Prime Video's 6-Part Space Series Made Sci-Fi Look Easy

Who would make a sci-fi series? As amazing as the genre can be, it’s rife with potential pitfalls. The “science” element demands some degree of plausibility, but the “fiction” side demands fantasy and imagination. At the same time, the prevalence of major franchises such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien, and Doctor Who makes it virtually impossible to be totally original. More than any other genre, sci-fi is filled with copycats and recurring tropes.

Sci-fi is, therefore, a challenging beast to tackle, and that often comes across onscreen. Sometimes you can feel the script pulling back-and-forth between serious business and a lighthearted slant. On other occasions, a sense of déjà vu envelops a storyline you’ve definitely seen somewhere before. Plenty of times in the past, the limitations of budget have become painfully obvious.

Some sci-fi shows will even bend over backwards to avoid being predictable – like when Westworld responded to Reddit predicting a twist, or when Doctor Who stopped using Daleks for the second or third time.

Very rarely, a sci-fi show comes along that makes the whole thing look surprisingly easy.

The Expanse Made Sci-Fi TV Look Easy

By all accounts, The Expanse was not an easy TV show to make – not least because it switched midway from SyFy to Amazon to avoid an abrupt cancellation. Nevertheless, the finished product makes navigating the genre itself look strangely like smooth sailing.

The Expanse nestles into a sweet spot between realistic and fantastical that few other sci-fi series locate as successfully. On one hand, the mechanics of ship propulsion and space battles adhere to laws of semi-believable physics, and there’s a strict rule that no little green men in flying saucers show up. Through the Protomolecule, however, The Expanse gets away with all kinds of crazy nonsense, from glowing blue super soldiers to reanimated dead. And, weirdly, it all kind of makes sense.

Many sci-fi TV shows drop the ball because they keep making the same play over and over again, responding to audience reactions and always attempting to one-up what came before. And if the series belongs to an existing franchise, there’s often a concerted effort to reinvent the IP without smashing canon completely and inciting fandom ire.

A large part of The Expanse‘s success can be attributed to its blueprint. By taking the novels by James S.A. Corey and sticking to them faithfully – even when the prospect of cancellation beckoned – The Expanse unfolds like one big saga, building and building in an organic and logical way. There’s no agenda beyond telling the best space-faring story possible and making it look pretty.

The Expanse Shows The Importance Of Original Sci-Fi

Thomas Jane in The Expanse episode "It Reaches Out."

Compare The Expanse to the other major multi-season sci-fi TV series of the 2010s and 2020s, Star Trek: Discovery, and the difference is night and day. Star Trek: Discovery struggled against the restrictions of the franchise’s established timeline, then moved into the far-future to avoid them. Even after altering its approach, Star Trek: Discovery never escaped questions over being “proper Trek,” nor inquiries over the fates of specific characters, planets, or species.

As a result, Star Trek: Discovery never looked fully comfortable in its own skin. And yet, if the show had merely been Discovery without any connection to Star Trek whatsoever, it surely would have had an easier ride.

The Expanse is able to define its own parameters and rules, set its own tone and expectations, and do so within the confines of a completely untouched universe. It inevitably would have had a far harder time as an expansion of an older, more storied franchise.

That’s not to say a spinoff, reboot, or revival can’t “look easy” – Alien: Earth makes reinventing a familiar brand look deceptively simple – but The Expanse highlights that the best way to take advantage of sci-fi‘s capacity for imagination is by removing those self-imposed barriers to creativity.

Release Date: 2015 – 2022-00-00
Network: SyFy, Prime Video
Showrunner: Naren Shankar, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
Directors: Breck Eisner, Jeff Woolnough, David Grossman, Kenneth Fink, Rob Lieberman, Terry McDonough, Thor Freudenthal, Bill Johnson, David Petrarca, Jennifer Phang, Mikael Salomon, Sarah Harding, Marisol Adler, Anya Adams, Nick Gomez, Simon Cellan Jones
Writers: Georgia Lee, Robin Veith, Hallie Lambert, Matthew Rasmussen, Ty Franck, Naren Shankar, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Daniel Abraham, Dan Nowak