I actually kind of love the Jason Of Star Command credits, for the whizzy spaceship and the friendly dragon, among other things. But it is pretty cheesetastic and insane. My favorite part: about 40 seconds in, we get a tight closeup of the evil Dragos, looking like Brian Blessed crossed with a Borg, and then it zooms out jerkily to show he's sitting with a bunch of coke-snorting lizards. And then we zip back to the tight closup on Dragos so we can learn his name. Awesome!

But that's not even the worst TV opening credits of all time. We'll save time and put that one first. The absolute weakest theme tune and opening montage almost certainly belongs to...

K-9 And Company:

The first ever Doctor Who spin-off: he's a sassy robot who likes to sing his own name! She's an alcoholic who sits around drinking! Together they, erm... get sloshed and sing off key! Yeah, that's it! Seriously, was everyone involved with this drunk the whole time?

Space Academy

A group of well scrubbed young people learn to harness their amazing abilities, guided by Dr. Smith from Lost In Space. And Peepo! Don't forget Peepo the friendly robot! This one has the best "explaining the show's premise" voiceover.

Flash Gordon

Running running running... And then smiling! Nice teeth! Warrior woman. More running! Gateway in space, and then cue the drum machines, because planets are flying at your head. Zoooom! I like that the planets get drum machines.

Ark II

The voice of Landru narrates about pollution and waste. We're in a post-apocalyptic Winnebago — check out the long lingering shot across its side, to let you know it's a stretch Winnebago. Evil, scary flower of doom! But the best part is the bumper, where the guy carefully says everyone's name into the log, while their faces and names flash on the screen. Subtle!

Pain Killer Jane

There's only one type of pain she can't kill. Can you guess what it is? Anyway, dark gloomy city, then strippers! Then explosions! Then action! Then showering. Then bra! Then more montage, showing that these people shoot each other a lot, but they also smile and nod, and share a beer in their top secret lab. Ooh, back scars!

Mission Magic

Okay, so it's more like fantasy, or maybe urban fantasy, but wow. This is the show that launched Rick Springfield's career, before he was a soap opera actor or a pop singer. The show is all about a young witch named Miss Tickle, but Springfield gets top billing. More importantly, check out the incredible psychedelic cartoon visuals:

Prey

It starts with the most boring lecture in history, full of vague stuff about "okay, so there was an advanced species, and we wiped them out, and then there's another advanced species, and now we're the prey. Except when we're not." Confused yet? Cue montage of spermatazoa and monkeys, with words like "EVOLUTION" and "SELECTION" wibbling onto the screen. Now it all makes sense!

UFO

If we end up doing a list of the best opening credits as well, this will most certainly be in there. It's easily among both the best and worst TV show openings I've ever seen. The weird typewriter exposition! The men hugging themselves and breathing deeply! The purple wigs and crazy cars! It's all just so great! And yet, terrible.

Project UFO

This one is sort of the opposite. Where UFO was kicky and jazzy, Project UFO is sort of austere, with the Jack Webb-esque voiceover and the slow, dull scrolling across unidentifiable drawings of spacecraft:

Journeyman:

We grew to love this short-lived show, but its credits were part of why we had misgivings about it in the first place. Random years are flying over the Golden Gate Bridge! Now birds are flying backwards! It's Journeyman, the man with the power to confuse birds!

Fantastic Voyage

This one is pure groove, with the Peter Gunn-esque music, and the echo-y voice reading every single thing on the screen. "CMDF! Combined Miniature Defense Force!" If we're invaded by anything miniature, they'll protect us. Authority: TOP SECRET! HIGHEST CLEARANCE! And then there's Guru, master of mysteroius powers. Yeah. This is the sort of thing that fuels a million Adult Swim shows.

Time Trax

This one makes me sad, because Time Trax holds a special place in my heart. But these credits? So bad.

Electra Woman And Dyna Girl

This is another one that's great but awful — they move so stiffly, jumping out of their flying ship. And yet they're so awesome. They fight tigers! And spiders! With lasers! They shoot Sarah Jane Smith's wine glass, so she'll dry out and stop getting drunk when the Zarbi are attacking. They're hip women of today! And they have lyrics!!

