10 Best Sci-Fi Shows Streaming On Prime Video, Ranked

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Fractured as the world of streaming services may be, Amazon Prime Video remains a fantastic port of call for science fiction aficionados. The streamer has countless hours of wonderful sci-fi shows that run the full gamut from laugh-out-loud funny to unabashedly dramatic and cover themes that range from "our world with one small exception" to "wild space adventures from the deepest pits of imagination." 

Granted, there's competition. Streamers like Apple TV have their own great sci-fi series, and the best sci-fi shows streaming on Netflix are absolute powerhouses. Still, Prime Video remains home to some of the absolute best titles in the game. A list of the platform's finest sci-fi shows features hidden gems that have never quite entered the public discussion, major new projects, and classics that have been part of sci-fi water cooler discussions for ages. There's genuinely something for everyone there — and to make sure that you dive in with full knowledge of the streamer's best offerings, TVLine has collected a list of the 10 best sci-fi shows on Prime Video.   

Cirocco Dunlap is arguably best known for producing and writing the Netflix mindbender "Russian Doll," but her work as the creator-showrunner of Prime Video's excellent "The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy" is at least as impressive. The animated medical comedy-drama knows and absolutely adores every single sci-fi trope it has ever seen and repurposes easily recognizable storylines from genre classics into medical cases of the week. As such, expect brain parasites that lock the patient in a contented state like the spores in the "Star Trek: The Original Series" episode "This Side of Paradise," conditions that get the patient trapped in a time loop, and whatnot. 

This, Dunlap told Awards Daily, is the very point of the show. "What if Ripley from 'Alien' had a place to go where they could treat her," she said. "Or if Bill Murray in 'Groundhog Day' had a place that he could go to help him out. Or John Carpenter's 'The Thing,' and the Thing that was devouring all these creatures could say, 'Hey, I've been eating things and shapeshifting, can you help me out?'" 

Relentlessly funny and wildly inventive, "The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy" has a stacked voice cast featuring the likes of Stephanie Hsu, Keke Palmer, Natasha Lyonne, Kieran Culkin, and Maya Rudolph. Like many of the best animated shows for adults, it juxtaposes jokes and absurdity with very serious real-world problems, such as anxiety and intimacy issues. 

Out of all the shows on this list, Brian Watkins' "Outer Range" might have the simplest yet most effective premise: First, take a ranch in the middle of the majestic landscapes of Wyoming. Then, introduce neo-Western stakes of the "Yellowstone" variety, complete with a big Hollywood star playing the patriarch of the central family. Finally, throw in a big, supernatural, time-bending hole in the ground and refuse to elaborate. 

Such are the issues Royal Abbott (Josh Brolin) and the cast of colorful characters surrounding him and his family wrestle with. Early on, it becomes clear that the hole plays a massive role in the various mysteries and disappearances in the area. Soon, there's no telling who will turn up — or precisely when it will happen, or what age they will be. All along, the hole stubbornly keeps its secrets, which grow more and more ominous. 

"Outer Range" is an attention-grabber of a show, with plenty of interesting twists. Yet, the lack of progress around its central mystery keeps it on the lower end of the top 10, along with the fact that the show was never given enough time to solve it. Prime Video cancelled "Outer Range" in 2024, so we'll never know just how strange its plot might have become over time, let alone whether it would have been able to deliver a satisfying payoff. As it stands, the "Outer Range" Season 2 finale leaves us with few comprehensive answers, which is hardly ideal. 

Speaking of short and sweet sci-fi stories that proceed on multiple timelines, Stephany Folsom's "Paper Girls" would like the floor. Based on the Eisner Award-winning comic by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, the show features a quartet of newspaper delivery girls from the year 1988. After a mysterious attack during their morning rounds, the four girls accidentally time travel to 2019 and unwittingly become important players in a war between two time-traveling factions.

It's a pretty strange situation for four young girls to find themselves in, and it only gets stranger. Unwanted time travel, massive robots, pterodactyls, and older selves of central characters are just a fraction of the oddities that lie ahead, and "Paper Girls" balances all these peculiar plot elements with gusto. The show's greatest strength is using its time-travel concept to explore the gap between childhood expectations and adult reality as the girls come face-to-face with their future selves.

