There’s nothing I love more than seeing a unique world that another fellow author wrote. While I love books because they explain everything in detail, sometimes I’m tired of reading, and I want something cool to watch. This is where I typically search for sci-fi and fictional TV shows because I’ve also been writing my own sci-fi novel, and I’m looking for inspiration.
Not gonna lie, I’ve watched countless TV shows and movies in my life – all types and kinds. My Trakt account used to give me a report of my watch hours that was simply scary, but growing up, there were only a bunch of those that really mattered – everything else was just entertainment.
Some of them have been completed, and you can watch all their seasons on a streaming platform, while others are still airing.
I will not spoil you.
1. Silo
Available for streaming on Apple TV.
Silo is based on Hugh Howey’s bestselling Silo trilogy, which includes Wool, Shift, and Dust. The TV adaptation was created and showrun by Graham Yost, with Rebecca Ferguson starring as Juliette Nichols (who is also serving as an executive producer). Silo is an Apple Original and streams exclusively on Apple TV, with the company producing the whole show along with AMC Studios.
The story takes place hundreds of years into the future, where around 10,000 people live inside Silo 18, a gigantic underground structure that’s more than 100 floors deep. Nobody knows exactly why the Silo exists, who built it, how long humanity has been underground, or what happened to the world. They were simply taught one thing: going outside means dying.
The Silo has cameras looking outside, and the screens show a dead, gray wasteland, with a few dead bodies outside. Thanks to strict laws called The Pact, old technology and objects from before the Silo (called relics) are illegal. Magnification beyond a certain level is forbidden, historical information is completely suppressed, and nobody is supposed to investigate humanity’s past. The ones who do may get sent outside to their deaths.
The story initially revolves around Sheriff Holston Becker and his wife Allison. Allison discovers evidence suggesting that the government of the Silo has been lying about the outside world. She finds an old video showing the outside as a beautiful green landscape. She becomes convinced that the ugly wasteland shown on the cafeteria screens is fake. So she asks to go outside. Once outside, her helmet suddenly shows her exactly what she expected: green grass, blue sky, birds flying around.
She cleans the camera because she thinks, “Everyone inside needs to see this.” Then she collapses and dies. Later, Holston goes outside as well and dies. This brings us to the real protagonist: Juliette Nichols. Juliette is an engineer from Mechanical, near the bottom of the Silo. She starts investigating the death of her boyfriend George, who had secretly been investigating the Silo’s history. Her investigation eventually leads her toward Bernard Holland, head of IT, who turns out to be one of the people responsible for maintaining the Silo’s secrets.
Judicial appears to run things. But really, IT has enormous hidden power. Bernard knows about old technology, the outside, previous rebellions, and things ordinary citizens aren’t allowed to know. Eventually, Juliette becomes too dangerous, so Bernard sends her outside.
2. The Last of Us
Available for streaming on HBO.
Unlike Silo, The Last of Us is not based on a book, but rather on a video game series created by Naughty Dog, with Neil Druckmann as one of the main creators/writers of the games. As an HBO Original adaptation of the official games, HBO, Sony Pictures Television, Naughty Dog, and some other production companies are producing the TV show.
Season one basically adapts the first game of the series, where Joel meets Ellie and starts their journey across America, looking for the Firefly hospital. It also focuses on Ellie’s story with Riley, and while there are a few differences from the games, such as the story of Bill and Frank, HBO has expanded many things. The second season focuses on the second part of the game series.
The story in The Last of Us is all about Joel, who has lost almost everything while trying to protect a girl. The world collapsed in 2003 after a mutated Cordyceps fungus began infecting humans, taking control of their bodies, and eventually transforming them into increasingly dangerous forms. Civilization fell apart almost overnight, and the main character, Joel Miller, tries to survive the first moments along with his teenage daughter, Sarah, and his brother, Tommy.
Twenty years later, Joel is living in a militarized quarantine zone in Boston. Society is divided between the authoritarian government force FEDRA, rebel groups called the Fireflies, raiders, survivors, and isolated communities. Joel works as a smuggler with his partner Tess. Then they are given a job: transport a teenage girl named Ellie out of Boston. At first, Ellie seems like just another person they need to move, but then Joel discovers something extraordinary.
