Over the last few years my family and I have binged all of Star Trek, then moved on to Star Trek adjacent shows like The Orville and Stargate. At the moment we’re not really watching anything sci-fi. I was wondering if anyone had recommendations for similar shows (or maybe some books) that fill the void left by Star Trek. In particular I really like the episodes that deal with interacting with other civilizations, diplomacy, and exploration more-so than say, an anomaly episode.
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I’d say the The Expanse fits the bill. It is a book series with a very successful television adaptation.
100%. Just finished watching the entire series a couple days ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Concur. I’m a huge Trek fan, and The Expanse fits that blend of optimism and realpolitik.
I’d have enjoyed it a lot more with a better main character. He really is the blandest white man in the universe.
Definitely. There were a few things that could have been optimized a bit more, like dat invented language wot dey speaking in. David Strathairn totally sounded like Bruce Lee when he tried to get the accent down. But I appreciated their attention to details, like requiring “juice” for high-g burns (as opposed to Star Trek ships hitting near light speed with the crew only needing to hold the edge of a nearby desk to handle the acceleration).
I’m still wondering what the heck the storyline idea was with those weird dog like creatures 🤷🏻♂️
the infuriating thing is that according to the books he is a pretty unique mix of … checking … ”the only child in a family co-op of five fathers and three mothers“
they could have done almost anything with the character in terms of appearance and chose this sigh
I love the expanse i think it is one of the best recent space sci fi shows.
But its not really a startek style show and i dont think its what op is looking for.
I think the show sliders would be much better if stargate is a good example of a non startrek franchise that fits the bill.
But then so is Doctor Who now that i think about it
Huh, I didn’t really think of Dr Who and Star Trek in the same terms. I guess? Dr Who is great, but it’s so much campier than anything after TOS. Also, I’ve only watched New Who. I did try watching the first old ep a while back but it wasn’t really something I could watch. But it’s such a long running series, are there any seasons of the old show that are super worth watching?
I’ll also check out Sliders.
Classic Who went through enough changes that there might be something you enjoy in there. It was arguably at its best during the Tom Baker years. (Season 12). If you can’t get into that, then it may just not be your jam. A lot of the charm to the old series came from the low budgets and aggressively short production times. But with the 4th Doctor they had gotten a little more confidence from BBC and I think their budgets started getting bigger for a few years.
The original Doctor Who in the 60s was more like original series Star Trek, in that it sometimes felt more like a stage production than a television show, and that kind of writing is understandably dated.
I was worried about it being a bit of a departure, but it does fit if we apply your interest broadly
And no i cant recommend any of the old Who because i also could not watch it.
Sorry friend, but i hope you find something that scratches your itch! Ide love an update if you find something that fits the bill! Even if its just s DM letting me know what you settled on
Oh that’s one I’ve seen. I enjoyed the first few seasons but got kind of tired it after trying to watch the first few eps of a recent season. Around the time where that spacer started hucking rocks at Earth. I don’t know how it was gonna go from there, but it was starting to feel very… supervillain has a good point so let’s make them do awful things so you can’t sympathize with them. Idk, I could probably be convinced to give it another try if people thought it got good.
Thanks. Downloading it now.
civilizations, diplomacy, and exploration
Babylon 5 - It has a bit of a slow start with the first season (just the 1990’s Trek shows), but it picks up about midway through season 1 and gets progressively better (higher stakes) until season 4. Season 5 is okay, and then there are series of movies, and recently even an animated show in the universe.
To add to this, they have been talking about remaking the show.
So what you’re saying is, I should watch it now so I can complain when the remake isn’t as good. /s
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STARGATE!
Goofy, but also deep enough. It captures some of that Startrek: TNG vibe in a totally different way. Not a lot of modern stuff has come close to that balance, closest would be Orville and while closest that leans far more into the comedy (I also still effing love that show, I’m just saying it’s different).
Also totally agree re: SGU. I loved it. I get why it’s divisive, but it’s still one of my favorites.
