Influencer Halley Kate McGookin opted for a vintage designer dress as she tied the knot with Reed Williams.

Posting via her TikTok on Thursday, July 2, the New York-based influencer, 25, showed off her thrifted Dior outfit as she got ready for her special day.

“I’m getting married today and my vision for this look absolutely came together,” she shared in the video. “Yes, I’m just going to the courthouse, but I’m still going to do an insane, iconic look.”

McGookin shared details of her wedding day attire as she explained the aesthetic she was aiming for.

Related: Halley Kate Shows Off Massive Marquise Engagement Ring From Reed Williams

Influencer Halley Kate McGookin showed off a massive engagement ring from boyfriend Reed Williams. Halley, 24, shared a glimpse of the stunning sparkler, featuring a marquise-shaped diamond set on a gold band, while taking to social media on Friday, January 23, to announce that she and Reed were engaged after more than two years of […]

“This is a vintage Dior look. Immediately, when I saw the flowers on it, I knew it was for me. Reed actually picked it up for me at a vintage market. I still wanted to keep the integrity of the dress, but I had it altered to be strapless because I knew I was going to do this hat,” she said. “I had this hat custom made because I saw this vintage Valentino look. Immediately, I knew I had to recreate it. I’m so happy with how this turned out. I think it’s insane.”

Later the same day, McGookin shared a video of her and Williams kissing inside the courthouse after exchanging vows.

@halleykate

Tomorrow look might even top this👀

♬ Venus and Flower – Austin Farwell

McGookin announced her engagement to Williams in January after more than two years of dating. Taking to Instagram, McGookin shared a glimpse of the stunning sparkler, which featured a marquise-shaped diamond set on a gold band.

She followed up the post by sharing a clip of the sweet proposal. The video showed Williams getting down on one knee to pop the question as they stood in a park in Switzerland. After asking McGookin for her hand in marriage, Williams stood back up and gave her a kiss.

“He ate with the 💍,” she captioned the post at the time.

The content creator also shared that Williams couldn’t sleep for “a couple of nights” because he was “trying to decide between which diamond to get.”

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Related: Influencer Anna Sitar Is Engaged to Bru, More Content Creator Engagements

Several of the internet’s most famous faces took the next steps in their relationships in 2026. The year kicked off with influencer and former Playboy model Amanda Cerny saying yes to Serhant real estate agent Johannes Bartl. Weeks later, influencer Halley Kate McGookin announced that Reed Williams popped the question to her while on vacation […]

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In an episode of her “Delusional Diaries” podcast in June 2025, McGookin was candid about never having any ambitions to have a big ceremony if she ties the knot.

“I’m not against getting married, I just wanna make that clear, I have nothing against marriages, I just don’t wanna have a wedding, is what I’ve always said,” she explained on the podcast.

McGookin and Williams first met on the dating app Hinge in early 2023 and dated briefly before calling it quits in November 2023. After that false start, McGookin announced in April 2024 that the pair had gotten back together.

The world loves a heartwarming sports story, and they don’t come much better than Ted Lasso. Although it seemed the Apple TV flagship series, which once saved the streamer by establishing it as a main player, had come to an end, Jason Sudeikis‘ happy-go-lucky coach is set to return later this year. The hotly anticipated fourth season is set to debut on August 5, 2026, with Ted and Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) set to take charge of a new women’s division at AFC Richmond. Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein) attempts to lead the men’s team to victory in a season sure to prove one of the most popular of 2026.

Last summer, another sports story with plenty of heart was dominating the streaming charts, as Hollywood’s resident funny-man Adam Sandler starred in Happy Gilmore 2, reprising one of his fan-favorite comedies after almost three decades. The sequel officially debuted to 46.7 million views over three days, marking the biggest U.S. opening weekend for a Netflix original film, and proving once again that Sandler is a huge draw. But this was far from his only sports story, with perhaps his very best now available to stream on a new platform.

The film in question is The Longest Yard, thought by many to be one of the best football movies of all time, which starred Sandler alongside veteran Burt Reynolds. Made for $82 million, the film just about scraped success during its 2005 theatrical run, returning a global haul of $191 million, split between $158 million in domestic revenue and a further $33 million from overseas markets. This is made all the more impressive, considering The Longest Yard was going head-to-head with Star Wars Ep. III: Revenge of the Sith. Over two decades later, you can stream The Longest Yard right now on Paramount+.

What Is Adam Sandler’s Next Movie?

You might not be surprised to learn that Sandler’s next movie is a Netflix project, but you might not have expected it to be a thriller. Based on the 2001 French film, Sandler will star in Time Out, which began production back in late March this year. The film, which is directed by Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere‘s Scott Cooper, also stars the likes of Willem Dafoe, Gaby Hoffmann, F. Murray Abraham, Steve Zahn, and Adam Horovitz.

You can stream The Longest Yard right now on Paramount+. Make sure to stay tuned to Collider for the latest streaming stories.

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Release Date

May 27, 2005

Runtime

113 minutes

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Director

Peter Segal

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Love Island USA‘s Jen Terry made a bold statement about how she hated all men.

“I just hate men. I always say this,” she said in the Friday, July 3, episode. “I say it outside of here and inside.”

She continued: “They all f**king suck. When will it ever be my turn? It feels like it never is.”

Jen was venting about her issues with Gal Tshnieder after their connection came to an end. The boys were then instructed to choose who they wanted to couple up with — and Gal didn’t choose Jen. As a result, she was sent home as the only single person still left in the villa.

Before her exit, Jen was surprisingly candid when she previously admitted to struggling when guys in the villa don’t show interest in her.

