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For All Mankind is a great deal more grounded than anything involving FTL spaceships and intelligent aliens. So, for that matter, was the first year of Westworld - if you object to specific aspects of the tech on that show you're really quibbling, as things have gotten a lot stranger a lot faster than we could have anticipated, since then. The AIs look likely to skip the whole Sadist's Sex Slaves shakedown period and go straight to the Rule Humanity phase of the plan.
If you want to try to limit it to "grounded shows about interstellar spaceships," you've already thrown in the towel. There's nothing realistic about the depictions of interstellar travel in TV shows, and only one and a half examples in the movies.
Here's another example of a series that's not grounded: Red Dwarf.
But it doesn't have aliens. Not one single alien has ever shown up in the series, because it wouldn't be Red Dwarf if they did and the writer understands this.
Being grounded or not isn't really the whole story.
I think that a series can have an established flavor that fans can come to expect.
Red Dwarf allows much (including mutated organisms of Earthly back ground), but excludes genuine aliens.
Star Trek allows much, but barely tolerates the appearance of robots. A few androids, and a rare "tin can" robot. Even though you would expect 'droids to be common.
(The Synth attack on Mars was a special case, for story purposes.)
there are everal cases of grounded Sci-fi series given. It's not about winning, anyway. One being closer to hard-sf, the other being space opera doesn't mean one is better than the other.
And that's even worse than dragging the real Lincoln into the tale to start with! I hated seeing him die a second time, real or not. Kirk clearly did as well, given that he ran after Colonel Green like a crack-addict bunny rabbit.
there are everal cases of grounded Sci-fi series given. It's not about winning, anyway. One being closer to hard-sf, the other being space opera doesn't mean one is better than the other.
The only sci fi TV franchises I can think of offhand that have tried to have some kind of real scientific grounding are For All Mankind, The Expanse, Westworld, Severance, Ghost In the Shell, and maybe Firefly.
I'm sorry, but I just can't call The Expanse all that grounded. It's as grounded as a Godzilla movie. Sure, all the people are going about very grounded day to day lives but then there's Godzilla.
Just because we're going up against Star Trek, I'll leave out Ghost in the Shell (I'm not familiar enough, I've seen it once. No space travel, right?) and Westworld (same reasons). For All Mankind, sure. But that's pretty much Alternate History as much as sci-fi, isn't it?
That leaves Firefly. Which has a solar system with "hundreds of new Earths". It had lots of nods to "no Warp Drive, no aliens, no sound in space". (I love Firefly.) But it still had artificial gravity. And roving cannibalistic space pirate Apaches.
But let's accept all of them. That puts the entire genre of "grounded sci fi on film" to six shows. Three of them with spaceships. Two of them with spaceships we don't already have. (I don't know how advanced For All Mankind has gotten.)
I'm sorry, but I just can't call The Expanse all that grounded. It's as grounded as a Godzilla movie. Sure, all the people are going about very grounded day to day lives but then there's Godzilla.
Just because we're going up against Star Trek, I'll leave out Ghost in the Shell (I'm not familiar enough, I've seen it once. No space travel, right?) and Westworld (same reasons). For All Mankind, sure. But that's pretty much Alternate History as much as sci-fi, isn't it?
That leaves Firefly. Which has a solar system with "hundreds of new Earths". It had lots of nods to "no Warp Drive, no aliens, no sound in space". (I love Firefly.) But it still had artificial gravity. And roving cannibalistic space pirate Apaches.
But let's accept all of them. That puts the entire genre of "grounded sci fi on film" to six shows. Three of them with spaceships. Two of them with spaceships we don't already have. (I don't know how advanced For All Mankind has gotten.)
