Here’s something that keeps bothering me: how does a show run five seasons, win a BAFTA, generate a loud and devoted fanbase… and then just vanish from reality? How do people file it under “things I once liked” and just forget about it? Science fiction TV has never been bigger. We’ve got Severance, Andor, The Expanse, Dark, For All Mankind, Stranger Things, Black Mirror, and more in the past decade. These shows get the coverage, the essays, the awards, and the discourse. Deservedly.
But there’s a whole other tier of sci-fi shows that did everything right – they were tightly paced, performances were brilliant, and the world-building was awe-inspiring – and somehow still slipped through the cracks. A couple of entries here will make you say, “Wait, that’s not underrated.” I know. Fair point. But when was the last time you actually heard someone bring up Torchwood or 12 Monkeys? Being forgotten feels wrong. So let’s fix that for these eight near-perfect sci-fi shows.
8
‘Warehouse 13’ (2009 – 2014)
Two Secret Service agents get reassigned to a vast South Dakota warehouse storing every dangerous artifact in human history. Something escapes, they retrieve it, and the cycle repeats itself. I know that sounds like a thin plot, but Warehouse 13 is breezy, funny, and sneakily emotional. Plus, Eddie McClintock and Joanne Kelly have chemistry that most procedural shows spend multiple seasons trying to fake.
Warehouse 13 also uses its artifact-retrieval format as a delivery mechanism for grief, because almost every object connects back to loss, rage, or a life stolen too soon. Artie, played by Saul Rubinek, carries the sentimental weight of the show on his shoulders, and Allison Scagliotti as Claudia is one of the most underrated supporting turns on TV. It won a Saturn Award, ran for five seasons, and nobody talks about it anymore.
7
‘Red Dwarf’ (1988 – Present)
Red Dwarf is a sci-fi comedy with unbelievable staying power. It has been running in some form since 1988 and most people outside the UK treat it like a charming niche relic. While it is, in fact, one of the most inventive British sitcoms ever produced and a piece of rigorous science fiction. It’s set three million years into deep space, and it revolves around the last human alive, a hologram of his dead bunkmate, a humanoid evolved from his pet cat, and a mechanoid with a PhD in applied anxiety.
Series I through VI are a creative miracle because of how Rob Grant and Doug Naylor wrote time loops and consciousness experiments and infused them with philosophical punchlines. The episode “Back to Reality” from Series V hits harder than most dramas. Red Dwarf is still alive, still sharp in stretches, and somehow still under-discussed considering it has 13 series to its name.
6
‘Counterpart’ (2017 – 2019)
In Counterpart, J.K. Simmons plays two versions of Howard Silk. One is a meek UN bureaucrat and the other is a cold intelligence operative. They’re separated by parallel dimensions and 30 years’ worth of divergent choices. It’s a sci-fi thriller presented as a slow-burn Cold War spy drama, with episodes so meticulously constructed you won’t be able to tell one thing apart from another. It ran two seasons on Starz and then disappeared so completely that I genuinely forgot it existed until I was looking at Simmons’ TV roles a few months ago.
Speaking of Simmons, he plays both men in the same scenes, but he nails their different postures, silences, and moral choices. The performance is so clean that you stop thinking about the technical achievement by the time you get to Episode 2. Olivia Williams, also split into two versions of Emily, matches him at every step. Season 1 is really good. Season 2 gets more ambitious, and then Starz canceled it one season before the story could close. But don’t let the cliffhanger ending stop you from devouring this near-perfect sci-fi masterpiece.
5
‘Farscape’ (1999 – 2003)
When I think of the late ’90s and science fiction, Farscape always comes to mind. It follows an American astronaut who falls through a wormhole, lands aboard a living ship full of alien fugitives, and spends four seasons losing his mind trying to get home. It’s a Henson company production, which means the alien characters have a genuine physical presence that other CGI-heavy modern alien TV shows cannot touch. I mean, Rygel has more aura than most lead actors, wouldn’t you agree?
