10 Sci-Fi TV Shows We'll Be Glued To This Year

With so much science-fiction coming this year, fans are spoiled for choice.

By Mik Furie /

It's safe to say that science-fiction TV has gone through a bit of a renaissance in the past decade or so, finally moving on from the monster-of-the-week adventures where everything has to be back to the status quo by the end of the episode.

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Shows these days respect their viewers enough to keep up not only with increasingly complex storylines and characters who don't always act in logical ways, but also with understanding the technology they're showing. They do this without stopping every few minutes to launch into some exposition about why technology X works and how it makes technology Y possible.

With the viewers trusted to make these leaps themselves, there's more room for story and characterization in the shows we watch. There's also more room for experimentation. Those series built for streaming services are free to change their lengths to fit the story as well, rather than being built around a certain amount of time to show adverts, and the format has widened to include documentaries, sitcoms, and dramatic serials alike.

Fans have never been so spoiled for choice, and these ten shows are only a few of the ones we're looking forward to this year.

10. Stranger Things

While the quality of the Netflix's Stranger Things has been a rollercoaster ride even for the most ardent fan, the combination of Goonies-style kid-led adventure with some truly creepy monsters and a nicely simplified look at pocket (very much not parallel) universes has been a winning formula.

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When the show ended its third season, poor Will Byers was finding his friends had started to grow beyond him, Eleven was infected by the Mind Flayer and had lost her powers as a result, and everyone's favourite grumpy copper Jim Hopper had bravely sacrificed himself right next to a portal to another world.

Despite the final moments of the series showing us that the Russians were experimenting with a gateway to the other world and had an American prisoner, the recent trailer had a "shocking" reveal that Hopper was still alive and somehow a prisoner in a snowy area guarded by Russian-looking fellows.

How will he escape? Will the threat from the Russian gateway to the Upside Down affect Hawkins, Indiana? How will the currently stateside kids play into a seemingly Russian story? We'll find out when we binge every episode the moment they drop.

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