15 Best Sci-Fi TV Shows Of The 2020s (So Far), Ranked

Of all the dramatic qualities that define the science fiction genre, one of the most compelling is its capacity to imagine futures, whether they're the kind we should hope to achieve or they're the kind we should frantically be trying to avoid. Fittingly, we here at /Film are going to cast our critical minds into the future to explore which sci-fi series will go down as the best of the 2020s.

The decade is halfway done as of writing, and it has already produced stories unlike anything we've ever seen on the small screen (mostly from one particular streaming service). As the terrifying evolution of technology dominates every aspect of our lives, however, it seems every streamer and network is itching to predict where things are headed next — and how our lives could be irreversibly changed as a result. Yay! 

In case the next five years become flooded with shows about how AI is cool and good actually, let's take a moment to celebrate the best sci-fi TV shows of the 2020s so far.

The first few entries on our list belong to shows with strong starts and loads of promising potential. Some or all of them may be deserving of far higher spots on a ranking such as this by the end of the 2020s after more seasons are released. Consider the first three spots a ranking based on that potential, starting with Netflix's "3 Body Problem."

The highly anticipated follow-up project of "Game of Thrones" creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (who created this sci-fi show with "The Terror" co-creator Alexander Woo) sets out to adapt a trilogy of novels almost as popular in their genre as George R. R. Martin's series was in the realm of fantasy. Author Liu Cixin designed a conflict-driven world around the disturbing, plausible consequences of discovering intelligent extraterrestrial life.

The adaptation of "3 Body Problem" is already every bit as nerdy as we could hope for, holding true to the hard-science-based approach of Cixin's work. Season 1 is admittedly still in search of its footing with regards to its presentation (much was said about the show's dialogue when it was released), but with a major Emmy Award nomination right out of the gate, we'd be surprised if it didn't stick around as one of the decade's most important sci-fi series.

The multiversal drama has emerged as a defining subgenre of the 2020s, made popular by the Marvel Cinematic Universe but elevated by critically acclaimed films like "Everything Everywhere All at Once" and "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse." At the same time, it's also been oversaturated by its repetitive use in more disappointing superhero fare like "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" and the truly dispiriting "The Flash." By 2024, audiences felt as though they had experienced every kind of multiverse story they could stomach – then came Apple TV's mind-bending thriller "Dark Matter."

Based on the novel by Blake Crouch (who also serves as the series' creator and showrunner), "Dark Matter" gets to the heart of why multiverse stories can be so emotionally compelling in the first place. Through the nightmare of Joel Edgerton's Jason Dessen — a college physics professor abducted and replaced by a version of himself who chose professional scientific success over a modest life with his family — it explores the mental torment of a life un-lived in a way that wouldn't be as effective in a single universe. That it uses a familiar "It's a Wonderful Life"-style premise to venture somewhere unexpected and unsettling cements its place on our list. As of writing, "Dark Matter" Season 2 is set to be released in the fall of 2026.

Sadly, unlike the previous shows on our list, "Scavengers Reign" is the kind of one-season sci-fi gem that will never get to become what it was meant to be. Even so, its indefinitely unrealized potential is enough — at least for now — for it to be worthy of mention in our assessment of the decade's best series.

In case you missed it, this Emmy Award-winning animated survival series from Joe Bennett ("Common Side Effects") and Charles Huettner tells the story of the crew of a space-faring vessel who are stranded on the unforgiving planet of Vesta. Over 12 episodes, it stretches your expectations of where a series like this might go narratively and, most especially, visually, with an unpredictable animation style that mines horror from alien monsters and ecosystems alike.

As of writing, "Scavengers Reign" is one of the highest-rated adult animated series on IMDb. Sadly, HBO Max cancelled it after a single season, leaving its team to scatter to other projects. Though another season will likely never be made, it remains one of the most entrancing and original sci-fi horror series made in the past decade.

If we're being 100% real with ourselves, "Foundation" will, by the end of the decade, most likely go down as the lowest-ranked Apple TV series on retrospective lists like this. And that's if it even makes the cut for inclusion. The first two seasons were so stop-and-start that they seriously tested the patience of those who wanted to like it. Those devoted to Isaac Asimov's famously un-adaptable series were never going to be satisfied, which meant Apple needed to entertain and engage the rest of us enough to justify its existence.

