For many years, genre television has remained a great source of entertainment, and there might not be a better genre for the small screen than sci-fi and fantasy TV series.
While science fiction has always enjoyed great success, with the various Star Trek series leading the way, fantasy television has experienced a lot of success as well, with its witches, monsters, vampires and dragons. With so much mythology and fantasy elements to pull from, there seems to be a fantasy TV series for everyone, regardless of their individual tastes. These aren’t just relegated to the SyFy Network anymore either, as some of the top premium cable networks rely on fantasy television as their backbone.
When it comes to this list, we eliminated hard science fiction television series, which eliminated space-based series like Star Trek and Firefly, science-based series like Fringe and straight sci-fi like X-Files. Also eliminated were superhero TV shows (a ranking of the best superhero TV shows exists here). Finally, we also eliminated all animated TV shows from the list, so there is no Avatar or Trollhunters listed here either. This countdown is a list of pure fantasy based live action television shows.
Without further ado, here is a list of the 25 best fantasy TV series of all-time, ranked from worst to first.
25. The Man in the High Castle
Amazon has started to put out some great original programming over the past few years, but nothing might be as groundbreaking as their fantasy TV series The Man in the High Castle. The series is based on the 1962 novel by none other than Philip K. Dick. When it comes to fantasy, mixed with a bit of sci-fi, it doesn’t get any better than Dick and Amazon have returned to the well to create the new anthology series Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams this year.
The Man in the High Castle tells the dystopian story of what would happen if the Axis powers had won World War II instead of the Allies. The story takes place in America, which was divided in two by the victors, the Nazis getting the east (Greater Nazi Reicht) and the Japanese getting the west (Japanese Pacific States).
The series then follows some people who watch some propaganda films that shows a different history than the one they are living in. While controversial in today’s political landscape, the pilot was the most-watched Amazon original series of all-time and garnered two seasons, with a third coming in 2018.
The idea of parallel worlds, and the chances of seeing what happens in those other worlds, solidly puts this in the realm of fantasy TV. The first two seasons contained 20 episodes and the third season looks to keep that pace.
24. Camelot
Before Outlander became a hugely popular fantasy TV series on Starz, the network tried to head to medieval times once already with Camelot. Rumors indicate that the reason that Camelot did not get a second season was that it beaten routinely in the ratings by HBO’s Game of Thrones, which looking back seems an unfair comparison to try to expect any series to match up to that HBO juggernaut. Starz denied those rumors, saying there were conflicts with the cast that caused the cancelation.
As the name suggests, Camelot was based on the legend of King Arthur. The cast was fantastic with Jamie Campbell Bower (Twilight) as the young King Arthur, Eva Green (Penny Dreadful) as Morgan and Joseph Fiennes as Merlin. The series has Merlin seeing a dark future in Camelot, causing him to put the young Arthur in place as the new king. Morgan is his evil half-sister who wants her brother off the throne to take for herself.
When Camelot debuted, it was the highest rated Starz original series of all time with 1.1 million viewers. The viewing numbers dropped each week in the season until the end, which saw an uptick and the finale matched the premiere. While the ending of the season had a huge and controversial twist, the series still ended the main story of that season and did not leave fans hanging.
There were only 10 episodes in the first season of Camelot.
23. Reaper
One fantasy TV series that doesn’t get a lot of love was the highly underrated Reaper. The series features a slacker named Sam, who on his 21st birthday learns that his parents made a deal with the Devil once when his father was ill and promised Sam to the devil in exchange for a cure. When Sam turned 21, the Devil came to cash in the bargain.
The cast in Reaper was fantastic. Lesser known Bret Harrison stars as Sam, but the Devil is played by the always entertaining Ray Wise (Twin Peaks). Everytime Wise is on the screen, he steals the scenes and elevates the show to high levels as he manipulates Sam and messes with his actual son, Morgan (played wonderfully by Armie Hammer).
The plot was pretty straightforward. Sam was forced to be a bounty hunter for the Devil, finding souls that escaped from Hell and sending them back. When he learned his mother would forfeit her soul if he refused, and deciding that sending souls back to Hell was a good thing, he agreed. Joining him are his slacker friends Sock and Ben, as well as the girl he loves, Andi. Two other standouts are former State castmembers Ken Marino and Michael Ian Black, demons and former lovers until Steve died.
