The 50 Greatest Sci-Fi TV Shows Ever

Filmed in Videcolor and Supermarionation (it says so right in the opening), this British mid-60s classic answers the question: What would a retired astronaut with his own private island, access to unlimited technology, and five upstanding sons do if given the chance? He'd help people in need, of course, and do it with the slickest supersonic jets, amphibious vehicles, and rockets imaginable.

Once you get past the fact that, yes, the cast of Thunderbirds are all 9-inch puppets, the eye-popping color and groovy vehicles are all quite cinematic. Thunderbirds lasted only two seasons but inspired numerous sequels, reboots, film versions, tie-in fiction and, indirectly at least, Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Team America: World Police.

In February, ITV announced its intention to bring the show back one more time for the 50th anniversary in 2015. Thunderbirds are Go, and, apparently, will continue to Go.

A lot of great theme songs live on this list, but we may have hit the best one right here. As the banjo and synthesizer-based synopsis reminded us, Land of the Lost tells of a routine expedition fraught with peril, as a poorly superimposed yellow raft falls down a waterfall into a parallel universe.

From the great producers Sid and Marty Kroft, Land of the Lost scared the hell out of the kids of the 1970s with rubber suits and cheap stop-motion, forever associating the consumption of Saturday morning Alpha-Bits with the horrors of tyrannosauruses and Sleestaks. A surprising number of notable science-fiction authors contributed scripts during the show's three- season run, including the legendary Theodore Sturgeon, Ringworld author Larry Niven, and Grand Tour novelist and longtime Omni and Analog: Science Fiction and Fact editor Ben Bova.

Moonbase Alpha come baaaaaaaaack!

Now we know what will happen if we put all of our nuclear waste on the far side of the moon. It will ignite somehow (through a higher power?) and catapult the moon on a tour through space.

From the British producers of Thunderbirds, Space: 1999 starred Martin Landau and Barbara Bain leading a group of eggheads trying to figure out how to get home. From the Eagle shuttles to the Moon City uniforms, Space: 1999 perpetuated the notion that the future would look white, smooth, and clean. There's no doubt Steve Jobs was inspired just a tad by this aesthetic.

Like all great sci-fi shows it had casting changes and a premature cancellation. Rumors of a movie version or a reboot continue long after the year 1999 has passed.

Sometimes little strands of pop culture become so woven into daily life that we forget where they came from. The phrase "we have the technology" originated, of course, from the opening credits of The Six Million Dollar Man, 90 seconds of perfection which, taken on its own, may rank as one of the best short films of the entire 1970s.

Lee Majors's Steve Austin (neither stone nor cold) was an astronaut who suffered a terrible crash in a test aircraft. Luckily, Richard Anderson was there to make him bigger, stronger, and faster by adding "bionics" to his legs, right arm, and eye, which meant he could fight crime with superhuman power. Those powers were never exactly explained, but by slowing down the action and putting a nyah-ah-ah-ah-ah sound effect over all the fight scenes, the producers convinced us something awesome was going on. (Fact: Between 1974 and 1982, every playground in America was home to some doofus making a slo-mo kick and mimicking the accompanying bionic noise.)

A spin-off, The Bionic Woman, and a number of TV movies kept this franchise running on that training treadmill for years.

James Cameron's only foray into television production is actually a lot like The Six Million Dollar Man, except this scientifically enhanced badass spends her time running away from the people who gave her the edge. For 43 episodes Jessica Alba's character Max leapt off buildings and evaded the questionable agents of Manticore while trusting no one.

Dark Angel served up eugenics, cyber-assassins, and ancient orders of cross-breeding telekinetics in a Matrix-like stew of paranoia and teen-friendly brooding. While the show looks a little dated now, that's in part because so many subsequent shows aped its aesthetic.

Not just a talking car, but a sassy talking car. Before anyone would ever dream of Hassling the Hoff, we got to love him as a slick speed demon behind the wheel of a Pontiac Trans Am who… I dunno… busted up drug smugglers? Nobody really remembers the plots of Knight Rider (though the episode where you met KITT's arch-nemesis KARR nearly gave my cousin and me heart attacks). We remember the cool jumps, awesome Giorgio Moroderesque music stingers, and the talking car.

KITT (which stood for Knight Industries Two Thousand) would chase down baddies, access super computers, and offer motherly advice. If the oscillating red light up front reminds you of the "eyes" of Battlestar Galactica's Cylons, it isn't a coincidence. Knight Rider was developed by the same creator, Glen A. Larson.

A number of shows on this list end their stories with "despite a letter-writing campaign, they were cancelled." Jericho is one of the few that, after the plug got pulled, came back to life because of the fans.

