Favorite Sci-Fi Series (TV or Streaming)

[eric]

What's your favorite Sci-Fi show, either from broadcast TV, satellite/cable or a streaming service.

If it's currently available on streaming or on-demand, please mention where.

(And if you will.... no movies made for the big screen... we can do that topic another time)

[Orbita]

Right now, I am into an obscure sci-fi series from the late 90's - early 00's called Farscape. It's free on a bunch of services. Tubi, Crackle, Plex, etc.

It's quite good. An astronaut gets sucked into a wormhole in space and ends up in a ship in the middle of a space battle. Not to many recognizable actors, but it's definitely worth watching. I'm trying to finish up the first season. It's a bit hard to get into, but after a while, you'll get into it.

[crimsonfloyd]

I will have to say the top of my list would be almost all of the Star Trek shows which are now on Paramount Plus. I do watch Lost in Space from time to time, which is on Hulu, but for as much as I enjoyed it as a kid it can be a little annoying now for how the show turned into the "Adventures of Dr, Smith, Will and the Robot". I do enjoy the Star Wars shows on Disney, but I think it can be fair to classify them more as action adventure with scifi elements. Babylon 5 will make the list as well, but I haven't watched it in years since the original broadcasts. So, I am not sure if the episodes are streaming anywhere.

Mark

[MMSS]

Growing up in the mid to late 1960's & early 1970's and to this day my favorite Sci-Fi shows were those UK Supermarionation shows by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. Shows like Supercar, Stingray, Thunderbirds (T-Birds was primetime on NBC back then) and my favorite of them all Captain Scarlet & the Mystrons. Captain Scarlet was much different than the other shows of this type because it was far from being more family orientated. It was very dark and had great story lines. All these great shows are streamed on Amazon Prime Video today.

I still have my regular type of favorites like Star Trek which I hold dearly. And of course, my "Irwin Allen Trifecta" Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Land of the Giants. Star Trek is on many streaming platforms. Lost in Space I know is on Hulu but the others I am not sure about. I have all the Irwin Allen box sets of those shows to watch.

Then around 1972 I got hooked on UFO and then later Space:1999 (Both also Gerry and Sylvia Anderson vehicles). These use to be on Tubi at one time, but I don't know if they are on any streaming service now, but I know box sets are available, and I have them. UK Sci-Fi was great back then.

[ftldave]

Shows like Supercar, Stingray, Thunderbirds (T-Birds was primetime on NBC back then)

Mark, I think you are mistaken. The only Anderson Supermarionation show to ever get a US network deal was Fireball XL-5, not Thunderbirds. Fireball was part of NBC's fledgling Saturday morning programming back in, what, 1963? I remember watching it then while living in New Jersey. It was much harder to find Thunderbirds on TV here in the Midwest because it was syndicated, and American local TV stations had it playing at different times and days. Gerry Anderson often lamented that none of his shows were bought by the American networks, except for Fireball XL-5. Your NBC station might have broadcast Thunderbirds, but surely it was outside the network-provided shows' scheduled time block. Here in Indiana, Thunderbirds was shown by an independent local station WTTV Channel 4.

And in that early sixties era, my favorite science-fiction TV show was The Outer Limits, particularly the premiere episode of the second season, "Soldier". Written by acclaimed author Harlan Ellison - and later a matter of some legal troubles for James Cameron when he made The Terminator movie in 1984. That Outer Limits episode had an infantry soldier from the far future accidentally transported back in time to 1964 America. One of the first real examples of military science fiction on TV - in glorious black-and-white.

https://kosmosflot.blogspot.com/2008/09/soldier-outer-limits.html

From gerryanderson.com:

"Despite phenomenal success in their country of origin the Gerry Anderson television series were always produced with American audiences very much in mind, with the main prize being a sale to a major American network. Sadly, only one Anderson series (Fireball XL5, sold to NBC in 1963) would achieve this success, with the others still airing around the USA in syndication – a process by which local stations affiliated with a particular major network would air programming outside of that network’s prime-time schedule."

[niknak]

For me it's probably UFO ( mainly due to Gabrielle Drake ) and Futurama ( mainly due to Bender ). Needless to say for very different reasons....

[eric]

As a kid, Space Battleship Yamato a.k.a. Star Blazers.... It's essentially an animated anime (is that really redundant?) with a flying version of the battleship Yamato (which was sunk during the later days of WW-2). Somewhat obscure for the time, but it's now available on Amazon Prime Video.

As an adult, hands down it's Battlestar Galactic (2004). It's some of the best CGI work for the time, and not one of those one-hour story arc "watch it and forget it" shows. You have to watch it end to end, and at four seasons was just about right for longevity. Originally aired on SyFi, then moved to Paramount, and is now on Amazon Prime Video.

It also introduced me to Ron Moore as a show runner, and Bear McCreary for soundtracks. Moore was part of the writing team Star Trek:Voyager, but left over creative differences: he wanted to break with the episodic approach that ST:V had, and do deeper story arcs, but the lead writers disagreed. Had they followed his direction, BSG would have probably never happened. I never did get into Star Trek and their need for quasi-humanoid aliens, but in BSG, humanity was the entire premise. Maybe that's why I liked it.

I'll give an honorable mention to Dr. Who, but to be blunt, can only tolerate Tom Baker, Matt Smith and David Tennant in the role. The more modern iterations seem.... forced.

[haverfordwest]

The Invaders 1967-1968 (TV).

Mike.

[burgerbern]

I really liked the re-imagined battlestar galactica as well as Babylon 5, got both of the box sets

[caldrail]

Blake's Seven - a low budget British series that ran for four seasons at the end of the seventies. A bunch of escaped rogues mount a resistance against a tyrannical Federation. Really dodgy locations and sets, but at times, quite compelling.

https://youtu.be/2warRbMFOpk?si=xzoIinblJUd3Nh0h

[ftldave]

The Invaders 1967-1968 (TV).

The music score for that show, composed by the late great Dominic Frontiere, still gives me the creeps. I thought it was a cool touch when actor Michael Rennie, who was the alien Klatuu in the original Day The Earth Stood Still, was cast as an alien Invader leader in a couple of episodes. Pretty aged by then, I never thought Rennie did the part justice, but still. When you would see one of the Invaders - who looked like humans but could not completely close their hands - and that scary Frontiere music started, it was pretty doggone scary.

Recognize that alien? The Invaders used that deadly little gadget to snuff people, make it appear like death from "natural" cerebral hemorrhage!

[davidlk]

Easy One: Firefly, Farscape and Babylon 5

[ftldave]

Easy One: Firefly, Farscape and Babylon 5

Firefly had some great stories but got lots of flack about that Inara "consort" character, that ongoing "aren't whores the best!" theme. I thought it was overdone, that part, kind of forced sleazy.

[brama]

Well, I grew up watching old Tom Baker Dr. Who on tv on Wednesdays after school. A few years later TNG, Voyager and DS9 were on in the early evening. Every working day guess. Though there is a lot to appreciate about the moral message of Star Trek, it gets tiresome after a point. DS9 ended quite well, but started out boring (to boldly sit still in some backwater part of the universe where dozens have gone before)

Babylon 5 I liked more. Just like the sadly aborted Space: Above And Beyond.

nBSG was great in the beginning, but got a bit off the rails at the end. Happily it still has an active fanfiction base.

The last SciFi series that interested me was The Expanse.