Reaper only lasted two seasons and 31 episodes. It remains a great show to seek out and one that was axed before its time.
22. Dead Zone
The Dead Zone was an interesting proposition. It was based on the classic Stephen King novel, had already been made into a movie (starring Christopher Walken) and starred a man mostly known as a nerd in John Hughes movies – Anthony Michael Hall. However, it exceeded most expectations and finished as one of the most successful Stephen King television adaptations of all-time.
The plot was the same as the novel and movie, with Hall playing Johnny Smith, a man who almost died, only to wake from his coma and realize he has the supernatural power to touch someone and see visions of the past and future in that person’s life. Amazingly, Hall transformed himself from the geek from Sixteen Candles to a hunky heroic protagonist that carried this fantasy TV series through six seasons.
Much like the novel and movie, the entire overlying storyline involved Johnny Smith seeing an apocalyptic future due to a politician named Greg Stillson (Sean Patrick Flannery). While the novel and movie had Johnny attempt an assassination, the TV series needed to change things up to keep Johnny alive and out of prison so he could have his weekly adventures, which usually involved him helping people in need.
The Dead Zone aired from 2002 through 2007 and honestly lasted a year too long, although Anthony Michael Hall made even the lesser episodes fun to watch and entertaining. As a USA Network series, the seasons were shorter, so there were only 80 episodes, short of the total needed for syndication.
21. Ash vs. Evil Dead
Starz has become a go-to destination for many people who love genre television, possibly rivaling AMC on many fronts. One of the riskiest fantasy TV series to come to Starz was Ash vs. Evil Dead. Based on the popular movie trilogy by Sam Raimi and starring Bruce Campbell, the franchise has a ton of dedicated fans, but the question remained whether or not it could bring in enough mainstream television viewers to make it worth the production.
Ash vs. Evil Dead succeeded by allowing Raimi and Rob Tappert to retain control of the property and by bringing back pop culture icon Bruce Campbell to reprise his role of Ashley Williams, 30 years after the original trilogy. By the time the show started, Ash was living on his past accolades as a demon-killing tough guy with a chainsaw and a shotgun as his favorite weapons. When the deadites return to wreak havoc once again, it is up to Ash to battle them again.
Unlike the original trilogy, where Ash pretty much battled deadites alone, this time he has friends in Pablo and Kelly and an immortal named Ruby, played by another genre icon in Lucy Lawless (Xena: Warrior Princess). The show also kept the movies tendencies to splatter gore everywhere, and the makeup effects remain top-notch for the series.
Thanks to airing on Starz, the seasons are short, and there have been 20 episodes through two seasons with a third season about to kick off in 2018.
20. Penny Dreadful
A penny dreadful was a term used to describe cheap serial novels make in the 19th century Europe. These were often short serials, released weekly, each costing just one penny each and told stories that were genre-based in flavor, whether detective stories, adventure tales or gothic horror related. Many of these penny dreadfuls were re-tellings of classic gothic tales, and while they died off in the 1890s, their legacy persevered. It was from those stories that the Showtime series Penny Dreadful took its inspiration.
Debuting in 2014, Penny Dreadful took place in Victorian London and featured a large number of famous classic literary characters, all of which have fallen into the realm of public domain. Unlike the classic penny dreadfuls, this series found some high-quality actors to join the ranks of the cast.
The legendary Timothy Dalton played Sir Malcolm Murray, an explorer. Eva Green portrays Vanessa Ives, the heroine of this fantasy TV series, and the woman who battles the villains of the underworld. Famous monsters and fictional characters appearing in this series include Dorian Gray, Frankenstein’s Creature, Mina Harker, the famed vampire Dracula, Van Helsing, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and many more
The series only lasted three seasons, but showrunner and creator John Logan said that he finished his initial story in that third season and the series ended as it was meant to end. Airing from 2014 until 2016, there were 27 total episodes.
19. True Blood
HBO has had a lot of success with its original series, with everything from The Sopranos and The Wire to Entourage, Game of Thrones and the next fantasy TV series on this list – True Blood. The show is based on the Charlaine Harris Southern Vampire Mysteries novel series.
