Science fiction has always been built on ambition, but a great idea can only carry a show so far. Alternate realities, dystopias, and space travel are exciting, but the real challenge is to find enough depth in the spectacle to tell a story that actually resonates with the audience. Modern sci-fi seems to be focusing on exactly that. The genre is telling stories that feel intimate, philosophical, funny, and politically charged while still delivering the escapism that draws people to science fiction.
Apple TV in particular has become home to some of the strongest sci-fi titles in the last few years. The streamer has developed a reputation for not only backing unique ideas, but also doing total justice to them. The Apple TV sci-fi shows on this list are proof of the streamer’s commitment to making every single episode count.
‘Dark Matter’ (2024–Present)
Dark Matter technically centers on one of sci-fi’s most overused ideas, but makes it feel a lot more personal. The Apple TV series, based on Blake Crouch’s bestselling novel, follows physicist and family man Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), who wakes up in an alternate reality where he never married Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), never became a father, and pursued the scientific career he once gave up. Jason has wondered about this version of his life for a long time, but when he finally has it, he realizes that it’s not what he wants at all. What ensues is a race against time as Jason tries to find his way back to his own reality before the version of him who stole his life settles into it permanently.
The concept of the multiverse in Dark Matter isn’t extremely complicated, but the show uses it to explore how humans respond to regret. The series makes Jason confront several versions of the life he might have lived if he had made different choices. Every world offers new possibilities, but none of them feel like home. Edgerton brilliantly performs radically different versions of Jason without reducing them to one-dimensional opposites. Dark Matter balances its huge science fiction ideas with a story that never stops feeling human, which is what makes every episode count.
‘Severance’ (2022–Present)
Severance is one of the most brilliant thriller TV shows in recent times, with a premise that’s unlike anything else. The series takes the idea of work-life balance to its most disturbing extent. It follows Mark Scout (Adam Scott), an employee at Lumon Industries who has undergone the Severance procedure, which surgically separates his work memories from his personal ones. The moment Mark enters the office, his Innie remembers nothing about the outside world, while his Outie has no idea of what happens during the eight hours he spends at work. It’s like he is two completely different people. Initially, the idea seems pretty great, especially for Mark, who desperately needs an escape from the grief of losing his wife. However, things start taking a darker turn for the version of Mark trapped inside Lumon.
Through its absurd premise, Severance takes familiar parts of corporate culture and makes them feel extremely unsettling. Lumon employees have to follow bizarre rules. In fact, they barely even understand the work they do or why it’s so important. This mystery surrounding just about everything in Lumon gives every episode weight, because the audience gets to uncover something new. Every new development makes the show’s central concept feel increasingly comfortable, especially when the Innies slowly develop identities and relationships despite technically only existing at work. Severance can be funny, weird, and genuinely unnerving within the same episode. Very few sci-fi shows have ever made fluorescent lights and office cubicles feel this threatening.
‘Pluribus’ (2025–Present)
Pluribus, created by, is easily one of the strangest sci-fi shows on Apple TV, but that doesn’t make it any less fascinating. The series follows novelist Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), who suddenly finds herself living in a world where everything is a little too perfect. An alien virus has connected humanity into a collective consciousness and turned all of them into one extremely polite hive mind. War, hostility, and most human conflicts have practically disappeared, but the problem is that the very idea of individuality has also gone away. Now, since Carol is one of the few people immune to the phenomenon, she sets out to try and reverse it. However, the strange part is that the hive mind is more than willing to help her with anything she needs.
It just insists that eventually, it will figure out a way to assimilate Carol too, which creates a constant sense of unease in the show. The concept is interesting because Carol’s stubbornness and anger are a perfect contrast to the extremely patient and accommodating hive mind. Pluribus takes its time to explore this contradiction. Entire episodes of the show revolve around Carol discovering one small aspect of this new world, but everything she learns shifts the audience’s understanding of how the collective consciousness operates. The show grounds its science fiction elements in surprisingly human questions and turns the idea of an alien apocalypse on its head. That unique premise alone is enough to make Pluribus worth watching.
‘Silo’ (2023–Present)
Silo is another show that puts a spin on a pretty traditional science fiction idea. The series, based on Hugh Howey‘s Wool novels, is set inside a massive underground structure where roughly 10,000 people have lived for generations because they believe the outside world to be toxic. Nobody knows exactly who built the silo, why it was created, or what really exists outside of it. However, asking too many questions is a surefire way to get in trouble here. The story picks up when engineer Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) begins investigating the suspicious death of someone close to her, and begins to realize that the world she has always known may not be as safe as she thinks.
Silo makes that mystery work because the world of the show feels like a fully developed, functioning society. The people living near the top have all the power, while the mechanics and workers at the lower levels are treated very differently, even though the entire structure depends on them. The audience experiences all this through Juliette’s eyes, but the fact that she approaches every mystery like an engineer is what keeps things interesting. She wants to learn how things actually work, which means that Silo spends a lot of time following her pulling at one small inconsistency until the bigger picture starts to make sense. The show is definitely a slow burn, but it rewards the audience for every bit of their attention.
