10 Sci-Fi Shows on Netflix Where Every Episode is a Masterpiece

From killer robots to friendly aliens, these shows are sure to satisfy.

Far too often, when you’re watching a series on Netflix and you’re really getting into it, you reach a point where the show suddenly goes way downhill. Even if things improve again later, the lull messes with the overall experience. Take The Walking Dead (currently available on Netflix). There are plenty of lulls you have to work through to get back to the good stuff and the show is downright unwatchable after Andrew Lincoln leaves. Or Lost, once that show started doing flash-forwards, it lost its edge. And Stranger Things, of course, suffered a massive decline after season 3.

But there are some shows on Netflix where this isn’t a problem and you can breeze through episode after episode without feeling like it's work to get back to the good stuff. Here are 10 such sci-fi shows that are on Netflix right now, that are great from start to finish.

1 11.22.63

Based on the book by Stephen King, 11.22.63 is an eight-episode miniseries about a time traveler trying to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Jake Epping (James Franco) is an ordinary English teacher tasked with the mission who ends up making all kinds of mistakes in the past, like getting too attached to the people there.

The show cleverly mixes classic sci-fi elements and themes and blends them with one of the best-known moments in American history, making the events and characters included take on a particular foreboding element. Especially interesting is the sense Jake gets that time itself is “pushing back” on his actions, as though what’s about to happen is supposed to happen and his mission may very well be hopeless.

2 Maniac

Maniac is a Netflix original miniseries created by Patrick Somerville (The Leftovers), based on a Norwegian series from 2015. The darkly comedic show is about two strangers (Jonah Hill and Emma Stone) with rather severe mental disorders, each of whom volunteers for a new medical trial of an experimental treatment which promises to cure all disorders. Over the course of 10 episodes, Maniac covers the story of a three-day drug trial which sees Hill and Stone’s characters venture into sometimes-shared fantasies. Some are domestic, like the two of them being a married couple, while others are other-worldly, like when Stone’s character is in an elf fantasy epic. The show is very weird and trippy, but it’s also quite resonant, as it's all about self-acceptance.

3 Bodies

Based on a DC graphic novel written by Si Spencer, Bodies has a killer concept. The show takes place during four different points in history, 1890, 1941, 2023, and 2053, and at each point, the same dead body is found at the same place in London. The show chronicles all four investigations and, eventually, the investigations become intertwined. Bodies takes classic sci-fi tropes, especially time travel, and combines them with film noir-like detective elements. It’s a show that requires a lot of attention over its eight episodes, as the storyline does get dense, but it's really rewarding in the end and makes excellent use of its unique premise.

4 The Tick (2016)

There are two live-action series based on The Tick on Netflix right now and both are incredibly, and consistently, funny. The Tick is a big, dumb superhero with super strength and nigh-invulnerability. His sidekick is a weak, cowardly average human named Arthur who has a moth-themed flying suit that looks more like a bunny. The superhero parody series began in the late 1980s as a comic book. (Well, technically, he was a newsletter mascot first, then had his own comic.) Then The Tick became an incredibly clever cartoon in the 1990s, which then led to the two live-action shows on Netflix.

The first show stars Seinfeld’s Patrick Warburton as the Big Blue Bug of Justice, and it’s a sharply-written sitcom-like series mostly about the moments in between The Tick’s adventures, when he’s chilling in a diner with Arthur and his other superhero pals. It lasted just nine episodes before it was canceled by Fox, but it’s a hidden gem of a series, particularly because Warburton was born to play The Tick.

The second series, which began its run on Amazon in 2016, lasted two seasons totaling 22 episodes and, overall, it’s even better than the first live-action series. Instead of focusing on The Tick this time around, this series was much more about Arthur (Griffin Newman), who was fleshed out into a deeper, more three-dimensional person with all kinds of issues and insecurities. The Tick (Peter Serafinowicz), however, is still the same big, dumb blue guy who accidentally breaks stuff because he doesn’t know his own strength. Both series are excellent, but if you’re going with only one, the second is better because each of its two seasons tells a consistent, funny story with lots of heart.

5 Orphan Black

Before Tatiana Maslany hulked out on She-Hulk, she had her breakout role in Orphan Black, a Canadian science fiction thriller about a woman who discovers she is just one of many identical clones. The show is really about an illegal cloning experiment, which is now trying to cover up its activities by killing off all of its clones, but the best thing about Orphan Black isn’t its premise, it’s Maslany. Over the course of five seasons totalling 50 episodes, Maslany plays 17 completely different characters, all with their own unique quirks and personalities shaped by different experiences. After being snubbed by the Emmys after the first two seasons, the outcry for Maslany was so overwhelming that she ended up getting nominated after the third season and winning for the fourth. Even that recognition, though, still falls short of just how great Maslany is in this show.

