Man, back in 1992, an amazing thing happened for fans of spaceships and robots and mutants and all that cool stuff: A channel devoted entirely to the science fiction genre was created. Yes, The Sci-Fi Channel was born, and what a time it was to be alive.
Actually, the cable network (long since rebranded, ugh, Syfy) turned out to be not quite as good as it sounded, unless lots and lots of repeats of The Incredible Hulk are your thing. And yet, in an era where the genre was still largely bastardized, it was something.
Of course, in the year 2023, even Grandma can name-check at least a couple of Avengers and a multiverse movie like Everything Everywhere All at Once can win the Best Picture Oscar. Look how far we’ve come, baby. And in the varied and wild landscape of streaming television these days, something of a successor to The Sci-Fi Channel (or to what The Sci-Fi Channel promised) has emerged: Apple TV+.
While the Apple streaming service obviously carries a ton of non-genre programs (stand down, Ted Lasso fans, I hear you), the people making the programming choices there obviously have one eye (or two, or more? I don’t know; maybe they’re aliens) on the demo represented by the nerd, the geek, and the folks who were excited by The Sci-Fi Channel in 1992.
Perhaps the most visually and narratively ambitious of Apple TV+’s sci-fi fare is Foundation, the adaptation/rethinking of Isaac Asimov’s revered series of novels which is currently finishing up its second season. The show tells the story of the slow disintegration of a galactic empire (ruled by an unending dynasty of Lee Pace clones) and the forces that work to minimize the devastating implications of that inevitability (as led by Jared Harris’ “psychohistory” expert and prophet, Hari Seldon). That Foundation — which is headed up by executive producer David S. Goyer — has also turned out to be something of a stealth I, Robot (another Asimov classic) story only sweetens the appeal of the series, even if it’s a sometimes bumpy ride.
See, something like Foundation – which spans centuries and multiple characters and Big Ideas with a capital “B” and a capital “I” – always felt unfilmable, even in those heady days when Lou Ferrigno was running around on Sci-Fi. But today, where Apple TV+ has the money and Goyer has the balls to not only try to film Asimov’s opus, but to also repurpose elements from the author’s work in order to tell his own version of the tale, the notion of a multi-season (a third is rumored to be in the works) version of one of the great sci-fi sagas in history somehow elicits little more than a simple collective shrug. “Found-what?”
And therein lies the rub for most of these Apple TV+ shows (and really, for 95% of streaming programming everywhere). Who’s actually watching Foundation? Is there a ton of Brother Day or Lady Demerzel cosplay at cons these days? Are Foundation memes going viral on social platforms? Does anyone care? The middle two questions are more easily answered, albeit anecdotally (those answers being no and no), and the first question is essentially unanswerable in this era where streaming services simply elect not to release their viewership numbers. We don’t know who’s watching Foundation, or anything else for that matter. But there sure doesn’t seem to be any buzz around the show from where I’m sitting, and this despite the fact that just about everyone with an Apple device gets like six months of Apple TV+ for free.
On the other hand, one of the streamer’s most talked about shows is also one of its sci-fi entries: the identity-scrambling thriller Severance. The first season of the Adam Scott-starring series received 14 Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Drama Series, for its tale of a biotech corporation that has developed a process by which its employees can have their consciousness bisected, as it were, so that one’s “innie” personality exists only at the workplace, with no knowledge of the outside world, while that same person’s “outie” persona knows nothing of what goes on inside the walls of Lumon Industries. The best of both worlds? Not quite, as it turns out.
While the very notion of being stranded forever in the workplace certainly must strike a chord for many viewers, so too must the idea of never having to go into the office again in our post-COVID, work-from-home reality. Clearly, Severance tapped into something there, with its crisp, darkly humorous scripts from creator Dan Erickson and his team, and taut direction from Ben Still and Aoife McArdle. But why did audiences discover this more grounded show over, say, the sweeping (in time and space) saga of Foundation? Could it be that what gets you an Emmy nom or 14 can’t star a guy in a funny space suit? Do you still have to wear a tie and go to work in the morning like your old man did if you want to be fully recognized by the mainstream? Ask Adam Scott.
Some of Apple TV+’s other genre entries fall into the “you should check this out even if you’re not into sc-fi” realm of recommendations that many fans are well acquainted with. It’s the out-to-dinner-with-friends advice that you know will likely not be heeded when you offer that “Battlestar Galactica just happens to be set on a spaceship, but you’d really love it!” In the case of For All Mankind, created by Star Trek writing legend Ronald D. Moore along with Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi, the show is even set in the past (so far, anyway). What could be less threatening to a sci-fi newbie than a show set in the 1970s?
The premise is simple: In 1969, the Soviets landed on the moon before the Americans. From there, an entire alternate history kicks in that sees Joel Kinnaman and his fellow Great Astronauts (but Flawed Men and Women) strive towards becoming better, stronger, faster in the space race. As history as we know it diverges, each season of the show kicks ahead a decade to keep these twists (and the space stuff itself) interesting; most recently, in Season 3, mankind was already on Mars, and Kinnaman was the oldest, most handsome astronaut you ever did see. For All Mankind takes a basic, understandable concept – the Russians beat us – and then combines compelling character drama with cool speculative fiction ideas from there.
On the other side of space exploration, but still on the Apple TV+ app, we have Silo, which stars Rebecca Ferguson in the claustrophobic story of what appears to be the last remnants of humankind, holed up in the subterranean location of the title. This one seems to have fallen into the pool of the nodding sci-fi fans who say to one another, “have you checked out Silo yet?” But I’m not sure too many normies have given it a shot yet; ditto Invasion (Season 2 is currently dropping weekly episodes), which as the title indicates, is about an alien invasion of Earth, if admittedly a slow-burn one. Both Silo and Invasion belong in the “watch ‘em if you got ‘em” pile of genre TV options, but sometimes that’s also the best kind of show, when you’re just in the mood to binge and not give it much thought.
There’s more: Jason Momoa did three seasons of the apocalypse in See; Steven Spielberg brought back his Amazing Stories anthology for a short run; Billy Crudup headed up a sci-fi comedy called Hello Tomorrow! earlier this season; and so on. Your appetite and mileage may vary for these various titles, but they’re all sitting there on the Apple TV+ app, just waiting to be watched.
But will they be? This takes us back to that last question I asked about Foundation earlier – does anyone care about the show? I can say I care. And you should too! But beyond that, we might need Hari Seldon and his psychohistory’s predictive powers to find an answer. Maybe decades from now, Apple TV+ will have become the dominant streaming service and sci-fi will be king on it. But for now, as with much of the streaming landscape, it feels like there are a bunch of shows hanging out there in the galactic wind, hoping someone will fly by and give them a try. The galaxy’s a big place though, and so is the world of streaming. Good luck, Hari.
