We may earn a commission from links on this page.

In Dan Fogelman’s Paradise, we’re apparently in an affluent suburban town in which everything looks fairly tidy. It’s the home of Sterling K. Brown’s Xavier Collins, a widower and secret service agent, which would be more impressive if the president he’d been serving (James Marsden) hadn’t been murdered (much of the narrative is revealed in flashbacks). Oh, and that cute little town? Turns out that it’s … something else. These 10 shows also come at their dystopian narratives sideways, using science fiction in surprising ways. Stream Paradise on Hulu and then head down these other dark holes.

Silo (2023 – )

Rebecca Ferguson stars as Juliette Nichols, an engineer who gets wrapped up in an investigation involving the local sheriff (David Oyelowo)—usual procedural stuff, except that the characters all inhabit a massive silo, 144 levels deep, protecting the remaining 10,000 humans from the allegedly poisoned world above. Those running the silo have managed to convince everyone left that only strict adherence to rules and procedures will keep them safe from the dangers outside. This is a more dour, less colorful apocalypse than the one in Fallout—it’s a prestige drama that incorporates elements of horror, mystery, and science fiction to tell human stories about fear and control. A third and concluding fourth season are both coming, so the show has the increasingly rare advantage of a planned conclusion. Stream Silo on Apple TV+.

Ascension (2014)

This smart, not terribly well-remembered miniseries establishes an alternate timeline à la For All Mankind: The Kennedy administration sends a generation ship into space (allegedly) in order to ensure the survival of humanity through the Cold War; as the series opens, it’s been just a bit over 50 years since the launch (2014, as it happens). The first murder ever committed on the Ascension raises a ton of questions, as does the fact that nobody back on Earth seems to have ever heard of this massive project. Look out for a couple of shock reveals and smart twists. Stream Ascension on Tubi.

Snowpiercer (2020 – 2024)

Though initially feeling like an unnecessary extension of Bong Joon Ho’s allegorical post-apocalyptic film, Snowpiercer ultimately takes on a life of its own as a clever sci-fi melodrama, smartly recognizing that there are no heroes and few true villains at the end of the world—it’s mostly just people doing whatever they can to survive. In a frozen future, humanity survives on an extremely long train that circumnavigates the globe. If it stops, the power will go out and everyone (literally everyone) will die. Those who came aboard with wealth live near the front in relative luxury, while the poor live on scraps (or worse) in the train’s tail. Daveed Diggs stars as former detective Andre Layton, a “Tailie” deputized by Jennifer Connelly’s Melanie Cavill, engineer and the train’s Head of Hospitality, to solve a series of murders. The inevitable uprising that follows sets the two of them on different sides of a violent conflict, before each eventually realizes they’re just pawns of elites—same as it ever was. It’s far less coy about its sci-fi setting than Paradise, but pays as a similarly apocalyptic political thriller. Stream Snowpiercer on Prime Video and Tubi.

Sugar (2024 – )

Sugar doesn’t try to obscure or downplay its reliance on old-school Hollywood noir tropes: Its characters are driven to emulate the style of antiheroes of old, and clips from old movies even play alongside the action as a means of driving the point home. The central mystery sees detective John Sugar (Colin Farrell) summoned to the mansion of a rich movie producer (James Cromwell), whose granddaughter has gone missing. The first few episodes are intriguing, and  the premise is unique in that Sugar is kind of an anti-anti-hero—he’s an actual nice guy in a world where he’s expected to play the tough guy. The sixth episode, though, drops an absolutely wild, love-it-or-hate it plot twist that drives the remaining episode and, presumably, the forthcoming second season—and that’s where it it heads into Paradise territory as a bit of sneaky, stealthy sci-fi. The show comes from writer Mark Protosevich (The Cell, I Am Legend) and is smartly directed by City of God‘s Fernando Meirelles, so it has style to spare. Stream Sugar on Apple TV.

