Beyond the Stars: Top-Rated Sci-Fi TV Shows

Science fiction is the genre that has always done television's heaviest philosophical lifting. When it's working, sci-fi uses its speculative premise to ask questions that realistic drama cannot approach — about consciousness, about what it means to be human, about the relationship between technology and freedom, about the nature of time and identity. These are the highest-rated science fiction series in the TV Maze database: shows that used their speculative conceits to create something genuinely thought-provoking rather than just visually spectacular.