Many viewers may have dropped off after Season 2, which is a shame, considering Season 3 is so good, it comes close to absorbing everything that came before it. It proves that diverting from Asimov's narrative was both unavoidably necessary and instrumental in making a television series that stands on its own. David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman are finally doing that vulnerable, exposing work that great adaptations should strive to do: Translate the ideas and themes as you understand them, and use your unique relationship to them to say something new. Over three seasons, it has transformed itself entirely from an unsuccessful transposition into a worthy love letter to an all-time-great sci-fi writer.

At the start of this list, we gave Marvel a bit of guff for essentially blunting the impact of multiverse stories broadly. Allow us, then, to offer them their well-deserved flowers for producing one of the subgenre's defining works at a time when the multiverse was swallowing the rest of the MCU whole.

The downturn of the franchise isn't the only thing that made "Loki" a surprise success. Fans had already said goodbye to the character in "Avengers: Infinity War" and felt as though he'd been thoroughly explored in every way a Marvel movie would allow. Operating with an extraordinary amount of creative freedom, the show's creative team were able to deliver one of the only superhero shows that truly deserves to take up space in the sci-fi world.

Tom Hiddleston's character feels impossibly new again after a decade's worth of reversals, as his new position at the Time Variance Authority forces him to finally reckon with who he is and who he wants to be. It ingeniously takes him out of the traditional superhero world to allow him to wrestle with the kinds of questions he wouldn't be able to otherwise, and in the process, it delivers one of the most satisfying endings for any Marvel character so far.

"Fallout" is a bit of a curious inclusion on this list. Full disclosure, if we were only able to consider the first season of the series, it would be much higher on this (or, at least, at the top of our single-seasoners). The first eight episodes of Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet's standout video game adaptation puts almost every previous console-to-screen effort to shame and lays a blueprint for what a successful project of this kind should aspire to accomplish. Given the limited runway offered by a direct narrative adaptation like "The Last of Us," "Fallout" should have cemented itself as the most important video game adaptation of the decade — if not of all time — with its second season.

Then Season 2 came out. The sophomore effort of "Fallout" certainly isn't bad, bringing back enough of what made it entertaining (in particular its tongue-in-cheek, retro-futuristic-meets-Old West vibe) to warrant continued interest. But the pacing was noticeably wonky, as the storylines became too disparate and were less developed overall. "Fallout" Season 1 was a great TV show, not just a great sci-fi program. Hopefully Season 3 regains the focus it once had.

If there's one show that reminds us it's never too late to rediscover your greatness, it's "Star Trek: Picard." The first two seasons are unbelievably uneven, at times perfectly exemplifying what we mean when we remark that something shows "flashes" of brilliance and at other times straining our ability to take it seriously as a "Star Trek" project.

But if there was one impossible goal Trekkies nevertheless hoped "Picard" could deliver, it was giving fans of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" a compelling epilogue that justified longtime fans revisiting this revived universe beyond pure franchise nostalgia. In the final season, showrunner Terry Matalas does exactly this by bringing back much of the "TNG" cast not as living props for cameos but as real characters with decades of new history for Patrick Stewart's character to confront. There are few TV shows that have been able to land the ship so effectively, despite such an inauspicious start, and in such a climactic way that re-contextualizes the series' legacy overall as being well worth the voyage.

By 2023, Hollywood had spent over a decade attempting to get an adaptation of Hugh Howey's sci-fi dystopia novels off the ground. It wasn't until Apple TV got involved that one materialized. The results thus far have been as captivating as they are devastating.

Adapting Howey's "Wool" trilogy loosely enough to maintain its own potential as a rewarding mystery box thriller, "Silo" travels several centuries into a future where humanity ostensibly survives in a single underground vault-like dwelling — at least, that's what they believe, based on what little they know about their own history. Rebecca Ferguson gives one of the genre's best performances of the 2020s as an engineer intent on discovering the truth about the silos, even if it means risking her execution at the hands of authorities or death in the supposedly uninhabitable wasteland above.

Unlike most mystery box shows, "Silo" is not out to waste your time. Both seasons have so far maintained a thrilling pace, each culminating in game-changing reveals. The world-building is so rich and the characters work so solid that cliffhangers feel earned rather than manipulative. A third season is set to release in 2026, with a fourth and final installment already on the horizon.