The show followed up on the paranoia of post-2001 America, presenting a homeland whose major cities are destroyed by nuclear attacks. Jericho, Kan., like all other surviving small towns, became its own little city-state as it tried to get information and keep its citizenry together.

It looked like we'd only get one season of this alternate universe, but vocal fans got us a second—and a third if you count comic book tie-ins (which you really shouldn't.)

Those who think TV is no place for hard sci-fi need to remember the mid-1990s' Space: Above and Beyond, which focuses on a band of fighters known as the Wildcards. In the show, Earth must defend its colonies against the marauding Chigs, aliens that have limited access to faster-than-light propulsion while Earthers make do with maps and timetables of known wormholes.

In addition to the typical flyboys (and flygirls, like Kristen Cloke's Captain Vansen), Space: Above and Beyond did what all good sci-fi is supposed to do: use far-out concepts to tackle difficult subject matter. The scientifically enhanced in-vitros of its universe are bigger, stronger, and faster, but treated like second-class citizens because of how they are created. Further down the chain are the Silicates, rebellious AIs who may have more to do with the Chigs than we first realize.

Space: Above and Beyond lasted only one season—further proof that it is terrific.

It was only a few short years ago that Joss Whedon's name on a project didn't just mean quality. It meant underdog.

Dollhouse gave us two seasons of Eliza Dushku's Echo on a slow journey to self-awareness. As an Active, she is a hired blank slate, an individual ready to do whatever nefarious deeds a wealthy person wants to do with her for an allotted period of time. Ostensibly a volunteer for five years with a large payout at the end, Actives have their memories saved at the beginning of their tenure and wiped after each episode.

Of course, no weekly deus ex machina is going to keep our heroine down, and eventually her memories begin to seep through. She engages in a fierce resistance against the corporation behind the Dollhouses, and once she achieves full awareness, the fireworks really start flying.

The time and place that you first watched this changes what you call it. In Japan it was Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. When it first came to the U.S., riding the post-Star Wars wave, it was Battle of the Planets. Kids just called it G Force, and when it was re-edited and shown again, that name stuck.

Whatever the name, this was a candy-colored anime with awesome ships, cool helmets, a villain that looked like crayons that melted into the shape of a bird, and, in the American version, a wise-crackin' underwater R2-D2 called 7-Zark-7.

Science fiction was only its initial hook, but this recent BBC series is so much damn fun that we're keeping it on the list anyway.

A Manchester police detective gets hit by a car in the mid-2000s and wakes up in 1973. While we're never quite sure if he's in a coma or if he actually travelled through time, the show quickly segues into a terrific police procedural with perhaps the greatest classic rock soundtrack ever.

The show worked best as a straight-up now-versus-then culture clash, but it snuck in some flashes from today that would creep into our lead character's consciousness, and always when it seemed like we'd given up on him ever getting home. An American remake didn't work quite as well.

Now it's time to get into some hard-core nerd stuff. Spanning two universes and countless worlds, Lexxfeatured the strangest crew ever assembled: on board the Lexx are a low-level security-guard-turned-captain, a mystical undead assassin, a half-cluster lizard love slave, a sentient plant that projects humanoid images, and a robotic head. Don't forget the ship itself, which is the size of a city and can destroy planets. Together, they must evade the nefarious Divine Shadow as well as the Insect Civilization.

Lexx is the kind of show in which the main characters can go into cryogenic sleep for a duration of 2000 years and still pretty much pick up where they left off. The struggle between the Insects and mankind rages across the light and dark zones, as well as a somewhat ridiculous planet called Earth. The show's four seasons are big, beautiful, ridiculous, and, unless I'm forgetting something, the finest-ever collaboration between Canadian and German television producers.

While nothing could ever top Orson Welles at the Mercury Theatre in 1938, this TV version picks up where the other leaves off. The invaders from Mars (switched to a distant planet Mor-Tax in this version) didn't just die out, but went into stasis. The government hid them in secret facilities and a widespread disinformation campaign eventually led to people forgetting that the attacks actually happened. That is, until a pesky leftist domestic-terrorist group accidentally irradiates the aliens and awakens them. The aliens then possess the bodies of the terrorists and begin a plan to prepare the Earth for a full invasion and occupation by a massive fleet coming from Mor-Tax.

An elite counterforce of mismatched souls is the only thing that can stop the rubbery E.T. from taking over. Our heroes include a mystical astrophysicist with a touch of the action hero whose parents were killed in the first invasion, a by-the-book biologist, a paraplegic computer genius, and a conservative Native American military man. Yeah, it sounds like a hodgepodge of 80s TV show clichés, but the show gelled into a fun interstellar A-Team for two seasons.

