9 Sci-Fi Shows Better Than ‘The X-Files’

Look, The X-Files is a classic. Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) are icons. Millennials put the show’s theme song in their Halloween playlist rotation every year. But being the best remembered isn’t the same as being the best. Nostalgia has a way of smoothing over the rougher patches of the beloved sci-fi saga — the mythology that kept promising answers, later seasons that lost the thread, and a revival that reminded you why too much of a good thing is an idiom that’s always accurate in the world of television.

The X-Files has more than earned its spot in the cultural pantheon, but it’s not the last word on the genre as a whole. Below, we’ve rounded up the sci-fi shows that are actually better than the cult icon.

‘The Expanse’ (2015–2022)

Image via Prime Video

Set two hundred years in the future across a colonized solar system, The Expanse follows a ragtag crew aboard a salvage ship who stumble onto a conspiracy so massive it threatens every faction of humanity. Steven Strait leads as Jim Holden, a man allergic to staying out of other people’s problems, and he’s joined by Cas Anvar, Dominique Tipper, Wes Chatham, and Shohreh Aghdashloo. Where The X-Files mostly just delivered mythology soup, The Expanse actually followed through on its mysteries.

The ominous Protomolecule driving most of the action is an alien substance that infects living tissue and starts rebuilding it into something else, following instructions from whatever sent it billions of years ago with no regard for the people it’s rewriting in the process. It’s not a monster you can shoot or an alien you can negotiate with, and the show has the good sense to never fully explain what it’s building toward. Syfy cancelled the series after three seasons, but its fanbase organized a campaign so committed it involved a plane trailing a banner over Amazon headquarters until the show found a new home there, earning six total seasons with physics accurate enough that NASA reportedly signed off on it. That kind of second life doesn’t happen for shows that aren’t doing something right.

’12 Monkeys’ (2015–2018)

Image via SYFY

Adapted from Terry Gilliam‘s bizarre 1995 film, Syfy’s 12 Monkeys is the rare TV adaptation that understood its source material well enough to improve on it. Aaron Stanford plays James Cole, a time traveler from a plague-decimated 2043 sent back to prevent the outbreak. He partners with virologist Cassandra Railly (Amanda Schull), who gets progressively less patient with being kidnapped through time (and more interesting as a character as a result). The show’s mythology, about a death cult called the Army of the 12 Monkeys trying to end time itself, sounds completely deranged. But they are, and that’s the whole point.

The show sported a phenomenal supporting cast with a finale that’s still one of the most satisfying endings in recent memory. If you miss The X-Files vibe of two people chasing something they can’t fully explain but can’t stop running toward, Cole and Cassie have the same exhausted, devoted energy… just with a healthy disrespect for the laws of physics.

‘Twin Peaks’ (1990–2017)

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Before David Lynch and Mark Frost‘s small-town murder mystery arrived, prestige television as a concept was largely theoretical. Laura Palmer’s (Sheryl Lee) plastic-wrapped body washing ashore in a Washington logging town launched a national obsession and changed what network TV thought it was allowed to do. Kyle MacLachlan‘s Agent Dale Cooper — a man who narrates his every observation into a tape recorder and considers a good cup of coffee a spiritual experience — is the single best FBI investigator in television history, and it isn’t close. (Sorry, Mulder.)

The original two seasons remain essential viewing, even when the show cannibalizes itself. But Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017 is somehow better, 18 episodes of pure Lynchian theatrics on a ballooned prestige budget. The X-Files built its whole identity around unresolved dread, which worked until the unresolved part started feeling like the writers had lost the map. Twin Peaks had dread baked into its DNA from the pilot. The mystery was always secondary to the atmosphere, which meant it couldn’t ever be ruined by a bad answer.

‘Fringe’ (2008–2013)

Image via FOX

Fox gave J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci money to make a show about fringe science — telekinesis, reanimated corpses, engineered diseases, the occasional exploding head — and they delivered five seasons of television that started as a procedural and ended as a meditation on parenthood and parallel universes. Anna Torv‘s FBI agent Olivia Dunham anchors the whole thing with the right amount of intensity. John Noble as the eccentric, institutionalized genius Walter Bishop is maybe the greatest performance in genre television, a man who destroyed the world and spent decades reconstructing his own sanity. And Joshua Jackson is there too, being charming, which is simply his natural state of existence.

The show’s secret weapon is its alternate universe where every character you love chooses to be different, sometimes worse, versions of themselves. Fringe ran for five seasons and ended on its own terms, a luxury that remains rare. Sure, its ratings were always precarious and its timeslot was a death sentence more than once, but its fanbase kept it breathing through sheer stubbornness. The monster-of-the-week formula it borrowed from The X-Files is just the container. What’s inside is considerably weirder and, in its final seasons, genuinely moving.