The HBO series starred Anna Paquin as Sookie Stackhouse, a halfling which is a telepathic human-faerie. She works at a bar in Lousiana in a world where vampires are real, and the public knows about them. The vampires have something called Tru Blood, which is synthetic blood that allows vampires to live without feeding on humans, although there is still fear and hatred among humans and vampires alike. This is because there are two factions of vampires – those who are willing to live with humans in peace and those who still want to prey on humans.
The series also has a number of other mythical creatures. Sookie’s boss Sam is a shapeshifter, and Sookie has a romantic relationship with a 173-year-old vampire named Bill Compton. Possibly the most interesting character was one that died early in the books but remained so popular that he lived on the TV show, that being a flamboyant short order cook named Lafayette.
The series was hugely successful, although its fandom shrunk as the final season aired. True Blood ended up lasting seven seasons and had a total of 80 episodes.
18. Preacher
Preacher is a fantasy TV series based on a popular ’90s comic book by Garth Ennis centering on a preacher who ends up with a powerful entity known as Genesis. Airing on AMC, Preacher was not an easy adaptation, one of the most sacrilegious stories in comic book history. However, with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg as producers, the series not only kept the themes of the comic book but even took it a few steps further.
Preacher tells the story of Jesse Custer, a Texas preacher who preaches in a small Texas town that hides a lot of secrets. When he ends up with the spawn of an angel and demon inside him, he can force people to tell him the truth and exposes much of the darkness in the town.
However, that is just the start, as a religious organization that controls the world sets out to convince Jesse to work with them while an unstoppable demon called the Saint of Killers is sent out to kill him. The series takes a lot of the things from the comics, and portrays most of the characters perfectly, from Herr Starr to the Cassidy the vampire. There was also a massive moment in the second season where a young man named Arseface was sent to Hell and ended up teaming with Hitler to escape.
Preacher has been on the air for two seasons and a total of 23 episodes and will return for a third season in 2018.
17. Dark Shadows
There have been a lot of popular classic fantasy TV series, but many of them erred on the side of comedy. While shows like Addams Family and The Munsters were great fun, they were at heart more comedy than fantasy and failed to make this list as a result. However, at the same time, there were some fantasy shows that fell solidly in the genre of the fantastical, including Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which barely missed out on making this list, and the hugely popular Dark Shadows.
Younger movie fans might recognize the name from the Johnny Depp movie remake of the classic fantasy TV series but that movie failed in many ways to delve into what made Dark Shadows such a great show. For one thing, this wasn’t a mystery series or horror show and was instead a fantasy gothic soap opera.
Airing from 1966 until 1971, Dark Shadows told the stories of the Collins family in Maine and also centered on supernatural occurrences that occurred in that town. While some popular soap operas dealt with the supernatural, with Days of Our Lives as an obvious example, Dark Shadows entire premise was seeping with fantasy and gothic themes. While the series was not very popular in its first season, things picked up in the second year when Barnabas Collins showed up, a 175-year-old vampire looking for both some fresh blood, as well as his lost love.
Dark Shadows featured ghosts, vampires, werewolves, zombies, witches, warlocks and more among its monsters. There was also time travel and a parallel dimension. The series lasted almost five years and aired 1,225 episodes.
16. Being Human
Fans of Being Human has two versions of this fantasy TV series to enjoy, with a superior BBC version and a lesser, yet still entertaining American remake. Both of the shows have the same storyline. A werewolf, vampire and ghost all share a home and try to blend in with the normal humans living in the city around them.
The BBC version went through some significant changes after the pilot, as the fantasy TV series was picked up but recast with only one of the original stars kept on board. There are numerous supernatural characters in the series with the difference being that the main stars live among the humans instead of living in hiding.
The British version of Being Human was on the air from 2009 until 2013. There were only 37 total episodes spread through the five seasons and spawned a spin-off series called Becoming Human, which was eight episodes for a total of 50 minutes.
Two years after the BBC version, SyFy produced an American remake of Being Human, which lasted one less season and ended up canceled one year after the BBC version ended. The American version features some familiar faces, including Sam Huntington (Rosewood). There were 52 total episodes over four seasons for the American version.
