Sci Fi TV Tier Listings

GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
GasBandit said:
Brackets are old and busted anyway. The new hotness is tier listings.
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So I went ahead and made the template for this. Ugh, I had to sign up for twitter (with a burner account of course) to be able to save the template. I feel icky.

tiermaker.com

Create a Space Sci Fi TV Shows Tier List

Science Fiction TV shows with a space theme
tiermaker.com tiermaker.com

And here's my listing.

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S-Tier: Babylon 5. Star Trek TNG. The Expanse. Legendary, genre redefining, must-see TV.

A-Tier: DS9, Firefly, Mandalorian. You really couldn't ask for much more in a series except for more of it.

B-Tier: ST:TOS, ST:Enterprise, Stargates SG1 and Atlantis: Often corny, often flawed, but still a fun watch. Enterprise got a raw deal, IMO, and its only real flaw is the writing of its captain and a couple REALLY bad episodes. Granted, those are big flaws.

C-Tier: Battlestar Galactica (new), Doctor Who, Farscape, ST: Picard, ST:Voyager. Meh. Not the WORST thing ever, but not something I'd pick to watch if there was something else available.

D-Tier: Battlestar Galactica (original), ST: Discovery. Bury it in the desert and ban anyone involved in its production from ever putting pen to paper again.



Incidentally, I can still edit the template, so if I forgot some shows, just chime in and I can add them.
 
Frank

Frank

I CAN'T AGREE WITH EVERYTHING.

Farscape deserves a lot better (and I honestly think Picard is a worse show than Discovery because Discovery is at least not assassinating TNG with it's awfulness) and I think that Firefly is overrated as EFF but it's mostly good.
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It's kind of not fair to the Stargates because while I acknowledge they have their fanbases and are probably good, they never did anything for me. Same thing with Doctor Who.

I honestly want to put B5 higher, but holy shit the special effects are SD and ugly as sin, even at the time they were ugly and poor. Trying to watch it now is very difficult.

FOR REFERENCE, this was airing:



At the same time as this:

 
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Gared

Gared

What about Fox's sci-fi dramedies? I personally would stick Fringe in D and X-Files (original) in B, but I know there are a lot of people out there that hold them both in higher esteem than I do.
 
mikerc

mikerc

Left The Mandalorian off my listing because I haven't got D+ so haven't seen it.

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Although if you're only going to have 1 Scott Bakula series in here then it should be Quantum Leap rather than Enterprise.
 
Frank

Frank

The list of shows is based off the IMDB best sci-fi series of all time tournament they did that I whined about in the random crap thread.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

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S tier - TNG and B 5 defined my childhood and are still the pinnacles of the type of scifi I like best.
A tier - DS9 is great, but it's not as innovative as TNG. Firefly died too young, the Mandalorian was great fun and has potential to become great. Farscape... I dunno. I was really in doubt where to put it. I only watched it 10 or so years after it ended.
B tier: I've only seen the first season of Discovery but it's the new Trek I like best - it feels more trekky to me than Enterprise, or what little I've seen of Picard. I like Dr Who, but I've never really latched on. It has some great parts, though also some really rough bits. TOS was original and stuff for its time, but it feels more dated to me - this has more to do with my age than the show, I guess. Voyager... It's no TNG or DS9, that's for sure. It's got lots of bad bits, but I like it when I was younger and I think it gets a bad rep because it came out more or less at the same time as DS9. The original Battlestar... I haven't seen it in 25 years, but I really did love it as a kid. Another one I struggled with, though. SG-1...maybe it should go a tier higher. I dunno, I liked parts but certainly in the latter seasons I disliked more than I liked.
C-tier: new Battlestar. It had lots of potential, great visuals, good acting and special effects, it was a Thing... And completely crashed and burned in the end. It's like A Game of Thrones, but scifi.
D-tier: two spin-offs that didn't need to exist and retroactively made the original worse. I never made it past the second season of Enterprise, or the third of Atlantis.
Not featured: Picard and the Expanse. Haven't seen them yet.
Post automatically merged:

I do want to say my list is not meant as a fair "which is the best", but a personal "which did I like best". They're definitely different
 
AshburnerX

AshburnerX

I too would put Discovery over Picard, if only because Picard should have been like 3 episodes shorter, should have saved the Borg stuff till Season 2...

... and didn't turn Seven in a space vigilante murderer for shits and giggles.

Also, no Expanse on my list because I haven't seen it.

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Squidleybits

Squidleybits

For the shows that I have seen,, and the given criteria, your ratings are fair.

Personally,I feel that DS9 is the best of the Star Trek shows by far. It did build on the universe created in TNG, so I agree that it isn’t genre-redefining.

I wanted to love Enterprise, but the Captain was such an ass that it became distracting.
Post automatically merged:

I guess I should have replied to the original post. Oops.
 
Kovac

Kovac

I find it hard to pick between DS9 and TNG as they are both such great shows (With some terrible episodes)

When I was younger I would have leaned more heavily towards TNG but as I get older I find myself leaning more towards DS9
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
I had thought about putting X-Files on the list as well as a couple others, but in the end it became clear to me that the original bracket that this post was based off of was limiting itself to space borne shows. and then when that occurred to me I thought I might need to put Futurama and tripping the rift on there, but I decided it didn't really fit the intent of the group.
 
MindDetective

MindDetective

My kids are always listing and asking us about personal favorites (colors, superheroes, animals, whatever.) I find myself just saying now that I don't think about things that way anymore. It feels like wasted mental bandwidth to rank things in the world. It isn't like I am going to use said listings to organize my future watching preferences or anything. And I don't need them to start up a discussion. I'll happily talk about Firefly or the Mandalorian with someone without a cursory comparison between superficially related media in the same genre.