That would be like comparing Rendezvous With Rama with a Godzilla comic. They both involve trying to understand, and not being very good at it, an advanced alien civilization. In the case of the Expanse, the Ring Builders were highly advanced but the thing that destroyed them was being hurt by the presence of the rings and would do whatever it took to get rid of such things. All that's left of the ring builders are automated functions that don't see any real difference between living things in our solar system and uses them accordingly, whether as building blocks, or rarely to understand people in order to accomplish a very simple task.. As wormholes are theoretically possible, just the technology to create them not understood, I would say it's grounded enough
The various Ghost in the Shell series that I have experience with, do not deal with spaceflight, though in the mangas it is mentioned there are space stations and lunar colonies.
For All Mankind began as alternate history but by the late 1970's their technology far outstrips ours in many ways, already building Lunar colonies. by the 1980s the switch to electric cars was well under way. They have fusion powered spaceships that we could not build right now.
by the end of season 5, and the 2010's at least one small area of Mars has fought for its independence, humans have walked on Titan and unicellular life was found there.
Firefly's comments about 100's of worlds are a comment at the beginning of the episode. It might by hyperbole or maybe they really stumbled into a solar system with super giant plants in the goldilocks zone with hundreds of livable moons. Doesn't seem likely, but that's the premise. How humans got there isn't clear. Maybe some kind of generational ship? Don't know. Putting Firefly 500 years into the future was probably a bad idea. They should have went for 1000's. Maybe the reboot will fix it. The grav generator thing also doesn't make any sense. TV show runners just didn't have the guts to handle gravity as an issue back then. It was probably too expensive and demanding of time. Maybe they didn't trust audiences to accept it. Comparing Reavers to Apaches is kind of offensive.
But FTL I would say is the least reason that Star Trek is a science fantasy. FTL comms and travel seems impossible. It violates causation, violates physics, etc, but whatever. Someone invents it one day and we all look like cavemen when someone reads all this. I don't think that will happen, but no matter. Star Trek has a lot of supernatural stuff: telepathy, tele-empathy, psychokinesis, gods (Q, Trelaine, Apollo, Kevin Uxbridge, etc), souls in pottery jars, soul transfer, the fungi-verse, teleportation, time travel, an actual real afterlife-for Klingons anyway, resurrections, and so on. That's why I call Star Trek science fantasy or space opera, but not those other shows. Star Trek isn't about that and it's never really made any attempt to be like that. If it tried now, it would break everything.
Firefly (Serenity, the movie): "Earth-That-Was could no longer sustain our numbers, we were so many. We found a new solar system: Dozens of planets and hundreds of moons. Each one terraformed, a process taking decades."
He may have backed of on the Savage Natives for the Reavers but he doubled down on the number of terraformed worlds.
The Expanse: The protomolecule aliens play as fast and loose with space time as Star Trek does. By the time you get to the later books it's really freaking the human scientist out. (Well, it's freaking them out from the start, I suppose.) Particularly as regards cause and effect. Oh, and "All humans in the universe have simultaneous consciousness loss." You have characters who are struggling with the fact that as far as they know that literally can't happen.
My point (such as it is): There is a lot of current Star Trek writing that is excused (by the writers and the audience) because they hand wave it away and say "Well, Star Trek was always silly." The difference is that TOS (for example) wasn't trying to be. While some (not necessarily all) of later Star Trek leans into it. I'm sure there are episodes of TOS that we find howlingly silly and nonsensical that the writers thought were trying to be pretty serious.
But now people point to those episodes and say "Star Trek, amirite?"
I'm not saying that all (or even much) Star Trek needs to be as humor averse as The Corbomite Maneuver or The Motion Picture.
Besides if you can lump THAT much sci-fi TV and movies into "not serious" then I suppose you can take the reverse approach: "OK, I know Star Trek isn't SERIOUS. But neither are Dune and Foundation. So make it as silly as those are."
Besides if you can lump THAT much sci-fi TV and movies into "not serious" then I suppose you can take the reverse approach: "OK, I know Star Trek isn't SERIOUS. But neither are Dune and Foundation. So make it as silly as those are."
The difference is that TOS (for example) wasn't trying to be. While some (not necessarily all) of later Star Trek leans into it. I'm sure there are episodes of TOS that we find howlingly silly and nonsensical that the writers thought were trying to be pretty serious.