I’ll leave it here, folks. It’s an amazing TV show, and if you’re a gamer, both parts are two of the best games ever built.
3. Game of Thrones
Available for streaming on HBO/Max, depending on your region.
With this one, you may want to avoid watching it with your family – that’s all I have to say about it; consider yourself warned (and never ask my sister and my mother about this topic; Balkan women ain’t to play with).
Written by, well, one of the most popular fantasy writers of our time, George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones is based on his A Song of Ice and Fire series of novels. The first book, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996, and HBO turned Martin’s enormous fictional world into one of the biggest television productions ever made.
The story takes place mainly on the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos, where multiple noble families fight for power, survival, revenge, independence, and, of course, the Iron Throne. But calling Game of Thrones a story about people fighting over a chair would be like calling The Lord of the Rings a hiking trip with an unfortunate jewelry problem. There is considerably more happening here.
The world itself is what makes Game of Thrones such an incredible source of inspiration for fictional authors. Every major house has its own history, symbols, traditions, enemies, alliances, castles, lands, values, and complicated family trees. There are religions, ancient civilizations, forgotten languages, legends, creatures, wars that happened long before the story begins, and political conflicts that existed before many of the main characters were even born.
That’s one of the biggest lessons I took from it as a writer: your world doesn’t have to begin when your protagonist enters it. Actually, I’ve applied that to my own sci-fi novel (currently in the works). Westeros feels old because it has a past. Characters constantly mention dead kings, old rebellions, destroyed families, ancient promises, and events that happened generations ago. Even when you don’t know all the details, you get the feeling that this world existed long before episode one and will continue existing after a character dies.
And yes, characters die. I’m not telling you which ones. Just don’t get attached to anyone. Actually, forget I said that.
The other thing Game of Thrones does exceptionally well is conflict. Instead of having one obvious villain standing on one side and all the good guys standing on the other, characters have their own goals. Two people can both have perfectly understandable reasons for wanting completely opposite things. Then again, someone you hate in one season may suddenly become one of the most interesting characters later, while someone you trusted may make a decision that has you staring at your screen, wondering why you emotionally invested in fictional people in the first place.
For authors writing fantasy, political fiction, large casts, multiple kingdoms, or stories involving factions, Game of Thrones is basically a masterclass in making every group feel like they have their own story rather than simply existing around the protagonist.
And if you end up liking Westeros, there’s also House of the Dragon, HBO’s prequel series based largely on Martin’s Fire & Blood. It takes place generations before Game of Thrones and focuses heavily on House Targaryen, which means even more political disasters, family problems, questionable decisions, and dragons.
Basically, “normal family” stuff. Just with dragons.
4. Fringe
Streaming availability varies by region.
If you’re writing science fiction and haven’t watched Fringe, I have some homework for you. Created by J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci, Fringe originally aired for five seasons and combines science fiction with an FBI-style procedural.
The series follows FBI agent Olivia Dunham, scientist Walter Bishop, and Walter’s son Peter Bishop as they investigate events involving experimental science that shouldn’t really be possible. And by “shouldn’t really be possible,” I mean the writers clearly sat in a room every week and asked: “Okay, but what if science went completely insane?”
Teleportation, mind control, biological experiments, genetic mutations, strange diseases, artificial intelligence, parallel scientific discoveries, and technologies that humanity probably shouldn’t be touching all make an appearance in one form or another. Warner Bros. itself describes the show as existing somewhere between reality and science fiction, which is probably the best explanation you’ll get without me ruining anything.
What makes Fringe particularly useful for writers is the way it starts relatively small. Many early episodes revolve around individual strange cases, almost like separate short science-fiction stories. Slowly, however, seemingly unrelated details start connecting to something much larger.
That’s a fantastic storytelling technique to study. Not every piece of worldbuilding has to arrive in chapter one with a seventeen-page history lesson explaining how the Quantum Council defeated Emperor Zorg in the Great Space Potato War of 2843.