15. Highlander: The Series
Highlander was one a beloved fantasy movie that spawned some sequels that began to lower the bar. While Christopher Lambert always remained entertaining as Connor MacLeod, a warrior known as a Highlander, an immortal that finds himself unwittingly in a battle where the final surviving Highlander receives the Prize, the combined power of every immortal who ever lived.
However, in 1992, the Highlander mantle was passed on to another member of the Clann MacLeod and Duncan MacLeod, played by Adrian Paul. He was stepping into some large shoes as Lambert had solidified his role as the definitive Highlander. Something unusual then happened – fans gravitated to Duncan and won over the fans.
Highlander: The Series was a monster hit all over the world and lasted six seasons, entering syndication with 119 total episodes. There was even a bow tied on the end when Duncan and Connor MacLeod joined forces in the movie Highlander: Endgame where Duncan took Connor’s life to help them defeat a greater evil. Paul even got a second movie of his own with Highlander: The Source.
This wasn’t the only time that a movie was reimagined as a television series that surpassed the franchise in popularity but it is arguably the most successful thanks to the films that continued in the new direction. Adrian Paul didn’t just take over the lead, but he owned it.
14. Charmed
While it arrived one year after Buffy the Vampire Slayer captured the public’s imagination, Charmed easily fit the same demographic but had one extra thing going for it that helped elevate it on its own right. This was one of the most successful television shows that consisted of an all-female lead cast and remained the longest running all-female led TV series until Desperate Housewives knocked it off the top.
This fantasy TV series had some big names to help bring in the fans and then turned in some great and compelling storylines to keep them watching for almost a decade. Shannon Doherty (Beverly Hills 90201), Alyssa Milano (Who’s the Boss) and Holly Marie Combs (Picket Fences) portrayed sisters who also happened to be witches. While Doherty left after three seasons due to behind-the-scenes turmoil, Rose McGowan replaced her, and the show never missed a beat.
The show was set solidly in the realm of magic, and while more recent shows have tried to pick up the slack in that subgenre, none have reached the charm and success of Charmed. Each sister had their own specialty powers and battled demons, other witches and warlocks, and other supernatural entities while also coming to terms with their own lives and places in the world.
Charmed is also the show that introduced the world to Kaley Cuoco (Big Bang Theory), who showed up in Season 8 as a witch and a young trainee for Paige (McGowan). This fantasy TV series lasted eight seasons and 178 episodes, airing from 1998 until 2006.
13. Pushing Daisies
Bryan Fuller has proven to be a master when it comes to creative television. While his most successful TV show was a horror outing with Hannibal, he has done masterful work in the fantasy TV genre. Fuller created Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies and American Gods. Two of those shows made this list, and the first is Pushing Daisies.
Lee Pace stars as Ned, a piemaker who can bring anyone back from the dead by touching them. However, if he touches them a second time, they die again for good. There is a love story that can never happen because he brings his true love, Chuck, back from the dead, but he can now never touch her again, or she would die for good.
Pushing Daisies also introduced the world to the charming and hilarious Kristen Chenoweth, who starred as Olivia Snook. The series was set up as a procedural as the piemaker, and his friends set out to solve murders, usually involving Ned bringing the dead back to life long enough to pick up clues on who killed them.
Pushing Daisies lasted only two seasons and 22 episodes. However, don’t let the lack of seasons deter you. In those two seasons, Pushing Daisies picked up 17 Primetime Emmy nominations and won seven of them.
12. Stranger Things
Netflix has become a powerhouse when it comes to original series, and arguably their most successful original series to date is the fantasy TV series Stranger Things. Created by The Duffer Brothers, Stranger Things is a love letter to the ’80s, with a little Steven Spielberg mixed in with a little Stephen King.
In the series, a group of children set out to discover the secret behind the disappearance of one of their best friends. Along the way, they meet a girl that possesses psychokinetic abilities and a connection to the mysterious Upside Down, the location where their friend was taken and where a frightening monster lives as well.
Wynona Rider stars as the grief-stricken mother of the missing child while David Harbour is the alcoholic police chief of the small town. Matthew Modine also stars as one of the antagonists of the series. However, the real MVPs are the kids, who carry this series to great heights and were wholly responsible for the critical accolades, including 18 Primetime Emmy nominations.
