We’re living in the golden age of geek TV, treated to an embarrassment of weekly riches dumped right onto our screens, delivering us new slices of the most treasured franchises we have, made with huge budgets. Some of us still remember the age of five TV channels — of taping Star Trek: The Next Generation off BBC 2 on Wednesday evenings and begging a friend with Sky to record Deep Space Nine and the new series of The X-Files for us, of feeling like a new Star Wars film was so far away as to feel non-existent, and of having literally one new episode of Doctor Who to make do with for an entire decade. When the only way to see proper, grown-up Anime was to stay up until 3am watching Channel 4. When Babylon 5 felt utterly tedious, but you watched it anyway because it had spaceships in it. When the missed opportunities of Space: Above and Beyond, Ultra Violet and Dark Skies came and went, unloved. When the only comic book show was The New Adventures of Superman. It was slim pickings back then. Low budgets. Long waits.
Last week, just last week, we had Daredevil: Born Again delivering grown-up storytelling that sits comfortably in a comic book world, unafraid to take big swings. Last week’s episode offered an artful dissection of the American criminal justice system’s treatment of the poor that wouldn’t have felt out of place in The Wire, and it did it in a comic book show. We had an episode of The Wheel of Time that vividly brought one of Robert Jordan’s best sequences to life, powered by brilliant performances and mesmerising scenery and effects. We had Severance delivering ultimate water-cooler TV as it wrapped up its second series.
And to come this year? An embarrassment of riches. Andor season 2 lands next month. The first season proved conclusively that “Star Wars for adults” wasn’t an oxymoron, that political complexity and nuanced characters could exist in the same universe as lightsabers and droids. We’re bracing for the return of The Last Of Us, with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey continuing their journey through a post-pandemic hellscape that delivered the most emotionally devastating hour of television in recent memory with its third episode, ‘Long, Long Time’. Given the source material, this season promises to put us through the wringer in the best possible way.
The third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds promises to continue the franchise’s remarkable renaissance, capturing the adventuring spirit and often-overlooked utter-weirdness of the original show, while exploring themes of camaraderie, prejudice and identity that feel urgently contemporary. Meanwhile, Russell T Davies is preparing his second season at the helm of the refreshed, Disney+ era of Doctor Who, with Ncuti Gatwa bringing both nuclear-levels of charisma and a fairly brutal way with emotional devastation to television’s most enduring time traveller. We’re getting more Star Wars, more Marvel, more Game of Thrones, more One Piece, more Stranger Things, more Witcher, more Squid Game … and I guarantee by the end of the year there’ll be something we’ll be obsessed with that we never even saw coming. We have never had it so good.
So why the constant stream of complaints? Why are YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers declaring shows like The Acolyte or The Rings of Power “disasters” (which neither is, by the way) instead of celebrating their strengths? Is it a symptom of our brutally divisive times? 2025 is a year where the news is constantly bleak, where politics feels increasingly extreme, and where sometimes it feels as though The Handmaid’s Tale is coming to life before our eyes. This toxicity has seeped into our entertainment discourse, turning fandom into another battleground.
What makes today’s science fiction particularly powerful is how it reflects our complicated present. The original Star Trek confronted Cold War tensions and civil rights struggles. Today’s sci-fi tackles our contemporary anxieties: climate catastrophe in Foundation, identity and corporate control in Severance, pandemic fears in The Last of Us. In an era when real-world problems feel increasingly insurmountable, these stories help us process difficult issues in the safe space of a galaxy far, far away, if only metaphorically.
The most frustrating aspect of the constant complaining is the sheer ingratitude it represents. For decades, genre fans had to make do with occasional crumbs – today, we can alternate new Star Wars and new Star Trek for chunks of the year. We can watch a genuine milestone in British television in Doctor Who right after catching up on a season of Daredevil we’ve been asking Marvel for since 2018. This embarrassment of riches should be celebrated, not nitpicked to death. Twenty years ago, waiting in the endless stretches between overstuffed seasons of Lost and Heroes, we’d have killed for this.
We’re watching the geek inherit the Earth. Our once-niche interests now dominate global entertainment. For the sake of all that is holy, sit back and enjoy it – because one day, we’ll look back on this as the true golden age of genre television. Live long and prosper, indeed.
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