While television producers are falling all over themselves lately to proclaim how their shows really aren’t science fiction, The Boston Globe goes out of its way to include pretty much anything it can under the genre umbrella — including shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Man from U.N.C.L.E, Tales from the Crypt, and The Wild Wild West. Like most lists of this sort, it alternates between the very subjective to the completely laughable. For instance, That Was Then, which had four episodes in 2002 (of which I think only one ran*), rates a mention, but something like Farscape doesn’t.
Which isn’t to say you have to think Farscape is among the fifty best science fiction television shows of all time. (Me, I think it’s in the top five, but lists like this are always going to spark endless debate.) Or even that the lines of the genre aren’t permeable — genre, after all, being mainly a marketing creation. But if you’re going to use the label of science fiction, you should at least have some criteria for what is and what isn’t.
Lists like this are pretty subjective and an endless source of debate. There are always going to be shows that don’t make the cut that readers think should have, and vice versa. My problem with this one isn’t so much all of the picks I’d have dropped or the ones I might have added. It’s that the criteria for picking what is and isn’t science fiction seems so wonky, so vague. Heck, under these rules, you could probably make a case even for a show like The West Wing being science fiction (I mean, it clearly takes place in a parallel universe, doesn’t it?)
But I think that raises an interesting question: What other clearly non-sci-fi shows, movies, books, et cetera could be re-interpreted as science fiction? Could you take something that clearly isn’t science fiction and make a convincing argument that it is?
* The only episode I saw. I remember it being confused, more than anything.
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