Top Ten Science Fiction TV shows

I recently caught up with the documentary about Firefly fandom called Done the Impossible; in it author Orson Scott Card says that he considers Firefly "the best science fiction TV show ever."  I don't quite agree with that opinion, but it got me thinking about what I would call the best SF TV show ever.

There are a number of problems approaching this task.  First, many brilliant SF shows are short lived (Max Headroom, The Prisoner) while many mediocre ones lasted for years (the old Doctor Who ran for decades with hackneyed plots and grade Z special effects).  Also, I have not seen everything; for instance, until I started this project I had not seen a single episode of Stargate SG-1 even though it was on for ten years (I watched the first season on DVD; this lasted ten seasons with a spinoff?).  

There are also definition problems with what is "science fiction."  I saw several "best SF" lists that included Xena and Buffy, both of which are clearly fantasy.  There are also shows like Quantum Leap and The Wild Wild West which definitely have SF elements but don't focus on them in most episodes.  The Twilight Zone is high on many lists, but it was more fantasy than science fiction.

With those caveats, here is my list of the ten best science fiction TV series:

1) The X-Files

2) Max Headroom

3) The Prisoner

4) Doctor Who (modern)

5) Star Trek (original)

6) Lost

7) Star Trek Deep Space 9

8) Star Trek the Next Generation

9) Battlestar Gallactica

10) Eureka

What’s surprising is not that numero uno is The X-Files, but that it is number one by such a wide margin.  It has the longevity of Stargate SG-I (which produced one more episode than X-Files) plus the brilliance of a short-lived series like Max Headroom.  At its peak it produced episodes like Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, which won Emmies for Best writing in a Drama and Best Guest Actor in a Drama for Peter Boyle, and was named by TV Guide as the second-best episode of television EVER.  Sci-fi series never get that sort of mainstream accolades.  Add in a Best Actress win for Gillian Anderson and a few other brilliant episodes (Triangle, set on the Queen Mary and filmed in wide-screen and with minimal editing, is possibly the best directed episode of TV ever produced) and you get the class of the science fiction genre.  Yeah, it stayed on four years past its expiration date, but few successful shows know when to quit.

I’m torn by Lost; technically it is science fiction but it almost transcends the genre.  However at the end of the day it was a series about smoke monsters, scientific experiments gone wrong, and time travel that won an Emmy for Best Drama (admittedly before things got really weird).

Putting DS9 and the original Trek will rile those who are fans of Next Generation, but I’ll stand by my picks.  The original Trek had a horrible last season, but the first two seasons featured several episodes written by honest-to-goodness SF writers (Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Jerome Bixby, Norman Spinrad) and created the franchise that refused to die.  BBC America repeats a lot of Next Gen episodes, and you know what? I almost never feel like watching them.  The show had a weak first two seasons, a lousy last two, and the middle three only occasionally (Best of Both Worlds) fired on all cylinders.  Meanwhile, DS9 produced good Sisko episodes, good Quark episodes, good Odo episodes, good Worf episodes, good Kira episodes, good O’Brien episodes, good Bashir episodes and good Dax episodes; heck, the episode voted the best episode of Trek ever (The Visitor) was a Jake episode!  Voyager and Enterprise aren’t worth discussing.

Max Headroom is the quintessential “too good for television” series, a brilliant, imaginative series that portrayed TV as stupid and derivative.  It was technically on for two seasons but they produced only fourteen episodes; in its final broadcast episode, the announcer at the fictional “Network XXIII” reported that Max Headroom had been renewed in response to rioting by his fans.  The show famously claimed to be set "20 minutes into the future: but as years go by its setting of a permanent underclass exploited by ruthless corporations ad banal TV networks seems nearer and nearer to reality.

BSG is on the list as a courtesy to its fans; I gave up on Battlestar Gallactica midway through season 2.  I admired its bravado but it just had major problems with the story arc (it turned out that over half the bridge crew were Cylon infiltrators for Pete's sake).  

The "modern" Doctor Who is the Russell T. Davies reboot starting in 2005, which unlike "classic" Doctor Who had consistently high quality writing and acting and great special effects.  The quality is starting to slip and it may drop unless the next Doctor helps pick it up again.

I recently re-watched the entire Babylon 5 series and I have to agree with what the author of a Babylon 5 episode guide wrote--it was a great experiment that failed.  It did not change the course of science fiction, or change the nature of TV production, nor did it create a new franchise to rival Star Trek.  I also left Farscape off the list for reasons explained in a previous post; while innovative, the show mostly made no sense and the darn muppets had zero credibility.

I am disappointed that Eureka is low on most lists or entirely left off; it was very high quality for its first three seasons and still enjoyable for its last two (when they started experimenting with half-season story "arcs").   It deserves a higher reputation, and I wonder if the fact that it was a comedy lessens it in the eyes of devoted SFers.