6 Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous

Wait, isn't this that Jurassic World kids’ show? Yes, it is, and I had similarly low expectations about a Netflix show made for kids about one of my favorite movie franchises. Then I watched it and couldn’t help but be impressed. Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous is about a group of kids who are on Isla Nublar during the events of Jurassic World — and well afterwards. They’re attending a kids’ camp on the island, but when dinosaurs start breaking out, chaos erupts and the two camp counselors charged with taking care of the kids are forced onto an evacuation boat while the kids are left behind on the island. From there, the kids must learn to survive until they can find a way to escape.

What’s impressive about Camp Cretaceous is just how much thought went into fitting the show into the pre-existing Jurassic Park and Jurassic World lore. Remember how Henry Wu (BD Wong) is kind of a bad guy in the new Jurassic World movies and they never quite explore it all that much? Camp Cretaceous does, and it's one of the show's best recurring storylines. Also very cool is that the show gives some love to dinosaur species that were neglected in the main films, like Ankylosaurus and Carnotaurus. Camp Cretaceous lasted five seasons totaling 50 episodes and it stays impressively consistent throughout. It’s actually a good deal better than a few of the Jurassic movies.

7 Pantheon

Originally premiering on AMC before moving to Prime Video for its second and final season, Pantheon takes place in a world where two rival technology companies — Logorhythms and Alliance Telecom — are making breakthroughs in the science of mind uploading into a virtual world. The show mostly follows three separate lead characters with different relationships to the two companies. There’s Maddie Kim (Katie Chang), a bullied teenage girl who finds out that her dead father isn’t really dead, he’s just been uploaded by Logorhythms. Caspian Keyes (Paul Dano) is a 17-year-old computer genius who discovers that his whole life has been a lie, set up by Logorhythms with a special purpose. Then there’s Vinod Chanda (Raza Jaffrey), an engineer who is uploaded by Alliance Telecom against his will and now resides in the virtual world.

The show explores some ideas similar to The Matrix with the contrast of the virtual world and the real one, but the antagonists are way more relevant to our current times. Instead of machines as the bad guys, Pantheon’s villains are the ruthless, uncaring CEOs behind the new technology, and they have no regard for the people they’re hurting in the name of discovery.

The show is also a visual marvel, especially when it embraces the mind-bending virtual world the uploaded characters reside in. But over its 16 tightly-crafted episodes, it never loses sight of the real-world stakes.

8 Cassandra

Cassandra is another tech thriller, but with a very different flavor. This German horror series sees a family move into the very first smart home, built back in the 1970s. While its AI features are dormant at first, the tech-savvy son in the family activates the system, bringing to life Cassandra, a robot woman with 1970s aesthetics. Over time though, Cassandra’s behavior becomes stranger and more manipulative, and the family realizes there’s much more to Cassandra than being a handy house appliance.

Created by Benjamin Gutsche, the six-episode series is a perfect slow burn that takes its time and plants its seeds methodically before they pay off with huge revelations and horrifying results.

9 Dark

Another German sci-fi import that’s worth the journey is Dark, the three-season, 26-episode thriller created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese. It follows four families in a small German town looking into the disappearance of a local child. Surprisingly, the trail leads them to a time-travel conspiracy reaching back (and forward) by several generations. What’s impressive about this series is how the stakes grow astronomically season by season, beginning with a simple missing person story and ballooning to potentially world-ending consequences. Even more impressively, the show expands its premise without ever losing track of the humanity of their characters, a truly rare feat.

10 Resident Alien

Who doesn’t love Alan Tudyk? Whether he’s voicing characters like K-2SO in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, or he’s playing the pilot Wash on Firefly the guy is endlessly talented and likable and he puts all that charm to great use over all four seasons, and 44 episodes, of Resident Alien.

Resident Alien is a sci-fi comedy about an alien sent to Earth to destroy the human race for the betterment of Earth’s wellbeing. However, he accidentally crash-lands in Colorado, killing a local doctor. He then assumes the doctor’s identity and tries to figure out how to carry out his mission, but begins to wonder if killing the humans is the right thing to do.

The show is sweet, funny, and stars Alan Tudyk. What more could you possibly need?