The Best Near-Future TV Series: 7 Shows Ranked, and What Came True
Seven series about pandemics, uploads, robots and bad offices, ranked by our review scores, with a note on how much of each one's future has actually arrived.
The best near-future TV series we've reviewed is Severance, followed by Pantheon and Station Eleven. Then come Years and Years, Humans, Devs and Upload. All seven are full series, not single episodes, and each is built around one question about the next few decades: what happens to work, to the dead, to the family kitchen, or to the news.
The list is ranked by our review scores, which are about how good the show is as television. They aren't about how accurate it was. For that we have a second measure. Each series has a prediction ledger on the P(n) Board, where we break its world into testable claims and check them against evidence. The two rankings disagree in useful ways. Station Eleven got its first weeks scene for scene and its premise not at all. Pantheon has the most far-fetched technology on the list and some of the most accurate side-effects. Devs is gorgeous and inert.
We've left out single episodes. For those, see Black Mirror episodes that came true. For one-off films, try the best near-future sci-fi movies, and for shows and films about machines in particular, sci-fi about AI.
The most beautiful thing ever made about a cubicle, and a very funny one. Lumon's staff have a chip that splits their memory between work and home, and the show's design, from the beige corridors to the missing Escape key, is flawless. Season two withholds for the sake of withholding, which is why it's an 8.4 and not a 9. As prophecy, the chip is far off. The percentage bars, voluntary workplace implants and brain-data laws around it have arrived. Watch it if you've ever been scored on your idle time.
An animated drama about uploaded minds, cancelled and pulled from AMC's service in January 2023, then rescued by other streamers. It follows its technology through a family, a market, a war and a species, in that order, and Daniel Dae Kim is the heart of it as a father who can only reach his daughter through a screen. The animation is stiff and season two is overstuffed. Uploading itself is far off, but a single bad software push crashing computers worldwide, and a lab asking whether its models might matter morally, both arrived first.
A pandemic drama that wants to cheer you up. The first episode is close to perfect, and the later ones follow a travelling Shakespeare troupe twenty years on, under the motto "Survival Is Insufficient". Its opening weeks arrived as filmed in 2020: grounded planes, sealed flats and a passenger ship held at anchor. The flu that kills nearly everyone did not. The finale forgives too much, but Himesh Patel makes it worth the trip. Start here if you want a gentle apocalypse. More like it in sci-fi about pandemics and collapse.
Six hours following one Manchester family from 2019 to 2034, with each big event reaching them through a phone, a radio or a row at a birthday party. It was uncannily right about the shape of the 2020s: a second Trump term, Ukrainian refugees and an American bank collapse all turned up roughly on schedule, though the outcomes differed. The speeches are heavy and the finale is too tidy. But Russell Tovey's storyline in episode four is the hardest thing on this list.
Series one is a sharp, humane family drama about a household synth, with Gemma Chan's controlled performance and William Hurt as a widower who can't let his old machine go. Series two and three drift into conspiracy. It was early on robot bodies, since the synth in your kitchen is still a factory prototype with a remote supervisor. It was right about the adult setting nobody mentions in the showroom, the anger at machines taking work, and the argument over whether software can suffer.
Alex Garland's eight-hour quantum-computer miniseries is serious, gorgeous and almost entirely static. Nick Offerman is excellent as a grieving founder who has built a theology out of physics. The machine that replays history is probably ruled out by physics. But the secretive, messianic lab, quantum hardware beating supercomputers on narrow tasks, and models that predict human behaviour all look uncomfortably familiar. It explains its ideas far more than it dramatises them. Watch it for the photography and Offerman.
Greg Daniels's afterlife comedy has one great joke: heaven is a subscription tier, and residents on the cheapest plan get a rationed eternity. The satire of the death business is often brilliant. A standard romantic murder mystery gets most of the screen time, and the later seasons bury the jokes under lore. The show wrapped in August 2025 with a four-episode fourth season. Uploading a mind is nowhere near its 2033 setting, but star-rated service work and paid AI versions of the dead are here.
What is the best near-future TV series?
On our scores it's Severance (8.4), then Pantheon (8.2) and Station Eleven (8.1). If you want the one that read the 2020s best, it's Years and Years, which we scored 7.6. Our scores rate the television, not the prediction, so it's worth reading the P(n) Board as well.
Which near-future TV show came true?
The first weeks of Station Eleven arrived in 2020, almost scene for scene, but its premise, a flu that ends industrial civilisation, did not. Years and Years got a run of real events roughly right, from a second Trump term to Ukrainian refugees and a bank collapse, though its outcomes differed. Severance and Humans were right about the surroundings of their technology more than the technology.
Are there near-future shows that are more comedy than drama?
Upload is the most comic, and Severance is very funny in places even as it frightens you. Pantheon and Station Eleven are the most emotional, and Devs the most austere. If you want something shorter, our Black Mirror guide ranks four single episodes by how much of their futures arrived.
Is *Pantheon* worth watching if it was cancelled?
Yes. AMC cancelled it in January 2023 after both seasons had been made, and it later found a home on Prime Video and Netflix. The story is complete, and our review thinks its final hour is moving rather than merely clever. Season two moves faster than the audience can grieve, so it's worth going in knowing that.