Best Sci-Fi Shows and Movies, Ranked by IQ Score

Science fiction earns its high IQ Scores when it earns its ideas. The best sci-fi on TVI is not the most technologically ambitious — it is the most willing to follow its premise to genuinely uncomfortable conclusions.

Interstellar and Stalker sit at the upper boundary of cinematic sci-fi by very different routes — one through scientifically literate spectacle, the other through philosophical patience. 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris are the canonical examples of sci-fi as serious philosophical inquiry. Metropolis earns its Masterclass status for being the genre's earliest sustained argument about labor and technology. Severance is the strongest contemporary example of sci-fi using premise to do philosophical work about personhood and consent.

What earns lower scores: sci-fi that uses the genre conventions as a vehicle for action sequences rather than ideas, or that treats the technology as the actual subject instead of as a lens onto the human question the technology is for.