One of the points of science fiction is to give us an idea of what our future could look like. Sci-fi movies and TV shows don’t always get things right, but there’s fun to be had in the attempt, and there are rare cases where they predict things with an almost eerie degree of accuracy.
Sometimes, a sci-fi TV show is so far ahead of its time that it confuses or puts off audiences, and it gets canceled too soon. That’s always disappointing, but at least shows like that are still available to stream.
5 sci‑fi thrillers that unravel one episode at a time
Prepare for a thrilling journey through time and space as these expertly crafted sci-fi series build tension with every episode, leading to jaw-dropping revelations.
Westworld (four seasons, 2016-2022)
Relevant, insightful, and kinda bad
We’ll start with a controversial one. Westworld began on HBO in 2016 and immediately captivated audiences with its tale of artificially intelligent “hosts” turning against their human creators inside a theme park. Future seasons would follow the hosts as they broke containment and infiltrated the real world, with the fourth season showing what happened after the robots took over. That season ended on a cliffhanger that was supposed to be resolved in a fifth and final season, but HBO canceled the show before it got the chance, and then took the episodes off of HBO Max for good measure.
Westworld became less coherent and popular as it went on, but it was still deserved to finish out the story. The timing was especially funny. The show was canceled in 2022, right before generative AI became a huge talking point; we’re still sorting through the ways that it will change our world. A show about AI robots surpassing humans already felt creepy and relevant, and the final season probably would have gotten a boost thanks to the explosion of popular applications like ChatGPT and Claude Code.
Buy episodes of Westworld on Prime Video, Apple TV+, and Fandango at Home
- Release Date
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2016 – 2022
- Network
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HBO
- Showrunner
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Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy
- Directors
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Fred Toye, Jennifer Getzinger, Stephen Williams, Vincenzo Natali, Craig William Macneill, Anna Foerster, Craig Zobel, Hanelle M. Culpepper, Helen Shaver, Jonny Campbell, Michelle MacLaren, Neil Marshall, Nicole Kassell, Tarik Saleh, Uta Briesewitz, Lisa Joy, Meera Menon
- Writers
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Roberto Patino, Carly Wray, Ron Fitzgerald, Daniel T. Thomsen, Karrie Crouse, Wes Humphrey
The Peripheral (one season, 2022)
The makers of Westworld present: another failure
Set in 2032, The Peripheral is about a professional gamer named Flynne Fisher (Chloë Grace Moretz) who gets a chance to test a VR headset that allows her to occupy a synthetic body in 22nd century London, which is a dystopian nightmare. She gets drawn into a conspiracy that threatens both her present and the future.
AR and VR gaming were already talking points in 2022 and are expected to grow in popularity in the years ahead. The Peripheral was well-positioned to explore what interacting with digital spaces will look like going forward. Hurtfully enough, the show actually was renewed for a second season, but Prime Video rescinded that renewal thanks to disruption from the 2023 actors and writers strikes.
Stream The Perilpheral on Prime Video
- Release Date
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2022 – 2022-00-00
- Network
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Prime Video
- Showrunner
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Scott B. Smith
- Directors
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Alrick Riley, Vincenzo Natali
- Writers
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Scott B. Smith, Jamie Chan, Greg Plageman, Bronwyn Garrity, William Gibson
Dollhouse (two seasons, 2009-2010)
Who are you?
Now we’re getting into shows that were way ahead of their time. In Dollhouse, we’re introduced to a company that develops technology capable of altering people’s brains so they can have new personalities implanted within them. Certain people give up seven years of their life to become a “doll,” after which they are paid handsomely. During their tenure, the dolls become assassins, investigators, or whatever else the company’s high-paying clients require.
A lot of sci-fi explores the boundaries of identity, Dollhouse included. The show feels more relevant than ever now that we have AI technology capable of cloning someone’s personality and companies like companies like Neuralink implanting computers in people’s brains.
Dollhouse does have an ending, but it’s clear that it was rushed. This show should have been given more time to fully explore its ideas.
- Release Date
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2009 – 2010-00-00
- Network
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FOX
- Showrunner
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Eliza Dushku
- Directors
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Joss Whedon
- Writers
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Joss Whedon
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Eliza Dushku
Echo / Caroline Farrell
-
-
Olivia Williams
Adelle DeWitt
-
Buy episodes of Dollhouse on Prime Video
Altered Carbon (two seasons, 2018-2020)
The cyberpunk cometh
Altered Carbon took ideas presented in Dollhouse and ran with them. In this dystopian future, people can have their personalities implanted into whole new bodies permanently, making some of them functionally immortal. Altered Carbon even stars Dollhouse veteran Dichen Lachman in a key role. She would go on to star in Severance, yet another show where technology allows people to alter their personalities. She has that niche locked down.
A lot of these shows fit into the cyberpunk genre, where ordinary people live at the mercy of giant, technologically advanced corporations. Clearly that idea is resonating these days, even if Altered Carbon was a bit early on the scene, and too expensive for Netflix to justify the cost. Expect Apple’s upcoming adaptation of Neuromancer, the original seminal work of cyberpunk fiction, to carry the torch forward.
