I used to live for late night syndicated sci-fi shows back in high school. My favorites were Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda and Invisible Man.
They’re cheesy when I revisit them now but they were my reason for staying up way too late.
The Colony was the weirdest idea, and they just Went For The Damn Thing.
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Yes, Farscape! That was going to be one of my additions to this thread. I think they did great work with what they had, but it’s definitely a budget show (especially the first season) and I love it for that.
There’s something in this discussion regarding the limitations of budget and the benefits that lends itself to the creative process. Farscape using puppets instead of CGI makes it infinitely better in my opinion.
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Yeah, that is a different topic entirely, and worth discussing. The cliffhanger of Carnivale actually makes me feel bad about recommending it to some people. It’s so great, but it just fucking ends. Like, done.
The show Helix on SyFy was some good quality low quality scifi that had a lot of cool ideas. I think it got a second season but they decided to completely change the show from taking place in a single Arctic base to THE WORLD and I lost interest.
Hello I am a Canadian and I am 
here to talk about lexx
(Or Cronenberg)
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Humans are superior!
I liked Farscape when it’s good it was good in interesting way, but perhaps of that, not all that they tried worked for me. But it one of the few shows, who made me go looking for fanfic, to get more histories from this universe
Buffy was the only show that I wrote fanfic for 
A show that I didn’t understand, why it was cancelled was Sarah Connor Chronicles. Perhaps the show that were perhaps too smart/subtle? (I would like to think so) for its own good. A Sci-Fi with time travel that made sense to. The character’s roles are not permanent and every character has breaking point, if they are not already broken. Different AI’s who are alien enough for me to question their actions and motives.
Two scenes from the show
Background song by Shirley Manson (who had also a role in the show)
Background song by Johny Cash (didn’t had a role in the show)
And a fanvid
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Sarah Connor Chronicles is great! I just remember it got a lot of flak for the casting (I don’t get people) and the first few episodes and I think the ratings just never really picked up much after that, damn shame. 
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That it took so long for Tatiana Maslany to win an emmy is criminal. The mental gymnastics that go with that role (playing a clone that’s imitating a different clone) are immense.
Holy heck please everyone watch The Quiet Earth. It’s a ‘last man left on earth’ story that’s told like a fever dream, full of empty 1980s New Zealand streets (I admittedly like it heaps for that because it’s so surreal seeing how small-town everything looks). I really really like it and Bruno Lawrence gives one of the best performances I’ve ever seen, a very steady and paranoid unwinding of sanity. please please please watch it
EDIT: It was made in NZ in the 1980s it is absolutely low-budget
Z Nation is one of my favourite shows, but it takes place in the Sharknado Cinematic Universe. It has terrible CGI, zombie bears, zombiequakes, and every other thing you’d associate with a bad SyFy movie. Except it’s also got some amazing dramatic tension, interesting worldbuilding, enough of that ‘not taking itself seriously’ to make phytozombies who are half-zombie, half-marijuana but good enough writing and acting to play that straight and have serious action scenes in a pre-Z grow-op greenhouse. Hell, as the series goes on it even gets pretty good on ‘social justice’ stuff, the cast is pretty diverse and white men are definitely not protected by plot armour.
But, like, there are zombabies and one zombie genuinely says ‘braaaains’.
I really like super restrained sci-fi, where very little money is spent on special effects and more focus is on the concepts.
A couple of years ago I saw a super low budget movie on Netflix called Coherence, which fits this perfectly. A group of friends get together for a party while a comet is going past and then they start meeting alternate versions of themselves from very similar other realities, and start to get mixed up about which reality they belong in.
In a similar low budget vein I would recommend Timecrimes, which is a sort of time travel mystery about a man who gets attacked in the woods and runs into a local inventor who helps him escape using a time machine.
While I was young I also particularly enjoyed a BBC show called Crime Traveller, about a detective who teams up with the daughter of a man who invented a time machine to solve crimes. It actually had a really good internal logic, and used the form of time travel where anything they did couldn’t affect the past in any way, as it had already happened, so sometimes weird things would happen in the first part of the episode that wouldn’t be explained until they travelled back and caused it.
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Orphan Black is so good! Tatiana does such an amazing job to play all those roles, man. Gonna miss it after season 5 wraps.
this thread reminded me of a show called “threshold” that went out for 13 episodes like 15 years ago, that i used to watch when i was a kid. it’s v classic low budget scifi, about aliens taking over the planet in secret, but it’s notable for starring some ppl who are pretty famous now — carla gugino, brent spiner and peter dinklage, mostly. i just found out that every episode is on youtube so i guess that’s my evening figured out 
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Its a movie, and it’s been mentioned, AND I don’t even really know the budget but Primer is by far the most important piece of sci-fi for me. I’d interacted with sci-fi growing up a bunch as my dad loved stuff like SG1, Farscape, Star Trek and had a bunch of Michael Crichton novels. I also loved comics and my favorite comic,X-Men, had many arcs concerning time travel and even though they had mutant powers the writers were always upping the ante with gadgets and aliens and parallel dimensions.
Primer really made me get into Hard sci-fi though and got me to question classic concepts in a way I had never thought about. The real ramifications and logic of sci-fi premises captured my imagination and watching a writer brilliantly extrapolate (and turn on it’s head) a thing I had seen and read about hundreds of times was eye opening. There were no big special effects here, just a spotlight on humanity in the face of perception shattering new realities followed to their logical conclusion. I don’t need everything I see to delve into the technical details of their conventions, but I always appreciate a nod to this, even when it’s not the focus. Like a reference to the classics in great modern fiction, it can be a shorthand for telling you about the experience you are about to have.
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Oh, man, I got super confused and thought this was referring to the pretty alright TV show on USA, Colony. This is greatttttt.
Budget sci-fi, you say?
(You had to know. You had to.)
I’m sure people here are familiar with Full Moon, makers of a billion budget sci-fi and horror movies. There’s two from them that really stand out for me, Trancers and Arena. The former is just nuts, I think you can see the whole movie on YouTube, it’s only like 78 minutes and a super fun movie about a wannabe Rick Deckard travelling back in time via drugs to stop his arch rival from brainwashing people to change the future.
The other, Arena, is literally Rocky but set on a space station. Claudia Christian, Marc Alaimo and Armin Shimerman play major characters in it too! Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine crew on one space station!!! This is another one that’s short and just super goofy and fun from start to finish, with some awesome costumes for the various alien warriors who compete. I love it. 
I don’t know why every science fiction show in the world hasn’t tapped the Jim Henson Creature shop for their aliens. it seems so obvious in retrospect.
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Anyone remember a show called Terra Nova from 2011? I may have missed it being mentioned earlier in the thread but I think it definitely fits in this category. It’s pretty crappy to be honest but it has dinosaurs and is only one 13 episode season long. There was a kind of intriguing foreshadowing of things to come in later seasons if I recall correctly, but of course it didn’t get renewed beyond the one season.
Other than that I’d also echo the earlier Stargate Universe mentions. I feel like the show was really hitting it’s stride and I definitely wanted to see where it was going when it was cancelled.
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