You can introduce things naturally. A strange object here. A company name there. A scientific experiment nobody fully understands. A character who seems to know more than they should. Readers start creating questions before you give them answers, and suddenly they’re doing half of your job for you because they desperately want to understand what’s happening.
But Walter Bishop is probably the biggest reason I recommend the show to writers. He’s brilliant, deeply flawed, funny, tragic, unpredictable, and sometimes completely lost inside his own mind.
Fringe understands something that’s easy to forget when writing science fiction: the science may create the plot, but the characters are what make us care about it. You can invent the greatest fictional technology ever created, but if I don’t care about the person pressing the button, it’s just a button.
5. Supernatural
Originally aired on The WB and The CW.
Fifteen seasons. Yes. Fifteen. AND WATCHED THEM ONLY SIX TIMES. Six! Godamn work and being grown up. No, seriously, I’ve grown up watching this show, and the nostalgia of rewatching the whole series every once in a while is worth all those hours.
So if you’re looking for something to watch over the weekend, I hope your weekend lasts approximately three months.
Supernatural follows brothers Sam and Dean Winchester, played by Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, as they travel across America in their 1967 Chevrolet Impala (you’ll fall in love with this car, that I promise) hunting monsters, demons, ghosts, and pretty much anything else that decides humans look delicious. The series debuted in 2005 and eventually ran for 15 seasons.
At first, the idea is wonderfully simple. Two brothers drive from town to town investigating strange deaths and supernatural events. Many episodes borrow from real legends, urban myths, religious stories, folklore, ghost stories, and creatures from different cultures. And that alone makes Supernatural incredibly useful for fiction writers.
One of the easiest ways to create something that feels familiar but still original is to take existing mythology and ask: What would this look like in my world? You don’t necessarily need to invent every creature from scratch. Werewolves, vampires, demons, spirits, witches, angels, gods, and monsters have existed in human storytelling for centuries. What matters is what you do with them.
What are your rules? What can kill them? Where did they come from? Are the stories humans tell about them even accurate? Supernatural constantly plays with those questions. The series also grows enormously beyond its original monster-hunting structure, developing its own mythology, rules, supernatural hierarchies, relationships, history, and conflicts. That’s useful to study if you’re writing a long series because it shows how a relatively simple premise can expand without immediately throwing the entire universe at the audience.
Your world can contain Heaven, Hell, monsters, gods, and the apocalypse itself, but readers may still care more about whether two brothers are going to forgive each other.
Most importantly, though, the show works because of Sam and Dean.
Remove the monsters, and you still have a story about two brothers carrying trauma, responsibility, loyalty, guilt, disagreements, and an unhealthy willingness to sacrifice themselves for each other approximately every seventeen minutes.
That’s something worth remembering when creating fictional worlds: Your world can contain Heaven, Hell, monsters, gods, and the apocalypse itself, but readers may still care more about whether two brothers are going to forgive each other.
And again, you’ll eventually become emotionally attached to a black 1967 Chevrolet Impala. I don’t make the rules.
6. Lost in Space
Available for streaming on Netflix.
There have been several versions of Lost in Space, but I’m talking specifically about Netflix’s modern adaptation that premiered in 2018. The series is a reimagining of the classic 1960s science-fiction show created by Irwin Allen. Netflix’s version was developed with writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless and showrunner Zack Estrin, and the complete story runs for three seasons. Netflix has described it as a three-part family adventure with a clear beginning, middle, and end.
The story takes place in a future where Earth is struggling and humanity has begun establishing colonies elsewhere in space. The Robinson family is selected to travel toward humanity’s new colony on Alpha Centauri, but things go spectacularly wrong because apparently nobody is allowed to have a peaceful space journey in science fiction.
The Robinsons become stranded far from their intended destination and have to survive unfamiliar planets, dangerous environments, failing equipment, limited resources, other survivors, and something considerably more interesting that I’m absolutely not going to explain because I promised not to spoil you. Netflix summarizes the premise rather nicely: after crash-landing on an alien planet, the Robinson family has to survive and find a way to escape while surrounded by hidden dangers.
