10 Forgotten Sci-Fi TV Shows That Deserve More Fans – TVLine

If shows like “Firefly” taught TV fans anything, it’s that great sci-fi doesn’t always get the runway it deserves. A show can launch with Ridley Scott behind the camera or millions of viewers on its first night, go on to win an Emmy, and still leave the public conversation. That’s what happened to the shows on this list.

None of these 10 projects got the following they deserved. Some were canceled within just weeks of premiering. One wrapped its final season, then waited more than two years for an American release, while another was renewed, then actually un-renewed. (Yes, really.) All of them hold up, and thankfully, most are still a click or two away on a streamer.

Beyond that, the shows don’t have that much in common. There’s an animated odyssey across a planet where the plants have plans, a British thriller with a time loop, a “Battlestar Galactica” prequel about the first Cylon, and a mystery about retirees with a secret doorway to another world. Here are 10 sci-fi shows that unquestionably deserve more fans and more love. 

Time travel is a war in Prime Video’s “Paper Girls,” an adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’s comic. The war sweeps up four 12-year-old newspaper carriers in 1988 and drops them in 2019, where they get a look at how their lives turned out. Erin (Riley Lai Nelet) always assumed she’d be president. The grown-up Erin she meets (Ali Wong) is a paralegal. Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), meanwhile, looks up her older brother, who is now a doctor, and he’s the one who must break the news to her that her own story has an untimely ending. Tiffany (Camryn Jones), for her part, learns her future self may be the one who invents time travel. And KJ (Fina Strazza) later lands at a Fourth of July party at her family’s home in 1999, where she sees her adult self with a girlfriend.

While the time war in “Paper Girls” keeps things moving, the show’s best scenes are arguably those where the kids size up the adults they turned into. The adults get rattled, too, as they face their younger selves and account for the compromises they made in life. As a grown-up version of Erin, for instance, Wong is especially noteworthy, performing deep disappointment with heartbreaking precision. Ultimately, it’s the characters’ two-way emotional reckoning that gives the show its heart. The show ended on a cliffhanger, as “Paper Girls” was canceled at Amazon soon after its premiere, leaving the girls still waiting for a ride home.

“Raised by Wolves” may have once been one of HBO Max’s most-watched original shows for a time, but today, it’s the hardest on this list to find. In it, the first children on Kepler-22b are grown from embryos and raised by two androids, Mother (Amanda Collin) and Father (Abubakar Salim), who teach them to reject the faith whose war with atheism left Earth uninhabitable. Ridley Scott set the show’s tone, directing the first two episodes of Aaron Guzikowski’s series. Then the believers show up in an ark, and Mother’s past comes out. She proves she was ultimately built for war, not parenting: She can fly, and when she screams, people burst into a bloody mist.

Amanda Collin keeps the show from tipping into pure camp, with a portrayal of Mother that’s tender and terrifying at once. Abubakar Salim, meanwhile, brings to Father a gentle, dad-joke awkwardness that makes the two androids the most human characters on screen, strangely enough. As a far-flung fictional setting, Kepler-22b looks stark and sun-bleached in a way that feels unmistakably Scott. And the writing also explores faith with nuance, so neither the atheist androids nor the believers ever get to be entirely right.

“Raised by Wolves” was canceled after two seasons at HBO Max in 2022, and the series disappeared from the service that same year. That’s an odd fate for a show the streamer once touted as its top-performing original, but then again, nothing about “Raised by Wolves” was ever really traditional. 

On the planet Vesta in “Scavengers Reign,” even the wildlife has ideas of its own. When the survivors from the cargo ship Demeter are strewn across Vesta, they come to realize shelter, food and danger all go hand in hand. Ursula (Sunita Mani) and Sam (Bob Stephenson) ride out a storm inside a living creature. The creature that has claimed Kamen (Ted Travelstead) can read his mind, and it keeps him close by conjuring memories of his wife. Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) and the ship’s robot Levi (Alia Shawkat) trek toward the wreck.

But the real star is Vesta itself. Vesta comes alive through vibrant 2-D animation that makes the planet feel like a far-flung nature documentary. The planet’s ecosystem seems to adhere to its own strange internal logic, because on Vesta, every creature seemingly feeds on something or angles for something. The scenery, meanwhile, never stops being either a threat or a puzzle to be overcome or solved. “Scavengers Reign” also lets long stretches play out with little dialogue, letting its imagery carry the story instead. That sense of restraint pays off with the show’s characters, who gradually reveal themselves through what they’re willing to give up to survive rather than say, big speeches. The show won an Emmy for outstanding individual achievement in animation in 2024. And while Bennett posted a teaser for a second season, one unfortunately never came.

