4 Cult 2006 Sci-fi Shows That Turn 20 This Year, With a Combined 227 EPisodes

2006 was an incredible year for television. So many incredible shows debuted in 2006 while already established series entered their best creative runs leading to a year where you could genuinely turn on the television almost any night of the week and on any network — broadcast or cable — and find a critically acclaimed, high-quality show to enjoy. It was also the last year before streaming really started to take off, which meant that these were shows that, for most people, were appointment television (or something you recorded on your DVR if you weren’t able to catch them live.) But while we think of iconic shows like Friday Night Lights, Dexter, and even Psych that made their debut that year, genre television was having a moment as well, especially sci-fi. Continuing series like Battlestar Galactica and Lost were both thriving and 2006 gave us new sci-fi as well.

With 2006 marking the 20th anniversary of that golden year of television and the arrival of some great sci-fi series, here are four in particular that remain cult favorites years later. It’s still so weird that these shows are turning 20. It seems like only yesterday we were settling in for the mysteries, the adventures, and being told to save the cheerleader, save the world. But hey, even if these shows really are 20 years old this year, the combined 227 episodes these shows gave us still hold up.

4) Kyle XY (43 episodes)

Kyle XY might fly a little under the radar even for fans of sci-fi television, but it was a solid hit when it first arrived in 2006 — the series was ABC Family’s highest-rated original series during its first two seasons. Kyle XY followed a teenage boy (Matt Dallas) who wakes up naked in the woods outside Seattle. He has no memory and, curiously, no belly button. A family takes him in and names him Kyle and now Kyle and his new family has to figure out who he really is and why he has no memory to begin with. The series ends up taking a lot of wild twists and turns as Kyle tries to figure out pretty much how to be human as well as the big reveal of exactly why Kyle is the way he is. While the show was family-oriented and skewed to a slightly younger audience than regular broadcast television, the series was pretty sophisticated and did very well in its first two seasons. The series was ultimately cancelled after its third season and a significant drop in ratings and left viewers with a few cliffhangers, but those were ultimately resolved with a special feature on that final season’s DVD release.

3) Eureka (77 episodes)

It’s not often that we get comedy and sci-fi together, but in 2006, Syfy (then called Sci-Fi Channel), gave us exactly that with Eureka. The series was set in the fictional Eureka, Oregon where most of the town’s residents were science geniuses employed by Global Dynamics which itself is overseen by the Department of Defense. As the company was behind a ton of major technological advances, the town is a closely guarded secret. When a Deputy United States Marshal, Jack Carter, ends up in Eureka on his way back to Los Angeles, things take a turn when a faulty experiment takes out the town’s sheriff and Jack finds himself selected to take the spot.

The show is a brilliant use of comedy — unlike most of the town, Jack isn’t a genius and so there’s a good bit of fish out of water humor — and sci-fi elements with the accidents and technological misuse at the heart of just about every episode. Also, what’s really fun about Eureka is that characters from the show actually crossed over into other series, including Warehouse 13 and Alphas. The show hits on just about every sci-fi adventure you can cook up before it ended after five seasons in 2012.

2) Jericho (29 episodes)

In some respects, Jericho might be one of the most infamous sci-fi series of the early 2000s, but not because of the show itself. Jericho debuted on CBS in September 2006 and was cancelled just one week after its first season finale. Fan reaction to the cancellation ended up launching a full-on campaign to bring the show back, which was ultimately successful, giving the show a second season of just seven episodes. The story would eventually be continued for two more “seasons” with a comic book published by IDW. As for the series itself, however, Jericho was a fascinating one. The story centered around the fictional town of Jericho, Kansas which finds itself dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear attack on 23 major cities in the United States.

The series not only dealt with the challenges the town faces as services start to collapse as well as the actual impact of the nuclear attacks, but there are also larger mysteries to unpack as well. There are various mysterious characters in the series who may or may not be somehow involved in the attack as well as questions about what happened to the government and, ultimately, who is responsible. It’s a layered series with a really interesting story that’s as much about the collapse of society and government as it is about the human impact of disaster.

1) Heroes (78 episodes)

Of all of the shows on this list, Heroes might be the best of the bunch — at least in its first season. Created by Tim Kring, Heroes ultimately ran for four seasons, though the final seasons weren’t nearly as good as that first, near perfect season of sci-fi television. The series centered around a group of seemingly ordinary and normal people who discover they have superhuman abilities. They end up having to work together trying to prevent various catastrophes and grim futures with the first season in particular centering around stopping a catastrophe from destroying New York City. It’s also the season that gave us the phrase “save the cheerleader, save the world” with its focus on Claire Bennet (Hayden Panettiere), a high school cheerleader with regeneration powers who ends up being crucial to stopping the catastrophe.

I cannot stress this enough: the first season of Heroes is not only a near perfect season of sci-fi television, but television in general. Even the second season isn’t bad. However, the series falls off heading into its third season and what could have been a truly legendary series run went out with mostly a whimper in 2010. Heroes would get a 13-episode follow up miniseries in 2015 called Heroes Reborn, but things never really caught on. A new series was reported to be in development in 2024, but nothing further has come from that.

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