Since this was a Netflix original series, it all hit at once and became one of the top binge-watched series of all-time, with a reported 14 million adults watching the series in the first 35 days it was live. A second season aired and The Duffer Brothers say that they expect four or five seasons to tell the entire story.
11. Outlander
Few shows on television today have built such an interesting fan base as Outlander, possibly the most shipped series on TV. This Starz fantasy TV series is a time travel tale that also mises as a historical melodrama.
Based on the Diana Gabaldon historical fantasy novels and short stories, Outlander tells the story of a nurse named Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe) at the start of World War II who ends up sent back in time to 1743 Scotland. While in the past, she meets her husband’s evil ancestor and falls in love with a Highland warrior named Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan).
The TV show takes Claire through this whirlwind romance as the rebel Highlanders prepare for war against the redcoats. The entire series is a fantasy melodrama as she ends up going back to her time and her husband with the revelation that her true love is alive 200 years in the past and she is pregnant with his daughter.
The series is still ongoing, with three seasons complete and a fourth ordered as well based on the novel Drums of Autumn. As of press time, there have been 42 episodes, which each season averaging less than 15 episodes each.
10. Grimm
While Once Upon a Time got the most publicity and ended up with the better ratings, don’t sleep on a series that started around the same time with the same idea of putting fairy tale characters in modern day surroundings. While Once Upon a Time went a lot further with the actual mythology of the fairy tales it retold, Grimm was a straight up detective show, but with the fairy tales and fantasy worlds brought to the forefront.
Debuting just one week after Once Upon a Time, this fantasy TV series separated itself from the pack by introducing a Grimm – a guardian tasked with keeping a balance between humans and the mythological creatures. This is as much a police procedural as it is a fantasy series, similar to Angel but with Grimm as an actual homicide detective in Portland.
Grimm features many twists on classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales – the dark ones that influenced the more Disney-influenced adaptations. The pilot episode had a werewolf preying on women wearing red, which was a clear callback to Little Red Riding Hood. This is the direction the show began, although the mythology of the overarching storyline of Nick as the last Grimm soon took center stage.
While never as successful ratings-wise as Once Upon a Time, what kept Grimm alive was a huge cult following, with fans who fought for the survival of the supernatural detective series. Grimm ended up lasting for six seasons with a total of 123 episodes.
9. Vampire Diaries / The Originals
While Buffy the Vampire Slayer changed the way television presented the fantasy genre for mainstream audiences, The Vampire Diaries took it one step further and created what might be the most popular fantasy-based nighttime soap in television history. Following the success of Supernatural, which was geared mainly for male audiences, Vampire Diaries brought mystery and danger and added the romantic subplots that sucked in the female demographic.
Debuting in 2009, The Vampire Diaries takes place in a fictional town in Virginia and follows the life of a teenage girl named Elena (Nina Dobrev) whose parents die and soon falls in love with a 162-year-old vampire, Stefan (Paul Wesley). When Stefan’s older brother Damon (Ian Somerhalder) returns, things get very complicated when a love triangle forms between the three.
If it sounds like Twilight, it is very close proximity to the story of a young girl falling in love with a mysterious vampire. However, Vampire Diaries is much better plotted and written and turned into a solid and entertaining story through its eight seasons. There were a total of 171 episodes before the series concluded in 2017.
In 2013, a spin-off arrived called The Originals. This series took Klaus, Elijah and Rebekah Mikaelson leaving Vampire Diaries and returning to New Orleans where they faced their own trials and tribulations. The spin-off has lasted four seasons with 79 episodes and will finish with a final fifth season in 2018.
8. Once Upon a Time
While Grimm had a much more extensive cult following, it was its fellow 2011 fantasy TV series Once Upon a Time that ended up as the blockbuster mainstream success. Part of the reason was that Once Upon a Time was unique in presenting actual fairy tale characters into the real world, using a purely fantastical plot instead of the procedural mysteries of Grimm.
While Grimm used its basis on the Grimm Fairy Tales, Once Upon a Time was an ABC production, and since Disney owns that network, the series had liberties to use any character that was introduced in the many Disney animated and live-action fairy tale movies. This fantasy TV series took place in the town of Storybook, Maine, where the residents lived in oblivion to the fact that they were all actual fairy tale characters displaced from their homeworld.