::: It’s the first part of the series where humans are on the cutting edge, not behind. Everyone else is gone, everything we knew is outdated, we are finally carrying the burden of being “the fifth race”. It’s dark because it has to be. It’s an amazing addition that was just starting to spread its wings when it got cancelled, :::
It’s an amazing addition that was just starting to spread its wings when it got cancelled.
Seaquest dsv is what they want. They changed it to seaquest 2023 for the last season, but I’d skip that anyway, I rewatched it a couple of years ago and that season is just straight garbage. Big changes to the cast, apparently the cast and the producers etc were constantly bickering, and boy does it show. Easy to see why it got canned before the season had even ended.
^ This person right here knows their sci-fi. A lot of good recommendations here.
Special shout-out on Dark Matter. I found the first episode almost unwatchable, but that was because I went into it with the wrong attitude. If you don’t take it to seriously it’s a really fun show (as I discovered when I gave it a second chance). And it just gets better and better. Such a shame it was cancelled too soon (though that seems to go for about 95% of science-fiction TV shows!).
Lexx is fun too, just in a really weird and raunchy way.
Very solid list. I have not thought about Seaquest in a very very long time. Might need to rewatch it here. I remember its originally airing like it was yesterday.
Also Sliders is a great 90s sci-fi TV show for up to the 3rd or 4th season from what I remember. As soon as the doc left it went down hill from what I remember 20 some years ago
For All Mankind is the Star Trek prequel we should have had. Co-created by Ron Moore (Deep Space Nine, Battlestar Galactica), the show has a bunch of Trek alumni working behind the scenes. It features human drama (and sometimes melodrama), geopolitical diplomacy, sweeping cultural change and scientific adventure against the backdrop of a multi generational future history, starting with the first moon landing.
I’m going to tag on to this and say another more adult themed Sci-Fi trip you should take on Apple TV+ is Foundation. It is somewhere between GoT, The Expanse, and Star Trek. It is loosely based on the Foundation book series by Isaac Asimov. I highly recommend it.
If you have read the Foundation books, the series will piss you off. Not just because it has very little in common with the books but because it goes against what the books stood for. And the most interesting parts of the Foundation tv series are the emperor arcs, which are original and arent from the books.
It seems to me that the creator wanted to make a scifi series of his own but just used the Foundation name for branding, name dropping and some abstract story elements. And then try to marry all the elements with some inane movie alchemy bullshit.
I read the books and ultimately didn’t like them very much. I recognize their value but they just weren’t for me. I don’t remember a lot about them, enough, say, to get upset about how they changed this or that character.
And I found that show to be an utter mess. Just a mess. It’s a mess absolutely chock full of stuff. It’s a very beautiful mess. It’s a mess with amazing production values. But it’s still a hot mess. Forget adapting the books… what in the world is it about at all?? Ultimately it seemed to just get stuck on its emperor character and invented various struggles to take him down. Totally empty in the end.
Huh. Watched the TV show and haven’t read the books. It did feel a little odd in a way that was hard to put my finger on. Maybe it’s that? What’s the pitch on the books if they’re that different from what I see in the show?
Some of the books are small stories that take part throughout the ages and have different characters. In the series they decided to have the same protagonists, so they went through insanely convoluted plot devices to achieve that and to move them around the place and have them being related.
But my real issue is that they really changed not only Hari Seldon’s and “Demerzel”'s characters but what the series is about. They are kinda making it a religion and then say “oh it isnt a religion thing, it is just a tool, oh nvm, it is a religion, ha just kidding, not a religion or maybe it is”. The foundation series is pretty atheistic in nature. And while religion is used(as a tool against the outsiders), the tv series makes Seldon a televangelist.
The tv series is full of deus ex machina and not even good deus ex machina. Maybe they felt the initial stories would appear somewhat simplistic and tried to modernize them and make them “edgy”. Generally, 90% of the plot isnt from the books.
“Demerzel” is a couple characters combined from the books but ultimately she is the most important character of the show(well i assume so, because she isnt a 1:1 character from the books). And she cannot be religious.
