You know what really gets me fired up? Finding a science fiction show that actually respects its audience’s intelligence, only to watch it get canceled after three seasons because it didn’t have explosions every five minutes. After forty years in aerospace engineering and probably twice as many years reading sci-fi, I’ve developed what my wife calls an “unhealthy obsession” with shows that get the science right—or at least acknowledge when they’re bending the rules.
Look, I’m not asking for perfect physics in my entertainment. Hell, I spent decades designing satellite propulsion systems while watching Star Trek pretend sound travels through space. But there’s something special about shows that actually try to ground their speculation in reality, and it drives me absolutely nuts when those shows get overlooked while mindless space opera garbage gets renewed for seven seasons.
So here are five shows that deserved better—not just from networks, but from audiences who apparently prefer their sci-fi dumbed down and flashy. These aren’t perfect, mind you, but they’re what science fiction should be: smart stories that use real science as a launching pad for meaningful speculation about who we are and where we’re going.
Dark Matter ran on Syfy from 2015 to 2017, which right there tells you everything about how networks treat decent science fiction. Three seasons and out—it’s like they have a goddamn timer set. The premise sounds simple enough: six people wake up on a spaceship with their memories wiped, no idea who they are or how they got there. But what starts as a straightforward mystery becomes something much more interesting—a meditation on identity, redemption, and whether your past defines who you have to be.
I’ll admit, when I first heard the setup, I rolled my eyes. Another amnesia plot? But the writers (led by Joseph Mallozzi, who cut his teeth on Stargate) understood that the memory loss was just the hook. The real story was watching these characters—known only as One through Six—discover not just who they were, but who they wanted to become. And the science, while not hard sci-fi by any stretch, at least felt consistent. The ship’s systems made sense, the faster-than-light travel had rules, and when characters got hurt in zero-g, they stayed hurt.
What really sold me was the crew dynamics, especially in those first two seasons. These weren’t the usual TV archetypes—the reluctant hero, the wise-cracking pilot, the mysterious woman with a dark past. Well, okay, they were those things, but the amnesia twist let the writers subvert expectations. The guy who seems like natural leadership material? Turns out he was a corporate assassin. The deadly android? She develops something approaching humanity faster than most of the actual humans.
The show got canceled on a cliffhanger, naturally. Mallozzi’s been trying to get a wrap-up movie made for years now, and honestly, Dark Matter deserves it more than half the franchises getting rebooted every other Tuesday.
Then there’s Counterpart, which aired on Starz from 2017 to 2019 and might be the most criminally underwatched show in recent memory. This one’s got a premise that sounds like it came straight out of a Philip K. Dick fever dream: during the Cold War, scientists accidentally created a parallel dimension, and now two versions of Earth exist side by side, connected by a heavily guarded crossing point in Berlin.
The genius here isn’t the parallel worlds concept—that’s been done to death. It’s how the show uses that concept to explore identity and choice. J.K. Simmons plays Howard Silk, a low-level bureaucrat who discovers not only that his mundane office job is actually cover for interdimensional espionage, but that there’s another version of himself on the other side who’s everything he isn’t—confident, capable, dangerous.
From a science standpoint, the show’s pretty light on explanations, which honestly works in its favor. They don’t try to justify the parallel worlds with a lot of technobabble—it happened, deal with it. What matters is how thirty years of divergent history has created two worlds that are similar enough to be recognizable but different enough to be genuinely unsettling. The pacing is deliberate, almost literary, which probably explains why it never found a mass audience. People want their sci-fi fast and loud these days.
I binged both seasons over a weekend and spent the next week pestering my old colleagues about alternate timeline theory. Not that any of us had answers—we were rocket engineers, not quantum physicists—but it’s the kind of show that makes you think, which is more than I can say for most of what passes for science fiction these days.
The Expanse is probably the best hard sci-fi show ever made for television, and somehow it still doesn’t get the respect it deserves outside genre circles. Based on the novels by James S.A. Corey (actually the pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), it’s set a couple hundred years in the future when humanity has colonized the solar system but hasn’t figured out faster-than-light travel. Which means space is still dangerous, still vast, still unforgiving.
This is what I’ve been waiting my whole career to see on screen—a show that understands that space travel is hard. Ships flip and burn to accelerate, then flip and burn to decelerate. Characters inject themselves with drugs to survive high-g maneuvers. There’s no artificial gravity except through rotation or thrust. When someone gets spaced, they don’t explode—they just die horribly and realistically. It’s everything I tried to explain to people about actual spaceflight, finally presented as compelling drama instead of boring technical documentation.