If you don't think this is sci-fi, tell it to the pocket-universe-dwelling dwarf who speaks in a backward-audiotape language. David Lynch's 1990 trip into television was a surreal send-up of every genre imaginable, including detective stories, soap operas, and supernatural horror, with trace elements of sci-fi tropes and whiffs of spooky Eisenhower UFO signifiers. One of the many loose ends from season two were radio waves beamed in from outer space that spelled Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan)'s last name.

Like most of David Lynch's work it is more about the experience than the actual story (not a pejorative) so it's not like any of it ever really meant anything. Finding Laura Palmer's killer might be the biggest anticlimax in television history, but as far as strange mood and far-out concepts, Twin Peaks remains in a class by itself.

The post-Star Wars years saw a boom for existing science-fiction franchises. The era launched Star Trek into the movies and brought this well-loved character back from comic strips, film serials, and early television.

Glen Larson, who was also working on Battlestar Galactica at the time, reimagined Buck Rogers as a NASA Astronaut in the then-future year of 1987. While on a mission into deep space, an accident sends him into cryogenic stasis and returns him to Earth five centuries later. The planet he finds has had to rebuild from World War III, and while sentient computers and buddy robots catch him by surprise, the biggest surprise this swaggering flyboy faces is the tough-as-nails Colonel Wilma Deering, played by Erin Gray.

Despite some really cool tech on display, this was a show aimed more at kids, but recurring threats from invaders and appearances from a hawk-humanoid species kept things energetic.

This genre mash-up anime from the mind of Shinichro Watanabe came out of Japan in the late 1990s. Its 26 episodes continue to loop on late-night cable to this day.

In 2022 (not that far away anymore), early usage of hyperspace gateways destroys the moon and makes Earth almost uninhabitable. Mars becomes the new center of the solar system, with colonies on other planets and satellites. With a dispersed government, an Old West style of private law enforcement springs up, and that's where the ragtag team of bounty hunters (called cowboys) aboard the ship Bebop comes into play.

Mixing cybernetic martial arts masters, teen hackers, a sexy pilot with a debilitating gambling addiction, and a hyper-intelligent dog (yes, you read that correctly) Cowboy Bebop snaps its fingers to its own beat, mixing up the conventions of Westerns, samurai films, film noir and tech-heavy hard sci-fi. Recommended viewing for 3 am.

Fan devotion to the reimagined Battlestar Galactica meant there was no way producers were going to leave the franchise alone once the survivors of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol finally made it to Earth. Unfortunately for Caprica, Battlestar was an impossible act to follow and the show didn't make it past one season. This doesn't mean the show was without merit.

Going back a generation before the first Cylon War,Caprica tells the planet-bound tale of a wealthy, opulant culture at the precipice of change, featuring plenty of nifty tech, cool cityscapes, and further insight into the mighty Adama family tree. Hard-core BSG fans got to dive into inter-colonial politics and heavy backstory, while less obsessive fans were merely granted an opportunity to check out Alessandro Torresani as the prototype for future skinjobs.

Just when you thought you'd seen every mismatched cop pair, there's this: My partner is a space alien!

While it lacked the ineffable quality of the James Caan/Mandy Patinkin bromance of the 1988 feature film, the series that came the following year retained the essence of Alien Nation's social tapestry. The "Newcomers" (refugee Tenctonese on a crashed slave ship) offered us a chance to address prejudice in an unusual manner, one that involved pregnant men with lizard-skin scalps.

Despite a successful run at the new Fox Network, Alien Nation lasted only one season.

People spend a lot of time giving Voyager grief, and while it did have a rocky launch, the series became some quality adventure spacefaring once things got in a groove (goodbye Kes, hello Seven of Nine).

Voyager took a handful of Federation crew members and some Maquis rebels and flicked 'em way, way out in the Delta Quadrant, where coming home would take seven decades at top speed. Luckily Captain Janeway, one of the greatest leaders in all television, isn't going out like that. She takes risk after risk, battling the Borg, Species 8472, and alternate realities during Voyager's journey.

Yes, there are some clunkers in here. But there are also a lot of really innovative stories and great characters. Let Neelix fix you up a plate and come along for the ride.

Some TV shows don't give us any goofy voices to mimic. Lost in Space gave us two. The booming, stentorian Robot ("Danger, Will Robinson!") and the cowardly, histrionic Dr. Smith ("Oh, the pain!") are fully ingrained in pop culture, and rightly so.

Lost in Space is a daffy, energetic romp through absurd scenarios and cheesy sci-fi tropes. It's an interplanetary Swiss Family Robinson that lasted 83 episodes, long enough to watch Penny Robinson transform from moppet to teen heartthrob.

The trials and tribulations of the eternally ill-fated Jupiter 2 got goofier as the show progressed. As far as I'm concerned, though, the show didn't hit its stride until the Robot was asking rock-jawed Major Don West things like "What am I, chopped liver?"