Most of these issues could be solved by simply renaming the series and some story editing to make it tighter and less convoluted. You dont need to have the same characters be everywhere, at every period and be related to each other, it is silly and cringe, just like Rey
PalpatineSkywalker.I will still watch future seasons and the show has many stories and scenes that are great(most of the Empire stuff, which are original). But even without knowledge of the books, i feel those artificial story arcs that try to connect characters are bad.
TLDR : If the books are Star Trek TNG, the series is Star Trek Discovery
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent
- Salvor Hardin
I can’t think of a better way to explain the difference between the books and the show then that quote.
Can you imagine Salvor of the show ever saying that?
This is the most parroted comment on this topic. Please actually say something original.
What would you say the show is about? And not just the starting premise. Having seen the whole thing, what’s at the center?
I found it to be a huge morass of sound and fury orbiting an empty center.
I think the show has some decent themes that connect together alright. There’s a bit of a free will vs determinism thing going on. A bit of what is a human/transporter problem with the robot, the emperor clones, and Harry’s mind copies.
But there’s also a lot of other noise that kinda makes the show too unfocused to properly explore those ideas. There’s some war on terror/fall of Rome imagery. There’s the weird religious stuff around the Church of Seldon. The mentalists wanting to put their leader into Gale’s body, etc.
Nice to see For All Mankind getting some love. Absolutely fantastic show, and definitely feels true to Roddenberry’s vision.
Yeah, I just signed up for Apple TV primarily for this show! Haven’t started it yet npbut that may be my weekend
I’m curious about The Foundation as well, since that was one of my favorite book series, but I just don’t see that working on TV
As others have pointed out, Foundation isn’t a particularly faithful adaptation of Asimov’s stories, but there good things in it. It might be more accurately titled Foundation and Empire IMO, because it focuses as much on the Empire side of the story as the Foundation. The first season was lopsided. The Empire plotline was compelling, the Foundation ones were… not. Haven’t watched the second season yet, but apparently it’s more consistent.
Man, FAMK was dragging its feet for me. Too slow, i could only force myself to watch the second episode before i stopped completely. Foundation however was damn good. Almost like Raised by Wolves but a different dimension.
Thanks. Downloading it now.
I mean, the Expanse is fantastic sci fi, both book and show. It’s not that Star Trek like though.
In particular I really like the episodes that deal with interacting with other civilizations, diplomacy, and exploration more-so than say, an anomaly episode.
In light of this, and since you were able to work through the not-so-stellar episodes of ST, I’d strongly argue that Babylon 5 should be your next stop.
It has a slow start, some more mixed episodes, dated special effects and both main characters (they switched after season 1) are plain “heroic American leader” types, but virtually everything else is top tier even today. An excellent political plot, humor, great characters with genuine growth.
Just be aware that it is different from DS9 (personally, I like both).
Battlestar Galactica (the new one) and The Expanse are probably worth pointing out, too. To me, they’re the best high-production-value sci-fi shows that didn’t sacrifice their plot. Nevertheless, both are far more grim than the shows you’ve mentioned and overall “feel” different.
Was going to say Babylon 5, but yeah it’s very 90s at this point. I do love it very much
BSG (the 2003 remake) was amazing. So much better than the original version. And it really ushered in a new era of more gritty, darker science fiction on television. My only complaint with it was that they largely botched the ending (especially the whole Starbuck thing. But I won’t elaborate on that as it is spoiler-heavy).
The other science fiction series that I feel most-closely mimic the energy of Star Trek:
- Star Gate SG1/Atlantis - Episodic planetary exploration and adventure with overarching serial universe-building
- Babylon 5 - Space politics and looming galactic war (the show pitched to Paramount right before they made Deep Space Nine)
- The Orville - Space utopia and moral dilemma seen from the outside (The Next Generation with all the funny outtakes left in)
(This list is for anyone reading. Enjoy B5, OP! Let us know when you get to that part where everyone cries.)
The Expanse is an amazing sci-fi series that just gets better every season. Politics, war, discovery of new life, all within new civilizations cataloguing the early expansion of humans from the Earth to within our local system. Acting is top tier, graphics get better each season due to it’s meteoric rise in popularity.
