The 50 Greatest Sci-Fi TV Shows (kinda-sorta more-or-less) (Redux)

So this is based on an article from a Popular Mechanics (!) article on "The 50 Greatest Sci-Fi Shows Ever" [http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/g156/the-50-greatest-sci-fi-tv-shows]. See here [https://hill-kleerup.org/blog/2015/10/17/the-50-greatest-sci-fi-tv-shows-kinda-sorta-more-or-less.html] for caveats and comments on that list.

I've decided to do my own force ranking (thanks +Stan Pedzick), working within the same list (to do otherwise would be to court madness). And, because I can (and, apparently, have way too much free time on my hands), I'll annotate it. Because the Internet.

First, the shows I never watched sufficiently to judge — they either never grabbed me, or were on at an odd time, or I missed the tide in watching them. (Please don't ply me with DVDs; my backlog of stuff to watch already reaches past the Singularity.) They are ordered as per the original rankings:

Dark Angel (46)
Jericho (44)
Life on Mars [2006] (40)
Lexx (39)
Twin Peaks (37)
Caprica (34)
Red Dwarf (27)
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (26)
Star Blazers / Space Battleship Yamato (20)
Blake's 7 (15)
Lost (12)

The rest are ranked by some idiosyncratic mish-mosh of how I like them plus what quality I think they are. I;ve indicated past the title the original ranking; the lower-ranked ones are helped a lot by dropping out the above 11 choices. Since I broke them up into three groups for initial sorting, I've kept them that way.

(Force ranking of this sort is one of my least favorite activities, since on any given day or for any given episode, I could easy see any of these rankings +/5.)

BOTTOM OF THE CLASS

39. Knight Rider (45) – Silly kids fare, with minimal FX and zero SFishness aside from snarky car AI. Though I still love Marc Daniels.

38. Battle of the Planets (41) — Noteworthy mainly for still inspiring cosplay.

37. The Six Million Dollar Man (47) — I would still watch this at the drop of a hat, but its SF elements were awful.

36. Logan's Run (28) — Deep 70s SF, variable "worlds," pretty bad writing.

35. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (36) — Space fantasy, though I still dearly love the stargate effect.

34. Lost in Space (31) — The first show to really get space opera in everyone's living room, dragged down by camp silliness that only increased each season.

33. _Thunderbirds (50) — Crunchy SF with marionettes and kiddy melodrama. I still marvel at this show.

32. Land of the Lost (49) — Hurt by being a Saturday morning "cartoon" period show, it's still (behind the awful stop-action) full of some very cool SF concepts.

31. V [1983] (13) — Brought big screen TV SF to life as an "event" — but with writing straight out of Dallas or Dynasty.

30. War of the Worlds (38) — A personal favorite of mine, if for no other reason than bringing back those lovely swan-necked Martian War Machines from the Pal movie.

29. Mystery Science Theater 3000 (17) — Upchecked for showing so many wonderfully cheesy SF movies, but downchecked for really just being a comedy riff.

STARTING TO GET SERIOUS

28. Sliders (18) — Imaginative, but the concept wore thin after a while.

27. Quantum Leap (21) — Better than its first cousin Sliders if only because the consequences were of such import and the characterizations were such a challenge. Arguably as much fantasy as thinly veiled SF.

26. The X-Files (02) — It was … okay. Influential. Dearly loved by zillions. But I never really got hooked by it.

25. Stargate SG-1 (14) — I was never a big fan of any of the Stargate iterations. Not sure why. But impressive in overall accomplishment.

24. Space: 1999 (48) — I remember this as the first satisfying SF show after the original Star Trek went off the air. The FX/model work was exquisite. It was hampered S.1 by opaque British plots, and S.2 by dumbing down too far from S.1.

23. Battlestar Galactica [1978] (30) — Incredibly hokey, but spectacular beyond its budget. Some plots were deeper than others.

22. Dollhouse (42) — Possibly ranked higher than it should be here, because while I never quite got hooked, I could tell it had a lot of strings below the surface that I wasn't giving it a chance to show.

21. Space: Above and Beyond (43) — As close as we'll ever get to a Starship Troopers TV show. I liked it.

20. Star Trek: Voyager (32) — Decent Star Trek fare, hampered by an unwillingness to truly embrace the inevitable change and problems of isolation, division, and deferred maintenance.