"Paper Girls" is excellent and unique, but it unfortunately suffers from the same issue as "Outer Range. "Paper Girls" ended up joining the ranks of the most unjust cancellations of 2022, with just one fine season and a big 1970s-themed cliffhanger to its name.

Touching and visually brilliant, Nathaniel Halpern's "Tales from the Loop" draws from artist Simon Stålenhag's retrofuturistic visuals that combine 1980s-style everyday landscapes with towering machines and futuristic sci-fi buildings. This gives it a distinct visual identity that's different from pretty much everything else out there — except perhaps Netflix's fellow Stålenhag adaptation "The Electric State," which is slicker but far less effective. 

"Tales from the Loop" has a simple premise. We're in Mercer, Ohio, where a research facility known as the Loop keeps pumping out strange and impossible inventions that affect the environment in unpredictable ways. Here, time and physics are often treated as approximate guidelines instead of laws, androids roam the land, and people change bodies by unwisely exploring old inventions found in the woods. 

The stories on the show are interconnected, yet each stands on its own two legs. They're all absolutely gorgeous and share an otherworldly air of a rusting dystopia that has seen better days but nevertheless seems oddly human and sometimes even outright ... cozy. Unfortunately, "Tales from the Loop" only has one eight-episode season, but its atmosphere alone means that every science fiction fan owes it to themselves to give it a watch.

If you're fond of the best "Black Mirror" episode ever — the Season 3 digital heaven love story "San Junipero" – Greg Daniels' "Upload" should be right up your alley. This comedy-drama kicks off when Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell) finds himself in the idyllic town of Lakeview. He soon finds out that he's dead and that his consciousness has been uploaded into an exclusive afterlife. Here, he befriends others in the same situation and learns that his time in Lakeview is supervised by a living handler called Nora Antony (Andy Allo), who can visit Lakeview as a virtual "angel." 

Unfortunately, man-made heavens are rarely as heavenly as they seem. "Upload" soon introduces plenty of hurdles in Nathan's supposedly luxurious life after death: It's not enough that Lakeview is full of product placement and microtransactions, or even that Nathan's still-living girlfriend Ingrid Kannerman (Allegra Edwards) continues to make his (after)life her business. It soon starts to seem that Nathan's memories have been tampered with, and that his death might not have been an accident.

With "The Office," "King of the Hill," and "Parks and Recreation" in his back pocket, Daniels uses "Upload" to wrap his signature brand of humor and humanity into an inventive sci-fi package. The end result is sleek, supersized, and charming and will easily entice fans of humor and science fiction alike. 

The people behind the Prime Video adult animated series "Undone" are Raphael Bob-Waksberg, who created "BoJack Horseman," and Kate Purdy, who produced and wrote the show. There are no anthropomorphic horses here, but that background still gives you an idea of what particular sci-fi flavors this psychological comedy-drama comes in. 

"Undone" revolves around Alma Winograd-Diaz (Rosa Salazar), who gains the ability to manipulate time after a bad car accident. Before long, she's investigating the death of her long-dead father (Bob Odenkirk), but that's just a small fraction of the time-hopping tale that focuses at least as much on the mental well-being of its characters as it does on sci-fi tropes. 

Made using rotoscope animation, "Undone" manages to be both unbelievable and utterly mundane in the best possible way. Fans of alien overlords and lasers might not eat their fill at this table, but for those who prefer their sci-fi cerebral and existential, the two-season series is a must-watch. 

"Stargate SG-1" should require little in the way of introduction. The show is a stone-cold classic of the military sci-fi genre, with 10 seasons of increasingly deep mythology to its name. Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner's show started out as a TV extension of Roland Emmerich's 1994 film "Stargate," but it was almost immediately clear that the television drama was far better than the movie that inspired it. 

Using a mysterious portal to explore far corners of space is a classic sci-fi trope, but few projects have used it even remotely as efficiently as "SG-1." The show builds a vast mythology around the movie's basic concept of aliens themed like Egyptian deities, constantly expanding its lore with new additions and spin-offs. 