- Release Date
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2018 – 2020-00-00
- Network
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Netflix
- Showrunner
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Anthony Mackie
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Anthony Mackie
Takeshi Kovacs
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Joel Kinnaman
Takeshi Kovacs 2
-
-
Martha Higareda
Kristin Ortega
Stream Altered Carbon on Netflix
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (two seasons, 2008-2009)
Big IP, little screen
The Terminator franchise has been up and down over the past 40+ years, with some movies being better than others. One of the highlights was The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a two-season series set after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day that followed Sarah Connor (Lena Headey) and her son John (Thomas Dekker) as they try to stop an early version of Skynet, the AI system that will one day take over the world. Firefly’s Summer Glau stars as their Terminator protector.
The Sarah Connor Chronicles hits on some of the same AI themes we’ve been talking about, but it was ahead of its time in another way: in recent years, TV shows like The Last of Us, The Penguin, and everything coming out of the Star Wars universe have shown us that it’s possible to have a hit series based on a big IP that started elsewhere. But when The Sarah Connor Chronicles was airing, this wasn’t common yet. The show was canceled before it time, but had it come out a decade later, it might have been a massive hit.
- Release Date
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2008 – 2009-00-00
- Network
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FOX
- Showrunner
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Josh Friedman
- Directors
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David Nutter
- Writers
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David Nutter, Josh Friedman
Stream Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Hulu
Almost Human (one season, 2013-14)
Almost a hit
Almost Human is about a cop (Karl Urban) who gets teamed up with a lifelike android (Michael Ealy) to investigate crimes. The show focuses on their growing bond, and on how technology has enabled new kinds of crimes to be committed in the year 2048.
Although we have yet to see androids as convincing and lifelike as Ealy’s DRN-0167, companies like Tesla are continually refining their humanoid robots. As for police officers using AI, so far it’s resulted in some high-profile failures, like a grandmother who was locked up for six months after AI facial recognition software falsely implicated her in a crime. But there’s no doubt it will keep getting used.
- Release Date
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2013 – 2014-00-00
- Showrunner
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J.H. Wyman
- Directors
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Joe Begos
- Writers
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Justin Doble, Cheo Hodari Coker, J. H. Wyman
Buy episodes of Almost Human on Apple TV+
Star Trek: The Original Series (three seasons, 1966-69)
Nice recovery
Star Trek, about a crew of space-faring professionals charged with the task of boldly going “where no man has gone before,” is one of the original forward-thinking science fiction shows. It featured a diverse cast at a time when including people of different races on TV was seen as taboo, and it predicted devices like cell phones, tablets, and wireless headsets.
Nonetheless, Star Trek was canceled after three seasons due to poor ratings. Obviously that was premature, because the series went on to include multiple movies and many more TV shows.
Stream Star Trek: The Original Series on Paramount+ or Pluto TV (for free)
- Release Date
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1966 – 1969-00-00
- Network
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NBC
- Showrunner
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Gene Roddenberry
- Directors
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Marc Daniels, Joseph Pevney, Ralph Senensky, Vincent McEveety, Herb Wallerstein, Jud Taylor, Marvin J. Chomsky, David Alexander, Gerd Oswald, Herschel Daugherty, James Goldstone, Robert Butler, Anton Leader, Gene Nelson, Harvey Hart, Herbert Kenwith, James Komack, John Erman, John Newland, Joseph Sargent, Lawrence Dobkin, Leo Penn, Michael O’Herlihy, Murray Golden
- Writers
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D.C. Fontana, Jerome Bixby, Arthur Heinemann, David Gerrold, Jerry Sohl, Oliver Crawford, Robert Bloch, David P. Harmon, Don Ingalls, Paul Schneider, Shimon Wincelberg, Steven W. Carabatsos, Theodore Sturgeon, Jean Lisette Aroeste, Art Wallace, Adrian Spies, Barry Trivers, Don Mankiewicz, Edward J. Lakso, Fredric Brown, George Clayton Johnson, George F. Slavin, Gilbert Ralston, Harlan Ellison
Firefly (one season, 2002)
The one people still can’t forget
Firefly was a sci-fi western about a group of mercenaries traveling the solar system looking for jobs, kind of like Star Trek if the Enterprise was a hunk of junk and the crew didn’t have government funding. The show was canceled after one season but found new life on home video. Fans tried desperately to get it renewed, and while that never happened, they did at least get a follow-up movie called Serenity in 2005.
Firefly was mostly ahead of its time in the way that it was trying to tell an expansive, multi-season story at a time when not many shows were doing that. This is another series that probably would have fared better had it been released a decade or two later.
Stream Firefly on Hulu
- Release Date
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2002 – 2003-00-00
- Network
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FOX
- Showrunner
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Joss Whedon
- Directors
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Allan Kroeker, David Solomon, James A. Contner, Marita Grabiak, Michael Grossman, Tim Minear, Vern Gillum
- Writers
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Cheryl Cain, Drew Z. Greenberg, Jane Espenson
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Nathan Fillion
Mal Reynolds
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Gina Torres
Zoë Washburne
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Alan Tudyk
Hoban Washburne
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Morena Baccarin
Inara Serra
Firefly is coming back
Proving that nothing’s impossible, it was announced on March 15, 2026 that there’s a new Firefly animated series in development, with much of the original cast returning. So there may be hope for some of these other series yet.
