Realms of Wonder: the Best Fantasy TV Series

Pendleton Ward's animated masterwork began as a children's fantasy adventure and became, over ten seasons, one of the most emotionally sophisticated shows on television. Its revelation that the Land of Ooo is a post-nuclear Earth — that Finn is among the last humans — gives the show's warmth and melancholy a profound undertow. Rating: 7.8/10.

Doc Venture — failed super-scientist and son of a legendary one — navigates a world populated by supervillains, super-heroes, and government-sanctioned killers. Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer's Adult Swim series is the richest fantasy-comedy on television: a decades-spanning meditation on legacy, failure, and the gap between who we want to be and who we are. Rating: 8.2/10.

Elena Michaels tries to live as a human in Toronto while her Pack in upstate New York faces an unprecedented threat from mutts — rogue werewolves operating outside the Pack's code. The show handled its mythological worldbuilding with care, particularly the tension between Elena's desire for a normal life and her inevitable nature. Rating: 7.3/10.

Kevin Pacalioglu is a slacker medium who sees ghosts — and who must help them complete whatever unfinished business is keeping them from moving on. The Hulu comedy-fantasy is charming precisely because of how low-key it is: Kevin's supernatural gifts are treated as a mild inconvenience rather than a heroic calling. Rating: 6.7/10.

The Greendale study group's adventures include multiple genre-spanning fantasy episodes — animated D&D sessions, live-action roleplaying catastrophes, and a mid-season clip show featuring a magical origin story for the group's formation. Community understood genre as a tool for emotional revelation, not just entertainment. Rating: 8.3/10.

The postal detective team at the Denver Dead Letter Office solves crimes using undelivered mail. While not conventionally fantastical, the show's use of coincidence, timing, and the poetic resonance of lost letters gives it a romantic, almost magical quality — a warm fantasy of a universe in which things arrive when they are needed. Rating: 7.8/10.

The animated sequel-series to the 2009 blaxploitation parody film places Black Dynamite in increasingly surreal situations involving government conspiracies, ancient mythology, and supernatural forces. The show uses fantasy and magical realism as satirical tools, with results that are simultaneously absurd and sharply political. Rating: 8.0/10.

New York doctor Zoe Hart inherits a medical practice in the fictional small town of Bluebell, Alabama — a place so eccentric, community-minded, and resistant to the modern world that it operates more like a fairy tale than a realistic setting. The show's warmth and its idealized Southern Gothic atmosphere give it a charming fantastical quality. Rating: 7.9/10.

The Bluth family's spectacularly dysfunctional attempts to rebuild their construction company after patriarch George Sr. is arrested for fraud generate a comedy so dense with callbacks, foreshadowing, and layered gags that it functions almost as a puzzle-box fantasy. The show's Season 4 experiment — each episode from a single character's perspective — was the most ambitious thing network comedy had attempted. Rating: 8.2/10.

Pendleton Ward's animated masterwork began as a children's fantasy adventure and became, over ten seasons, one of the most emotionally sophisticated shows on television. Its revelation that the Land of Ooo is a post-nuclear Earth — that Finn is among the last humans — gives the show's warmth and melancholy a profound undertow. Rating: 7.8/10.

Doc Venture — failed super-scientist and son of a legendary one — navigates a world populated by supervillains, super-heroes, and government-sanctioned killers. Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer's Adult Swim series is the richest fantasy-comedy on television: a decades-spanning meditation on legacy, failure, and the gap between who we want to be and who we are. Rating: 8.2/10.

Elena Michaels tries to live as a human in Toronto while her Pack in upstate New York faces an unprecedented threat from mutts — rogue werewolves operating outside the Pack's code. The show handled its mythological worldbuilding with care, particularly the tension between Elena's desire for a normal life and her inevitable nature. Rating: 7.3/10.

Kevin Pacalioglu is a slacker medium who sees ghosts — and who must help them complete whatever unfinished business is keeping them from moving on. The Hulu comedy-fantasy is charming precisely because of how low-key it is: Kevin's supernatural gifts are treated as a mild inconvenience rather than a heroic calling. Rating: 6.7/10.

The Greendale study group's adventures include multiple genre-spanning fantasy episodes — animated D&D sessions, live-action roleplaying catastrophes, and a mid-season clip show featuring a magical origin story for the group's formation. Community understood genre as a tool for emotional revelation, not just entertainment. Rating: 8.3/10.

The postal detective team at the Denver Dead Letter Office solves crimes using undelivered mail. While not conventionally fantastical, the show's use of coincidence, timing, and the poetic resonance of lost letters gives it a romantic, almost magical quality — a warm fantasy of a universe in which things arrive when they are needed. Rating: 7.8/10.

The animated sequel-series to the 2009 blaxploitation parody film places Black Dynamite in increasingly surreal situations involving government conspiracies, ancient mythology, and supernatural forces. The show uses fantasy and magical realism as satirical tools, with results that are simultaneously absurd and sharply political. Rating: 8.0/10.

New York doctor Zoe Hart inherits a medical practice in the fictional small town of Bluebell, Alabama — a place so eccentric, community-minded, and resistant to the modern world that it operates more like a fairy tale than a realistic setting. The show's warmth and its idealized Southern Gothic atmosphere give it a charming fantastical quality. Rating: 7.9/10.

The Bluth family's spectacularly dysfunctional attempts to rebuild their construction company after patriarch George Sr. is arrested for fraud generate a comedy so dense with callbacks, foreshadowing, and layered gags that it functions almost as a puzzle-box fantasy. The show's Season 4 experiment — each episode from a single character's perspective — was the most ambitious thing network comedy had attempted. Rating: 8.2/10.