Though the premise is already great, the show's true strength lies in its central cast. Richard Dean Anderson and Michael Shanks thoroughly own the roles of Jack O'Neill and Daniel Jackson, originally played by Kurt Russell and James Spader. With the addition of Amanda Tapping's Samantha Carter and Christopher Judge's Teal'c, the show's secret sauce was complete.

"The Man in the High Castle" leans hard on the speculative fiction side of sci-fi, and the speculation it brings to the table is one of the big ones: What if the Nazis won World War II? 

Based on Philip K. Dick's novel of the same name, Frank Spotnitz's "The Man in the High Castle" takes place in the early 1960s. The world has been effectively divided between the German Reich and the Empire of Japan. The U.S. has succumbed as well, with the Japanese Pacific States controlling the West, the Greater Nazi Reich controlling the East, and a neutral zone separating them. Yet, a strange form of hope lingers: The mysterious Man in the High Castle keeps distributing equally mysterious film reels that seem to depict radically different historical events where the Allies actually emerged victorious and the Axis states lost the war. 

The alternate history setting alone gives "The Man in the High Castle" plenty to play with, and it does deliver with gusto. The moral dilemmas in the storyline featuring the increasingly high-ranking Nazi officer John Smith (Rufus Sewell) alone could power a lesser show. However, "The Man in the High Castle" chooses to reach as high as it can on all fronts, juggling myriad complex plotlines with a captivating ease that makes the four-season series a great binge-watch.

Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet's "Fallout" does the seemingly impossible and adapts Bethesda's video game series in a way that's not only faithful to the source material but actually fits the franchise's overall timeline as part of the larger whole. The show's depiction of post-apocalyptic California often seems directly lifted from the games, with many familiar creatures and factions making an appearance. 

Yet, the show's true masterstroke isn't its faithful world-building. "Fallout" lives and breathes through its main characters, who embody three very different viewpoints. Ella Purnell's Lucy MacLean represents the naive, sheltered Vault Dweller archetype who struggles to adapt to the brutal world outside her shelter. Aaron Moten's Maximus is more used to the horrors of the post-apocalypse, and his association with the militant Brotherhood of Steel gives us an in to one of the most important organizations in the franchise — not to mention its iconic power armor. 

Finally, we have series MVP Walton Goggins, who pulls double duty as pre-apocalyptic film star Cooper Howard and his post-apocalyptic gunslinger incarnation, the Ghoul. As Cooper, Goggins explores the absurdities of the past and how they led to the nuclear apocalypse, while his present-timeline status as the jaded Ghoul counterbalances Lucy and Maximus with his cynical anti-heroism. Put these three together and throw in a massive cast of other delightful characters, and you have all the makings of a wonderfully absurd yet surprisingly moving show. "Fallout" is happy to entertain, but it also isn't afraid to ask big questions about the nature of survival — and whether it should come at the expense of one's humanity.

"The Expanse" might not have started out as an Amazon Original, but it's still one of the sci-fi shows most commonly associated with Prime Video. After Syfy canceled the stellar series after Season 3, Amazon famously picked it up and brought it all the way to Season 6. 

It was a good thing, too, seeing as "The Expanse" might just be the finest spacefaring sci-fi drama of recent years. The story kicks off as a murder mystery, expands into solar system politics that are on the verge of a greater conflict, and even introduces alien tech into the hitherto human-centric narrative for good measure. Though the central heroes of the story are the crew of the commandeered Martian ship Rocinante, "The Expanse" purposefully spreads its key characters across every side of the conflict, allowing the viewer access to multiple vantage points. 

"The Expanse" is the kind of show that can happily throw an old-school detective (Thomas Jane) and a politically minded United Nations deputy undersecretary (Shohreh Aghdashloo) in the mix with more traditional ragtag spacefarers while still keeping things fully coherent and exciting. The dystopian solar system it depicts seems entirely plausible, even at its wildest. While the people living in it rarely have a good time, the viewer most definitely will.