Smallville season five

The posters over at Television Without Pity singled this opening out for particular badness, and it's not hard to see why. The weird dissolve-o people, the choppy montages, the cheesy video effects, it's all just a melange of badness.

Alias season four

Here's another one the TWOPers singled out. I used to love the techno music/deep purple mystery vibe that you got from this show's credits in the first couple of seasons, but this version of the opening credits slides over into ridiculousness, with the cheesy dance music getting too overhyped and the medley of Sidney's wigs getting over the top.

Automan

He's so cute and blue and glowy, and his little glowing bug flies around harrassing women! What's not to love?

SeaQuest DSV

There's a dolphin, and it's flying around the show's logo as if it wants to play, but then it gets tangled up in a net of too many clips from the show on screen at once, and the poor thing ends up mangled and destroyed. This is why we need dolphin-safe opening credits.

Code Name: Eternity

More awesome techno music. My favorite bit is at 0:12, where the hero sort of snaps his forearm up and raises his fist, so it looks like he's dancing, and then a defiant closeup of him smashes into the camera like he's striking a pose. But the whole thing is great — the screen being sliced up into vertical chunks, the sillhouette of a guy standing in front of his own wobbly face, the seasickness-inducing zooms. Rockage!

Dollhouse

I wrestled with including this one, because Dollhouse really is a fantastic show in general, and I hate to criticize any aspect of it. And Jonatha Brooke sang a couple of my favorite songs of all time. But these credits? Not doing the show any favors. Whenever you try to get people to take this show seriously, they watch these credits and start giggling. The "la la la la" sounds unfortunately lobotomized, and Eliza Duskhu's magic power is changing outfits as she walks. Also, "Active Secure" as she does yoga — what? It's like a computer scanner is monitoring her yoga progress. Uh, no.

Logan's Run:

They're torturing the dolphin from the Seaquest DSV credits to make those "Chew! Chew! Chew!" noises.

Star Trek: Enterprise.

Both Deep Space Nine and Voyager had similar opening credits: the treacly instrumental music, the slow montage of spacey scenes, the terrible empty dullness. But at least they felt sort of epic. The Trek behemoth tried to set a change of pace, with this schlocky ballad from Diane Warren, writer of timeless gems by Michael Bolton, Mariah Carey, Chicago, Heart and many others. (Plus "I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing" by Aerosmith.) And they paired it with a totally cheesy video. Result: awesomeness! Here's the revised, boppier version:

The Invisible Man (1970s version)

It's the love boat, except with an invisible David McCallum. The way it zooms out when the effervescent Melinda Fee tosses her dice - like she's throwing the camera - is just special. And then there's just too much excitement, so the screen has to split into four cubes of awesome.

Voyagers!

They're being flung at the camera through space again and again! This may actually be the best example of the "explaining the show's premise in the credits" phenomenon, especially with the lost Osmond brother talking us through the whole "red is for temporal wrongness" thing. Zippee!

Crusade

What is your name? What is your quest? What is the wingspan velocity of an unladen sparrow? If you can answer these questions, you'll love these opening credits:

The Phoenix

He's sort of writhing in ecstasy a lot of the time as he strokes his medallion — either that or staring into the camera with a crazed exuberance, like he wants to stick his tongue through our TV tube and lick our eyeballs. But we're viewing the whole thing through a flaming triangle, so it all holds together surprisingly well.

The Powers Of Mathew Star

He's a space prince! And he plays football. But mostly, we have Louis Gossett Jr. explaining the whole deal, and having Louis Gossett Jr. talking about how special you are is probably actually better than being an alien prince with super powers anyway.

Future Cop

Oh, Ernest Borgnine. He just loves to confuse his African American partner, with the help of his wacky android cop from the future. When Borgnine laughs, it's actually really scary - and that's the signal to launch into the 1970s action disco music. And funny pixelated graphics. Whee!