Okay, I am done being @fade for now.

 
PatrThom

PatrThom

I want to participate, but since I would probably only put up maybe a dozen total tiles, I don't know if it'd be worth it.

--Patrick
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

PatrThom said:
I want to participate, but since I would probably only put up maybe a dozen total tiles, I don't know if it'd be worth it.

--Patrick
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I'd be worse, I think my list would consist only of TNG and Lexx: The Dark Zone.

And Lexx would come out ahead because it has a character who's literally a love slave.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

GasBandit said:
Added
Click to expand...
Oh, you gotta add these things by hand? Well, let me call my wife over a sec aaaannnddd...

Space: 1999
Ark II
Thunderbirds (or any of the other sci-fi "Supermarionation" shows)
The Time Tunnel
The Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman
Lost in Space
Outland
Space: Above and Beyond
The Orville
Space Rangers
Quark
Earth 2
Torchwood
Westworld
Sea Quest
Quantum Leap
Cleopatra 2525
V (OG)
V (remake)
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
Starman
Red Dwarf
Blake 7
Star Trek: The Animated Series
The Jetsons
Æon Flux
The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Futurama
The Prisoner
Terminator
Max Headroom
Clone Wars
Sens8

Ones we weren't sure of:
Knight Rider
Street Hawk
The Pretender
The Sentinel
The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
3rd Rock From the Sun
Alf
Voyagers!
Mork & Mindy

And of course all the Japanese stuff:
Starblazers
Ghost in the Shell
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Battle of the Planets
Johnny Socko and his Giant Robot
Ultra Man

...this was 20min of brainstorming and a few searches to look up "that thing with the guy who...oh, you know..."

--Patrick
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
PatrThom said:
Oh, you gotta add these things by hand? Well, let me call my wife over a sec aaaannnddd...

Space: 1999
Ark II
Thunderbirds (or any of the other sci-fi "Supermarionation" shows)
The Time Tunnel
The Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman
Lost in Space
Outland
Space: Above and Beyond
The Orville
Space Rangers
Quark
Earth 2
Torchwood
Westworld
Sea Quest
Quantum Leap
Cleopatra 2525
V (OG)
V (remake)
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
Starman
Red Dwarf
Blake 7
Star Trek: The Animated Series
The Jetsons
Æon Flux
The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Futurama
The Prisoner
Terminator
Max Headroom
Clone Wars
Sens8

Ones we weren't sure of:
Knight Rider
Street Hawk
The Pretender
The Sentinel
The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
3rd Rock From the Sun
Alf
Voyagers!
Mork & Mindy

And of course all the Japanese stuff:
Starblazers
Ghost in the Shell
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Battle of the Planets
Johnny Socko and his Giant Robot
Ultra Man

...this was 20min of brainstorming and a few searches to look up "that thing with the guy who...oh, you know..."

--Patrick
Click to expand...
You clearly didn't read the thread and missed the point.

It's not ANY AND ALL SCI FI SERIES.

As it says in this thread, and in the link, it is space-faring sci fi of non-comedic bent. I guess I should also clarify non-animated.

So the vast majority of that list doesn't apply (or isn't noteworthy enough to merit a D rating or higher)

That said, added Buck Rogers, Lost in Space, Space: Above and Beyond, and The Orville.

If you want an exhaustive all-sci-fi stable, you can make a TierMaker yourself :p
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

GasBandit said:
If you want an exhaustive all-sci-fi stable, you can make a TierMaker yourself :p
Click to expand...
You are correct that I did not read the OP, because I started before it had its own thread and didn't realize the tier page itself had further instructions, so :p yourself.

--Patrick
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
And to reiterate in a less snarky fashion, if anybody has a ton of shows they think should be on the list, there is absolutely nothing to stop you from easily making your own tierbuilder (other than it requires a twitter login). You just name it, upload the pictures of the items you want, and you're done.

Then you can still post your results here, or whatever.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

At the time the show was airing, I didn't care, and by the time I cared, the show was no longer airing. A shame.

--Patrick
 
Shawn

Shawn

I haven't seen a lot of the items on the list to make a tier. Never had an interest in Babylon 5 or Battlestar. Never tried Space Above and Beyond or The Expanse. Even some of the more recent Star Trek series I haven't seen.
If WestWorld was on the list it would be my S tier.
 
fade

fade

Staff member
MindDetective said:
My kids are always listing and asking us about personal favorites (colors, superheroes, animals, whatever.) I find myself just saying now that I don't think about things that way anymore. It feels like wasted mental bandwidth to rank things in the world. It isn't like I am going to use said listings to organize my future watching preferences or anything. And I don't need them to start up a discussion. I'll happily talk about Firefly or the Mandalorian with someone without a cursory comparison between superficially related media in the same genre.

Okay, I am done being @fade for now.

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I resemble that remark.

But yeah. I'll happily rank which ones belong at the bottom, but then again, I think they all kind of do for some things. I mean, I love TNG (and trek in general), but even when I was a teenager I was old enough to realize they treated women pretty crappy (for example). I cringed when I saw 7 of 9's outfit. I mean, sure, I'm a heterosexual dude, so it made me feel funny in places, but I couldn't help but immediately think about what message this otherwise progressive show was sending.
 
fade

fade

Staff member
GasBandit said:
7 was Voyager, tho, not TNG. And Voyager was bad.
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You know, I saw that and thought, "someone's going to read that as 7 being part of TNG", but I was just moving onto the next example from the Trek verse.

For TNG it was really Troi and Yar. Crusher, too. Classic "nurturer" role casting. But especially Troi.
 
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