The Expanse

What hackers pick instead

• Star Trek: The Next GenerationPeople recommend it for its character-driven stories, moral dilemmas, and optimistic view of humanity, with many rewatching it for life lessons. Critics say the early seasons are weak and character growth is limited.88recommend
• Star Trek: Deep Space NineRecommended for its strong characters, long story arcs and mature, nuanced politics; the most common caveat is uneven filler episodes and a weak final season.59recommend
• Silo by Apple TVApple TV sci-fi mystery that answers its questions at a good rate; fans call it one of the best TV adaptations. Common caveats: slow pacing and only two short seasons so far.27recommend
• Altered Carbon (Netflix series)Fans praise the first season and its cyberpunk world, but critics found later seasons weaker and the show was cancelled.23recommend
• Scavengers ReignPeople recommend it for an inventive, truly alien planet ecosystem, told like a Robinson Crusoe story in a nature documentary style.18recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 73 comments. Each links to the original.

1. they got that visually right. I cannot blame them because I haven't seen anything any space combat in shows or movies that is even half as exciting and well done.

   Mixed · May 2026 · in “Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart”

2. the settings and production were fantastic, but I found the characters just became overwritten and annoying as the show went on

   Mixed · Nov 2026 · in “Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power”

3. That series strived for realism in that regard, and in using magnetic boots to work in zero gravity; which was admirable.

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world”

4. Books were better than the show in many ways the the prose quality was pleasantly good.

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Ask HN: What are you reading?”

5. Their main cast is utterly bland and have absolutely no chemistry with each other

   Mixed · Nov 2026 · in “Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power”

6. The Expanse is a show/book - that doesn't actually portray any of this very well

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “NASA's DART spacecraft changed an asteroid's orbit around the sun”

7. one of the most viable portrayals of what a society under UBI would look like

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Leaked OpenAI financials show $38.5B loss and compute burn”

8. The background world building was pretty good from a hard SF point of view.

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart”

9. a saga like The Expanse is 100 times better written than all that new shit

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing?”

10. we got a ship full of gloomy self-loathing heroes with poor mental health

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “The X-Files Has Made Me Nostalgic for a Time I Never Experienced”

11. pretty good at this; it sets up a world with complex political dynamics

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits”

12. it had no battles that were as well written or as memorable as this one

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart”

13. how deftly it wove subtle economic and resource dynamics into the plot

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “NASA Artemis II moon mission live launch broadcast”

14. The show takes liberties to look cool, I think, which is okay.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart”

15. offers a realistic take on what UBI would probably entail

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “GitHub should charge everyone $1 more per month”

16. it turns out that realism is actually really interesting

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate (2020)”

17. The Expanse is basically Breaking Bad in space - a meaningless, ugly, depressing trash show only possible to produce in an empire in terminal decline.

    Criticizes · Nov 2026 · in “Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power”

18. I never found the Expanse television series to be very good when compared to the books.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, Song of Kali, dead at 77”

19. likes books to not read like a movie screenplay, same goes for The Expanse

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025”

20. the endings of neither felt satisfying and the final seasons - rushed

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros”

21. they played a lot of artistic license to make it exciting

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart”

22. The later books seemed like they were written “to be movies/series” with less political stuff and more visuals

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Amazon Has Axed Its New Stargate Series”

23. I highly recommend the novels, and feel the show was one of the best-ever translations of sci-fi to the screen

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “I Now Assume That All Ads on Apple News Are Scams”

24. up there with BattleStar Galactica and The Expanse as the greatest TV sci-fi series of all time

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Babylon 5 Is Now Free to Watch on YouTube”

25. I love sci-fi, but I also dislike a lot of it because a lot of it's not well written

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Science Fiction Is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?”

26. We train a cluster-specific model that gets better as more jobs run on your cluster

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Launch HN: Expanse (YC P26) – Unlock Wasted GPU Capacity”

27. The Expanse also was (for me) the first to introduce the concept of a braking burn.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart”

28. superb sci-fi on the screen in recent years like Severance , Silo and The Expanse

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Where did all the starships go?”

29. Deployments are air-gapped and run in the customer's VPC, on their own hardware.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Launch HN: Expanse (YC P26) – Unlock Wasted GPU Capacity”

30. the books and the series were so great that they sort of complemented each other

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “My Astrophotography in the Movie Project Hail Mary”

31. I've heard "The Expanse" and "For All Mankind" are supposed to be good TV shows

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Where did all the starships go?”

32. the writers also wrote some of the episode scripts, so that probably helped

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, Song of Kali, dead at 77”

33. which, like many, I consider the greatest sci fi TV show of all time

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Babylon 5 Is Now Free to Watch on YouTube”

34. The Expanse was serious, and touched some Western/Frontier sci-fi

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Animated 'Firefly' Reboot in Development from Nathan Fillion, 20th TV”

35. Only Expanse and The Orville compares in the past decade I guess.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees”

36. If you enjoy The Expanse, definitely pick up The Mercy of Gods

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Ask HN: What are you reading?”

37. There's still some gems like Westworld, The Expanse or DARK

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix”

38. This is actually a really cool feature of the platform.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Launch HN: Expanse (YC P26) – Unlock Wasted GPU Capacity”

39. the last independent good scifi show was The Expanse

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Amazon Has Axed Its New Stargate Series”

40. those I revisit and watch when and if I've got time

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Ask HN: Favorite TV Show?”