The main character for most of the series is Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison), the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming. Because she was transferred to the real world before the Evil Queen Regina cursed the fairy tale characters, she is the only one who can break the curse.
Once Upon a Time introduces the famed characters into the series in interesting ways, which are almost always against type for their movie representation. Included are Rumplestiltskin, Peter Pan, Captain Hook, Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio, and even new characters like the Snow Queen from Frozen. Currently, in its seventh season, there have been over 140 episodes to date.
7. American Gods
As mentioned earlier, Bryan Fuller has created some fantastic fantasy TV series and this, his second show on this countdown, might be his masterpiece. Sadly, Fuller only lasted one season as the showrunner, and if the series takes a stumble in season two, this could fall further down the list – despite the first season that was a true masterpiece of fantasy storytelling.
American Gods is based on the novel of the same name by Neil Gaiman. The story is the highest of concepts. The old gods of mythology – all the world myths – are growing outdated and when people forget these gods, they disappear forever. Replacing the old gods in the minds of humans are new gods of technology, media, and other modern day devices.
Shadow Moon is a man who gets out of prison the day after his girlfriend dies in a car accident. He meets a strange man named Wednesday and takes a job as his bodyguard and muscle before learning that Wednesday is one of the old gods and Shadow finds himself in the middle of the war between the ancient beings and the new gods.
The cast is spectacular, with names like Ian McShane, Crispin Glover, Gillian Anderson, Kristen Chenoweth, Cloris Leachman, Peter Stormare and Orlando Jones among the standouts. The set design and visual effects are dazzling and are as much part of the story as the actors. American Gods might be the most visually striking new series ever to hit fantasy television and its second season will have a lot to live up to.
6. Lost
Initially, Lost was a story of a group of people who survived an airline crash and found themselves stranded on a lost island with no chance of rescue. However, something happened in that first season as the romantic subplots, backstabbing and Lord of the Flies-styled action gave way to something ominous, mysterious and alien. Something was on this island other than the survivors, and there was a good chance that it wasn’t human.
The best thing about Lost, and what kept it positioned as one of the most-watched show on television for a number of years, was the characters. The love triangle between Jack, Sawyer and Kate; the drug addict trying to survive in Charlie; the loveable but depressed big man in Hurley; and the antagonistic Locke were all perfectly depicted, cast and kept fans glued to the TV for the series week after week.
There was a lot of complaints about the end of Lost but the fact is that the series set things up from the start and it had little chance of winning over all the fans since the “happily ever after” was never in the cards.
By the end, Lost was on the air for six seasons and 121 episodes and is one of the few fantasy TV series that controlled its destiny and finished the story in the manner it intended.
5. Xena: Warrior Princess / Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Another combination on this list takes the two medieval fantasy TV series from the ’90s that presented one of the fiercest female warriors in TV history. It all started with Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, where Kevin Sorbo starred as the demigod Hercules as he went through adventures and was always at odds with his stepmother Hera, and later his half-brother Ares, the God of War.
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys was very popular and lasted for six seasons, with 111 episodes before going into syndication. The Sam Raimi (Evil Dead) produced series also spawned five television movies and a spin-off with one of its most popular guest characters – Xena: Warrior Princess.
Xena: Warrior Princess was a quick spin-off, coming just eight months after Hercules: The Legendary Journeys premiered and ended up even more popular. Lucy Lawless starred as Xena, a warrior out to seek redemption for past sins. It also featured a fun cast of characters, including Ted Raimi as Joxer and Bruce Campbell as Autolycus, King of Thieves.
Xena: Warrior Princess matched Hercules, with six seasons but had more episodes, finishing at 134.
4. Supernatural
Supernatural faced an uphill battle because it was the show that The WB replaced Angel with, after canceling the beloved vampire series. However, the story was a hit from the start, with Dean and Sam Winchester hunting demons and monsters while trying to find and defeat the creature that killed their mother.
The best parts of the show remain the dynamic between Sam and Dean, as the two brothers hunt monsters while fighting for their own souls and are just different enough to keep the tension raised at all times. Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles have kept the torch burning on Supernatural longer than any show on The CW and don’t look to be slowing down anytime soon.