What I like about Lost in Space as inspiration is that the environment itself becomes an antagonist. You don’t always need an evil emperor, serial killer, demon, or suspicious billionaire secretly controlling humanity from a volcano. Sometimes your characters simply need oxygen, or water, or fuel, or approximately five more minutes before an entire planet decides it no longer likes them.
Survival stories become interesting when characters understand what they need but have no easy way to get it. That creates natural conflict without forcing villains into every chapter. The show is also great for studying family dynamics. The Robinsons aren’t simply a crew of highly skilled astronauts completing missions; they’re parents, children, siblings, and people who disagree with one another while simultaneously depending on each other to stay alive.
If you’re writing science fiction involving exploration, alien environments, survival, robots, technology, or families travelling together, there’s a lot to take from Lost in Space.
And visually? Oh… Beautiful! It’s one of those shows that constantly made me stop thinking about the plot for a few seconds and start thinking: “I want something like THAT in my book.” Which is exactly why it’s on this list.
7. The 100
Originally aired on The CW.
If you looked at The 100 and thought it was simply another teenage CW drama, I wouldn’t blame you. That’s more or less what I thought too. Then people started making decisions involving the survival of entire civilizations, and suddenly things became a little more complicated.
The 100 is based on the book series by Kass Morgan, although the television adaptation created by Jason Rothenberg develops its own version of the story and world. The basic premise is fantastic: after a nuclear apocalypse makes Earth seemingly uninhabitable, the surviving human population lives aboard a massive space station called the Ark. Ninety-seven years later, resources are disappearing, so 100 young prisoners are sent down to Earth to discover whether humans can survive there again.
That’s all I’m telling you about where the story goes, because it goes places. Many places. Places I definitely did not expect when I started season one.
From a writer’s perspective, The 100 is probably one of the most useful shows on this entire list when it comes to creating factions. Different groups have their own cultures, leaders, rules, beliefs, enemies, histories, languages, symbols, technologies, and ideas about what survival means. And nobody agrees, which is excellent, because agreement is terrible for fiction.
If all your characters enter a room and immediately agree on what to do, congratulations, you have successfully written a very efficient meeting. Unfortunately, nobody wants seven seasons of that. The 100 constantly puts characters into situations where every available choice is awful. Save one group and another may die. Protect your people and someone else’s people suffer. Tell the truth and cause chaos, or lie and maintain peace. Trust an enemy or risk losing everything.
Those decisions reveal characters far more effectively than simply telling readers that somebody is “a good person.” Put your character in a situation where being good has a terrible cost. Then see what they do. That’s where things get interesting. The series is also useful for studying how civilizations can develop differently even when they originally came from the same humanity. Give people enough time, isolation, trauma, environmental pressure, and limited information, and completely different cultures can emerge.
If you’re into dystopian fiction, post-apocalyptic societies, political conflict, survival, factions, or morally questionable protagonists trying very hard to convince themselves they’re doing the right thing, watch this one.
8. Lost
Streaming availability varies by region.
If we’re talking about TV shows that can inspire fiction writers, I genuinely think that you should watch Lost.
The series originally aired on ABC between 2004 and 2010 and ran for six seasons. The basic premise sounds simple enough: Oceanic Flight 815 crashes on a mysterious island somewhere in the South Pacific, leaving a group of survivors trying to stay alive while waiting for rescue. Except this is Lost, so obviously the island isn’t going to politely sit there being an island.
At first, you’ve got everything you’d expect from a survival story. People need food, water, shelter, medicine, and some kind of leadership. The survivors are complete strangers, many of whom would probably never have spoken to each other under normal circumstances, and now they’re stuck together trying not to die.
Then the questions start, and then more questions. And then approximately seventeen thousand more questions. Something is very, very wrong with this island, and I’m not telling you what.
One of the reasons Lost deserves a place on this list is the way it handles its characters. Instead of simply telling us who these people are, the series regularly leaves the island through flashbacks and shows us their lives before the crash. You gradually learn that the doctor isn’t just the doctor, the criminal isn’t just the criminal, the funny guy isn’t just there to make jokes, and almost everybody arrived on that plane carrying something they hadn’t dealt with.
