7 Great Sci-Fi TV Reboots That Surpassed The Originals

When it comes to entertainment, reboots are just a part of the natural order of things. It’s not that there aren’t new or original ideas or stories to be told; it’s just that there are some stories that are worth exploring a second time (or more, in some cases.) Sometimes, it’s a matter of a story having new relevance with the passage of time and sometimes, it’s a matter of new technology or advancements in filmmaking and the art of creating entertainment that makes bringing a story to life even better.

While movie remakes are common, they’re also common with television as well. Many shows get the reboot treatment, with new versions of old favorites — or, in some cases, shows that maybe were promising but didn’t perform all that well the first time around — showing up pretty regularly on the small screen. In terms of sci-fi, there are several shows that have gotten a second chance through a reboot and while not all of them are successful, there are several that manage to outshine the original they are based on. Here are seven sci-fi reboots that are better than the original series and when it comes to the number one entry on this list, it’s a show that is so good you might have forgotten anything came before it.

7) The Tick (2016)

You can probably argue with me that The Tick is more a superhero series than a sci-fi series, but I am personally of the feeling that superhero stories are largely sci-fi so here we are with The Tick landing on our list. The Tick debuted on Prime Video in 2016 and ran for two seasons and is a rare case where it’s actually a reboot of a reboot. 2016’s The Tick is a reboot of 2001’s live-action The Tick, which was a live-action reboot of 1994’s animated The Tick. The series follows the titular character, a mostly invulnerable superhero in a blue tick suit who comes to the City to fight crime and uncover who is behind the City’s underworld. He ends up friend with a man named Arthur who becomes his sidekick and the duo discovers that a long-dead supervillain, The Terror, may actually still be causing problems.

To be clear, the 2001 live-action The Tick wasn’t bad, but the 2016 was just great. The series hit the right balance of humor and realism, delivering surprisingly sophisticated laughs with some high-octane action that really made what could have otherwise felt like a goofy concept into something grounded and interesting.  Unfortunately, like the previous iterations of the series, it just didn’t quite catch on and was ended after just two seasons and a total of 22 episodes.

6) Quantum Leap (2022)

Debuting on NBC in 2022, the new Quantum Leap was a revival of the iconic 1989 series of the same name and served less as a reboot and more of a continuation. The series starred Raymond Lee as Dr. Ben Song, the new lead physicist for the same Quantum Leap project with the United States Department of Defense that Dr. Sam Beckett (played by Scott Bakula in the original series) was involved with and vanished while working with thirty years prior. Like Sam, Ben becomes stuck in the past but things are just a little different — and he has his fiancée Addison helping him the way Al did Sam.

It is probably a little unfair to say that the new Quantum Leap is “better” because both shows are good. There is a reason the original series is a classic. However, the 2022 functions more as a serialized version of things and the episodic structure allows for them to tell a larger story than the original did. The structural change gave the new series a lot of opportunity to work with. The revival was cancelled after just two seasons but ended in a much more solid place than the original, giving fans at least something much more hopeful to hold onto.

5) Lost in Space (2018)

Netflix’s 2018 Lost in Space reboot was a huge deal. Functioning more as a reimagining of the 1965 Lost in Space series, the new version ran for three seasons and the 24th mission of the Resolute, an interstellar spacecraft carrying families and civilians sent to colonize the Alpha Centauri planetary system in 2046, two years after an impact event threatened the survival of humanity. However, the Resolute doesn’t reach its destination after a hull breach and colonists evacuate, crash landing on a nearby planet where they have to survive and find their way back.

The contemporary Lost in Space is quite a bit different from the original. The inciting event is different to be certain, but there are other differences as well. This version featured more mature characters, much less camp, and made things infinitely more dangerous for the Robinsons but it also managed to preserve the things that made the original great, such as the family sticking together to get through this literally out of this world challenge.

4) V (2009)

In 1983, NBC aired a two-part sci-fi miniseries, V, about reptilian aliens known as Visitors coming to Earth claiming to be doing so as friends seeking to help in exchange for chemicals and minerals for their own ailing world only for it to be revealed that the Visitors were actually there conquer, stealing the Earth’s water and harvest the human race for food. Once the truth is revealed, a revolution against the Visitors begins. In 2009, ABC debuted a series reboot of that concept. Starring Elizabeth Mitchell and Morena Baccarin, the series had a similar premise — alien Visitors claiming to come in peace needing only a few resources in exchange for advanced technological and medical knowledge but secretly having sinister intent — and mixes things up a bit. In the series, the aliens have actually been on Earth for decades, hiding among humanity and infiltrating every aspect of life for what is now the final stages of a takeover.

With the 2009 having more episodes to unfold its story, the reboot is able to get a bit more into some of the themes of media manipulation and mass delusion that the original miniseries was really only able to touch on. The first season of V in particular was fantastic and while the second season dips a bit in quality it’s still quite good — and leaves humanity in much the same predicament as the original miniseries.

3) Westworld (2016)

HBO’s Westworld is another unique entry on this list as it’s not exactly a reboot of an existing television series but is instead based upon films — 1973’s Westworld and, in a much looser sense, the 1976 sequel, Futureworld. The Westworld television series starts in a technologically advanced Wild West theme park that is populated by android hosts with the park catering to high paying guests that indulge their wildest fantasies at the park without any fear of retaliation from the hosts or fear of consequences as the hosts are programmed so that they cannot harm humans. Of course, things get a little interesting when some of the hosts develop sentience thanks to an update.

The series is a bit more nuanced than the movies are, likely because the episodic nature of television gives it the space to dig a bit deeper into the story, but it is also very thought-provoking. The series takes on serious questions about robots and artificial intelligence well before it was something we were thinking about every single day. There’s also plenty of action in the series that makes it a thrilling watch that somehow manages to be a bit more human than you might expect.

2) Doctor Who (2005)

Doctor Who is a British television institution so many would be forgiven for not realizing that Doctor Who as most contemporary audiences know it is actually a revival, which is what lands it on this list. The original Doctor Who debuted in 1963 but ceased broadcasting in 1989. When it returned in 2005, it did so with a new format, trading the multi-episode serial for more self-contained episodes that built into loose story arcs. The new Doctor Who era kicked off with Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor and generally maintained the general premise of the original series: the Doctor is an extraterrestrial being, a Time Lord, travelling the universe and time in his ship (the TARDIS).

Changing up the format a bit definitely helped to revive the series, which has proven to be very popular globally. One can argue that this isn’t so much a case of a reboot that is “better” and is more a case of one that has simply evolved something that was already great, but the modern era of Doctor Who has certainly been very good and even if it’s time with Disney+ has come to an end, there’s still more ahead — a Christmas episode is in the works for 2026.

1) Battlestar Galactica (2004)

There is really only one show that could be at the top of this list and it’s Battlestar Galactica. Ronald D. Moore’s reboot of the 1978 series is so good that it’s sometimes easy to forget anything actually came before it — and that’s not shade to the original. The reboot is just that good. Set in a distant star system the series tells the story the last remnants of humanity, fleeing for a fabled thirteenth colony called Earth after an attack by an android race they created — the Cylons — laid waste to the other twelve colonies and wiped out most of the human population.

Almost everything about the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica took the original to the next level. Everything from the production quality to the writing to the performances, there is nothing that Battlestar didn’t improve upon so much so that the reboot manages to do what few sci-fi series does: it transcends its genre to become something more. The series quickly became a series that you didn’t have to be a “nerd” to enjoy and in many ways remains the gold standard for how to reboot a series.

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