The 4 best science-fiction shows of 2026 so far

What does the state of sci-fi TV in the first half of 2026 tell us? To be honest, things could be better. Only one series has been an unalloyed pleasure. This may seem an odd way to describe Star City, a grim alternate-history thriller about the Soviet space programme, in which its characters duck KGB interrogators and endure near-fatal space accidents. More anon.

There were brilliant moments in other series, too – they just came with a little more baggage. Typifying this was Fallout, which, as the New Year rolled around, was already three episodes into its uneven second outing. Here, a nuclear catastrophe sees a privileged few take refuge in underground “vaults” while everyone else dukes it out for survival on the surface.

The heroes of Fallout season one are back: Pollyannaish vault-dweller Lucy, mech-powered super-soldier Max and the irradiated gunslinger known as the Ghoul. But for Lucy and Max, it’s more of the same. Max continues to bounce between embracing and rejecting the paramilitary Brotherhood of Steel, and all that Lucy learned from countless near-death experiences in season one has been forgotten. Her time is spent scolding the Ghoul for his “shoot first, ask questions later” attitude, more foil for his storyline than her own person.

What a storyline that is, though. The Ghoul is the saving grace of Fallout season two, reliably compelling and impossibly charismatic. We knew about his prelapsarian career starring in westerns, and that he has spent the rest of his unnaturally long life trying to find his wife, who is still alive. But the flashbacks to before nuclear disaster, where the Ghoul was recruited by a network of spies trying to prevent the war by murdering a Las Vegas technocrat, are a masterclass that keeps Fallout worth watching.

Paradise is another series faced with producing the difficult second album. Its first season was beloved for its opening-episode twist, that murdered president Cal Bradford wasn’t living in a gated community, as it appeared, but in a bunker under a mountain after a civilisation-ending disaster. It seemed unlikely season two would live up to this propulsive whodunnit.

Yet, for the most part, it succeeded – and even threw a Ghoul-shaped plotline at protagonist Xavier Collins, Secret Service agent turned general badass. He, too, has a long-lost, not-dead wife for whom he must travel the wasteland, around which a cheesy subplot is created.

And cheese is the point. Sometimes, that can really grate (sorry), particularly when cast members give weaker performances than Sterling K. Brown does as Xavier. But the intoxicating thing about Paradise is that it plays with the tropes of different sci-fi subgenres – the underground bunker in season one, the post-apocalyptic world in season two – more intelligently than most other series today.

Another unabashedly cheesy show is For All Mankind, which imagines a world where the US and USSR still spend billions on colonising space, so while its timeline is only 2012, characters we follow are already living on Mars and seeking to land on Saturn’s moon Titan to search for alien life.

Our anchor is still the Baldwin family, including cantankerous Apollo-era astronaut Ed, alive and under arrest on Mars after helping the colonists steal an iridium-rich asteroid. That iridium allowed the fledgling Mars base to thrive and expand, but it is still under the control of Earth, particularly the strongmen leaders of the US and USSR. The colonists start to plead for independence, but soon it’s all-out war on the Red Planet.

The new season does little with its Mars-Earth conflict, so despite its thrilling set pieces, it has been a minor letdown.

Thank god, then, that For All Mankind‘s new spin-off, Star City, has been such a joy. The shared universe of these shows began to diverge from our own because of one man: rocket engineer Sergei Korolev. In real life, he died in 1966, severely limiting the Soviet space programme. In Star City, he survives, enabling the USSR to put men and women on the moon before their US rivals.

But life for Anastasia Belikova, that first female cosmonaut to grace the lunar surface, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As soon as she returns to Earth, she is punished for acknowledging Yana Akhmatova, who was abruptly removed from the mission by the KGB. When it becomes clear Yana wasn’t the mole they were looking for, KGB agent Lyudmilla Raskova begins to investigate other cosmonauts, including Anastasia. All of this is revelatory, particularly Anna Maxwell Martin’s bone-chilling performance as Raskova.

With no knowledge of For All Mankind required to watch it, this is the sci-fi series of 2026 that I’d most recommend to you.