For All Mankind & 9 Other Great Shows About Space From the Last 5 Years
2026 has truly been the year of space, with Artemis II charting its record-breaking journey around the moon, Ryan Gosling making friends with a rock in space, and For All Mankind delivering another epic season of television.
For All Mankind is a series that’s taken a minute to get off the launchpad, at least in terms of acclaim, but is one that’s safely now in orbit thanks to that rarest of things: good, old-fashioned world of mouth.
For five seasons now, the show has worked speculative wonders with the simplest of premises — namely, considering what might have happened if the USSR had been the first nation to land on the moon. The series is the brainchild of Ronald D. Moore, a certified legend in the sci-fi community thanks to his 2003 relaunch of Battlestar Galactica and for successfully adapting Outlander to the small screen.
With For All Mankind’s fifth season now over, it got us thinking about all the other space-based TV shows that have caught our imagination in the last five years.
In the list below, you’ll find nine of the best of them to fill the void. Read on for a bit more information about each one and use the guide below to find out where to stream them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
It might have taken a few episodes to settle in, but Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby’s adaptation of James S. A. Corey’s The Expanse is now widely considered to be one of the greatest sci-fi shows of the last 20 years.
Fergus and Ostby made their name as additional co-screenwriters on modern sci-fi classics like Children of Men and Iron Man before going it alone in 2016 with The Expanse, a noirish tale of interplanetary conspiracy set in a fully colonised solar system at some point in the distant future. The show ran for three years on Syfy before being cancelled, but thankfully it was quickly brought back to life on Amazon, where it went on to finish its celebrated six season run.
What in the world is going on with 3 Body Problem? For the first Season, Game of Thrones helmers D.B. Weiss and David Benioff had successfully managed to visualise the mathematical intricacies of Liu Cixin’s best-selling sci-fi novel for the small screen, but it’s been over two years since it dropped on Netflix.
Word is that Season 2 will be with us at some point later this year, so if you’re a fan of speculative space shows that focus on human-level problem solving while using the biggest narrative canvases imaginable, make sure to check out the first season as soon as possible.
If you liked the hard sci-fi elements of The Expanse and appreciate the approach of classic writers like Isaac Asimov, David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman’s Apple TV adaptation of that legendary author’s genre-defining Foundation novels will be right up your alley. Set some 50,000 years in the future, the show can’t boast the Earthly relatability of For All Mankind, but its allegories about power and civilizations are just as resonant.
If you’re a devoted fan of the books, be ready for a little creative license when it comes to the original texts — which Asimov stretched out over multiple Centuries — but the series (which has so far resulted in three seasons, with another on the way) comes with a lot more action and a wonderful cast of actors, including Jared Harris as Hari Sheldon and Lee Pace as Brother Day.
It says everything you need to know about Andor that the prequel series is now considered by some die-hard fans to be the best addition to the Star Wars universe since The Empire Strikes Back — with some going even further than that.
Written by Tony Gilroy, this is a show that uses the world of George Lucas’ creation to talk about oppression, colonialism, fascism, and the impossible decisions that some people have to make for a revolution to succeed. It also boasts wonderful performances from Fiona Shaw, Diego Luna and Stellan Skarsgård. If you like all the juicy political themes of For All Mankind and appreciate Gilroy’s work on movies like Michael Clayton, I honestly can’t recommend it enough.
It’s kind of amazing to think that six standalone Star Trek shows (on three different platforms) have been released in the last ten years. As far as the Trekkie community is concerned, the best of these has been Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — which is about to enter the fourth of its five planned seasons on Paramount Plus.
Set in the years leading up to the original series (and also JJ Abrams’ 2009 reboot film), the show follows Captain Cristopher Pike (Kirk’s predecessor on the Enterprise) and his crew as they go on various adventures, one world and one episode at a time — a classic Star Trek approach that chimes perfectly with the series’ throwback aesthetics and the nostalgic opening narration. If you are partial to the world of Star Trek and are wondering what recent series is worth a watch, look no further.
Compared to what Dan Trachtenberg has been doing with the Predator universe, the recent additions to the Alien franchise have been divisive, to say the least. 2024’s Alien: Romulus certainly looked the part, but Fede Álvarez’s decision to play fast and loose with the lore and inner logic of these movies was enough to turn some long-time fans into puddles of corrosive Xenomorphic goo.
Similar things can be said about FX’s Alien: Earth, but if you’re a fan of the more meditative parts of the Alien universe (think more in line with Prometheus, less with Aliens) and willing to approach it as its own thing, there is a lot to appreciate – not least the memorable cast of actors and all the creepy crawlies they have to deal with.
Given how expensive they are to produce, it’s not surprising that sci-fi shows have seemingly suffered more unreasonable cancellations than any other genre of TV. Case in point was Raised by Wolves, a Ridley Scott-produced show that was reduced to collateral damage status after HBO’s WarnerMedia merged with Discovery.
That decision left fans of the Android-centric show with a huge hole in their viewing schedules, but even without a satisfying conclusion, the show’s two seasons are still a fascinating watch. If you liked For All Mankind and are looking for something a little more on the weird sci-fi spectrum, this one might be for you.
As for Raised by Wolves, so too for Scavenger’s Reign — one of the most critically acclaimed animated shows in recent years and one of the most surprising cancellations in that time, too.
Created by Joe Bennett and Charles Huettner, this beautifully rendered series follows the stranded survivors of a crashed cargo ship as they attempt to survive on a naturally diverse planet called Vesta. If you’re a fan of ecologically-focused sci-fi movies like Annihilation and High Life, you should definitely check it out.
Last on our list of recent space shows is the Apple TV+ series Invasion, which takes place on Earth but is mostly concerned with beings from elsewhere. As the title suggests, it’s a story about an alien invasion told from the perspective of various characters around the globe.
The series, which ran for three seasons between 2021 and 2025, was created by David Weil and Simon Kinberg — the latter of whom was responsible for producing the X-Men movies for Fox as well as Ridley Scott’s The Martian. His credits as writer and director are a little patchier, but he definitely knows how to tell a story like this.