‘Star City’ (2026–Present)
Star City takes the alternate-history world of For All Mankind and flips the entire perspective. Instead of following NASA, the series follows the Soviet side of the Space Race. The story begins around the moment the USSR becomes the first nation to put a man on the Moon and follows the cosmonauts, engineers, and intelligence officers responsible for keeping that advantage alive. Some of Star City‘s most compelling characters include Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert), who is pushed into becoming the first woman on the Moon, and Irina Morozova (Agnes O’Casey), a junior surveillance officer tasked with listening in on the private lives of people inside the space program.
The biggest difference, however, is how Star City constantly examines the cost of progress instead of treating it as something hopeful like For All Mankind did. In fact, the series plays out like a Cold War spy thriller more than a science fiction drama. The rockets and Moon missions are great, but some of the show’s most tense moments happen in ordinary rooms where one careless sentence can completely change someone’s life. That angle is exactly what makes the spin-off worthwhile.
‘Foundation’ (2021–Present)
Foundation is the kind of complex, expansive science fiction that TV has been missing. The series is loosely based on Isaac Asimov‘s legendary novels and begins with mathematician Hari Seldon (Jared Harris), who has developed a science called psychohistory that can predict the behavior of entire civilizations. His calculations reveal that the Galactic Empire, which has ruled humanity for thousands of years, is inevitably going to collapse. Now, Hari can’t prevent this, but he believes he can shorten the dark age that follows from 30,000 years to just 1,000 by creating the Foundation, a civilization designed to preserve humanity’s knowledge and guide whatever comes next.
This premise allows Foundation to tell an ambitious story that stretches across planets, generations, and time itself. Hari’s biggest challenge is the Genetic Dynasty. Instead of passing power from one emperor to the next, the Empire keeps cloning the same man and ruling through three versions of him at different ages. Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton), Brother Day (Lee Pace), and Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann) serve as proof of the Empire’s desperation to maintain the illusion of their permanence. Foundation might be too on-the-nose with its themes, but that is also what gives the series its political weight.
‘Calls’ (2021)
Calls is an underrated Apple TV show because it doesn’t feature traditional visuals, elaborate sets, or even actors appearing on the screen. The entire nine-episode series actually unfolds through phone conversations accompanied by abstract graphics, waveforms, and fragments of text. It sounds like something that should work better as a podcast than a television show, but after a few minutes, this strange creative direction starts to make sense. The show, helmed by Fede Álvarez, follows seemingly unrelated people whose ordinary phone calls start becoming increasingly impossible. One woman sees someone identical to herself outside her house, another caller begins describing disturbing changes happening to his own body, and other conversations start bending time in ways neither the characters nor the audience initially understand.
Slowly, those isolated incidents begin connecting into one much larger story about an approaching catastrophe. Call trusts the audience’s imagination to create dread and horror without ever showing anything. The voice cast — including Lily Collins, Pedro Pascal, Aubrey Plaza, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Rosario Dawson — perform these conversations with such panic and desperation that the lack of conventional visuals starts feeling like an advantage rather than a limitation. The episodes are extremely short with no room for filler, which makes every call feel more urgent than the one before. Calls proves that great science fiction doesn’t need spectacle to make an impact. All it needs is a great story.
‘Shining Girls’ (2022)
Shining Girls, based on Lauren Beukes‘ novel, the series follows Chicago newspaper archivist Kirby Mazrachi (Elisabeth Moss), who survived a brutal attack years earlier and has struggled to regain control of her life ever since. When another woman is found with injuries resembling Kirby’s, she teams up with reporter Dan Velazquez (Wagner Moura) to investigate the case. Their search eventually leads them to Harper Curtis (Jamie Bell), a man who appears to have been targeting women across different decades without aging himself. However, finding Harper is only half the problem because, all of a sudden, Kirby’s entire reality starts shifting. Her pet cat is suddenly a dog, her desk at work was never hers, she remembers conversations differently, and even discovers that she is apparently married to a man she only remembers as a coworker.
The catch is that nobody else notices any of this. The show doesn’t make a big deal of these shifts either, which is what makes watching it so much fun. A scene can suddenly contain one detail that feels completely wrong, and for a moment, the audience is just as disoriented as Kirby. The setup never feels gimmicky though, because this fragmented experience directly ties in with Kirby’s trauma. By the time the mystery starts coming together, the audience is completely invested and constantly scanning scenes for anything that might have changed, which says a lot about how effectively Shining Girls pulls viewers into Kirby’s unstable reality.
Shining Girls
- Release Date
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2022 – 2022-00-00
- Network
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Apple TV
- Writers
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Katrina Albright, Alan Page Arriaga, Kirsa Rein, Naledi Jackson, Silka Luisa