Most time loops send their heroes back to the same morning, but in “The Lazarus Project,” the time loops always return to July 1. When time resets, almost everyone’s memory is affected, save for a few. George (Paapa Essiedu), a London app developer, can’t miss it, as his marriage vanishes overnight. Wes (Caroline Quentin) runs Lazarus, a secret outfit with its hand on the reset button; when a pandemic or a nuclear exchange threatens to end humanity, the world gets rewound. In George, Wes sees the ideal hire, a man who remembers months nobody else seemingly does.

If the July 1 time reset gives “The Lazarus Project” its initial hook, the human cost of those resets gives the show its weight. Every time Lazarus saves the world, its efforts also wipe out months of ordinary life, pregnancies and weddings included. Creator Joe Barton, for his part, keeps the action propulsive without losing sight of those small, domestic losses. Later in Season 1, George forces a reset by doing something unforgivable to get his partner, Sarah (Charly Clive), back. The show never lets him off easy, and Essiedu plays his grief out in such a way that it becomes harder for viewers to root for him. For his stirring performance, Essiedu earned a BAFTA nomination in 2024, although Sky canceled the show that same year. The actor’s next big part is Severus Snape in HBO’s “Harry Potter” series, and anyone wondering how he landed the role should start here.

In Prime Video’s “The Peripheral,” inspired by William Gibson’s novel, Flynne (Chloë Grace Moretz) has always out-gamed her brother, Burton (Jack Reynor), so when he’s paid to beta-test a new headset, she’s the one who logs in from their Appalachian hometown in 2032. What she steers on the other end is no avatar, but a real body walking around London in 2099. Gibson’s twist on time travel is that contact with the past splits off a new timeline, a “stub,” which the future can meddle with however it likes. That future rests on decades of piled-up disasters that Gibson calls the Jackpot. When the fourth episode lays them out, that future feels very close to home.

Under the show’s whizbang gadgetry, which delivers a potent high-tech buzz, is a story about elitism and class. Flynne takes the job because her family needs the money, while the people on the other end of the headset see her whole world as expendable. Moretz gives the show its much-needed emotional anchor, playing her as sharp, wary, and fiercely protective of her family. Producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy bring the same big-budget sheen they gave “Westworld,” but the show is at its best in the scruffier 2032 scenes, where the stakes are personal. “The Peripheral” wasn’t canceled for lack of viewers. The writers’ and actors’ strikes stalled production long enough that Amazon reversed a Season 2 renewal. That leaves “The Peripheral” in the same sort of limbo it left Flynne in.

“Pantheon” starts with a bullied teenager and ends with the fate of the universe. In this underappreciated AMC+ show, Maddie (Katie Chang) never suspects her late father, David (Daniel Dae Kim), when a faceless helper online starts getting back at the kids who torment her at school. But the brain scan his employer made as he lay dying means David never fully left, and the company has plans for more. It has also secretly cast an entire family around a teenager named Caspian (Paul Dano) to re-create its late founder’s upbringing. William Hurt, in one of his final roles, plays that founder.

Creator Craig Silverstein drew inspiration for his show from Ken Liu’s short stories and brought them to life with a grounded 2D animation style that plays more like a prestige drama than anything on, say, Adult Swim. Chang and Kim make the father-daughter bond the show’s beating heart, which is why its bigger ideas land as hard as they do. Season 2 turns the uploads into a global arms race before the finale leaps far into the future. Hardly anyone saw it happen, though: AMC had Season 2 in the can when it wrote the show off in a cost-cutting purge, and American viewers didn’t get to see it until Netflix released it in 2025. Still, “Pantheon” should be remembered for exploring a moral question that becomes more relevant as technology rapidly advances: Who owns a person once a company can essentially copy and digitize them?

No one in the small town of Mercer, Ohio, can explain what happens in the Loop, the lab beneath it, including the scientists who work there. Nathaniel Halpern based the town on Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag’s paintings of farmland crowded with surreal fixtures, including robots. Each episode follows a different town local and circles back to a family with Loretta (Rebecca Hall), her husband, George (Paul Schneider), and her father-in-law, Russ (Jonathan Pryce). Where many sci-fi shows depicting hypothetical scenarios focus on delivering moral lessons or warnings, “Tales From the Loop” focuses on comfort.

