Look, I need to be honest about something that’s been bugging me for years. Everyone talks about how great modern sci-fi television is, and yeah, *The Expanse* and *Stranger Things* are solid, but there’s this whole decade of absolutely bonkers sci-fi TV that seems to have vanished from collective memory. The 1980s, man. What a time to be a kid discovering that television could actually mess with your head in productive ways.
I wasn’t even supposed to be watching most of this stuff. My parents had this rule about “age-appropriate content” that they enforced about as consistently as they enforced my bedtime, which is to say not at all once they realized I’d stop bothering them if they just let me park myself in front of the TV. This was back when we had maybe twelve channels and you watched whatever was on or you didn’t watch anything.
So there I was, probably ten or eleven, flipping through channels on a Saturday afternoon when I stumbled across *Blake’s 7*. Holy shit. Sorry, but that’s really the only appropriate response to discovering that show exists. Here’s this British sci-fi series that looks like it was filmed inside a refrigerator factory, everyone’s wearing what appears to be spray-painted cardboard, and somehow it’s the most compelling thing I’d ever seen on television.
The premise alone should’ve been too complex for afternoon TV: totalitarian space empire, group of criminals and rebels stealing an alien ship, fighting a war they can’t possibly win against an enemy that controls everything. But what really got me was how seriously it took its own ideas. These weren’t cartoon villains or perfect heroes. They were complicated people making impossible choices with technology that barely worked and plans that usually went sideways.
I remember trying to explain the teleportation system to my friend Mike during recess. You step into this chamber, get broken down into molecules, transmitted somewhere else, then reassembled. But what if something goes wrong? What if you come back slightly different? What if the person who gets reassembled isn’t really you, just thinks they are? Mike told me I was overthinking a TV show. He wasn’t wrong, but he was missing the point.
That’s what made ’80s sci-fi special. Shows like *Quantum Leap* didn’t just give you time travel as a plot device – they made you think about what it would actually feel like to wake up in someone else’s body, with their memories mixing with yours, trying to figure out how to fix their life without completely screwing up the timeline. Sam Beckett wasn’t having adventures, he was having existential crises with commercial breaks.
*Knight Rider* gets dismissed as cheesy action TV, and fair enough, David Hasselhoff’s hair deserved its own screen credit. But underneath all that was this ongoing conversation about artificial intelligence that was way more sophisticated than anyone gave it credit for. KITT had personality quirks, got his feelings hurt, developed preferences about music and driving routes. The show kept asking: if something thinks it’s conscious, acts conscious, claims to have feelings… at what point do we have to treat it like it actually is conscious?
I spent way too much time as a kid thinking about whether KITT ever got lonely sitting in parking garages, waiting for Michael to finish whatever he was doing. Did he think about stuff when no one was around? Did he dream? These probably weren’t the questions the writers expected twelve-year-olds to obsess over, but there you go.
The British shows were even weirder. *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy* TV adaptation took Douglas Adams’ already insane radio series and somehow made it more surreal. Those animated Guide sequences explaining stuff like the Babel fish or the Total Perspective Vortex were like getting a PhD in creative problem-solving. Here’s an impossible concept – now we’re going to make it feel inevitable through pure commitment to internal logic.
I tried recreating some of those animations using my parents’ slide projector and colored transparencies I stole from my mom’s teaching supplies. Results were… not good. But the process taught me something important about world-building: it’s not about having unlimited resources, it’s about establishing rules for your universe and then never breaking them.
*Max Headroom* was probably the most prophetic thing on television, though none of us realized it at the time. This stuttering, glitchy digital character commenting on media culture, corporate control of information, the way technology could create entirely new forms of celebrity. In 1987, it seemed like wild science fiction. Now it just seems like someone describing Twitter.
What all these shows understood was that the most interesting sci-fi questions aren’t technical ones. They’re psychological and moral. How do you maintain your identity when you’re constantly jumping between other people’s lives? What does friendship mean when one of you is a machine? How do you fight against overwhelming power without becoming what you’re fighting against?
Modern sci-fi TV has better effects, bigger budgets, more sophisticated storytelling techniques. But sometimes I feel like we’ve lost something from those scrappy ’80s shows that had to rely on ideas instead of spectacle. They trusted their audiences to follow complex plots, engage with moral ambiguity, think seriously about technological implications. They assumed viewers were smart enough to handle stories that didn’t wrap up neatly in forty-three minutes.
I keep thinking about that first time watching *Blake’s 7*, sitting too close to our old CRT television, suddenly realizing that adults were making shows that treated me like I could handle complicated ideas about freedom, sacrifice, and what it means to keep fighting when you know you’re probably going to lose. That respect for the audience shaped how I think about storytelling across all media.
These days, I test video games for a living and spend way too much time analyzing sci-fi across different platforms. But those ’80s TV shows were my first real education in how speculative fiction could be more than just entertainment. They could be training exercises for thinking about the future, practicing for moral dilemmas we might actually face someday.
And honestly? When I see modern sci-fi that relies purely on visual spectacle without engaging with its own concepts, I miss that ’80s willingness to prioritize ideas over production values. Those shows proved you don’t need perfect special effects to transport people somewhere genuinely alien. You just need to believe completely in your vision and trust that your audience is ready to think alongside you.
That trust changed everything for me. Still does.
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