Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Xena

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Is Fantasy considered mainly "swords and sorcery" kind of stuff or things like "the Good Place" which have fantastical elements? No sci-fi/superheroes? Also I'm assuming live action?

Budgets being higher, special effects being better and episode counts being contained on cable channels certainly have elevated the genre in general, though.

Despite the ending, GoT is certainly up there along with Stranger Things. Not sure how Buffy holds up today if I were to rewatch it. If we're including animation than stuff like Avatar and Gravity Falls are certainly up there as well.

edited to add: Oh, there's a poll, I swear I didn't see that when I commented.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Not quite "fantasy" per se.

- Stargate SG-1
- Stargate Atlantis

I always thought the Stargate franchise was like the ultimate "kitchen sink" encompassing scifi, fantasy, conspiracy, etc ... type stuff which would appeal to hardcore nerdy/geeky types.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Buffy.
though technically GoT is a marvel and i love to death, but i always loved Buffy and SMG...

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

I was going to vote Buffy, but then I realized that the scope of what GoT achieved in the genre was too great to ignore.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Gravity Falls - A bit of an under-rated masterpiece of a show.

I almost went with Xena which is such an iconic show (it was so much better than the fun Kevin Sorbo Hercules).

I think folks are taking the easy way out by saying GOT, as even if I ignore the last two seasons so they do not color my opinion of the show I feel that in-between some great action scenes and conversations between characters with admittedly sharp dialogue there were a whole lot of scenes that were filler, and not very good filler at that (I will even include the "filler" scenes that were an excuse for the show runners to parade a bunch of T & A in front of the audience, granted some good looking folks but still T & A that did nothing to advance the storyline).

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a show without filler, and GoT strikes me as the kind of show that kept a pretty brisk pace, even if not every thread turned out to be worthwhile. Certainly every single network show has filler and a ton of it.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Avatar TLA has such consistency and depth of characters, and you can make references to it almost anywhere on the internet and most people will get it, even those that didn't watch it, because they've absorbed them secondhand.

Gravity Falls really needed another 8-10 episodes to flesh out some things, but it still stands as a masterpiece of "Weird-Shit-O-Meter going off the charts".

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Actually, not to open up a big can of worms and have Ash come in here and recommend Pokemon ( :) ), I'd probably say some anime like Attack on Titan, Fullmetal Alchemist (which is on there), Hunter x Hunter, Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure, One Piece, Death Note, Berserk, heck even Dragon Ball are up there (though in pretty much every case the manga is better). I'd pick them all over Madoka (though I like Madoka).

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Look at all the people who think Game of Thrones was better than Buffy. :lol:

If Twin Peaks qualifies as "fantasy," I would have picked that easily. But it's such a mix of fantasy, sci-fi, horror, crime-drama, and a few other genres, it defies categorization.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Despite its inclusion in the poll, I would want to argue whether Buffy counts as fantasy at all. Fantasy and horror are separate genres, and a huge component of Buffy is real world teen drama.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

They can only sing in one episode, they switch bodies in another, they open portals to other worlds, things come out, that aren’t human or vampire...that’s not fantasy?

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Obviously there is a lot of bleed among the fantasy, horror, and sci-fi genres, and what defines each can be debated by literary theorists. I'll just stand by the "if it looks like a duck" standard. Vampires in 1990s Southern California versus dragons and sword-fighting in the imaginary land of Westeros.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

In practice, I've found that folks who like to precisely define and categorize things in a particular niche, were almost always the hardcore nerdy/geeky types with some form of extreme ocd when it comes to details and other minutea.

Similar to the mindset of a person who pays attention to the detailed canon of stuff like Star Wars and/or Star Trek, and will debate + argue with others over such minutea. (Not much different than trying to argue "theology").

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer has many fantasy elements imo.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Some of the choices...are out of left field in the fantasy category. Should have included Legend of the Seeker, a real fantasy show, over stuff like Buffy.

Grudgingly voted for Game of Thrones, though the show's final seasons are best forgotten. Best show on the entire list may be Puella Magi Madoka Magica. If you include anime, you have to include most people's #1 fantasy series in that field, the Fate/Stay Night franchise.

Props to the person that voted for Angel, which was much more of a fantasy series than Buffy.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

"Fantasy" is, in theory, a broad genre that of fiction that includes fantastical elements and includes things like science fiction and horror. (It's why Tolkien shares shelf-space in most bookstores with Asimov and Heinlein.)

As a general rule, though, when people think of fantasy a genre, it's usually limited to "high fantasy," which covers immersive, self-contained worlds like Tolkien's Middle Earth and George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire. There's also "Low Fantasy," where the fantastical elements intrude into the otherwise "real" world -- Harry Potter and Narnia are good example of this. Most horror would probably be considered to be low fantasy, though it's generally referred to as "dark fantasy" when the f-word is applied to it. Though not all horror has fantastical elements in it.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

That said, I think Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twin Peaks, with all of the fantastical elements, would easily qualify as "Low Fantasy."

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

It has to be Game of Thrones. No matter what you think of the final season, the show became one of the most imaginative and influential shows in the current TV landscape. You couldn't make this kind of show 20 to 30 years ago. It was literally a feature film every single week.

At least in the last 10 years, it's my favorite fantasy show.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

I watched a few episodes of this and found it terrible.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

You know I could include only 25 series in the poll options. As for Legend of the Seeker, this series hasn`t done anything innovative or special for the Fantasy Genre. I found it to be cliched Fantasy and a pretty week series.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

never even heard of that.

Re: Best Fantasy TV Series of All Time
 

Would've been Game of Thrones before the final season, but had to go with my previous topper Buffy. Angel is a close second, with GoT sliding into 3rd place.