‘Counterpart’ (2017–2019)

Image via Starz

A double-dose of J. K. Simmons. That’s the pitch of Counterpart, and it’s more than enough. Starz’s Cold War-inflected sci-fi thriller is built around a single high-concept premise: the Berlin Wall came down, but underneath it, decades prior, two parallel Earths split apart. Now they share a crossing point, maintained in secret, and both versions of Howard Silk — one timid UN bureaucrat, one ruthless intelligence operative — must navigate a spy war between worlds. It is bleak and fascinating.

Starz cancelled the show after two seasons, but what we did get was a competent, well-acted thriller that used its sci-fi premise for exactly what sci-fi is supposed to do: ask what you would become if the universe had arranged itself differently. The X-Files chased monsters, but Counterpart made you paranoid about your own reflection.

‘Battlestar Galactica’ (2004–2009)

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Ronald D. Moore‘s reimagining of the campy 1978 original arrived in 2003 with a miniseries plus four seasons that were so politically urgent and unwilling to offer easy comfort that it reset the bar for what science fiction on television could be. Humanity survives a genocidal attack by the Cylons — robots of our own making, some of whom now look exactly like us — by fleeing in a fleet of ships led by Commander William Adama (Edward James Olmos) and the newly appointed President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell, doing career-best work).

At its peak, Battlestar Galactica was bona fide appointment television. Shakespeare in space, some might argue. The show aired during the height of the Iraq War and was not subtle about where its sympathies lay on questions of torture, martial law, and what democracies do when they’re desperate. It stumbles in its final season, but the journey is extraordinary.

‘Black Mirror’ (2011–Present)

Charlie Brooker’s British anthology series began airing on Channel 4 with a premiere episode about a British Prime Minister being blackmailed into having sex with a pig on live television. It got progressively weirder (and prescient) from there. Each standalone episode drops a different cast into a different near-future scenario that functions as a referendum on some aspect of technology’s grip on modern life — think social media ratings systems, grief simulation, memory playback, a dating app that uses a compatibility algorithm to assign relationship expiration dates. Some episodes are horror, some are tragedy. A handful of episodes are even (shockingly) hopeful.

Netflix acquired it in 2016 and the episodes got bigger, the casts glossier. But the hits: “San Junipero,” “USS Callister,” “Nosedive,” and “White Bear,” are among the best individual hours of television made in the last two decades. The beauty of the anthology format is that a bad episode costs you an hour and nothing else. The frustration is that there’s no ongoing mythology to sink into, no Mulder to follow down the rabbit hole. Black Mirror works differently: that’s kind of the point.

‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ (1987–1994)

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The argument for The Next Generation over The X-Files is pretty simple: Patrick Stewart. Sir Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, an archaeologist, diplomat, wine enthusiast, is one of the great TV characters, full stop. The surrounding ensemble is equally strong: Marina Sirtis‘ Counselor Troi, Brent Spiner‘s android Data grappling with questions of personhood, Jonathan Frakes being rakishly charming… it all works. Over seven seasons and 178 episodes, the show left a cultural footprint so large we’re still marveling at its size.

It made space feel vast and strange again, populated it with moral complexity that didn’t always resolve neatly. The X-Files was built on the assumption that people in power are lying to you, which is an easy argument to make and, honestly, usually correct. The Next Generation was interested in the harder question: what if we chose to trust each other anyway?

‘Station Eleven’ (2021–2022)

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HBO Max’s adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel‘s novel aired during a pandemic, which should have made it unwatchable, but somehow made it essential instead. The story moves across multiple timelines before and after the Georgia Flu kills most of humanity. The main plot follows a traveling Shakespeare company performing across the Great Lakes region 20 years after the collapse, tracing backward the connections between a man named Jeevan (Himesh Patel), a child actress named Kirsten (Matilda Lawler and later Mackenzie Davis), and a graphic novel called Station Eleven that keeps surfacing among the wreckage. Gael García Bernal plays Arthur Leander, whose death in the opening scene ripples outward across every timeline. (It is not a coincidence that he’s performing King Lear when he goes.)

The show’s refusal to be a survival horror drama when all genre expectations pointed that direction was its greatest act, turning a post-apocalypse story into something closer to a meditation on art, memory, and the enduring power of human connection. If The X-Files spent seasons insisting the worst things imaginable were coming, Station Eleven set that world on fire and then asked what we’d bother to salvage. The answer, obviously, is Shakespeare.