That’s an incredibly useful lesson for writers working with a large cast: your characters don’t suddenly begin existing when the first chapter starts. They had parents. Relationships. Mistakes. Jobs. Enemies. Regrets. Secrets. Maybe they borrowed twenty euros from somebody in 1997 and never gave it back. Whatever, they had lives. And those lives should influence the way they behave when your story begins.
Lost is also one of the best examples I can think of when it comes to using mystery as fuel. You’ll repeatedly receive an answer that immediately creates two more questions. Strange locations appear. Objects seem important before you understand why. Characters know things they shouldn’t. Numbers, symbols, organizations, old structures, and stories gradually create a mythology around the island.
The dangerous part of writing this way is that you can’t simply throw random weird things into a story and hope your readers assume you’re a genius. Eventually, they’re going to want answers. So if you’re writing mysteries, take one important lesson from Lost: questions can keep people reading for an incredibly long time, but those questions need to feel like pieces of something larger.
Another thing Lost does beautifully is turn the setting itself into part of the story. The island isn’t simply the location where events happen. Its history, geography, mysteries, and previous inhabitants matter. That’s something I’ve grown to appreciate a lot when worldbuilding. A fictional location should be able to have secrets of its own.
And if you’ve never watched Lost, do yourself a favor and don’t start searching for explanations beforehand. Hulu’s own description barely goes beyond the crash, survival, flashbacks, and the island’s secrets, which is exactly how I’d recommend entering it.
Just accept that eventually you’ll hear the words Dharma Initiative and suddenly understand why people spent years arguing about a television island.
9. Locke & Key
Available for streaming on Netflix.
Imagine moving into your family’s old ancestral mansion after a tragedy and discovering a collection of magical keys hidden throughout the house. Each key does something different. That alone was enough to get me interested.
Locke & Key is based on the comic book series written by Joe Hill and illustrated by Gabriel Rodríguez. Netflix’s adaptation follows the Locke family after they move into Keyhouse, where they begin discovering magical keys connected to the house, their family, and things that happened long before they arrived. The television series was developed by Carlton Cuse and Meredith Averill and ran for three seasons.
And for writers, those keys are where things become interesting. I love fictional objects with rules. Give me an ancient sword that remembers everyone it has killed. Give me a book that rewrites itself. Give me a door that only opens while someone is lying. Give me a magical spoon that summons Satan whenever you try to eat yogurt with it. Okay, maybe not that one.
The point is that an object becomes far more interesting when it isn’t simply “magic.” The keys in Locke & Key have specific purposes, and as the characters discover what they can do, the story begins exploring the consequences of having access to that kind of power.
That’s something worth thinking about if you’re building your own magic system. Don’t only ask: What can this magical thing do? Ask: Who created it? Why? What are its limits? Who knows it exists? What happens if the wrong person finds it? What price does using it have? Rules create problems, and problems create stories.
The series also does something I personally love in fiction: it combines family history with worldbuilding. Keyhouse has existed long before the current characters moved into it, which means discoveries aren’t simply random magical events created for the protagonist. They are connected to people, decisions, secrets, and events from previous generations. That makes the world feel deeper because your protagonists aren’t necessarily the most important people who ever existed in it. Sometimes they’re simply the latest people unlucky enough to discover what everyone before them messed up.
There’s also a good mix of fantasy, mystery, horror, coming-of-age storytelling, and family drama. Netflix itself describes the series as a coming-of-age mystery centered on love, loss, family bonds, and the magical world the Locke siblings uncover.
For fantasy authors, especially anyone creating magical artifacts, hidden histories, secret rooms, cursed families, or houses that probably need an exorcist instead of another renovation, Locke & Key is absolutely worth watching. And Keyhouse itself? Beautiful. If a relative leaves you a giant mansion filled with locked doors and unexplained family secrets, maybe rent an apartment instead.
10. Fallout
Available for streaming on Prime Video.
If you’ve played the games, you already know why Fallout belongs here.
If you haven’t played them, that’s fine too. The TV show doesn’t require you to spend 300 hours collecting bottle caps, accidentally stealing somebody’s spoon, and being murdered by a mutant because you decided that carrying seventeen broken desk fans was essential to your survival.