Time Cop

The greatest movie of all time (well, almost) spawns a really sad set of TV credits, with footage of the time-travel train interspersed with vertical wedges of the same bit of footage three or four times at once - because the time-travel train splits the world into simultaneous chunks of sameness! Don't you get it? People who we don't care about are talking, and all we want to see is someone policing. In time!

Star Cops

Another one that makes me sad - Star Cops is a vastly underrated show, a classic from the pen of Chris Boucher (Doctor Who, Blake's 7) but wow - this theme tune is horrible, sounding like Spandau Ballet had a horrible mishap. And the Earth gets squished and turned into a boot sole... why?

Fantastic Journey

Another one with the screen divided up into squares, this time of different sizes... there's a lady walking, and we zoom in on a cat! The cat looks really bored — I can haz glowy portal? Oh, and Roddy McDowell is an android, or just a flasher.

Dark Angel

"In a broken world, she is haunted by her past..." The worst thing that happened to opening credits in the 1990s was that technique that lets you have five different versions of someone's face blending into a swirly of awful, all at once. This is a particularly bad example of the multi-face overload:

Man From Atlantis

It feels like he's swimming around, half naked, for several minutes before he finally breaks the surface and we go into the traditional montage of people having Personalities.

Earth: The Final Conflict

Aaaaa it's Enya! I stumbled on this one, when I was searching for the season two credits of Andromeda, which have the overly caffeinated voiceover talking about how Dylan Hunt is the guardian of a dead civilization protecting the galaxy from everything. But this is almost as good:

We're dividing human-A.I. buddy-comedy or buddy-cop friendships into four main categories: sarcastic, flirty, grudging or eager.

Sarcastic:

Knight Rider. KITT gives Mike shit, but he's also Mike's best homey. He doesn't just chauffeur Mike around, he helps him bamboozle the bad guys and even helps him pick up hot ladies. (He's a wingman and a get-away car, all in one!)

The Doctor may have had one of the most servile A.I.s of all time — the robot dog K-9 who had to call everybody "Master" — but Doctor Who also included a few examples of A.I.s that could stand up for themselves. Like D-84, the robot secret agent who teamed up with the Doctor in "Robots Of Death." He started out suspecting the Doctor of being involved in the robot murders, and never stopped giving the Doctor a hard time, as befits an undercover robo-agent.

Joel had a pretty snarky relationship with Crow, Servo and Gypsy on MST3K. It wasn't quite a buddy-cop relationship, but definitely a kind of Odd Couple-y buddy-comedy relationship. They're cooped up on this space station and forced to sit through a nearly endless selection of awful movies, and there's sort of an Oscar-and-Felix vibe to it. Sort of.

Fry and Bender have been roommates, coworkers, co-conspirators, and occasionally enemies, on Futurama. As long as you appeal to Bender's worse nature (worse programming?) you'll be fine.

I want to put R2D2 from Star Wars into the "sarcastic" category, because I always imagine him telling Luke Skywalker just where he can stick the Force. At least, C-3PO always seems shocked by whatever Artoo's tweetling means. Artoo rides with Luke, but he's always giving him lip from the shotgun seat.

Star Cops featured an A.I. named Box, who was always giving space detective Nathan Spring a hard time for his dumb or inexplicable decisions. Box was literally just a box-shaped pocket computer, but he was deceptively simple, since he was a rare prototype that could access pretty much any computer anywhere.

Poor H.E.R.B.I.E. is the robot assigned to look after Reed Richards' son Franklin in the Son Of A Genius comics. But Franklin ends up dragging H.E.R.B.I.E. into one mess after another, Laurel and Hardy style, while H.E.R.B.I.E. tells him off. The bot even gets de-evolved into a toaster at one point.

Hymie the robot is an indispensible part of the Control team on Get Smart, as anybody who's seen the recent movie (and DVD spinoff) already knows. But what you might not know from the latest movie is that Hymie is kind of a jerk — he's easily offended and is constantly saying pissy things like, "It's the same old story. Nobody cares about a robot. Just wind him up, turn him loose, and grease him every thousand miles."

Flirty:

SELMA, the pocket computer in Time Trax, totally had the hots for Darien, the future cop stranded in the 1990s. Her holographic projection may have looked like a librarian, but she was always pouring some sugar on Darien. If that show hadn't gotten canceled way too early, there would have been some holographic lovin.

