14 Best TV Shows Similar to Caprica

There’s no honest way to say WondLa looks ugly or uninteresting. The environs, in particular, make wonderful use of gentle pastels broken by sharp primary colors to create a world both beautiful and utterly alien (no pun intended) to our protagonist, Eva (Jeanine Mason). But visually attractive isn’t the same as unique or arresting. Sadly, once one begins to scratch the show’s surface, it reveals many all-too-familiar elements. Sometimes, it is just a general sense of the thing. At others, it is nearly one-to-one. For example, Eva’s first otherworldly ally, Otto (Brad Garrett), is a furry talkative sibling to Raya and The Last Dragon’s Tuk Tuk. Similar design elements are typically easy to accept for this critic, provided the story utilizing them offers enough to chew on. It is here that WondLa truly stumbles. A collection of other “coming of age” and “humanity’s end” stories’ greatest hits, the series never offers something fresh enough to get its audience to sit up and take notice. A collection of strong voice work, including Teri Hatcher—who has proven herself a real voice talent asset over the years—is further hamstrung because the voices come from mostly thinly sketched characters. Sarah Hollis and Jeanine Mason love your new look. (AppleTV+) In some unnumbered future year, Eva is the only child living in a vast underground bunker known as a Sanctuary. Her only true companionship is a robot surrogate parent, Muthr, who sees to the child’s physical—and, with time, inevitably—emotional needs. When Eva turns six, she—and the audience—learns she is part of a program to “save” humans from themselves. Under the direction of Cadmus Pryde (Alan Tudyk in a rare straightforward voice performance), the dwindling human populace built an array of Sanctuaries. In each, a robot raised children until the planet healed from the various environmental catastrophes and violent conflicts people visited upon it. When the Earth is ready and the children properly trained, they will be released to the surface to re-establish society and maybe treat each other and their planet right this time. Continue Reading →

In reviewing Dark Matter, it feels fitting to follow the moral of the show’s story. While it is easy to get lost in forever puzzling over details, the far more useful—and rewarding—path is to take a step back and fully appreciate a thing. There are elements in creator/showrunner Blake Crouch’s adaptation of his own work that do not work, especially concerning pacing. And yet, by the time the credits roll on the final episode, one is largely left satisfied and, perhaps, a bit exhilarated. The temptation to dwell on each choice at the expense of the larger picture is something Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) knows well. But we’re already getting ahead of ourselves. Dark Matters begins with the Jason I’ll christen “our Jason” for clarity. Our Jason is a Physics professor living in Chicago with his wife Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), a former artist who now focuses more on the administrative and business sides of art, and their son Charlie (Oakes Fegley). One night, Jason meets up with his friend Ryan (Jimmi Simpson) to celebrate the latter’s academic success. The vibe is strained, with parties seemingly aware that Jason should’ve received the same award, if not over Ryan, then certainly before him. Continue Reading →

The 1960s Star Trek show did not have the chance to do a true series finale. All of its successors did though, until now. From The Next Generation to Deep Space Nine to Voyager to Enterprise to Picard, every show had the opportunity to make a final statement and sum up the years of adventures in some fashion. Yet, despite being the primogenitor of the franchise, The Original Series just sort of ends, with the sense of the conveyor belt simply stopping, and its last output accidentally becoming an end, if not quite the end. And yet “Turnabout Intruder”, infamous though it may be, is a surprisingly fitting finale for TOS. It features the good notions and abiding themes of the 1960s show: the idea that this crew knows their captain well enough to sniff out a fake; that become a well-functioning team that can work through even the most unorthodox problems, and that after seventy-nine episodes’ worth of outlandish adventures, they remain open to new and unexpected possibilities. It also features the bad ideas and problematic elements that plagued series time and again: from a mixed-at-best perspective on women to William Shatner’s over-the-top acting. In that, the show’s final outing is an inadvertent but strangely apt swan song for the series. In its new season, Star Trek: Discovery follows in those hallowed, unexpected footsteps. This is Discovery’s fifth and final year on the air, but as reported by the cast and crew, they didn’t know that when writing or filming it until the last minute. Despite the promise of a hastily-shot coda to give the show an air of finality, that makes this last leg of Discovery’s mission an accidental ending, not unlike the one endured by the original Star Trek series. Continue Reading →

After averting the Apocalypse and stopping a more militaristic Leaper from the near future by leaping into his own past, Ben (Raymond Lee) and everyone else at Quantum Leap expected him to leap home. Instead, he was nowhere to be seen. Continue Reading →

When Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome) began this season, she harbored nothing but mistrust for Starfleet and resolved to rescue her mother all by herself, even as it turned out Mom didn’t need saving. Now, at season’s end, Mariner returns, ready to fight for both the people and the idea of Starfleet, and she enlists the help of her comrades and colleagues to rescue Captain Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) in a moment where she could really use the save. Continue Reading →

The first season of Avenue 5 premiered in January 2020. The comedic show about a large group of people stuck in the same location for an extended period of time seemed to resonate with audiences who suddenly found themselves in a somewhat similar situation with the emergence of COVID-19. The show’s second season was delayed due to the pandemic and logistical scheduling hurdles of corralling its stacked roster of talent. Nevertheless, show creator Armando Iannucci and company persisted, and 2+ years later, we’re treated to another season of clever space satire in the second season of Avenue 5. Continue Reading →

After fifteen seasons, ever-escalating seasonal arcs, and literally thousands of trips to the afterlife for both Winchester brothers, Supernatural closed its final chapter. Once you’ve killed God, Lucifer, and Death, is there anywhere else to go? The CW, faced with the prospect of losing it’s biggest moneymaker, was already laying the groundwork with Jensen Ackles (who played older brother Dean) for a new spin-off/prequel focusing on John and Mary, the ill-fated parents of the Winchesters. A bold move, considering the story of Mary and John was well-trod ground in Supernatural, even featuring the boys time traveling back to the days of their parents' courtship. Bold, too, because who would want to watch a show about two of the most reviled characters in the show’s history? Supernatural historians will tell you that John was neglectful, with some heavily implied physical abuse. Mary, only getting to know her children as adults, was distant and cold, not the sainted paragon of motherhood she’d been painted as. Continue Reading →

There’s a moment in the second episode of Cowboy Bebop that captures the experience of the entire series. Spike Spiegel (John Cho) fights a man in a bathroom while a wedding takes place in the same building mere yards away. As Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) tries to figure out what’s happening over comms—despite it seeming fairly obvious—Spike gets the upper hand. He pauses, shifts slightly, pauses again, and then kicks the man through a bathroom stall door. The man helpfully stayed in place throughout. Continue Reading →

Invasion, Apple TV+’s newest foray into sci-fi television, follows “ordinary” people around the world as an alien force, well, invades. Created by Simon Kinberg (who writes and directs several episodes) and David Weil (who also created Amazon’s Hunters), Invasion is an engaging slow-burn of a thriller series, building character and atmosphere with the ever-looming threat of an unforeseen enemy. Continue Reading →

Masters of the Universe: Revelation, Netflix's animated reimagining of the iconic He-Man and his amazing friends begins on a familiar note. It kicks off as a continuation of the 80s cartoon—sadly skipping over the Cartoon Network series entirely while still borrowing some of its modern art direction. Revelation checks in with the classic Masters of the Universe just before all magic vanishes from the world. The annihilation of magic (including the Power of Grayskull) paves the way for a bold, watercooler-worthy reset of all that has come before. Given this dramatic paradigm shift, Revelation almost feels like a spin-off, rather than a sequel series. Continue Reading →

Patrick Stewart is still carrying much of the weight as "Star Trek: Picard" continues to pile on the lore & find its footing. “Maps and Legends” improves on Star Trek: Picard’s series premiere. It’s filled to the brim with new lore and exposition and features another extended bout of table-setting. But it also features plenty of Patrick Stewart acting in one-on-one scenes, his forte, and puts him opposite performers who can hold their own. Making those conversations and confrontations a bigger focus here helps balance out the wobbly plot mechanics and less-exciting new faces the series strains to introduce. That catch is that the series still dumps a ton of lore on the audience here. "Maps and Legends" is full of implausible and contradictory nonsense that constantly tries to top or overcomplicate (or both) whatever’s come before. It’s not enough for the Tal Shiar, the Romulan secret police, to be involved in this conspiracy. There has to be an extra-double-secret force that’s even more hidden and even more deadly! Apparently the Romulans just hate androids and A.I. and any complex computing whatsoever, for reasons we’ve never been privy to before but which will assuredly be retconned down the line! Despite that, they still have fancy molecular reconstruction tools and can perfectly scrub a crime scene at the molecular level, but somehow not so well that Picard’s former Tal Shiar buddy can’t figure out what happened! And this new secret agency has also apparently infiltrated the highest ranks of Starfleet, where the latest corrupt commodore turns out to be a sleeper agent whose two goons are going after Dahj’s twin sister! Phew! Continue Reading →