But the real achievement isn’t the physics—it’s how the show uses that realistic foundation to examine very contemporary issues. Earth, Mars, and the Belt are locked in a three-way cold war that’s really about resources and power. The Belters, who mine the asteroids and outer planets, are basically an exploited underclass whose physiology has adapted to low gravity. It’s colonialism in space, complete with exploitation, resistance, and the kind of political complexity that makes your head spin.
The characters are what keep you invested, though. Jim Holden’s got that classic American hero complex that gets everyone in trouble. Naomi Nagata is probably the best engineer character I’ve seen on television—she actually thinks like an engineer, problem-solving her way through crises instead of just spouting technobabble. And don’t get me started on Amos Burton, who might be a sociopath but is absolutely loyal to his chosen family. The cast works because they feel like real people dealing with extraordinary circumstances, not action figures spouting one-liners.
The show got canceled by Syfy after three seasons (sensing a pattern here?), but Amazon picked it up for three more, giving it a proper ending. Still feels like it deserved a bigger cultural impact than it got.
Travelers is a Netflix series that ran from 2016 to 2018 and might have the cleverest take on time travel I’ve seen since I read Benford’s “Timescape” back in the eighties. Instead of building machines or opening portals, future humans send their consciousness back in time to inhabit the bodies of people who are about to die. The travelers have to complete missions to prevent the apocalyptic future they came from, all while maintaining the lives of their host bodies.
It’s a brilliant premise because it sidesteps most of the usual time travel paradoxes while creating new problems. How do you maintain a marriage when you’re not actually the person your spouse married? What happens when the future keeps changing based on your actions, so your mission parameters become obsolete? The show starred Eric McCormack, who you probably remember from Will & Grace, but this couldn’t be more different—it’s thoughtful, often dark, and surprisingly emotional.
The science is handwavy, sure. Consciousness transfer is pure fantasy at this point, and don’t get me started on their “quantum frame” communication system. But the show acknowledges its own impossibilities and focuses on the human cost of its premise. These aren’t superhero time travelers fixing history—they’re desperate people from a dying future trying to save a world that doesn’t know it needs saving.
What impressed me most was how the show dealt with the identity questions. If someone else’s consciousness is running your body, are you still you? The travelers struggle with this constantly, trying to honor the lives they’ve inherited while completing missions that often put those lives at risk. It’s heady stuff for what could have been just another time travel adventure series.
Finally, there’s The OA, which aired on Netflix from 2016 to 2019 and is… well, it’s hard to explain The OA without sounding completely insane. A woman who’s been missing for seven years suddenly reappears, claiming she’s been held captive in a dimension where she learned to travel between realities through interpretive dance. I know how that sounds. Trust me, I know.
The thing about The OA is that it’s not really science fiction in any traditional sense. It’s more like magical realism with scientific pretensions, which should have driven me up the wall. But somehow it works, at least if you’re willing to meet it on its own terms. The show is deliberately mysterious, almost aggressively weird, and it asks you to believe things that make faster-than-light travel look conservative.
I started watching it with my wife—one of the few shows we both found intriguing—though I’ll admit I never finished it. What I saw was ambitious in a way that reminded me why I fell in love with science fiction in the first place. Not because it explained everything, but because it suggested possibilities beyond our current understanding. The OA doesn’t care about scientific plausibility; it cares about the human need to believe there’s something more.
The show got canceled after two seasons, leaving its devoted fanbase (and they were devoted) with a massive cliffhanger. It’s the kind of cancellation that makes you wonder what streaming services are actually looking for, because The OA was unlike anything else on television.
Here’s what frustrates me about all these shows getting canceled: they represent exactly what science fiction should be doing. Not just entertaining us with laser battles and explosions, but using speculative concepts to examine what it means to be human. Dark Matter asks whether we can escape our past. Counterpart explores how different choices create different people. The Expanse shows us that expanding into space won’t solve our fundamental problems. Travelers questions the cost of sacrifice for the greater good. The OA suggests that reality might be more malleable than we think.
These aren’t just good sci-fi shows—they’re the kind of thoughtful, scientifically literate television that proves the genre can be more than mindless entertainment. And they all got killed by networks and algorithms that apparently prefer their science fiction loud, dumb, and familiar.
I keep hoping one of them will get revived, the way The Expanse was rescued by Amazon. Dark Matter’s creators are still pushing for a conclusion movie. The OA’s fans mounted one of the most creative campaign efforts I’ve ever seen, complete with billboards and flash mob interpretive dances (which, okay, sounds ridiculous but was actually kind of touching). Even canceled shows can find new audiences through streaming and word of mouth.
But mostly, these shows remind me why I fell in love with science fiction in the first place, watching the Apollo launches as a kid and dreaming about the futures we might build. The best sci-fi doesn’t just predict technology—it helps us think about the choices we’ll face as that technology develops. These five shows did that beautifully, and they deserved better from all of us.
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