Boston Globe's 50 best SF TV series

#33. Behind My Favorite Martian and ahead of The Avengers.

At least two of those are fantasy. Not that I’m complaining - I’m another who thinks the distinction between the two genres is largely artificial

TZ and LOST?

Lost and BSG.

I was pleased to see MST3K on the list, but otherwise, a big mess. Using a still from the TV movie to illustrate Doctor Who? The Jetsons ranked above Futurama? Logan’s Run? Yikes.

Well, I don’t think any of them (except maaybe Firefly if you squint hard at River’s special abilities plus some individual episodes of The Twilight Zone & The Outer Limits) really qualify as science fiction in the strictest Hal Clement sense; B5 had dubious “life energy” and psi, Star Trek’s energy beings are basically gods (never mind the dubious extrapolation of how transporter/duplicator/etc technology would work), I think Quantum Leap went into the “God wants you to do good things” direction towards the end.

ETA: I probably should have made it a 13-part list with the X-Files in there at #7

Yeah, but now I don’t have any way to tell what is science fiction, since Damon can no longer come to my house and point at my bookshelf…

Sometimes I suspect that hard science fiction purists see the “fiction” part as a barely-neccessary evil. Personally, I think SF is just another genre, and like with any other fiction, characters, plot and style should always come first.

That aside, BSG was a classic case of almost pure fantasy in a vaguely science fiction setting. On the one hand, it had gods, angels, prophecies, ancient magical artifacts, ghosts and destinies; on the other hand, it never actually explained how anything worked - it used no technobabble whatsoever - and I can’t think of any plot that was ever resolved using science. If *Star Wars *was fantasy in space, then BSG was 10 times that.

Did Space Ghost and/or Space Ghost: Coast to Coast make the list?

Um, which is it? A season? Or two?

Any review/list that can’t be arsed to put enough effort to get some basics about its subject matter isn’t worth the html it’s coded in.

About #22, Andromeda:

“Pretty good.” :rolleyes: There was definitely a lot of thought going into this list, for sure.

Not only that, but better than DS9. :rolleyes:

Putting My Favorite Martian above Third Rock (and Futurama) is pretty feeble.
Putting Science Fiction Theater in (which was seriously boring, even when I was 8 and pretty happy to see any TV) is feeble. No Kolchak, the Night Stalker? That was a very good show (the original one, of course.)
MST3K at 9 is about the only quirky but reasonable thing on this list. They would have done better throwing a bunch of slips of paper with shows written on them down the stairs.

Sure, theres gray areas, but there’s still a pretty good rule of thumb. If you want to wander around thinking “The Exorcist” is the same genre as “Star Trek,” fine for you, I’ll stick with my framework, thanks very much. And I guess you missed the point that “Alien” IS science fiction, not fantasy, in my book, so it’s quite consistent with “Black Destroyer” being SF as well.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. I got a pretty good rule of thumb here. Not gonna worry if it does not cover every last movie, story and book in existence.

You can still draw reasonable distinctions between them as genres. “Lord of the Rings” is fantasy even if it has a well thought out mythos that reads like a history, “Star Wars” is basically science fiction, even though it has the motherfricking Force gumming up the works. Maybe they’re the same to you, that’s your problem, not mine.

Is this a recent list? The description for LOST reads like the show is still on network TV.

Season 2, final episode: nuclear explosion’s EMP as signaling device.

Scot McCloud. Space Angel!

Top 50 list is published, nerds express anger on the Internet. Surprise, surprise.

Anyway, the correct top 10:

  1. Twilight Zone (whichever version)
  2. Futurama
  3. Firefly
  4. BSG 2004
  5. The Outer Limits
  6. Fringe
  7. Sealab 2021
  8. Timecop (yes, there was a tv show, and it was awesome)
  9. Star Wars: The Clone Wars (way better than any film released since the 80s)
  10. Millennium

Sliders was great for ONE season, and then the show fell apart. And I enjoyed Lost a lot more when there was still hope of getting answers. And as you can probably guess, I’m not a Trek fan.

Here’s the list for anyone too lazy to click or fed up with the scrolling:

  1. Earth - Final Conflict
  2. The Wild, Wild West
  3. 3rd Rock From the Sun
  4. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
  5. That Was Then
  6. The Greatest American Hero
  7. Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
  8. Nowhere Man
  9. Science Fiction Theatre
  10. Futurama
  11. The Thunderbirds
  12. (The new) V
  13. Batman
  14. Space 1999
  15. The Bionic Woman
  16. Battlestar Galactica’ (Original)
  17. The Avengers
  18. Lost in Space
  19. My Favorite Martian
  20. Alien Nation
  21. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
  22. The Six Million Dollar Man
  23. Adventures of Superman
  24. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
  25. Stargate Atlantis
  26. The Jetsons
  27. Wonder Woman
  28. Tales From the Crypt
  29. Andromeda
  30. Quantum Leap
  31. The Hitchhiker
  32. Dark Angel
  33. (The original) ‘V’
  34. Firefly
  35. Flash Gordon
  36. Logan’s Run
  37. Star Trek Voyager
  38. The Outer Limits
  39. Xena: Warrior Princess
  40. LOST
  41. Sliders
  42. Mystery Science Theater 3000
  43. Dr Who
  44. The Twilight Zone
  45. Stargate SG-1
  46. Babylon 5
  47. The X-Files
  48. Star Trek: The Next Generation
  49. (Original) Star Trek
  50. Battlestar Galactica (New)