Fans of sci-fi worldwide have found themselves binging on Amazon Prime’s hit seriesThe Peripheral.Made by the same people who created Westworld (Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan), the adaptation of the 2014 book by William Gibson is about the near future and the things that technology can do to alter the human minds and lives.
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But thankfully,The Peripheralis not the only show out there that explores alternate realities, technology, and the human mind. A lot of great sci-fi shows, both new and old, are waiting for eager fans to get obsessed with them too.
8Sense 8
Aired in June 2015 and went on until June 2018, this seriescreated by Lana and Lilly Wachowskiand J. Michael Straczynski for Netflix, has gained thousands of hardcore fans who fell in love with at least one of the eight main characters from the first episode.
Sense 8is about a group of people who have psychic connections with each other and can share their skills and knowledge as well. They come together to try and fight the Biologic Preservation Organization (BPO) which considers them dangerous and wants them gone.
86% on Rotten Tomatoes -8.2/10 on IMDb
7Altered Carbon
Aired in February 2018 and went on until February 2020, this series created by Laeta Kalogridis for Netflix, is based on a novel by the author Richard K. Morgan.Altered Carbontakes place in the year 2384, and the new normal is that someone can take a person’s consciousness and memories and record it in a device that is implanted in the back of the neck. Yes, it does haveCyberpunk 2077vibes.
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The rich in that universecan purchase “sleeves”, which are either human or synthetic bodies, transfer your consciousness and go on living forever. The show focuses on Takeshi Kovacs, a prisoner who is the only survivor of the “Envoys”, a group with high skills who decided that this new world order was not for them and organized an uprising that failed. Kovacs is brought back to solve a murder.
75% on Rotten Tomatoes -7.9/10 on IMDb
6Westworld
Aired in October 2016 and went on until August 2022, this series created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy for HBO, based on a 1973 film with the same name, became a fan favorite, almost from the get-go.Westworldis a theme park for adults that has android “Hosts”. It is resembling the American Wild West and lets visitors who pay a lot of money go there and do whatever they want (quite literally), without having any fear of legal repercussions or being harmed by the players. Things start to go south when the “Hosts” become sentient, after an update.
The show features some of the saddest deathson TV series and has made fans want to break their screens more than one time, but kept going back for more until the news broke out that unfortunately, the series had their last season.
80% on Rotten Tomatoes -8.5/10 on IMDb
5The Rain
Aired in May 2018 and went on until August 2020, this Danish series created by Jannik Tai Mosholt, Esben Toft Jacobsen, and Christian Potalivo for Netflix,captured the viewers’ hearts from the first trailerand left them wanting more.
The Rainintroduces the viewers to a post-apocalyptic world where a mysterious rain causes a virus that kills almost everyone in Scandinavia – “almost” being the key word. A brother and a sister manage to find shelter in a bunker and go out of it after six years, in search of their father, and a cure. They meet with other survivors along the way, and all of them together look for their new Eden.
82% on Rotten Tomatoes -6.3/10 on IMDb
4Homecoming
Aired in November 2018 and went on until May 2020, this series created by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg for Amazon Prime was a surprise to Julia Roberts fans, who aren’t used to see her on the small screen.
Homecomingmight have fanswondering if it’s a love story or not, but it didn’t have them wondering if it’s a good series or not, and the reviews clearly showed that.
The series follows Heidi Bergman who is a social worker at Homecoming, helping soldiers make the transition into civilian life smoothly. After four years, she works as a waitress and doesn’t remember what she was doing exactly while she was in Homecoming.
98% on Rotten Tomatoes -7.4/10 on IMDb
3Black Mirror
Aired in December 2011 and still going on, this anthology series created by Charlie Brooker has already become the most classic answer to the question: “Know of any good sci-fi series?”.
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Black Mirroris composed of individual episodes, and almost all of them fall under the near-future dystopia genre,except for one episodethat made fans jump for joy with its positive outcome. Some of the most usual tropes in the series include episodes that circle around the topics of technology, and more specifically of the breach of privacy and VR or AI.
84% on Rotten Tomatoes -8.8/10 on IMDb
2Travelers
Aired in October 2016 and went on until December 2018, this series created by Brad Wright for Netflix is about the well-explored theme of the end of the world. What makes this one special, is thewell-established charactersand the twist of the also overused trope of traveling back in time.
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Travelerstakes place in a future that is completely destroyed by humans and who else is going to save it, but humans from the future are sent to the past. Technically though, it is not the whole human, but just their consciousness that is transferred into humans that are about to die, thus preventing any time-travel anomalies.
100% on Rotten Tomatoes -8/10 on IMDb
1Better Than Us
Aired in November 2018 and went on until August 2019, this Russian series created by Andrey Junkovsky for Netflix (originally for the Russian state channel C1R), is about the near future, as it takes place in 2029, and explores AI and Asimov’s Three Laws Of Robotics, as well as the problem with China’s one-child policy.
The themes might look unconnected, but Better Than Us has Arisa, an android, who is one of the most memorable characters in the show, that manages to connect all of them and more. She is delivered from China to a family in Russia who is on the verge of breaking up and completely changes their lives, and her own.
100% on Rotten Tomatoes -7.4/10 on IMDb