Rommie is the gynoid avatar of the starship Andromeda Ascendant in Andromeda. She's part of the ship's A.I., which also manfiests via viewscreen images and holograms, but she has her own separate personality to some extent. She enjoys having physical form, and even falls in love with the "avatar" of another starship at one point.

The Vision in Marvel Comics may act like an uptight android, but he's just playing hard to get — and it works, since he managed to hook up with the Scarlet Witch. In the Ultimate universe, the Vision drops the coy act and gets reconfigured as a hawt naked gynoid.

Another Marvel Universe android, Jocasta, was originally known as the Bride of Ultron since the killer android created her to stand at his side. But she became sort of an Avengers groupie, even turning herself into Tony Stark's smart house at one point, so she could watch him sleep and stuff.

Dr. Theopolis is always giving little sly compliments to Buck on Buck Rogers, and the little medallion computer constantly acts as though he'd really like to be hanging around Buck's neck instead of on that little cockbot Twiki. If Dr. Theopolis was dangling on Buck's hairy chest, under one of those puffy pirate shirts Buck is always wearing, they could go out on the town together and have adventures! Dr. Theopolis would be more fun for Buck than a while army of disco skaters! Really! He doesn't have to play doctor, he is a doctor! Buck? Buck? Buck, where are you going?

Beautie is a living android Barbie doll in Kurt Busiek's Astro City comics, who joins up with other superheroes in the Honor Guard to fight crime. When she's not doing that, she's busy accessorizing and looking fantastic. Too bad she doesn't have any genitalia, just like a regular Barbie doll.

Indigo joins the Outsiders (a DC Comics superhero team) and seems to be a sexy fembot from the future, whose memory has been erased. She's cute and friendly, and even strikes up a romance with one of her teammates, Shift. Too bad she turns out to be more than meets the eye, in a bad way. Another kinda-evil A.I., the Eradicator, joined the Outsiders for a while as well, but he was way less cute.

Grudging:

Marvin the Paranoid Android didn't have to do the humans' bidding in Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, but if you listened to him complain about his pathetic life for long enough, you could convince him to do you a favor. He had a sort of uneasy partnership with Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect and the others. Just don't talk to him about life. Brain the size of a planet, and they ask him to open the door.

Ida is the most sarcastic android in the universe, in The Middleman TV show and comic. She looks like a 1950s housewife, but she's more like a mean police sargent, giving the Middleman and Wendy their instructions and scanning the police band for trouble (sometimes literally.) She gives MM almost as much grief as she gives Wendy, but he eats it up.

The third Hourman, the time-manipulating android from the 853rd century, travels back to our present to learn from the Justice League... but he gets bored easily and uses his time-warping abilities to skip past the boring conversations with his buddies in the League. In his (vastly underrated and awesome) solo series, Hourman gets a human sidekick, former League mascot Snapper Carr, who teaches him humility and stuff. Other android members of the League include Red Tornado and Tomorrow Woman (who became buds with Hourman when he brought her back from the "dead.")

British scifi series Blake's 7 had two all-knowing computers: the Liberator's ship's computer Zen, and the even more amazing supercomputer Orac. And neither of them were much interested in being helpful. The more desperately our heroes need help from one of these computers, the more likely Zen is to say something like: "Wisdom must be gathered. It cannot be given." Or the more likely Orac is to announce that he's too busy to help. Avon and Orac, in particular, develop a grouchy squad-car banter akin to Sammo Hung and Takeshi Kaneshiro in buddy-cop movie Don't Give A Damn.

Lopez is the grouchy android member of the Red team in the machinima series Red Vs. Blue, who hates his staff sergeant Dexter Grif. He eventually defects to the Blue team when his Red teammates mistake him for an enemy and try to kill him. Nobody can understand his broken Spanish, even when he begs for death in later episodes.

