Daniel Wu plays Sunny, a clipper — highly trained soldiers — who serves as the show’s protagonist and anti-hero, a man with a moral center and questionable allies. There’s plenty of martial arts, bloodshed, and war to keep things interesting but what’s really intriguing about this sci-fi series is the amount of world building the writers have been able to craft out of the three seasons available on Netflix.
The 100
7 seasons, 100 episodes | IMDb: 7.7/10
The CW continues to prove it’s committed to bringing quality sci-fi series to the masses. It’s got a slew of superhero fare currently in its lineup but we can’t forget one of the longest-running shows on the network, The 100. The series from Jason Rothenberg focuses on a group of delinquents sent down from space to see if a post-apocalyptic Earth is survivable. The story quickly balloons to include Grounders, natives who survived the first nuclear apocalypse instead of fleeing to space, Mountain Men, warring clans, a second apocalyptic event, and plenty of bad guys.
Wynonna Earp
3 seasons, 37 episodes | IMDb: 7.4/10
Whatever you do, please do not sleep on Wynonna Earp. The Syfy series is a combination of genres — supernatural Western, action-adventure, and a bit of horror thrown in for good measure. The show follows Wynonna Earp, the great-great-grandaughter of the gunslinging Wyatt Earp who inherits his ability to kill revenants — old enemies returned from the dead — on her 27th birthday. Along the way, Earp has to rescue a couple of family members, contend with famous outlaws from her family’s past, and come to terms with her own supernatural abilities.
The 4400
4 seasons, 44 episodes | IMDb: 7.3/10
It’s likely a new audience will be introduced to this sci-fi saga when the CW reboots the story, but you really should make time to appreciate the original series that spawned it. It follows a group of 4400 individuals who return to Earth, sometimes decades after they were taken by a beam of white light and have no memories of their time away. Instead, they’re forced to assimilate into society, figure out why they’re developing supernatural abilities, and uncover the reason they were abducted in the first place, pretty much all on their own.
The Umbrella Academy
2 seasons, 20 episodes | IMDb: 8/10
Superhero team-ups are a dime a dozen but the TV adaptation of this award-winning comic series created by Gerard Way — yes, the lead singer of My Chemical Romance — feels wholly unique and thus, totally refreshing. The show follows the story of seven kids, all born on the same day to mothers who didn’t even know they were pregnant. They’re adopted by a mysterious billionaire and trained to use their supernatural abilities to fight evil in the world, but when they grow up, their dysfunctional upbringing catches up with them, and they’re left struggling to live normal lives. It’s all kinds of weird, which is exactly what the genre needs right now.
The OA
2 seasons, 16 episodes | IMDb: 7.9/10
The OA has been wildly divisive among both critics and viewers alike, with about 50 percent strongly disliking it and the other 50 percent incredibly intrigued by the Brit Marling series. Marling stars as Praire Johnson, a blind, adopted woman who disappears for seven years and when she returns, she has scars on her back, she’s clearly been underground for a long period of time, and she can see. She calls herself The OA, and shares the details of her disappearance with only a few select people, her cult of followers. It’s an ambitious, imaginative series and though it is wildly uneven, it still remains watchable, full of moments both profound and eye-rolling. The problem with The OA, however, is that it buys too readily into its own ethos and ultimately takes itself way more seriously than any viewer could.
Dark
3 seasons, 26 episodes | IMDb: 8.6/10
If you’re trying to pin down Netflix’s mystery crime thriller, the best way to describe it is to call it a German version of Stranger Things minus the Demogorgon. The show centers on four families whose lives and dark deeds are brought to light after two children vanish in the woods. There’s plenty of familial drama here and a supernatural twist or two to keep things interesting. Oh, and time travel. Did we mention the f*ck with your mind time-travel plot?
Black Mirror
5 seasons, 23 episodes | IMDb: 8.8/10
Love it or hate it, Black Mirror is one of the more popular and successful shows on television right now. A modern successor to The Twilight Zone, albeit with a technological twist, Charlie Brooker’s British-American creation recently came to Netflix with an exclusive fourth season featuring new horrifying critiques of some very real-world behaviors that, with a little science-fiction flourish, could become a nightmare reality in just a few years or decades.
Dark Matter
3 seasons, 39 episodes | IMDb: 7.5/10
You’re trapped aboard a semi-functioning ship in the depths of space. You have no idea who you are. You’re all alone, except for an assortment of fellow human beings who are asleep in stasis. So you wake them up for answers and for the company, only to discover that they have no idea who they are either. No, this isn’t that terrible sci-fi film Passengers with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. It’s a Canadian series called Dark Matter that aired on the Space channel. And since its six main human characters cannot remember their names or pasts, they name each other numbers One through Six (in order of who woke up when) and set about trying to discover who they are, why they’re there and who’s coming after them.
Travelers
3 seasons, 34 episodes | IMDb: 8.2/10
Travelers is a sci-fi series co-produced by Netflix and a Canadian television network Showcase starring Eric McCormick (Will & Grace). It’s a light sci-fi drama about people from hundreds of years in the future whose consciences are sent back to the present day to take the place of others who are already about to die. They’re sent back, a la Terminator, to prevent a bleak future from taking place. In the present day, this group of people is tasked with missions to prevent the future dystopia from happening, but they also have to acclimate into the lives of their host bodies. It is a quintessential Netflix show: Easy-to-binge, madly addictive, fun as hell, and immediately engrossing. While it certainly borrows heavily from other sci-fi shows and movies, it does an excellent job of shaking it up and bringing fresh life to the genre.
Legends of Tomorrow
4 seasons, 87 episodes | IMDb: 6.8/10
Legends of Tomorrow, the third Greg Berlanti-produced DC Comics show to come alive on The CW, is bonkers — but in the best way possible. It’s like if someone took the nuts and bolts of Doctor Who, the most disparate, minor superheroes and villains in the DC roster, and combined them into a single vehicle. (Quite literally, in fact.) It’s literally a show about time-traveling comic book characters hopping from one famous portion of human history to another, all in an effort to “fight the future” and its nefarious bad guys. It doesn’t always make the most sense, but it’s still fun to watch.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
7 seasons, 176 episodes | IMDb: 8.6/10
As significant as Star Trek: The Original Series is, Gene Roddenberry’s television successor broken even more ground in the science-fiction genre and beyond. TNG fans are just as stalwart as TOS proponents, if not more so, and the generational differences between the two groups produce more positivity within the series’ larger fan community than anything else. Plus, there were four more and far longer seasons of TNG for viewers to watch, re-watch and discuss frequently — both at the time, and decades later with the arrival of the Internet, message board and social media.
Stranger Things
3 seasons, 33 episodes | IMDb: 8.8/10
A throwback and love letter to the early 1980s movies of Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter, the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things feels both familiar and new. It’s about a boy named Will (think E.T.‘s Elliot) who is captured by a The Thing-like creature and trapped in a Poltergeist-like world. His mother (Winona Ryder) recruits the local sheriff to investigate Will’s disappearance. Meanwhile, Will’s dorky, Goonies-like best friends take to their bikes to do some sleuthing of their own and eventually befriend an alien-like girl with telepathic powers (the E.T. of the series). Season two continues that vibe as the show dives deeper into government conspiracies and alien monsters intent on wreaking havoc on small-town Indiana. It’s great PG horror/sci-fi, like the blockbusters of the early ’80s, and even if you didn’t come of age in the era, there’s something for everyone to enjoy.