In Episode 4, directed by Pixar’s Andrew Stanton, Russ shows his grandson a weathered sphere that can essentially tell people how much life they have left. When Russ calls into the sphere and hears nothing back, Pryce plays the moment with devastation. It’s a moment that exemplifies the show at its very best, as a big sci-fi idea is scaled down to one family’s grief. 

Episodes that seem self-contained turn out to be connected, so when the finale, directed by Jodie Foster, circles back to a teenage boy whose mind got trapped in a junk robot, the emotional payoff feels earned. Much of the storytelling happens without dialogue, carried by Jeff Cronenweth’s wintry cinematography. The deliberate pace won’t work for everyone, but few shows arguably reward patience more. “Tales From the Loop” earned two Emmy nominations in 2020,but Prime Video, unfortunately, never released a second season.

Set after the events of “Terminator 2,” creator Josh Friedman’s ambitious show centers on fugitives Sarah (Lena Headey) and a teenage John (Thomas Dekker), who encounter Cameron (Summer Glau), a Terminator the adult John sent back to protect them. Together, they leap forward in time to 2007. In the Season 2 episode “Self Made Man,” Cameron finds a Terminator that got stuck 90 years early. It taps into the show’s larger question: What does a machine do with nothing but time and a mission? In answering it, Cameron develops an unlikely friendship with a sick young man. It’s a connection that offers a glimpse at how much more than her programming she could be.

Despite being canceled in 2009, the show ultimately became one of the smartest takes on Terminator since “T2.” Glau is the key, with a distinctive and slightly off delivery that makes Cameron funny in one moment but chilling the next. Headey, meanwhile, plays out Sarah’s paranoia as the price of being right about the world’s end.

In the Season 2 finale, John is sent into a future where nobody has ever heard of him, and it’s a chapter that remains unexplored. Still, the show did see some awards recognition, with Glau winning a Saturn Award in 2008 for best supporting actress on television, and to this day, it remains one of the best shows based on a movie.

“Caprica” asks what grief can do to a man with a bottomless bank account and a robotics lab. The first Cylon, it turns out, begins as a teenager’s secret. Tech magnate Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz) loses his daughter, Zoe (Alessandra Torresani), to a terrorist bombing that occurs 58 years before “Battlestar Galactica.” Once Daniel learns Zoe actually built a digital double of herself in V-World, the virtual hangout for teens, he transfers that version of Zoe into the robot prototype his company is building. Joseph Adama (Esai Morales), meanwhile, who lost his daughter in that same attack, chases after a digital echo of her through a video game.

Created by Ronald D. Moore and Remi Aubuchon, the show puts its future in 1950s suits and fedoras, playing out events as more of a family drama than a space opera. Torresani does some of the show’s best work, portraying Zoe as a grieving father’s lost daughter and the eerie, newly self-aware machine she’s becoming. Still, many “Battlestar Galactica” fans kept their distance, perhaps because the show was so little like its predecessor. By the time Syfy dumped the last five episodes into a single night in January 2011, it had already canceled the series months earlier. But more than 15 years later, “Caprica” still feels relevant in some ways. A show based around digital resurrection and an AI born from grief now feels less like some far-flung prequel and more like an unsettling forecast of what may one day come.

Take the stairs under Irene (Sissy Spacek) and Franklin York’s (J.K. Simmons) backyard shed far enough, and people will find themselves in a room on a distant planet. That’s the premise behind Prime Video’s “Night Sky.” When Irene finds a young man there, they disagree on what to do with him. Irene, who never stopped grieving the death of their son, wants Jude (Chai Hansen) to stay, but Franklin trusts him about as far as the shed. Jude, for his part, can’t explain how he even got there. Meanwhile, Stella (Julieta Zylberberg) is a rancher in Argentina. She watches over a chamber of her own. At first, this subplot feels separate from the rest, but later, it becomes clear how it connects to everything else.

Simmons replaced Ed O’Neill in the role of Franklin before production began. That turned out to be kismet, because his chemistry with Spacek feels entirely natural. The pair are convincing in portraying two halves of a marriage with all its shorthand and old wounds, and the show resonates most when it lets them simply sit with each other in the silence of what they’ve lost. Although slow at times, the show works, because it’s a sharp exploration of aging and what a couple does with the time that’s left. Weeks after transmitting its first episode into space, “Night Sky” was canceled at Prime Video. The cancellation stranded the Yorks in the finale on the other side, looking out at a hidden settlement.