Ben Browder plays Crichton, and Claudia Black plays Aeryn Sun. Aeryn, a soldier trained to feel nothing who spends the whole series learning, against her own will, to feel everything, is a great sci-fi character. The Season 3 two-parter “Into the Lion’s Den” still holds up as an excellent mid-season arc, and the finale cliffhanger also sparked a real fan campaign. So, clearly, the demand was there, but today, it’s overshadowed by Battlestar Galactica and Firefly and has become a hidden gem.
4
‘Space: Above and Beyond’ (1995 – 1996)
One season, canceled mid-story, and I keep recommending it anyway. Glen Morgan and James Wong came straight off The X-Files to make Space: Above and Beyond, a show that follows a squad of Marine space fighter pilots during an interstellar war against an alien species called the Chigs. What they made was a morally ambiguous combat drama with a willingness to kill characters, and a portrait of military service that was doing things Band of Brothers would get celebrated for five years later.
It also nails the restraint. The Chigs stay alien and motivationally opaque all the way through, and the show treats that ambiguity as a strength. Fox really had a talent for canceling shows before they could finish back then, and that’s what happened with Space: Above and Beyond. The finale is called “… Tell Our Moms We Done Our Best” and it ends mid-story, so you can imagine how devastating that was.
3
‘Torchwood’ (2006 – 2011)
Torchwood started as a Doctor Who spin-off. It was more adult-oriented, set in Cardiff, and it revolved around the immortal Captain Jack Harkness. The first series is honestly a mess. It is tonally scattered, and it tries too hard to prove it isn’t for kids. But I’d plead you to push through anyway, because by Series 3, the show becomes something I’d put against almost any sci-fi TV show from the 2000s. Children of Earth, the 2009 five-part miniseries, is bleak, serious, and refuses to give anyone a clean exit.
Many would argue that John Barrowman holds it together, but I honestly think that run belongs to Peter Capaldi as John Frobisher, a government official attempting to do what he believes is right inside a system that makes it structurally impossible to do right. Series 4, Miracle Day, is uneven, and most fans hold it at arm’s length. But Series 2 and Series 3 represent a creative peak and are a perfect watch for Doctor Who fans.
2
‘The 100’ (2014 – 2020)
Before you come at me, yes, I know it’s a CW show. And yes, the first few episodes look exactly like what “YA post-apocalyptic drama about teenagers sent back to a radioactive Earth” sounds like for a CW show. But I’m asking you to hold on until the back half of Season 1 and see how a show that questions whether survival justifies atrocity emerges from that scaffolding. It also touches on family dysfunction, shifting alliances, and is constantly unpredictable. By Season 2, with the Mount Weather arc, The 100 establishes itself as a show you simply cannot put down.
At the center is Eliza Taylor’s performance. It is excellent across all seasons and almost never gets discussed on those terms. The finale in 2020 divided fans, yet I admired its attempt to grapple with transcendence rather than giving viewers easy answers. Despite its popularity during its run, The 100 is already fading from discussions and being replaced by flashier shows. Dismissing the whole thing because it aired on the CW is TV criticism’s most persistent, laziest blind spot.
1
’12 Monkeys’ (2015 – 2018)
Syfy’s 12 Monkeys took Terry Gilliam’s 1995 movie and expanded it into a four-season epic. Showrunner Terry Matalas, who would later run Star Trek: Picard Season 3, created a time-travel narrative that is as intricately plotted as anything the genre has produced, and centered it on a man trying to prevent a plague and a virologist who becomes his anchor across decades. I came in with low expectations and finished it in a week.
Aaron Stanford and Amanda Schull anchor the core of the series, but Emily Hampshire as Jennifer Goines is truly unforgettable. Season 3, set largely in 1944, takes swings even a better-funded TV show would be too cautious to attempt. The show ends by design, with all threads resolved and no truncated finale. 12 Monkeys manages to make time travel coherent, emotional, and thrilling, a rare trifecta. It deserves to be remembered not just as a clever adaptation, but as one of the best sci-fi sagas of the 2010s.
Which forgotten sci-fi show do you think would blow up if it were released today? Let us know in the comments.
