TV Shows Like The Expanse
If you like The Expanse, here are 10 similar TV shows — each with its current AI renewal verdict, so you can see which are still going and which have been cancelled.
Syfy · Drama · The Expanse is ended
The Expanse earns its reputation by treating science fiction seriously. Ships need time to accelerate. Political factions have real, competing interests. The solar system feels lived-in, dirty, and unfair. At its core, though, it is a conspiracy thriller, and that combination, hard physical logic wrapped around a genuinely urgent mystery, is what keeps fans locked in across six seasons. The missing-woman case that opens the story is really just a door into something much larger, and the show never lets you forget that ordinary people, a detective, a ship's crew, a political aide, are the ones who have to carry the weight of that larger thing.
The best shows like The Expanse
1. Star Trek: Discovery
Discovery commits to season-long serialized arcs in a way earlier Trek shows never did, which gives it the same sense of building momentum that made The Expanse so hard to drop. The galaxy here is dangerous and politically fractured, and the personal stakes for the main characters are tied directly into the larger conflict. It is not as grounded in physics, but the ambition to tell one big, continuous story is absolutely there.
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Cancelled0%
2. Battlestar Galactica
If The Expanse is the show you recommend to serious science fiction readers, Battlestar Galactica is the one you recommend right alongside it. The civilian fleet trying to survive under military protection maps almost directly onto the tension between Earth, Mars, and the Belt, and the show is equally ruthless about showing how power corrupts and how people rationalize terrible decisions. The mystery running through it, about who is human and who is not, gives it the same conspiratorial undertow that The Expanse does so well.
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Ended0%
3. Halo
Halo builds a detailed 26th-century civilization and then puts it under genuine existential pressure from an alien enemy, which is a premise fans of The Expanse will recognize immediately. The scale is larger and the action more front-and-center than anything in The Expanse, but the show takes time to develop the human side of its world rather than treating the war as pure spectacle. Viewers who liked the political maneuvering between Earth factions in The Expanse will find something similar here in how humanity's institutions respond to a threat they barely understand.
Stream on Netflix, Paramount Plus Premium, Paramount Plus Essential, Paramount Plus Apple TV Channel
Cancelled0%
4. Invasion
Invasion tells its alien-threat story almost entirely from the ground up, through people who have no special training or privileged information, which gives it the same kind of scrappy, survival-focused energy that the Belter storylines in The Expanse carried so well. It is deliberately paced and more interested in how ordinary life fractures under pressure than in delivering big action sequences. Viewers who found the quieter, more human moments in The Expanse just as gripping as the space battles will find a lot to hold onto here.
Stream on Apple TV, Apple TV Amazon Channel
On the Bubble42%
5. Star Trek: Picard
Set decades after the character's most familiar adventures, Picard is a show about what a future looks like when its promises have not been kept, which is very much The Expanse's territory. The tone is more reflective and melancholy than standard Trek, and the conspiracy at its center has real weight. For fans of The Expanse who want serialized sci-fi drama with political texture and a protagonist carrying genuine history, this one delivers.
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Ended0%
More on shows like The Expanse
Fans of The Expanse tend to want a few specific things when they go looking for their next show. They want a future that has texture and consequence, not a clean utopia. They want characters who disagree with each other for reasons that make sense, not just because the plot needs conflict. And they want stakes that feel physical, whether that means a space battle with real momentum or a civilization slowly grinding itself apart. Pure action is not enough; pure drama without the speculative ideas is not enough either. The best recommendations sit in that overlap.
The shows here cover a range of tones. Battlestar Galactica is the closest in spirit: a fleet under constant threat, moral compromise at every level of command, and a mystery about identity and survival that runs underneath all the combat. Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard both operate in the familiar Trek universe but push into darker, more serialized territory than the franchise's older entries, which makes them a reasonable fit for viewers who liked The Expanse's willingness to let things get complicated. Halo scales up the conflict to a full interstellar war and leans harder into action, but it shares the ambition of building a richly detailed future civilization. Invasion takes the opposite approach, slowing everything down to ground level and following ordinary people instead of soldiers or officers, which will appeal to viewers who appreciated the Belter storylines and the way The Expanse made working-class survival feel as urgent as any military plot.
None of these are perfect replacements, and a couple come with real caveats. Invasion requires patience; its first season in particular is more mood than momentum. Halo is built for fans of the game as much as for general sci-fi audiences. But taken as a set, these recommendations cover almost every reason someone might love The Expanse, and at least one of them is likely to stick.
More shows like The Expanse
Frequently asked
- What is the most popular show like The Expanse?
- Star Trek: Discovery is the most popular show similar to The Expanse in the IsItRenewed catalogue.
- Are shows like The Expanse still on the air?
- Of the 10 shows similar to The Expanse listed here, 1 currently carry a renewed verdict — the rest are cancelled, ended, or awaiting a decision.
- How does IsItRenewed pick shows like The Expanse?
- The recommendations come from TMDB's similar-titles data, and each is shown with its current AI renewal verdict so you know which are still going.