Pluribus, Foundation, Future Man… I’m wallowing in superb Scifi TV right now
Scifi TV shows seem to be having a moment, and the last decade has seen a lot of great content, such as, off the top of my head, Pluribus, Foundation, and Future Man. I’ll be honest, I’m mentioning these as they are what I’m currently watching and thoroughly enjoying. They aren’t a ‘best of’ or anything like that.
Scifi TV is currently awesome
I grew up in the 70s and 80s in the UK. Scifi TV was fun and explored different themes, and special effects were expected to be bad. Shows like Doctor Who, Buck Rogers, Blake’s 7, Red Dwarf, Space 1999, Battlestar Galactica, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy were awesome, but the effects were dire.
From the mid-90s till the mid-2010s, big-budget films could do fairly decent special effects, but TV couldn’t. Unfortunately, this also happened to be a time when people started to care about the fact that plastic wobbly monsters looked a bit iffy.
Consequently, lots of promising science fiction shows were cancelled if they didn’t perform well. Or were even ended if something else could be made more cheaply that would pull in the same viewers. I’m still sad about Firefly.
But now, Scifi TV shows look good, can cost less, and appeal to mass audiences. This trend will continue as special effects become cheaper and writers become more imaginative. As a bonus, these shows are set to get cheaper still as more people sell their souls and try to justify the plagiarism-fest of AI art and graphics. But that is a complicated and clearly contradictory whine for another time.
I’m currently watching Pluribus, Foundation, and Future Man and loving them
I was thinking about what to write about and had to tear myself away from three awesome shows that are utterly, utterly different, but are all great scifi. So I thought I would mention them now and will review them later. They all have varying budgets and began within the last ten years.
Pluribus
I was quite surprised that Vince Gilligan followed up Breaking Bad with a scifi TV show. I have so far watched the first three episodes (I think a new one just dropped), and I am loving it so far. I have so many questions, but the show is slowly working its way through them.
In case you missed the premise – aliens come and take over everyone apart from a few who seem immune. The big twist is that the aliens are kind of nice. In a vegetarian-Guardian-reading kind of way. I’m really enjoying it, but the lead character is a bit too miserable. It is understandable in the context of the show, but she was also a bit of a downer in the flashbacks when she was a succesful, wealthy author in a happy relationship.
Pluribus is generally a lot of fun, though, and explores morality and identity. Would there be less crime and war in such a scenario? Yes. But there might also be less culture. There would be no need to create angsty or angry music, for example, and that is what I like in my music. Could these people make a decent horror film?
Arguably, a humanity that is linked as they are, wouldn’t necessarily need any culture like art or music. They’d just exist and eat vegan pies or something.
The show has a slightly bleak, unnerving undertone, which I love. It also has great writing and characters. I look forward to seeing how it all pans out.
Anyway, so far – recommended. I think episode 4 is just out, so catch up now. It’s on Apple TV+.
Foundation
Foundation began in 2021 and recently completed its third season, with a fourth having just been greenlit. As a huge fan of the books, I was baffled how they could turn them into a TV show, but they’ve done a really good job. In my opinion, anyway. To be fair, I read the main books over 30 years ago, and don’t remember a lot.
I do remember that the book has several large time jumps. This means the story would start afresh with the odd link to the past (like Hari Seldon) and several new characters. But the TV show gets around this by having smaller jumps and using clones.
I’d heard it was a bit slow and there were some complaints, so I didn’t go into it with high hopes. I’m currently near the end of season one and absolutely loving it. I have since checked the ratings, and they are also high. I’m guessing I was reading reviews just after it came out in particularly snooty scifi forums (there are a few – full of angry mostly male ‘purists’), so I got biased angry opinions.
Foundation is also on Apple TV+ and is also great. It’s a completely different type of scifi TV show, though. This is a big-budget space opera, whereas Pluribus is more gritty and mildly scary. Think Star Wars compared to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I’m loving it so far.
Future Man
I’d recently finished watching The Studio on Netflix (a superb show) and was reading Reddit to see what other people thought about it. Like me, nearly everyone had enjoyed it. But I noticed quite a few people referred to a show called Future Man, which was also by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. It may only have been a few comments, but it was enough to get me intrigued.
I read the blurb and cursed the gods that I was only hearing about the show now. But it wasn’t on any of the streaming platforms I use. Just as I was pondering this dilemma, it popped up on Netflix. I’m pretty sure this is the kind of thing those “Manifesting” people are always banging on about.
Anyway, Future Man is a comedy scifi TV show that is very adult, puerile and funny. There’s no point going too much into the plot, but let’s just say the main trio travel through time trying to fix stuff, but generally mess things up and having a bad time.
This is especially true for the main guy, Josh, who is a gamer and janitor from 2017. The other two, Wolf and Tiger, come from a future where everyone lives in sewers, fights to the death a lot with the baddies, eats a lot of rats, and generally comes from the worst timeline imaginable. Consequently, they cope pretty well in any scenario and generally come out on top. They are also hilarious. But Josh has a consistently shit time.
I won’t talk about it too much as I will probably finish and then review it very soon. If you are curious about liking it, then watch the first 15 minutes or so, up to when Josh first meets Wolf and Tiger. If you find it funny, you are good to go.
Scifi TV is wild and inventive again
As I mentioned before, science fiction shows were wildly inventive and took weird chances back before the 90s, when people were a lot more forgiving. There were obviously limitations, often budgetary, that affected things, but even then, that could result in a cool idea – like Star Trek coming up with transporters, as shuttles are too expensive.
But in the 90s, film graphics got better, but because of cost, TV graphics didn’t much. This coincided with the period when most scifi I watched went from being filmed in the deserts near LA to the forests of Canada. (Again, budgetry.) I was working for the Syfy channel at the time and it was really noticeable. There were weird shows – Lexx and Farscape, for example – that were fun and inventive, but they weren’t always the best to look at. I’m overjoyed Battlestar Galactica got completed.
Now, there feels like a noticeable shift toward variety and exploring more weirdness. I hope so. As multiple Star Wars series have shown, you shouldn’t have to require massive audiences to claw back the ludicrously expensive TV shows they’ve put out. Don’t spend millions per episode and then cancel the show. Just be more inventive and keep the show going. Or, if you have to cancel, keep enough cash aside to finish it.