Oh, that uncomfortable pain of enjoying science fiction, knowing that the better the story is, the less it will feel like fiction entirely. As our bumbling tech overlords continue to speak like sociopathic scions of some ludicrous post-human society, "Devs" quietly hums in the minds of those who experience it.

FX's ambitious and underseen 2020 sci-fi series comes from "Ex Machina" director Alex Garland, who wrote and directed all eight episodes himself. It's a statement piece from one of sci-fi's most celebrated modern voices, who broke through as a director in part by exploring the psychology of those who use science to play god. "Devs" takes that exploration further by taking the audience inside a tech company seeking to use quantum computing to disprove free will. Nick Offerman is brilliantly cast as an eccentric tech CEO processing grief, trauma, and psychological dysfunction through a dangerous project that could change our understanding of the world. Stylish, propulsive, and existentially haunting, "Devs" is the kind of show you'll have to fight yourself not to finish in a single day.

Whenever you start a new, high-concept sci-fi show, there's a significantly higher level of "trusting the process" that has to take place — sometimes for multiple seasons. No other 2020s series rewards that trust like "For All Mankind."

Apple's alternate history drama is one of the most surprising shows of the last decade, period. What begins as a simple "What if?" about the Soviet Union winning the lunar race has since sprawled into a decade-spanning epic that is constantly reinventing itself with each new outing. It's inarguably one of the best alternate history series ever made, if only for the simple fact that its audacious structure allows it to explore what makes the subgenre exciting more completely than anything that came before it.

More than that, it does something many sci-fi shows — even those higher on this list — forget to do. It challenges our complacency and asks us to imagine a more complicated, prosperous tomorrow that might be possible.

"Cyberpunk: Edgerunners" could have easily been a cash-grab, as a flashy anime project designed as an extended advertisement for one of the decade's most popular (and controversial) video games. Studio Trigger and CD Projekt did something way more interesting.

This Netflix miniseries is an electric, stylishly hyper-violent action thriller that is, to put it bluntly, more emotionally satisfying than it has any right to be. In a decade where shows like "Fallout" and "The Last of Us" were showing that video game adaptations could be great, "Edgerunners" showed they had the potential to be better experiences than their source material (especially if that source material is buggy and nearly unplayable at launch). It exists as a single, near-perfect season of TV that fires on all cylinders and proves the ambition of "Cyberpunk 2077" was not blind. "Edgerunners" reignited interest in a game that some fans abandoned, and it remains one of the greatest animated miniseries ever made.

Credit where credit is due — at a time when the most toxic "Star Wars" fans were (for the most part, successfully) screeching at Disney to make the franchise "less political," the studio had no reason to let Tony Gilroy make the most openly radical and ideologically charged project we've ever gotten (or likely will ever get). In "Andor," the "Rogue One" co-writer revived Diego Luna's definitively dead character for a prequel that feels more vital than its more canonically consequential predecessor.

The reason why it stands out as some of the best "Star Wars" content ever made is that it actually asks the same questions the franchise always has but offers more serious answers in the process. What kind of a person rebels against the government and the established social order? What would push them to do such a thing, and what would it realistically cost them when all is said and done? Where other "Star Wars" series use "destiny" and "the Force" to distance the audience from these questions, "Andor" doesn't flinch. Instead it posits further what the use is of revolutionary storytelling if it has no impact on our real world attitudes toward injustice.

Barring some dramatic, unlikely post-Ben Stiller-exit downturn in quality, "Severance" will almost certainly be remembered as one of the greatest television series of the 2020s overall. Dan Erickson's brain-breaking existential drama manages to touch on several distinct genres at once — tropes from workplace comedy and dystopian horror exist alongside significant elements of prestige class dramas and corporate thrillers.

This genre elasticity feels entirely appropriate for how "Severance" simultaneously engages with almost every major issue facing the world right now. At the forefront of the show's bifurcated brain are themes of social atomization and paranoia, unchecked corporate power, and, above all else, the existential dread that comes from realizing the sheer meaninglessness of one's job.

It's the rare show that wins on all fronts, being equal parts narratively engaging, ideologically challenging, and genuinely cinematic. (Few 2020s shows have had viewers paying attention to who directs a single episode like "Severance.") The series has racked up 10 Emmy wins so far and is currently preparing a third season that stands to be one of the most-anticipated TV returns of the next few years. For now, it's the show that defines the sci-fi genre in the 2020s.