Netflix’s first original series, House of Cards, launched in 2013, and television was never the same. But even as Netflix and other platforms began to gain popularity, old-school network and basic cable channels continued to create edgy (and sometimes a bit unhinged) genre shows—the sort of programming that just a few years later would come to dominate the streaming landscape.
With that in mind, here are seven weird and wonderful sci-fi shows from the last era of TV before streaming well and truly took over.
Wayward Pines (2015-2018, Fox)
M. Night Shyamalan directed the pilot episode and served as executive producer on this adaptation of author Blake Crouch’s sci-fi mystery trilogy. Wayward Pines starts off as a sort of Twin Peaks riff—a federal agent (Matt Dillon) stumbles his way into a small town full of secretive people while looking for his missing partner.
Then comes the twist: it’s actually the 41st century, and everyone in the town is there because they were placed in cryosleep ahead of the apocalypse. In the intervening thousands of years, mutated humans took over the planet, and the barrier between 21st-century people and far-future “Abbies” (short for “aberrations”) is weakening by the day. Along the way, the show digs into some classic sci-fi questions, including “Who are the real monsters?”
Wayward Pines—whose cast included Carla Gugino, Toby Jones, Juliette Lewis, Melissa Leo, and Djimon Hounsou—ran for two seasons. Shyamalan’s next TV venture was Servant at Apple TV+, the same streamer hosting Crouch’s current project, an adaptation of his book Dark Matter. But you can still visit the roaring 4020s: Wayward Pines is streaming on Hulu; it also got a physical release.
Zoo (2015-2017, CBS)
For three seasons, viewers followed along as a ragtag group of reluctant heroes—a zoologist (James Wolk), a journalist (Kristen Connelly), a safari guide (Nonso Anozie), a French intelligence agent (Nora Arnezeder), and a veterinary pathologist (Billy Burke)—navigated a world where every “when animals attack” worst-case scenario suddenly happens at once.
From the start, there are conspiracies to investigate—a sinister biotech company looks awfully culpable, and you know there are going to be cover-ups galore—and a lot of Zoo, based on the James Patterson best-seller, featured its main characters zipping around from place to place looking for clues, guilty parties, and ways to fight back, including maybe even a cure.
Along the way, the show made plenty of room for crazed animals to do their thing (bears, birds, exotic escapees), eventually ushering in hybrid crazed animals, making Zoo even more unhinged than was originally promised. Zoo also incorporated humans among its horrifying mutations, in case you couldn’t get enough of that on Wayward Pines. You can buy all three seasons of Zoo through Amazon Prime; the show also got a physical release.
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