5 TV Shows With Better Worldbuilding Than Harry Potter

Worldbuilding has become an integral part of genre television. It’s not enough that a series tells a satisfying narrative; it needs a foundation built on lore deep enough to fill out a dozen wiki pages. While it isn’t a necessity for every series to be a success, it’s become an increasing focus for many. In many ways, series are built for this kind of worldbuilding in ways that movies are not. They can fill out the details of their worlds over multiple episodes and seasons rather than being confined to a runtime of a few hours. There are those films that have managed some very impressive worldbuilding despite their limitations, none more magically than the Harry Potter films. From the very first film, the big screen franchise brought the Wizarding World to life with incredible detail and atmosphere that had audiences across the globe wishing they’d get their own letter from Hogwarts in the mail. Each subsequent film brought even more detail to the world, despite the fact that they increasingly had to cut material from the books in order to make their runtimes manageable.

The fact that so much of the source material didn’t make it on screen was likely what motivated Warner Bros. to reboot the franchise as a series on HBO Max. It remains to be seen whether the upcoming Harry Potter series will successfully build out its world better than the decades-old film franchise did, but there are several series that the creators would have done well to take notes from. These are series that have developed strange new worlds in ways that are even more immersive than the Potter films. They’re sci-fi and fantasy landscapes filled with lore, history and all kinds of colorful characters. Their devoted fanbases are proof enough that these five TV shows have some of the absolute best worldbuilding.

‘Game of Thrones’ (2011-2019)

Image via HBO

The most obvious comparison to Harry Potter‘s world is the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros from Game of Thrones. Though they are both fantasy properties based on popular novels, Potter‘s low fantasy world is child’s play compared to the denser mythology of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels. Regardless of how controversial the show’s ending was, it produced several dynamic seasons that dutifully adapted Martin’s world into copious amounts of flesh and blood. The series tracked dozens of characters, their political machinations and changing allegiances without ever succumbing to overbearing exposition.

Having Martin’s text to use as a foundation for the series might seem like it has an unfair advantage over those that are created out of whole cloth, but there are unique challenges to adapting existing works versus creating wholly original ones. A series, even a long-running one, can’t manage the level of detail an author like Martin can pack into a paragraph, but where he was limited to words on the page, the series had the benefit of immaculate production design and stellar visual effects. Beyond the technical aspects and setting aside some questionable narrative changes, the writing impressively condensed the worldbuilding into digestible bits of dialogue woven throughout the larger plot. Game of Thrones set a high bar for modern fantasy television, and no show has been able to clear it since.

‘The Expanse’ (2015-2022)

Image via Syfy

Also based on a series of novels, though ones set in a far-off future rather than an antiquated fantasy realm, The Expanse has richly detailed worlds populated with characters navigating a fractured political landscape. The novels, written by two authors under the pen name James S.A. Corey, explore an interstellar world where our solar system has been colonized, creating a clash of cultures between the governments of the most powerful planets. Amidst this interplanetary conflict are the series’ central characters, who collectively become part of the larger conspiracy that drives the narrative.

Authoritarian regimes, alien technology and a noir detective mystery all play a part in the twisting plot lines that play out over six seasons, but the series manages to balance them all. It also includes its own fictional language developed for the series, Belter Creole, as spoken by the lower-class citizens who occupy the asteroid belt. That attention to detail serves The Expanse well, but it also knows how to use more succinct storytelling, as evidenced by the title sequence, which conveys an incredible amount of history and series information through visuals alone. The Expanse tells a compelling story of human nature out among the stars, and it mirrors our current age with a brilliantly realized sci-fi world.

‘Star Trek’ (1966-Current)

What makes the worldbuilding of Star Trek stand out from its other sci-fi contemporaries is how infinitely expansive it is. Across twelve TV shows, not to mention the numerous feature films, Gene Roddenberry‘s creation has gifted sci-fi fans with whole new civilizations, cultures and timelines that offer a wondrous future world to aspire to. Whether you’re a fan of the OG crew, The Next Generation, or even the young cadets of Starfleet Academy, there’s no end to the worldbuilding on the final frontier.

So many of the tenets of franchise worldbuilding can be traced back to Star Trek, from its development of entire races with unique languages and cultural customs to its aspirational technology, which has influenced many real-world inventions. Even in the earlier series, where the episodic format didn’t lend itself to expansive worldbuilding or a strict adherence to continuity, there is always a sense of larger events occurring outside the frame. Star Trek has endured for decades because its universe has always had such endless potential.

‘Arcane’ (2021-2024)

Image via Netflix

For a series with only two seasons that was inspired by a video game that was comparatively light in its fairly derivative worldbuilding, Arcane manages one of the most full-realized animated worlds of the streaming era. When so many recent news stories have focused on how streamers like Netflix focus on repetition in their storytelling to keep distracted viewers engaged, it’s refreshing to watch any original series that stands in strict defiance of that, with complex characters in a socially divided world of magic and technology.

The war between the rich and the poor is a simple but always effective basis for any story, and Arcane uses it to great effect to illustrate the widening gap between its sister protagonists. Both the wealthy world of Piltover and the economically distressed city of Zaun are richly designed and brought to life through the series’ striking animation. While the show began as a spin-off from League of Legends, it far surpassed that video game in every aspect of its production, giving fans and non-gamers alike a beautifully rendered world of haves and have-nots that felt fresh and vibrantly alive.

‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ (2005-2008)

Image via Nickelodeon

In terms of worldbuilding, animated series have been eating the lunch of live-action for decades. Anime in particular has a long history of developing deep, expansive lore. Shows like One Piece, Attack on Titan, or Fullmetal Alchemist all have dense, more richly detailed worlds than those found in Harry Potter, but if there’s one animated series that took great inspiration from anime to craft a rich mythology that has proven durable, it’s Avatar: The Last Airbender. In the nearly two decades since the show’s end, nothing has quite compared to its diverse cast of characters and their war to maintain the balance of the four nations.

Following Aang, the titular Avatar and last survivor of the Air Nomads, the series details the genocidal war led by the Fire Nation, encompassing themes of totalitarianism, corruption, fate and moral clarity in a world steeped in various cultural influences, particularly Asian cultures. Far beyond mere appropriation, the series embraced its cultural influences and many of the philosophies inherent to them to build its fictional world with meticulous care and detail. Compared to this, the world of Harry Potter might as well be a rough sketch in crayon.