From Space: 1999 to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, some really great sci-fi shows exist in the shadow of Star Trek. Star Trek wasn’t an immediate success when it premiered in 1966 — in fact, it was canceled after just three seasons — but it eventually found a fan base in syndication.
The Star Trek franchise remains an enduring staple of pop culture to this day, and it’s inspired generation after generation of sci-fi writers. A lot of great sci-fi TV shows, like Firefly and The Orville, owe a debt to Star Trek.
Farscape
In a lot of science fiction, humanity deals with its first contact with aliens. But Farscape flips the script and makes its human protagonist the alien. When modern-day American astronaut John Crichton accidentally travels through a wormhole near Earth, he finds himself an extraterrestrial fugitive in an unknown corner of the universe, desperate to get home.
Farscape arrived at a time when the Star Trek franchise was in decline, and it made efforts to subvert the Star Trek formula and tell its own kind of spacefaring story — for one, it’s much weirder and much more self-aware. The series’ otherworldly alien characters looked totally distinctive, thanks to the makeup, prosthetics, and animatronics designed by the incomparable Jim Henson Company.
Space: 1999
Space: 1999 was essentially the Brits’ answer to Star Trek. Its premise is a touch more bizarre than Star Trek — it turns the Moon into an uncontrollable spacecraft — but the basic format is the same. It centers on the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, which is hurtling through space following a nuclear explosion on the Moon’s far side.
As ridiculous as that sounds, the series itself is a controversial classic. It’s been criticized for its wooden acting and scientific inaccuracy, but it’s been praised for its stunning visuals, high production values, and the ambition of its storytelling. Space: 1999 is a morality play in space, but it’s also Star Trek on acid.
Earth: Final Conflict
When Star Trek was originally canceled in 1969, creator Gene Roddenberry began working on a handful of other projects that never came to fruition. One of these scripts was Battleground: Earth, another sci-fi show that wouldn’t spark any interest in Hollywood until the Star Trek franchise was revived with the movie series and The Next Generation, and it was too late.
After Roddenberry passed away, his widow, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, retooled the show as Earth: Final Conflict and finally got it produced. The series sees an alien race called the Taelons coming to Earth. As the Taelons share their advanced technology and wipe out Earth’s wars and diseases, a resistance movement forms among people questioning the aliens’ motives.
Buck Rogers In The 25th Century
After its pilot episode was released to some box office success in the sci-fi boom of the late ‘70s, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was quickly commissioned as a weekly series. It’s decidedly pulpier than Star Trek, but it was tapping into the cultural moment that Star Trek’s big-screen comeback had helped to instigate (although Star Wars technically kickstarted it).
Since it arrived in this post-Star Trek, post-Star Wars sci-fi boom, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was criticized as a cynical attempt to cash in on one of the greatest icons in American pop culture, but it’s an enjoyable show. It’s a fun bit of throwaway comic-strip sci-fi entertainment, but not much more.
Babylon 5
J. Michael Straczynski made an admirable effort to match the ambition and vision and timely social commentary of Roddenberry’s Star Trek with his own spacebound sci-fi epic, Babylon 5. Babylon 5 takes place aboard the eponymous five-mile-long space station and chronicles the interpersonal drama between all its passengers over the course of five years.
Much like in Star Trek, the characters who are drifting through space in the distant future are rounded out as relatable human beings. It’s essentially a small-town soap opera, except that small town exists on a giant structure floating across the cosmos, and it’s set against the political tension of a looming war.
Andromeda
After the success of Earth: Final Conflict, another one of Roddenberry’s unrealized projects was posthumously developed into a series. Genre-wise, Andromeda is more of a space opera than the hard sci-fi show that Star Trek was, but the complex political worldbuilding is in the same vein as Roddenberry’s groundbreaking work on Star Trek.
The series revolves around an interstellar government called the Systems Commonwealth, which enjoyed a period of peace and prosperity before it was brought down in a ruthless rebellion led by the trigger-happy Nietzcheans and the parasitic Magog. Without Roddenberry himself at the helm, Andromeda’s interesting underlying ideas were executed with goofy dialogue, underdeveloped characters, and a half-baked vision.
Firefly
Roddenberry’s original concept for Star Trek was essentially Wagon Train to the stars. It would be a classic frontier western, except the frontier the cast would be crossing was outer space. Joss Whedon adapted that premise more literally with his brilliant but sadly short-lived series Firefly. Firefly adheres to the western genre much more overtly, recontextualizing all the usual tropes in a futuristic setting.
Firefly takes place in the aftermath of a devastating civil war, as society struggles to rebuild, and follows a crew of gunslingers as they get into shootouts and train robberies. Nathan Fillion’s Mal Reynolds is more Han Solo than Captain Kirk, but Firefly taps into Star Trek’s timeless tale of a tightknit crew going on wild intergalactic adventures.
Battlestar Galactica
The 2000s reimagining of Battlestar Galactica is one of the greatest TV shows ever made. It’s a quintessential piece of military science fiction that captured the zeitgeist during the War on Terror with its allegorical conflict between the humans and the Cylons. But the original 1978 series it was based on was much less original.
Glen A. Larson’s original Battlestar Galactica essentially set out to merge the futuristic profundity of Star Trek with the action-packed spectacle of Star Wars, in order to cash in on the blockbuster returns of the latter and the resurgence in popularity for the former. It wasn’t 100% successful, but the original Battlestar Galactica more than earned its title as a cult classic.
SeaQuest DSV
After Star Trek had imagined a military crew stationed in outer space, SeaQuest DSV went in the other direction and imagined a military crew stationed deep below the surface of the ocean. Roy Scheider’s Captain Nathan Bridger is the designer and commander of the titular “deep-submergence vehicle,” a high-tech naval submarine scouring the ocean floor for the last remaining natural resources on Earth.
Much like Star Trek, SeaQuest DSV contrasts the sci-fi spectacle of its plot with the relatable human drama of its characters. And, much like Star Trek, it wasn’t just escapist entertainment; it carried an important message. SeaQuest warned viewers that humanity was depleting the Earth’s natural resources (and, as usual, humanity didn’t listen).
The Orville
When it was first announced that Seth MacFarlane was developing a Star Trek-inspired sci-fi series, the expectation was that, in the vein of Family Guy, it would be a self-aware satire with vulgar humor and random cutaway gags. But when The Orville arrived, it turned out to be an uncharacteristically earnest effort from MacFarlane.
It has some humor, of course, but above all, it’s a heartfelt love letter to Star Trek. MacFarlane clearly has a lot of affection for Roddenberry’s iconic franchise, and he perfectly recreated its lighthearted tone, old-school effects, and sincere optimism about the future. Out of all the shows on this list, The Orville comes the closest to recapturing the spirit of Star Trek.