19. Max Headroom (25) — I am afraid of rewatching this for fear that the zany fun and interesting concepts I remember will turn out to be threadbare.

18. Alien Nation (33) — Like much good TV SF, this tackled (well) contemporary issues (mostly about racism) that would have been too controversial outside of the SF realm.

17. Torchwood (23) — Sometimes too tempted to go over the top, and with an ensemble that the writers never quite knew what to do with, this is still good, gritty, high concept SF (overlapping to fantasy).

16. Fringe (09) — I never became a fan, despite being a serious watcher for at least the first season.

TOP DOGS

15. The Prisoner (07) — While suffering from British too-cleverness (and star/producer indulgence) at times, it's still gripping in making the viewer want to figure out what the hell is going on.

14. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (24) — A great example of successfully (for my taste) grabbing a movie concept and running with it for TV. Well done.

13. Cowboy Bebop (35) — Too cool for school, between the music, the action, the dialog.

12. Futurama (29) — Ranked this high if only because of their willingness to use very single SF trope in the book — multiple times — and do it with humor.

11. Neon Genesis Evangelion (08) — High concept that sometimes gets too high for comprehensibility, it's still a gorgeous (and frightening) Giant Robots vs Aliens anime with eleventy-dozen layers beneath it, from religion to child abuse to alcoholism to identity.

10. The Twilight Zone (05) — Endlessly rewatchable and entertaining, its SF elements get washed away by fantasy too many times, and too many of the Serling and Matheson plots were simply setups for (usually great) plot zingers.

09. Doctor Who (01) — The face of SF for many, and laudable for its longevity and the loyalty of its fans — but, again, too much of it is more properly fantasy, and the uneven writing over the decades does not for great SF make. I watch every episode, but I'm trying to be realistic here.

08. Star Trek: The Next Generation (03) — A remarkable rebirth of a franchise, with a long run, a decent number of great eps, and a large number of not-so-great ones.

07. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (16) — For my money, a better show than its TNG big brother, especially early days when they were diving into the characters and the religion / politics of Bajor, less into the Dominion War in its later episodes. That said, its serial elements put it a tick above TNG.

06. Star Trek: The Original Series (06) — A remarkably seminal show in its influence on TV SF for the decades since. Riddled with weaknesses that its cultural gestalt has overcome.

05. The Outer Limits (10) — With very few exceptions, this classic anthology show was hard SF, written by some great talent (and acted by some remarkable talent), hampered at time by budget limits, but hitting major literary themes and SF tropes in a remarkable fashion. This show (in rerun) solidified my love of SF.

04. _Battlestar Galactica [2004] (04) — A gripping tale of survival and moral compromise, in the face of aliens who look just like us … those were the high points of BSG. The further they drifted away from that (e.g., the further they explored Cylon society), the weaker the show got. And, of course, I truly despise the last couple of episodes concluding the series. Still, with those exceptions, it's a remarkable work.

03. Farscape (22) — One never quite knew where this show was going (that seems to have included the writers), but that didn't hamper the wonders, fun, drama, and imagination of this ensemble explorers-on-the-run show. I just enjoyed it so much, it needed to rank this high.

02. Babylon 5 (19) — Joe Straczynski didn't invent serial TV, but he made it legit, and epic (despite near-disasters by networks and actors alike). Rocky acting early on, and mangled plot points toward the end, it still holds a major place in my heart as a five-year long coherent SF novel, delving into everything from high concept battles between not-really-good vs not-truly-evil, to human weakness and prejudice, including some remarkable character evolutions.

01. Firefly (11) — Yeah, I'm one of those people. Deep-threaded plots and hidden backstories, a delightful mixing of the SF and Western tropes, a splendid set of actors, a roster of episodes where the great far outweigh the weak, and … well, the biggest criticism I can make of the show is that it was cut off way too soon to determine if it would all pay off. I'll assume it did, and just wait for the opportunity to buy the 5-season set when we finally get those portals to parallel worlds working …

And some arguably as-good shows that didn't make the list:

Wild Wild West (of course it's science fiction)
Andromeda
Fantastic Journey
Otherworld
Greatest American Hero
UFO
The Flash [1990]
Misfits of Science
The Invaders
Robotech

I do give, again, kudos to the writers of the original list for leaving off anything within the past five years. Not only would that add a large number of prospects, but it's really hard to judge such things so close to them.

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