However, much like similarly styled shows (the sci-fi hit The X-Files is a good example), there is also the underlying mythology that follows the boys from town to town and monster to monster. In this case, it is a war between Heaven and Hell and the boys standing in the middle, refusing to take sides, while both battling and teaming with angels and demons along the way.
There have been popular fantasy and sci-fi shows that have come and gone on television, but nothing has surpassed what Supernatural has accomplished. The series has been on for 13 seasons now and is closing in on 300 total episodes, the longest running fantasy TV series in history.
3. The Walking Dead / Fear the Walking Dead
Robert Kirkman created a black and white creator-owned comic book in 2003 called The Walking Dead. The comic followed a police officer named Rick Grimes who wakes from a coma and finds that the zombie apocalypse happened while he was unconscious. He found his family and best friend and started to work with a small group of survivors as they attempted to survive the new world.
Seven years later, AMC brought The Walking Dead to television under the guidance of Frank Darabont. While Darabont left after one season, and the series is about to welcome its fourth different showrunner next season, it is still running strong with its eighth season currently airing. There have been ups and downs, as this fantasy TV series has drifted from the comic books in a few important ways, but it remains one of the most-watched shows on television.
The ninth season is coming, and The Walking Dead recently eclipsed the 100-episode mark. While its spin-off was ridiculed during its first season, Fear the Walking Dead found its stride and has become a strong fantasy TV series in its own right. The show took place at the start of the zombie outbreak, something The Walking Dead skipped over, and moved the action from the East Coast to the West Coast.
Fear the Walking Dead has completed three seasons and 37 episodes and will start its fourth season in 2018 with the first crossover as Lennie James will make his debut on the show, reprising his role as Morgan.
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer / Angel
Arguably, the most unlikely fantasy TV series of all time has to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Originally, a schlocky B-level horror comedy starring Kristy Swanson and Luke Perry, that movie’s writer Joss Whedon convinced The WB to take a chance on a TV version of the story five years after the film came and went. What resulted was a fantasy TV series that changed everything about the way monsters and demons were portrayed on the small screen.
Former soap opera actress Sarah Michelle Gellar signed on to play Buffy Summers, a teenager moving to the town of Sunnydale and learning that she has to weigh being a high school student with the job of being the Chosen One, the one true vampire slayer. It also doesn’t help that Sunnydale in on top of a Hellmouth.
What makes Buffy work so well is that it takes the dynamic of the Scooby Gang, which is Buffy and her friends, and has then deal with real-world situations and conflicts while fighting monsters and demons. The show also approaches death and betrayal in a way that few young adult TV series ever considered before.
Angel was the spin-off series, and while it was not as overwhelmingly successful as Buffy ratings-wise, it has a strong fanbase that considers it the better of the shows. In Angel, the vampire with a soul that Buffy fell in love with moves to Los Angeles and starts an agency that helps people in need of assistance due to demons and monsters.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer lasted seven seasons and had 144 episodes, ending with a tidy conclusion that tied up the entire tale. Angel only lasted five seasons, with the final season truncated. A total of 110 episodes aired and Angel had one of the most interesting and bleak endings of any fantasy TV series.
1. Game of Thrones
Really, there can only be one fantasy TV series that ranks at the top of anyone’s countdown or list. Game of Thrones is based on the groundbreaking A Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R.R. Martin and has taken those stories and did more with fantasy television than any show in the history of the medium.
In what was once nothing more than a small genre for fantasy fans, Game of Thrones managed to cross over somehow and bring in monster mainstream audiences to watch one of the most fantastical, brutal and bloody medieval TV series of all-time. The series takes politics and mixes it with wartime battles, betrayals, deceptions, and some of the best dragons to ever appear on television.
There have been seven seasons so far, and Game of Thrones will officially conclude with its eighth season, which will air in 2019. At that time, fans will see who inherits the Iron Throne, who will survive (and important characters will surely die), and the ultimate fate of Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen.
Next: 25 Most Brutal Deaths on The Walking Dead
While Game of Thrones is ending in one year, this remains the most successful fantasy TV series ever based on ratings, and it will not die. HBO already has a number of possible spin-offs in the works and will continue to mine the gold from this epic as long as fans want to continue watching.