Prime Video’s Classic Sci-Fi Series With Near-Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score Revolutionized The Genre

There's a five-season science fiction series on Prime Video with a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, and more importantly, its influence can be found in just about every sci-fi show that has come out since. Every science fiction TV show iterates on the shows that came before it in one way or another.

Sometimes these influences are direct, and other times a show builds on ideas in a show that were built on ideas in another show. There are degrees of separation, and with the long-lasting franchises of the genre, movies and shows in one franchise might influence another, which in turn influences later shows and movies in the franchise. See the back-and-forth between Star Wars and Dune.

There are some shows with greater influence than others. Farscape is one of these TV series. The five-season show from The Jim Henson Company and Hallmark Entertainment premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel and introduced audiences to a crew of characters on the run from a galaxy-spanning corrupt authority.

The series stars John Crichton (Ben Browder), a modern-day American astronaut who flies into a wormhole and is spit out into the far future. There, he meets the crew of the biomechanical ship Moya. It's a revolutionary show whose influence can be seen in many popular sci-fi series that have come afterward.

Farscape Revolutionized TV Sci-Fi When It Debuted In 1999

Farscape changed the idea of what sci-fi TV shows could be when it first came out in 1999. The show came out when another massively popular sci-fi franchise was on a bit of a downward trend. Star Trek was in a strange spot with the beloved DS9 ending the same year, and Voyager not enjoying the same kind of popularity.

There was a hole in the sci-fi TV sphere, and Farscape filled it, and then changed it. In an explicit attempt to distance itself from Star Trek, Farscape was a much wilder and circus-like series, and not just because of the puppetry. John was more in the lineage of someone like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, firing off quips and making pop culture references.

The series began as a procedural but quickly transformed into a plot-rich show with a dense mythology that made watching the series in order required to enjoy it to its maximum potential. Sci-fi shows didn't tend to have multi-season plots without some "monster-of-the-week" episodes thrown in until Farscape.

Everything From Stargate SG-1 To Guardians Of The Galaxy Was Inspired By Farscape

It's hard to find any modern sci-fi show or movie that isn't at least a little bit influenced by Farscape, and many entries in the genre are very influenced by it. The combination of humor and drama in a sci-fi setting wasn't a completely new tone to the genre, but it had never been done so consistently as to be a pillar of a series.

Now, there are whole franchises based around mixing heady science fiction with outright, even slapstick, humor and epic drama. The MCU feels like it owes a lot to Farscape, particularly in something like Guardians of the Galaxy, a trilogy unafraid to be as weird as the comics that inspired it.

Stargate SG-1 was one of the first shows to be obviously influenced by Farscape, going so far as to bring Farscape actors Ben Browder and Claudia Black into the series. Farscape is worth going back to just to see how many ideas and nods to the show are omnipresent in modern TV and movies.