But yeah, nothing quite like those pure gold episodes of Star Trek: TNG. The new Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is more like TNG than the other series going on right now, but only has 2 seasons at this point I believe.
I don’t know if you gave Stargate Atlantis a try. It doesn’t reach the heights of SG1, but it has it’s moments and is enjoyable overall.
Stargate Universe was awesome. I will die on this hill.
Season 1 has some rough episodes, but the second season was great.
We watched Atlantis then some of the movies. When we looked into SGU it was on a different streaming service and we read it wasn’t great and got canceled early. Still worth seeing the little that’s there? Does it feel like it got to end on its own terms or is the cutoff jarring?
Yeah, SG1 was outstanding, SG:Atlantis had its moments but was annoying, SGU was just bad.
I personally couldn’t get into SGU. I don’t know how it ends because I never finished it. It felt like it was trying too hard to be like the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
The obvious answers are outside TV media.
Mass Effect 1, the video game, was originally conceived as a Star Trek game, but they couldn’t secure the IP rights, so ended up pivoting to a new universe that feels Star Trek like. Play it on story mode.
In print, there are literally a hundred reasonable options, some more or less like different elements of Trek. A good choice (in my opinion) is The Spiral Wars – rogue ship and crew, diplomacy, great combat, alien civilizations that are non-monolithic… Or CJ Cherryh’s Alliance Union universe (a good entry point is Downbelow Station, a good overview of the universe) – many different scenarios and topics and a lot of ethical dilemmas that would make Trek proud.
Of course, if TV is your thing, try out Babylon 5, Stargate, or Farscape. They all sort of start slow.
If you’re not into games I can recommend the excellent playthroughs by NitaZera. There’s no player commentary, just pure game. It’s like watching a TV show. Of course you miss out on making your own choices but the author has made sure to pick interesting ones. There is continuity because the events of each game (and the choices) build on each other.
The way you describe it reminds me of Primitive Technologies.
Thanks for your post even though it wasnt for meant for me!
I played through ME1-3. I didn’t know it was inspired by Star Trek but I could see it. I will say to anyone else that reads this, ME 1 feels really old and janky at this point. I got through it and enjoyed the story, but the gameplay was an unpleasant experience. ME 2 and 3 do a lot better in that regard, but then you have to get disappointed by the end of 3… so…
I don’t understand, aren’t you supposed to start it all over again from the beginning and continue until your death? Are you allowed to watch ST just once?
I’ll have to rewatch it in a few years to refresh my memory enough so I can keep saying “This is like this one episode of Star Trek” to my friends all the time.
When you rewatch, make sure to listen to the Greatest Generation podcast, if you’re into nerdy film guys who worked in the industry making insightful analysis alongside dick and fart jokes.
This is what i do. Star Trek playlist gets put on when i’ve got nothing else to watch. Random episodes of all trek is my happy place.
Highly recommend the Culture Novels by Iain M Banks. They’re not necessarily family friendly due to some adult themes and moments, but diplomacy, exploration and intrigue are the main focuses with a bit of action sprinkled in.
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We watched that recently. Pretty good show. It kind of makes me wish Star Trek had some better ecology episodes. Although now that I’m thinking about it, Star Trek would have had a hard time with that kind of stuff because of the costumes and effects. You can make a lot weirder creatures with animation.
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If you like British comedy then Red Drarf was surprisingly good imo
The summary I just read sounds great, thanks for the tip!
Ooh… I’m not sure if a summary really can set expectations in this case. But do give it a try! It’s silly but it’s hilarious.
+1 for Red Dwarf. Cheesy in a great way
… (or maybe some books)…
.Then how about the Bobiverse series? That should fit the bill perfectly. Even has a Riker! I’m a big fan of the audio books.
And definitely Project Hail Mary as a one off.
And maybe Expeditionary Force. That one is a bit much militaristic for my taste but I got to love the audio books anyways.
Expeditionary Force is great fun, but it’s also a huge commitment. There’s 16 books so far plus spin-offs (that are required reading) and even an Amazon-exclusive radio play.