The series is based on Bethesda’s Fallout video-game universe, but rather than directly retelling the plot of one specific game, the show tells its own story inside that world. It comes from Kilter Films, with Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy among its executive producers, while Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner serve as writers, executive producers, and co-showrunners.
The premise takes us roughly 200 years after nuclear war destroyed civilization. Before the bombs fell, some people entered massive underground shelters known as Vaults, believing they would preserve humanity until the surface became habitable again.
If you’ve already watched Silo, you’re probably thinking: “Panos, we’re underground again.” Yes. Apparently humanity’s long-term survival plan is digging very large holes. But Fallout and Silo couldn’t feel more different.
When vault dweller Lucy eventually enters the surface world, she discovers a wasteland filled with settlements, factions, mutated creatures, old technology, survivors, violence, strange cultures, and the ruins of the civilization that existed before the bombs. Prime Video describes the world as an incredibly complex, bizarre, and extremely violent place waiting above the shelters.
What makes Fallout so useful for writers is its environmental storytelling. The old world is dead. But it’s everywhere. Advertising posters remain on ruined walls. Old buildings still contain evidence of what happened inside them. Companies that existed before the apocalypse continue affecting people centuries later. Technology survives long after the society that created it disappeared.
You don’t always need a character to stand there explaining: “As you know, dear reader, the Great Nuclear War occurred exactly 219 years ago…” Please don’t. A world can tell its own history. A broken playground tells you children once lived there. An abandoned checkpoint tells you someone was trying to control movement. A skeleton beside a locked suitcase creates a tiny story without saying anything.
Fallout has been doing this brilliantly in its games for decades, and the TV adaptation understands the same principle. It’s also fantastic inspiration if you want to create factions that feel distinct. Different groups have different beliefs about rebuilding civilization, different technologies, different moral standards, different ideas about what humanity should become, and very different definitions of the word “normal.”
And then there’s the tone. Fallout can be horrifying, violent, tragic, ridiculous, funny, and strangely beautiful within the same episode. That balance is difficult. Post-apocalyptic fiction doesn’t have to consist entirely of people whispering dramatically beside gray buildings while sad music plays. Your world can be completely destroyed and still contain humor. Humans would probably still make stupid jokes during the apocalypse.
Actually, knowing us, someone would start making apocalypse memes approximately eleven minutes after the bombs fell.
11. Westworld
Originally aired on HBO. Current streaming availability varies by region.
I need to be careful with this section because Westworld is one of those shows where explaining too much is basically a crime. The television series was created by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy and is based on the 1973 film written and directed by Michael Crichton. HBO described the series as a story about artificial consciousness and free will, which is probably the safest possible explanation without me destroying half the fun.
The basic setup revolves around Westworld, an enormous theme park designed to resemble the American Old West. But this isn’t Disney with cowboy hats. The park is populated by incredibly advanced humanoid robots known as hosts, while wealthy human guests can enter the world, interact with them, follow different stories, explore the environment, and basically do whatever they want.
And when humans are told there are no consequences? Well. Turns out we’re lovely creatures. What could possibly go wrong?
For fiction writers, Westworld is fascinating because it doesn’t only ask what artificial intelligence can do. It asks when something artificial stops being a thing and starts becoming someone. What is consciousness? Are memories necessary for identity? If you erase someone’s memories, are they still the same person? If an artificial being experiences pain but you programmed that pain, does the suffering count? If someone is programmed to love you, is that love real? If a character discovers that the story they’ve been living was written by somebody else, what happens next?
These are enormous philosophical questions, but Westworld builds them into its characters and world rather than presenting them like a university lecture where everyone has forgotten what happiness feels like. The show is also very interesting structurally. Information matters enormously. Who knows what, when they know it, and what the audience assumes they understand can completely alter how you interpret events. For mystery writers, that’s incredibly useful.
The same scene can mean two completely different things depending on what the reader knows. That’s a powerful tool because you don’t necessarily need to lie to your audience – sometimes you simply need to let them make an assumption and not correct them. Another lesson comes from the hosts themselves. They’re written with fictional backstories, personalities, relationships, routines, and objectives inside the fictional world. So you’ve basically got characters who are literally characters. Try explaining that sentence after three beers.
