The Magicians, the Expanse, Umbrella Academy are shows I enjoy. I’d really like to find more that are well produced with good acting. Not so much superhero, but are there other magic or sci if series that are really good, yet aren’t sappy teen angst Twilight type shows?
I’ll assume you know about the limited run of Firefly?
Supernatural is a good show thought it tends to be season long story arcs. If you watched enough of it to get the general dynamics there are a lot of one-offs that are really enjoyable.
SyFy did a limited run of Harry Dresden episodes I enjoyed, though it’s older and the production isn’t all that great.
Grimm was awesome (well, they botched the ending a bit, but which series doesn’t).
Somewhat comparable to Supernatural, too.
Oh yes. Love firefly, and each time I think about it, pains me it got cancelled. There’s a lot of newer stuff out there according to a Netflix but I can’t suss our what’s tv fluff vs. quality material. Tis suggesting a lot so hoping people could point out what they thought was good and what they thought was el stinko (long list!):
Summary
- Once Upon a Time
- The Messengers
- Hemlock Grove
- Immortals
- Dark Matter
- The Legends of Tomorrow
- Osmosis
- Lost in Space
- Haven
- The 4400
- Mars
- Van Helsing series
- The Librarians
- Colony
- Travelers
- Lucifer
- Dark
- Evil
- Another Life
- Better Than Us
- Altered Carbon
- Chambers
- Glitch
- Originals
- The Order
- Legacies
- Penny Dreadful
- Zoo
- Winona Earp
Once Upon a Time is absolute garbage. The best seasons are 1 and 2, but really, the whole show is a convoluted mess with horrendous CGI backdrops, bad lighting, and contrived solutions to silly plots. The show has solid actors, but the writing is abominable dreck. I feel like they missed a big opportunity here. My wife loves it.
Lucifer has its ups and downs. It’s good enough to binge, but there’s never really any huge payoffs for the story arcs that come and go season to season. When it’s good it’s great, when it’s bad it’s grating. It’s worth watching, but don’t expect Buffy-style cliffhangers, resolutions, or emotional attachment to characters.
The plot and potential for the show Travelers is way, way above the writer’s ability. A lot of the acting is poor, some of it certainly isn’t, but it’s a bit of a meandering complicated mess because the story needs better writers to tell it. A lot of the characters themselves are just intolerable, and there are punchable faces everywhere. I feel like the story itself carries the first season, even if budgetary and logical concerns hold it back, but by the time I got a couple episodes into the second season I was just hoping a giant comet would crash into Canada and kill the entire production. I would love for this show to be good, but holy hell I hate some of the story beats.
Fringe is awesome, but not on your list.
Counterpart, likewise.
Legends of Tomorrow is ridiculous goofy fun. Skip Season 1
Travelers is pretty good
Haven is ok
I liked penny Dreadful, but it isn’t the easiest show to watch
Librarians never seemed to really get going
Falling Water had potential, but only got 2 seasons
Bit old now and only two seasons but The Middleman was fun
I find the first season of Fringe to be some of the worst TV ever put to film. But season 2 onward the whole show is elevated by a tremendous change to its genre, going from a shitty procedural to something with more meat on its bones. There are some genuinely excellent episodes in this show, and some great sci-fi. But I’m being honest when I say you should watch the pilot, skip the entirety of season one, and pick back up at the start of season 2.
We have different tastes, clearly.
Unacceptable!
Counterpart, Travelers, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Beforeigners, The Mandalorian, The Rook, His Dark Materials.
Just off the top of my head and not in any particular order.
Some total garbage that fits the bill but is terrible: a discovery of witches, Shadowhunters, Emerald City. Sometimes you could be in the mood for garbage I know sometimes I am.
Forgot this one
Oldies but goodies!
-Falling skies was watchable most of the time!
I also liked Being Human, a humoristic (but not straight comedy, so it does get serious) take on a werewolf and a vampire living together, with some other kinds of magic sprinkled in.
It can be quite campy, but if you like that and the first 2-3 minutes in this speak to you, I’d definitely recommend:
For once, I agree with Kerzain, though I don’t think the first season is terrible, just nowhere near as good as the rest, and very network TV-y. Skipping straight to season 2 is a good idea. The only caveat is that there are a lot of call backs to the procedural stuff toward the end. But if you decide you like season 2 you can always go back and watch season 1.
I’m struggling to think of current sci-fi that I would put anywhere near The Expanse. Humans is probably the closest, but it’s finished now. As I’ve described it before, it’s Westworld without the mystery box bollocks, and with a fleshed out exploration of what it would mean to have created sentient slaves.
Eureka had some fantastic episodes, and none really fell below “okay” (except for maybe one that focused too much on a particular character in the early seasons with a bad fake accent I could never understand without subtitles, not to be confused with a different character in the later seasons that had a bad fake American accent).
The writers tended to start and then drop big plot lines for no reason at all, as if they just couldn’t figure out what their original plan was with them, but this show lives and dies by its stand alone episodes, and those tended to be fantastic (if you just ignore the constant intentionally silly macguffin stuff).
This is a great show, and probably one of the best I’ve watched with my wife during our morning breakfast routine. It’s casual, feel good, has fun characters, and just enough nerdy fan service to earn a chuckle without going overboard at the expense of originality.
I loved this show, if for no other reason than it had my wife laughing so much and the characters were mostly fun(ny) enough to hold my interest.
I’ve been meaning to watch Warehouse 13, since apparently it’s tangentially related to this one somehow, but I still have to finish the last season of The Office before it leaves Netflix in a few weeks, and maybe finish Once Upon a Time if I can’t figure out a good way to make my wife forget about it.
I think you’d really enjoy Killjoys.
I haven’t heard of it. I’ll look it up.
I enjoyed Colony and was disappointed when they cancelled the show.
Yeah , Colony ended on a huge cliffhanger. :(