In this piece · 15 sections+
If you're in a hurry and just want one answer: watch The Boys on Prime Video. It's the best sci-fi show running because it's the only one with the guts to say the quiet part loud — that superheroes would, in real life, be sociopathic corporate mascots who do coke off a yacht and occasionally bisect a bystander. Start with Season 1, Episode 1. You'll know within ten minutes whether you're in.
Okay. That's the answer. If you want the whole list, stick around, because I watched a concerning amount of this stuff and I have thoughts.
Here's the state of sci-fi on streaming right now. Everyone is making it. Nobody is making it well. Every executive in Burbank looked at the success of Stranger Things and said "we need our own thing with kids and neon and a synth soundtrack," and now we have forty shows where a teenager discovers a portal behind a 7-Eleven. Apple TV+ is quietly the only streamer actually trying — they're burning Tim Cook's iPhone money on prestige sci-fi that twelve people watch. Netflix cancels sci-fi shows the moment they develop a pulse. HBO Max, or Max, or HBO, or whatever Zaslav is calling it this week, is mostly rerunning Game of Thrones and praying. Disney+ keeps pumping out Star Wars spinoffs about the guy who delivered the space mail to the guy who knew Boba Fett's cousin.
And yet. Some of it is good. A lot of it is bad. Let me sort it for you.
The Boys (2019, Prime Video)
A group of regular guys try to kill the superheroes, because the superheroes are owned by a mega-corporation and one of them, Homelander, is basically if Superman went to a rally and became radicalized by a podcast. It's the funniest show on television and also the meanest, which is the correct combination. Every season is about ten percent too long, but the first three episodes of Season 1 will ruin every Marvel movie for you forever, which is a gift.
Start here: Season 1, Episode 1 — "The Name of the Game."
Invincible (2021, Prime Video)
Animated, from the guy who wrote The Walking Dead comics, about a teen superhero whose dad is the most powerful man on Earth. It seems, for about twenty minutes, like a normal cape show. Then something happens at the end of the first episode that I will not spoil, and you realize the show has been lying to your face with a grin. Genuinely upsetting, in a good way.
Start here: Season 1, Episode 1. Don't look anything up.
Stranger Things (2016, Netflix)
The one that started it all and also single-handedly created the industry's 80s-nostalgia brain worm. Season 1 is genuinely perfect — small cast, small town, one monster, Winona Ryder yelling at Christmas lights. Then it got bigger, and the kids got older, and now the show is about eighteen hours per season and features Russia. The final season is here. Finally. Thank God. These children are now in their thirties.
Start here: Season 1, Episode 1 — "The Vanishing of Will Byers."
Rick and Morty (2013, HBO Max / Hulu)
A cartoon about a drunk genius dragging his grandson through the multiverse. It is better than it has any right to be. It is also, at this point, a show your insufferable coworker has been quoting at you for a decade. That's not the show's fault. The first three seasons are genuinely some of the sharpest sci-fi writing on TV. The episode where Rick becomes a pickle is — I'm not going to explain it. Just watch it.
Start here: Season 1, Episode 1 — "Pilot."
From (2022, MGM+ / Prime Video)
A small town in middle America traps everyone who drives into it, and at night monsters come out of the woods and do unspeakable things to anyone not inside. It's like Lost if Lost had the decency to actually be scary. Stars Harold Perrineau, who you will remember from Lost, yelling at people to get in the house. This show will not end well. It may not end at all. I'm still watching it.
Start here: Season 1, Episode 1 — "Long Day's Journey Into Night."
Stargate SG-1 (1997, various — Prime, Hulu depending on your luck)
A team of Air Force guys walks through a magic ring and fights alien pharaohs. Ten seasons. It is not a serious show. That's the point. This is the kind of television you put on while folding laundry and thirty minutes later you're invested in whether Teal'c can hug his son. Richard Dean Anderson, of MacGyver, is genuinely charming as a guy who just wants to retire and fish.
Start here: Season 1, Episode 1 — "Children of the Gods." Skip the prequel movie.
Person of Interest (2011, Prime Video / Paramount+)
Starts as a procedural about a rich guy and an ex-CIA operative getting tips from a mystery computer. Slowly — and I mean slowly, like it took me two seasons to notice — turns into one of the most prescient shows ever made about surveillance, AI, and what happens when a machine becomes a god. It aired on CBS. Between episodes of NCIS. Nobody involved seems to have noticed they were making prestige TV. Just incredible.