Unfortunately, there’s one thing you should know before starting: HBO ended Westworld after four seasons, so it didn’t receive the full conclusion its creators originally envisioned. Still, the ideas explored throughout those seasons make it one of the most interesting shows on this list for anyone writing about artificial intelligence, consciousness, identity, simulation, or the relationship between creator and creation.
And if you’re building AI characters into your own science-fiction world, Westworld may make you reconsider whether calling them “tools” is going to age particularly well.
12. Sense8
Available for streaming on Netflix.
Sense8 has one of those ideas that makes me jealous I didn’t think of it first. Eight complete strangers live in different parts of the world. Different countries and different cultures. Different languages. Different lives. Then they discover that they are somehow mentally connected.
Created by Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, and J. Michael Straczynski, Sense8 follows eight people who can begin experiencing one another’s lives, emotions, knowledge, and abilities despite being physically separated across the world. Netflix describes the premise simply as eight people who become telepathically connected and start experiencing each other’s lives.
Now imagine writing that. These people decided eight protagonists living around the planet wasn’t stressful enough, so let’s connect all their brains too.
What makes Sense8 especially useful for writers is how it handles an ensemble cast. The eight central characters aren’t copies of one another created to fill eight chairs. They come from dramatically different environments and have their own families, relationships, beliefs, careers, fears, problems, cultures, and personalities. Their differences are part of the story.
That’s an important thing to remember when writing groups. If you can remove three characters from your cast and nothing important changes, you may not actually need those characters. Each person should bring something different. Maybe one understands something the others don’t. Maybe two characters fundamentally disagree. Maybe someone has a skill another person desperately needs. Maybe one sees a moral problem where everyone else sees an obvious solution. That’s where groups become interesting.
Sense8 takes that concept and makes it literal because the characters can sometimes access one another’s experiences and abilities. But underneath all the science-fiction elements, the idea is surprisingly human: what would happen if people could genuinely understand what another person was feeling? Not guess. Not sympathize from the outside. Actually experience it. That’s an incredible foundation for fiction because so many conflicts exist precisely because people can’t fully understand each other’s experiences.
The series is also useful if you want to create a story that moves between multiple countries and cultures without making the world feel like a collection of generic locations. The different environments matter to who these characters are. And despite having a pretty complicated premise, Sense8 remains extremely character-driven. That’s probably the biggest lesson here. You can build telepathy, mysterious organizations, conspiracies, science fiction, action, and mythology around your characters.
But if we don’t care about those eight people, none of it matters. Netflix produced two seasons before cancelling the series, but fan response eventually resulted in a feature-length finale that gave the story a conclusion. Which also proves another important lesson: Never underestimate readers and viewers who have become emotionally attached to fictional people. We are not reasonable.
13. Under the Dome
Streaming availability varies by region.
Here’s another beautifully simple fictional question: What happens if an entire town suddenly gets trapped under an invisible dome? That’s it. That’s the premise. And it’s fantastic.
Under the Dome is based on Stephen King’s 2009 novel of the same name. The television adaptation originally aired on CBS beginning in 2013 and follows the residents of the fictional town of Chester’s Mill, which is suddenly cut off from the rest of the world by an enormous, mysterious, transparent barrier.
Nobody knows where it came from or why it’s there, and most importantly: nobody can leave. From a writer’s perspective, this is a perfect example of taking away escape. Think about how many fictional situations can be solved simply by leaving. Bad neighbor? Move. Dangerous town? Drive away. Murderer running around? Maybe don’t remain in Murderville.
But put a giant impenetrable wall around everybody and suddenly every existing problem becomes more serious. Food becomes finite. Medicine becomes finite. Fuel becomes finite. Authority becomes complicated. Personal conflicts can’t simply be escaped. People who hate each other still need each other. People with power may decide they’d quite like having more of it. And when nobody knows whether help is coming, society starts changing.