Wayward Pines (2015 – 2016)

While we’re talking high-concept sci-fi, let’s head off to Wayward Pines, from whence you will never leave. Based on a trilogy of Blake Crouch novels, this one stars Matt Dillon as a secret service agent investigating the disappearances of two fellow agents in the Idaho town of Wayward Pines. Things go awry pretty much immediately, and he wakes up from a car accident to find one of the agents (Carla Gugino), who’s also his ex, having settled down in the seemingly idyllic community—and 12 years older than when he last saw her only a few weeks ago. Even more dramatically, the local sheriff (Terrence Howard) enforces a strict “no one ever leaves” policy, on pain of having one’s neck slit. The mysteries pile up from there. Stream Wayward Pines on Hulu and Disney+.

Fallout (2024 – )

In the world of Fallout, adapted from the video games, the aesthetic of the 1950s hung on for a lot longer than it did in our own, so plot similarities give way, in part, to a unique sense of style. The background is a little complicated, but not belabored within the show itself: It’s 2296 on an Earth devastated two centuries earlier by a nuclear war between the United States and China. Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell) emerges from the underground fallout shelter where she’s lived her entire life in order to find her father, kidnapped by raiders. The aboveground wasteland is dominated by warring factions, each of which considers the others cults and believes that they alone know the correct way forward for mankind. Amid this conflict, the landscape is also overrun by ghouls, gulpers, and other wild radiation monsters, and Lucy seems to be just about the only human with any lingering belief in humanity. Stream Fallout on Prime Video.

The Silent Sea (2021)

Bae Doona (whom you’ll know from everything from Cloud Atlas to Sense8 to Rebel Moon) stars in this twisty-turny sci-fi drama that starts on a dry, near-waterless Earth of the near-future, following a team of astronauts and scientists sent on a mission to an abandoned lunar base. They’re tasked with retrieving a mysterious sample, and it soon becomes clear that the bureaucrats on Earth know a lot more about that sample than they’re telling. Suffice it to say that nothing goes particularly well—there are deaths, betrayals, and a deadly something that might be humanity’s future, but might just as easily be its end. Stream The Silent Sea on Netflix.

Heavenly Delusion (Tengoku Daimakyō) (2023)

We follow two parallel narratives in this (deeply weird) post-apocalyptic anime: In one, a group of children live in a confined, sterile, closely monitored school environment, called “Heaven” and protected from what we quickly learn is the devastation outside; in the other, bodyguard Kiruko and their companion Maru travel across a devastated Japan. Those relatively straightforward dystopian strands soon give way to some wild twists and turns as the plot lines dovetail into a story involving gender and sexual politics as well as a whole lot of dark secrets. Stream Heavenly Delusion on Hulu.

Class of ’09 (2023)

In much the same way that Paradise takes us to a sci-fi-inspired world for a political thriller, Class of ’09 feels like a crime thriller until it doesn’t: Brian Tyree Henry and Kate Mara star as a couple of FBI trainees in 2009 who we follow, concurrently, into two further timeframes: the present, circa 2023, and the future of 2034. The primary thread here is the development of artificial intelligence as a tool to predict crime, and the dangers inherent in targeting people who might only hypothetically commit crime. Prescient only a couple of years ago, the show feels impressively and alarmingly current in our AI-whether-you-like-it-or-not era. Stream Class of ’09 on Disney+ and Hulu.

Severance (2022 – )

Late-stage capitalism encourages “work-life balance” while simultaneously making it impossible, and then makes us feel guilty about it. In Severance, biotechnology giant Lumon Industries has a solution: They split your consciousness between your life at work and your life outside of it. For our lead characters (among them, Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, and Britt Lower) the work- and home-based consciousnesses grow apart to the point that they become different people. The show blends the conventions of office-based dark comedies with movies like Brazil and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, diving into the dangers of modern American-style totalitarian capitalism while providing a reminder that technology often promises to improve our lives while only making them worse. Stream Severance on Apple TV+.