Start here: Season 1, Episode 1 — "Pilot." Be patient through Season 1.
Doctor Who (2005, Disney+)
A 900-year-old alien travels through time in a phone booth. Extremely British. Has been running on and off since 1963, which means you cannot, and should not, start at the beginning. Start at the 2005 reboot. The early Tennant years are peak. Disney now has the worldwide rights, which means at some point the Doctor will meet a Disney princess, and I will be there.
Start here: Series 1 (2005), Episode 1 — "Rose." Or if you want peak, jump to Series 2 with David Tennant.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023, Apple TV+)
Godzilla show. Kurt Russell is in it. So is his son, Wyatt Russell, playing the younger version, which is the kind of nepotism I can get behind because it works. It's about a secret organization studying giant monsters, which is every movie you've ever seen, but the show does the one thing the Godzilla movies keep forgetting, which is to make you care about the humans. Apple spent a fortune on this. You can tell.
Start here: Season 1, Episode 1 — "Aftermath."
The Walking Dead (2010, Netflix / AMC+)
Zombies. You know this one. The first four seasons are a masterclass in dread. Then it becomes a show about people arguing on a farm, then a show about people arguing in a prison, then a show about people arguing about a guy with a baseball bat. If you've never watched it, the early seasons hold up. If you bailed around Season 7 like a sane person, you made the right call. There are now, I believe, eleven spinoffs. One of them is just Daryl in France. I'm not making that up.
Start here: Season 1, Episode 1 — "Days Gone Bye."
The Flash (2014, HBO Max)
Guy gets hit by lightning, runs fast. The first two seasons are genuinely charming CW superhero TV with a villain reveal in Season 1 that is one of the best in the genre. Then the show discovers time travel and never recovers. It runs for nine seasons. Nine. Grant Gustin is a saint for staying. Watch the first two seasons and then lie to yourself that it ended there.
Start here: Season 1, Episode 1 — "Pilot."
Lucifer (2016, Netflix)
The Devil moves to Los Angeles and helps the LAPD solve crimes. That is the pitch. Somehow it works, because Tom Ellis is doing Cary Grant in a silk shirt and the show knows exactly how silly it is. Fox cancelled it. Netflix picked it up. The fans are rabid. Perfect show to put on when your brain is broken and you just need a handsome man to smirk at a corpse.
Start here: Season 1, Episode 1 — "Pilot."
A note on what didn't make the cut
Supernatural is technically sci-fi adjacent and ran for fifteen seasons, but at some point it stopped being a show and became a lifestyle, and I'm not equipped to help you with that. Game of Thrones is fantasy, not sci-fi, and also we all agreed to stop talking about the ending. Outlander is a time-travel romance for your aunt. Teen Wolf is for people who were in middle school in 2011 and I respect them. One Piece and Jujutsu Kaisen are anime, which is its own universe with its own rules and its own forum wars, and I'm not wading in today.
FAQ
What's the best sci fi show to watch if I've never watched sci-fi before? The Boys. It reads as a dark comedy first and a superhero show second, and it'll lure you in before you realize you're watching a sci-fi show about corporate power and genetic engineering.
What's the best sci fi show for someone who hates superheroes? From. Or Person of Interest. Both are sci-fi in structure but not in vibe — no capes, no spandex, just creeping dread and smart writing.
What's the shortest good sci-fi show I can finish in a weekend? Invincible. Three seasons, eight episodes each, animated so they fly by. You'll be done by Sunday and you will need to talk to someone about it.
Are any of the new sci-fi shows actually good or is it all trash? Mostly trash. Monarch is fine. Invincible is great. Severance on Apple TV+ is the one actually essential new sci-fi show of the last five years, but it's not on this list because it got classified under drama, which tells you everything about how the streamers categorize their own content — they don't know what they have.
The Closer
Sci-fi is the genre most vulnerable to streaming-era rot, because it's expensive and weird, and executives hate expensive and weird. They want formulaic and cheap. Which is why half the shows on this list are over a decade old, and the newer ones are mostly animated or from Prime Video, which is a sentence I never thought I'd type. Apple is the only one with real ambition, but they hide their shows so well you need a treasure map to find them. Good luck out there.
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