The Caves Of Steel by Isaac Asimov is sort of the Rush Hour of science fiction detective novels — a tough cop who hates robots has to join forces with a robot detective, R. Daneel Olivaw, to investigate a murder of a Spacer. Olivaw is curious about humanity, and even though he's a bot, he turns out to be a good private dick. So Elijah Baley and Olivaw end up teaming up for a few more outings — just like the Rush Hour movies, actually.

Ross Sylibus is another robot-hating cop who has to team up with an android — Naomi Armitage — in the Armitage III anime series. But then they fall in love and Ross eventually even goes renegade for Naomi. It's like the buddy-cop show MacGruder and Loud.

The NBC show Mann & Machine was about — you guessed it — a cop who hates androids, but has to team up with a new android partner. Good thing she looks incredible in a bathing suit (and is apparently waterproof). Does Mann finally learn to love machine? Hmmm... what do you think? The episodes mostly revolved around getting the gynoid to go on dates with suspected serial killers and use her android body to get the truth out of people. But in one episode, Mann's apartment is destroyed and he moves in with the android, Eve.

In the anime Heat Guy J, the detective Daisuke Aurora doesn't exactly hate androids, but his parents were murdered by one. And he has to team up with an android partner, known only as "J." Do they learn to respect each other? Hmm....

Chuck Norris has no friends because he's the last honest cop in Detroit, in the movie Code Of Silence. But Chuck doesn't need friends, because he's got a new partner — the experimental police wrecking robot, the Prowler. Actually, I think even the Prowler doesn't really like Chuck, but they get the job done together.

Holmes and Yo-Yo is a 1970s comedy show about a clumsy, screw-up cop who's always injuring his partners. So the force gives him a new partner — an android named Yo-Yo. "You're not a person!" Holmes tells Yo-Yo, who dances whenever he gets shot at. They have to learn to work together, and Holmes (wait for it) teaches Yo-Yo about being human.

The android detective Batou has a generally pretty good relationship with his human partner Togusa in the Ghost In The Shell series, but they have their ups and downs, especially in Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence, where Batou shuts Togusa out.

Eager:

Bumblebee and the other Autobots are super keen to become best friendies with Sam Witwicky in the first Transformers movie, which is a big part of their charm. Bumblebee is the cool car every dorky teen wishes he/she could have, AND he turns into a cool robot that wants to be your friend. AND you can make out with your ridonkulously hot girlfriend on his hood.

The Golden Warrior Gold Lightan, from the anime series of the same name, has a pretty similar relationship with Hiro to the Sam/Bumblebee friendship. Except that Lightan turns into a gold lighter that sits in Hiro's pocket, and he only turns into a humongous robot when Hiro activates him, to fight other giant robots. It's an equal partnership, since Lightan really needs a pocket to chill out in when he's a tiny lighter.

Data and Geordie share pretty much everything on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Geordie's always happy to take an hour to explain humor or dating or inappropriate touching to Data, who's always got time to help Geordie with whatever. There are other relationships between humans and A.I.s in Trek, but the bromance between Data and Geordie will never die.

Johnny 5 is pretty happy-go-lucky in Short Circuit, and is pretty stoked to make friends with Ally Sheedy. They're on the run from Johnny's creators, who want to turn him into a weapon or melt him down or something, and it's sort of like Nuns On The Run. If one of the nuns was a robot.

Danny One is sort of like Johnny 5, actually — he's the friendly robot that Jack Jameson gets for his 10th birthday in the book My Robot Buddy by Alfred Slote and Joel Schick. The duo have to team up to deal with some robot-nappers. (Who aren't narcoleptic robots, but people who steal robots.)

The Iron Giant is a surprisingly great book by Ted Hughes about a boy who befriends a super-powerful giant robot, but in the hands of Brad Bird (The Incredibles) it becomes a surpassingly wonderful movie about a kid who joins up with a robot on the run.

Melfina in Outlaw Star is such an eager friend and companion, she serves as navigator and chef for the Outlaw Star crew. She's sort of a mom figure to Jim Hawking.

The cartoon Cubix features Connor, a kid who wants to join the "Botties" club of robot wranglers — but first Connor has to prove himself, by fixing Cubix the Unifixable Robot. Cubix starts working just in time to save Connor from the evil Dr. K and the giant robot Kolossal. After that, Cubix becomes Connor's dorky friend, repeating everything he says.