That’s where Under the Dome becomes particularly useful for writers interested in small fictional societies. You don’t need an entire planet; sometimes one town is enough. Take a limited number of people and remove their connection to normal civilization, then ask what happens to laws, jobs, money, leadership, relationships, morality, religion, resources, and trust. You can apply the same concept almost anywhere: a spaceship, an island, an underground Silo, a remote colony, a bunker, a generation ship, or a village surrounded by something nobody can cross.
The setting changes, but the storytelling principle remains the same: Isolation magnifies conflict. CBS originally described Under the Dome as a story about Chester’s Mill residents struggling to survive while trying to understand what the barrier is, where it came from, and whether it will ever disappear. That combination of survival and mystery gives you two engines running simultaneously.
Characters need to survive today, but they also desperately want to understand why this is happening. That’s extremely effective because solving one problem doesn’t automatically solve the other. You found food? Excellent. The giant invisible wall is still there. Good luck tomorrow.
14. The Boys
Available for streaming on Prime Video.
And finally: Superheroes. Except everyone needs therapy.
The Boys is based on the comic-book series created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson and was developed for television by Eric Kripke, who also created Supernatural. The television series follows a world in which superheroes are not simply people flying around saving civilians. They’re celebrities, corporate assets, political figures, brands, products, and in some cases some of the absolute worst human beings imaginable.
At the center of all this is Vought International, a massive corporation responsible for managing superheroes, controlling their public image, selling them to the world, and dealing with the little problem of what happens when incredibly powerful people realize ordinary laws can’t easily stop them. Opposing them are The Boys, a group of mostly ordinary humans trying to expose and fight superheroes who abuse their power.
Prime Video’s main series concluded with its fifth and final season in 2026, so unlike several shows on this list, you can currently watch the entire main story from beginning to end. Now, The Boys is obviously violent. Very violent.
There are moments where I’m fairly certain someone working in the effects department said: “Do you think that’s enough blood?” And somebody else replied: “No.” But underneath all the exploding human beings is something extremely useful for fiction writers. The Boys takes a familiar concept and asks uncomfortable questions about it.
We’re used to superheroes being good. But why? If one human being had the power to destroy a building with their eyes, who exactly would hold that person accountable? What happens when superheroes have publicists? What happens when corporations own their identities? What happens when saving people becomes marketing? What happens when popularity matters more than morality? What happens when the public loves someone who is actually horrible? Suddenly, “people with superpowers” stops being the whole idea.
That’s the lesson I’d take from The Boys. When you’re working with something familiar, don’t only ask how you can make your version look different.
Ask: What assumptions does this genre normally make? Then break one. Fantasy says the chosen hero will save everyone. What if they don’t want to? Science fiction says advanced technology improves life. What if only wealthy people get access to it? Superhero stories say enormous power creates heroes. What if enormous power simply creates enormously powerful assholes? There you go. Story.
It’s also a useful show for anyone creating fictional corporations. Vought doesn’t feel evil simply because someone put a skull on the company logo and called the CEO Mr. Evil McVillain. It has marketing departments, movies, merchandise, PR campaigns, contracts, shareholders, public scandals, products, political influence, and so much more. That’s far more believable. The most frightening fictional institutions often aren’t openly frightening. They have nice websites.
The Boys is also surprisingly good at creating characters who are difficult to place into neat little boxes labelled HERO and VILLAIN. People do terrible things for understandable reasons. Other people believe they’re doing something good while causing enormous damage. Power changes relationships, fear changes decisions, and revenge has a nasty habit of becoming someone’s entire personality.
So even if you’re not writing superheroes, there is plenty here to learn about power. Who has it? Who wants it? Who controls the people who have it? And what happens when someone becomes powerful enough that nobody can tell them no? Those questions work whether your character is Superman, a king, a billionaire, a wizard, a dictator, the leader of a fictional religion, or Steve from Accounting after finding an enchanted sword in the office kitchen.
Although personally, I wouldn’t trust Steve either.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, that’s the end of this list. I’ll probably add more shows as I watch newer ones, but for now, I think this will do. So make sure to keep this one saved in your bookmarks and come back to it after a few months.
And hey, if you’ve watched a TV show that’s helpful to watch as a writer/author, kindly recommend it in the comments below – I’m always looking for cool things to watch so I can get some inspiration and ideas my mind never thought of.
