Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Walked So Prime Video's Near-Perfect Sci-Fi Series Could Run

Published Oct 17, 2026, 2:15 PM EDT Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. While Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a great show in its own right, the series also deserves special commendation for helping to pave the way for Prime Video’s iconic six-season series from the 2010s. The 2020s is a great time to be a sci-fi TV fan. In the nine years between 2017 and 2026, the Star Trek franchise released Strange New Worlds, Discovery, Picard, Short Treks, Lower Decks, Prodigy, and Starfleet Academy. Meanwhile, the streaming wars saw every major streaming service embrace the genre with big-budget efforts. While Apple TV led the field with Severance, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Dark Matter, Silo, and Foundation, Netflix’s 3 Body Problem proved the streaming service was also committed to high-concept sci-fi. Meanwhile, after the success of The Handmaid’s Tale and Paradise, Hulu’s upcoming The X-Files reboot redoubled its commitment to the genre. However, as successful as all of these hits are, none have managed to outdo the best space opera of the 21st century yet. While the show isn’t part of the Star Trek franchise, it does owe some of its success to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s daring political storytelling. Prime Video’s The Expanse might have been based on a novel series by co-authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, writing as the shared pseudonym James S.A. Corey, but the show’s complex morality came straight from Deep Space Nine’s playbook. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Political Sci-Fi Paved The Way For The Expanse Image courtesy of MovieStillsDb While the Star Trek franchise had a complicated relationship with the Federation since The Original Series, its earliest shows weren’t all that well-equipped to focus on the complex morality of imperial politics. The episodic structure of shows like The Next Generation and The Original Series was beloved by fans and many wanted a return of this style in Seven of Nine’s Star Trek spinoff series, but the sidelining of serialized storytelling made broader political commentary harder. In contrast, since Commander Sisko spent his time on Deep Space Nine assisting the Bajoran attempts at rebuilding society after a devastating war with the Cardassians, the darker series was far better equipped to take on themes like colonial occupation, inter-world conflict, propaganda, and political corruption. While it was not quite The Wire in space, Deep Space Nine was more ethically fraught and morally complex than its more idealistic predecessors. If Deep Space Nine was the Hill Street Blues to The Original Series’ Dragnet, adding new levels of realism and grit to a once-simplistic series, then Prime Video’s The Expanse is the sci-fi genre’s answer to the seminal police procedural NYPD Blue. Like that iconic show, The Expanse pulled no punches when it came to making all of its characters morally compromised and all its systems believably flawed. Battlestar Galactica Is The Missing Link Between DS9 & The Expanse Image via MovieStillsDB Set in a future where humanity has colonized the solar system, The Expanse never downplays the political, moral, and ethical differences between members of the Martian Congressional Republic on Mars and the United Nations of Earth and Luna. None of the show’s futuristic factions are straightforward heroes or villains, and the Prime Video hit takes Deep Space Nine’s innovations to new heights by exploring the realistic outcome of space colonization. While Deep Space Nine can be credited with making The Expanse’s darker, more ethically complex sci-fi story palatable to mainstream viewers, there is another show that deserves credit for reshaping the genre between these two hits. The Battlestar Galactica reboot took a chintzy ‘70s series and turned it into a genuinely moving, deeply morally involved rumination on humanity, technology, societal responsibility, and technological progress. In an era when plenty of futuristic sci-fi shows were often full of either straightforward dystopian doom saying or blissfully simplistic techno-optimism, Battlestar Galactica made viewers mull over the complexities of imagined technological advancements. As such, the show deserves as much credit as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for making The Expanse’s success possible. Release Date 2015 - 2022-00-00 Network SyFy, Prime Video Showrunner Naren Shankar, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby Cast Dominique Tipper Naomi Nagata Directors Breck Eisner, Jeff Woolnough, David Grossman, Kenneth Fink, Rob Lieberman, Terry McDonough, Thor Freudenthal, Bill Johnson, David Petrarca, Jennifer Phang, Mikael Salomon, Sarah Harding, Marisol Adler, Anya Adams, Nick Gomez, Simon Cellan Jones Writers Georgia Lee, Robin Veith, Hallie Lambert, Matthew Rasmussen, Ty Franck, Naren Shankar, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Daniel Abraham, Dan Nowak Franchise(s) The Expanse