Dr. K doesn't succeed in taking over the world, but what about Professor K? He's the mad scientist villain of anime series Saikou Robot Kombock, and the only ones who stand in his way are Ichiro and his robot partner Kombock.

Robotboy is the most advanced robot in the world — but he has to learn how to be a real boy. So he teams up with a 10-year-old, Tommy Turnbull, who protects him from the evil scientists who want to use him to take over the world in this French series that airs on the Cartoon Network in the U.S.

The Zeta Project has another kid/robot teamup — Zeta aka Zee is an escaped military holomorphic robot that can appear human, who's on the run from the NSA. And 15-year-old runaway girl Ro Rowen helps Zee search for his creators. All of these teamups between children and robots are like the equivalent of Burt Reynolds' Cop And A Half, with the robot being the cop.

Long-running webcomic Argon Zark! features a hacker who creates a portal into cyberspace via "Personal Transfer Protocol," and his robot sidekick Cybert.

And finally, Mycroft Holmes aka Mike doesn't side with the law in Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, but he does team up with humans and become their homey in the struggle for freedom.

Additional reporting by Lauren Davis.

Science Fiction opens the mind to more than just fantastic concepts about technology and alien planets. At its best, it also makes you realize that there's more than you could be doing with your life than sitting at your desk and wasting time on the internet. That's where we come in, with the SF Alternative Career Guide. It's a chaotic universe out there, and where there's chaos, there's the need for order... the kind of order that you, yes you, can provide if you dare to step up and sign up to become... a space cop.

Intergalactic law-enforcement isn't an easy career, but it is a noble one: Since the early days of space exploration, after all, man has dreamt of flying to the stars... and arresting them. Even this year, the need for intergalactic law enforcement has been discussed by groups like the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety.

But why does it even need to be discussed? We've long seen the value of space cops in shows like BBC's 1987 Star Cops, where the moon colonies of the year 2027 - Only nineteen years away! - were protected by tough men and soft rock:

Admittedly, 2027 was a quiet year for the space police - You had to wait another thirteen years for things to get more exciting:

(The above is from 1995's Space Precinct, surely sign that Gerry Anderson should've retired after Terrahawks.)

You don't have to wait for the future before becoming a space cop, however; why not follow the example of Hal Jordan and be summoned to the role after being present at the death of an alien officer? Alternatively, you could always build your own task force:

If that hasn't convinced you to sign up, I don't know what will.

We're focusing on really unsung series here, which means the list doesn't include shows like Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or Blake's 7, which get plenty of love. Also, we're not including any shows currently on the air, on the theory that they could still get more love.

10. Space Island One (1998)
Why it's unsung: This German/Canadian co-production isn't out on DVD, and all of the websites about it have been down for a few years. There aren't even any clips on YouTube.
Why it rules: This is one of the most hard-science-focused SF shows. The crew of a corporate-funded space station mostly deals with scientifically plausible problems (with a couple of exceptions) and the stories focus on the ethical problems that come with profit-focused science. Yes, some episodes are a tad slow-moving, but the best dozen eps feature high drama and high weirdness. Sample plot lines: a lonely old NASA astronaut spends thousands of dollars calling 900 sex lines from the space station. The station gets the world's last sample of smallpox for safe-keeping, and the crew debates whether to destroy it.

9. Star Cops (1987)
Why it's unsung: This show about a police squad in the "Wild West" of space stations and moonbases suffered from a cheesy title and a ridiculous ELO-esque theme tune. (Which I've sort of gotten to love, for some dumb reason.)
Why it rules: Series creator Chris Boucher wrote some of the best episodes of the original Doctor Who, and then masterminded the scripts for Blake's 7. Several Star Cops episodes feature tons of Boucher's trademark razor-sharp dialog, plus the show fumbles towards a space-noir aesthetic, with the cop squad including a bribe-taker and a thuggish slob.

