It’s very common to mention that broadcasts of The Ed Sullivan Show or I Love Lucy or Fantasy Island have reached such-and-such star.
What science fiction is out there where humans are following the broadcasts from Arcturus or somewhere?
In Futurama, aliens invade Earth after the TV show Single Family Lawyer is cancelled.
Mr. Goober’s Show (excerpt here Dream Factories and Radio Pictures by Howard Waldrop - ElectricStory.com, Inc. )
In Star Trek TOS episode “Bread and circuses” the crew of the Enterprise watch TV broadcasts from an alien planet that is like modern earth where the roman empire never fell.
Silly. Earth is the only planet that counts. It’s like imagining Americans would watch TV from other countries. We are the center of the universe!
The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley had humans listening in on alien broadcasts.
The humans in the Tripod trilogy were enslaved by alien broadcasts on earth TV. That was not a matter of picking up original broadcasts from the aliens’ homeworld, though, but rather a deliberate attack from close range.
Wasn’t there an episode of ***Outer Limits *** where a scientist (Robert Culp, I think) made contact with an extraterrestrial through a television set?
In Borderlands 2, a side-quest involves tracking down the whereabouts of a podcast superstar who has billions of followers on many worlds.
He’s dead. Welcome to Pandora.
Sci-fi novel with humans watching alien television, though not transmitted across deep space: Manhattan Transfer, by John Stith. It’s mentioned that the aliens’ video standards are not the same as ours so techs have to devise converters.
A Serenity reference, I’m guessing.
On Rick and Morty, Morty has a cable box that enables you to watch an infinite number of channels from the multiverse.
Possible, but the Cortex wasn’t interstellar, so I figured it wouldn’t count.
We never figured out if they were on planets or moons in our solar system.
“She needs air to fire.”
dammit.
Serenity took place within one solar system, with more habitable planets & moons than ours does. There was a (extra-)solar map in River’s flashback at the beginning.
Thanks, Ethilrist.
There was an episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation where Riker was captured while on under cover in a pre-warp civilization the Federation was monitoring. IIRC the planet’s chancellor was horrified at the prospect of the Federation judging them by their popular entertainment broadcasts.
GALAXY QUEST! of course. The aliens watched old episodes of the Star Trek-like series and recreated the space ship and sought the original cast at an SF convention.
For humans listening to aliens, Mary Doria Russell’s novel The Sparrow concerns song-like transmissions received on a near-future earth from a planet orbiting a binary star. A team of Jesuits travels to the planet at the behest of the Vatican to make contact and disaster ensues. Good novel.
Isn’t this the exact opposite of what the OP asked for?