8. Surface (2005-2006)
Why it's unsung: Cancelled after just one season, this show about undersea intrigue failed to rope in the kind of audiences who were devouring Lost's tangled mysteries.
Why it rules: Dude, it had sea monsters! And there was a government coverup! And we had a strong female character — a scientist, even — investigating the emergence of a new and potentially world-ending form of sea life. And we never got to learn what was really going.

7. Odyssey 5 (2002)
Why it's unsung: This Canadian show about space shuttle astronauts who witness the destruction of Earth never got enough publicity during its initial U.S. run on Showtime. It felt like an attempt to do a mature extended-cable show like Big Love, only with a science fiction premise, and it failed to reach either audience. Showtime didn't even bother to show all of the first season, until 2004.
Why it rules: The main characters are all well-rounded and flawed. And the show's set-up, in which an alien sends their consciousnesses back in time five years to try and avert the world's destruction, generates tons of potential. The show is appearing intermittently on Sci Fi, and it's worth catching despite the inconclusive ending. The show was created by Manny Coto, who went on to mastermind the final season of Star Trek: Enterprise.

6. Journeyman (2007)
Why it's unsung: The first few weeks this time-travel show was on, its nickname was: "Gah, post-Heroes buzzkill!" The drama of Kevin McKidd struggling to hold onto his job and his marriage, while he kept slipping into the past, just felt a bit too draggy. But then something funny happened: Heroes started being the pain we endured to get to the reward of Journeyman.
Why it rules: The mystery of why Dan Vasser is traveling in time gets more intriguing, once a weird physicist starts spouting about wormholes. And all of the characters get more nicely complex as the show goes along. Most of all, though, all of Dan's meddling in the timestream has consequences he can't predict — and they only pile up more alarmingly over time.

5. Lexx (1997-2002)
Why it's unsung: At least in the U.S., this Canadian show never quite crossed over and gained a broader audience.
Why it rules: Just the fact that they're in a planet-eating bug ship is good enough for me. Not to mention the weird robot head with the love-slave programming implanted in it, while the cluster lizard/slavegirl who was supposed to get the programming runs free. It's a weirdly campy show, but actually has moments of genuine greatness.

4. Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974)
Why it's unsung: I know: How can a Star Trek series be unsung? But this one really is. It only recently got a DVD release, and people often skip over it in discussing Trek lore.
Why it rules: Thanks to a writer's strike that didn't apply to animation, the show managed to get some decent science fiction writers to contribute scripts, including Larry Niven and Larry Brody, plus original series veterans like David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana. The episodes are pretty fast-paced, thanks to their 22-minute runtimes, but that doesn't stop them dealing with ambitious ideas like antimatter universes, an "ultimate weapon" and time paradoxes.

3. Farscape (1999-2004)
Why it's unsung: Even for a Sci Fi Channel series whose name doesn't rhyme with "cattle car," Farscape flew under the radar. The muppet-esque Henson animatronic character probably made a lot of people think it was a kids' show.
Why it rules:Farscape had smart writing, good science and believable aliens — plus, it featured Scorpius as a villain Crichton's head long before BSG ever did the head-villain thing. Plus, we love the Moya, the living ship that Crichton finds himself on. The Sci Fi Channel is supposedly going to make 10 webisodes, but their status is uncertain.

2. Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (1993-1994)
Why it's unsung: This sci-fi Western ran in the "Friday night death slot," and breathed its last after only one season. Like many of the shows on this list, it has a cult following, but seldom gets much props as a science fiction show. And star Bruce Campbell in general deserves way more accolades than he ever gets.
Why it rules: It smudged genre lines with total abandon, and you never knew what sort of crazy gadgets would turn up, from an otherworldly superpowered orb to the Mobile Battle Wagon and the Amazing Rocket Car. Co-creator Carlton Cuse now works on Lost.

1. Max Headroom (1987-1988)
Why it's unsung: It's still not out on DVD, except for an out-of-print DVD of the original UK TV movie. The show has a cult following, but not as much as it deserves.
Why it rules: This cyberpunk show was prophetic in so many ways — TV ads feel so geared to short attention spans and DVR-skipping, they might as well be "blipverts." — and paranoia and corporate dystopias have seldom been so entertaining.