“I know that I am gorgeous and stunning but here — besides when I was with Gabe — I felt like, ‘Am I hideous?’” she said in a June episode. “Is there something wrong with me? Does my personality suck?”

She continued: “Normally I am used to guys drooling over me. Here, it has been so hard.”

Love Island USA follows a group of singles who must pair off in order to stay in the show’s luxury villa. The contestants — referred to as Islanders — live in isolation in a villa under constant video surveillance. They must be coupled up to remain on the show and earn a shot at the $100,000 prize.

The show is coming off a record-breaking moment with season 7 bringing in 18.4 billion streaming minutes, making it the most-watched original season of television on the platform.

“[This season] there’s a lot more emphasis put on the journey as opposed to the result,” narrator Iain Stirling told Us Weekly exclusively in July 2025. ”I think it’s about the journey of finding someone and how you grow as a person by doing that. Whereas five or six years ago, you had, like, proper millennials in there. There was that more traditional approach to dating.”

While some fans questioned the love journeys, Stirling was on board with the Islanders taking a different approach.

“The end goal [was] to be with someone and you have this contract with someone you’re in a relationship with to honor that person and to honor that relationship,” he noted. “I think now there’s a lot more people who make contracts with themselves to have the journey that they want and the experience they’re after.”

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He added, “These people are predominantly speaking in their early 20s. If you can’t be selfish dating then — then when can you? Especially people from my generation, they weren’t selfish in their 20s and maybe did not want to upset people. Then they get to sort of 30 to 40 and get divorced and go insane. Maybe it’s the healthier way to do it.”

New episodes of Love Island USA are released six days a week — except for Wednesdays — on Peacock.

Join Us Weekly and Bracketology.tv in our first-ever Love Island USA fantasy league! This is your chance to predict who you think will win Season 8 and rank the Islanders weekly based on how confident you are that they will survive the next elimination. You will be playing against our editors, get access to exclusive content and have the chance to win fun prizes. Sign up for free today!

Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss sparked a nearly inseparable bond back in 2012, but their friendship appeared to take a turn for the worst over time.

The BFFs quickly hit it off after Swift mentioned Kloss during her January 2012 Vogue cover story, saying, “I love Karlie Kloss. I want to bake cookies with her!” The comment caught Kloss’ eye, and a famous friendship was born.

Through the years, the duo put their connection on full display, both on social media and at high-power Hollywood events. Though it seemed like nothing could ever come between the two, their friendship seemingly hit a snag several years later when eagle-eyed fans noticed that Kloss was left out of Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” video, which featured a list of her remaining squad members.

Rumors of a falling out continued to swirl on and off — but Kloss consistently shut down speculation that she and Swift had grown apart. However, Swift hinted that things had gone south after penning a powerful essay for Elle ahead of her 30th birthday.

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“Something about ‘we’re in our young twenties!’ hurls people together into groups that can feel like your chosen family. And maybe they will be for the rest of your life,” Swift wrote in March 2019. “Or maybe they’ll just be your comrades for an important phase, but not forever.”

Years after the alleged friendship rift, fans were shocked when Kloss and her husband, Joshua Kushner, stepped out in New York City for Swift’s July 2026 wedding to Travis Kelce.

Scroll down to relive all of Swift and Kloss’ friendship highs and lows through the years:

NFL players Travis Kelce and Jason Kelce made history in 2023 when they became the first brothers to face off against each other at the Super Bowl.

When Jason, who is a center for the Philadelphia Eagles, and Travis, who is a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, cross paths on the football field, their parents are often caught in the middle.

In 2022, the duo’s mother, Donna Kelce, traveled over 1,200 miles in one day to see both of her sons play their Wild Card games. She watched Jason defeat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Philadelphia before hopping on a flight to Kansas City where she surprised Travis after the game.

At the time, the NFL celebrated Donna’s journey when they noticed her in the crowd. “She made it! Two games. One day. One amazing mom,” their official Twitter account read alongside a photo of her cheering.

While seeing both her boys in Super Bowl LVII was an exciting moment, Donna explained that it came with its complications. “You know, somebody’s gonna go home a loser, and neither one of them lose very well,” she told WJW’s PJ Zeilger in January 2023.

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Travis and the Chiefs narrowly beat Jason and the Eagles in the February 2023 championship, where Donna went viral for wearing a custom jacket dedicated to both of her sons’ teams.

When Travis and Jason married Taylor Swift and Kylie Kelce in 2026 and 2018, respectively, the brothers were one another’s Best Man.

Keep scrolling to learn about Travis and Jason’s family:

By Robert Scucci
| Published 20 seconds ago

Survival films like Castaway and The Revenant need to make way for 2023’s Society of the Snow, a one-of-a-kind survival thriller. Based on the 1972 Andes flight disaster, this Netflix film will punch you in the gut and not let up until you’re weeping into your popcorn because there are too many emotions to even consider unpacking upon its conclusion.

Through the tremendous hardships that are portrayed throughout Society of the Snow, you’ll find yourself awestruck by the indomitable human spirit that is so expertly captured on-screen.

The Suffering Of Surviving

Society of the Snow’s story is primarily set in the Andes mountains after a plane carrying 45 passengers crash-lands, ripping the fuselage apart. In one of the most violent depictions of a plane crash in recent cinematic history, those who lived through the initial impact often wished that they had been spared from the suffering of surviving.

Over the course of 72 days, the remaining survivors were put to the ultimate test as they braved sub-zero temperatures with whatever clothes they had on their backs, while tending to the wide array of injuries they sustained.

After eight days of waiting for a rescue plane, a battered radio leftover from the crash broadcasts that search parties have been called off, leaving the traumatized and gravely injured survivors to their own devices and basic survival instincts. Many of the passengers never experienced snowfall, let alone being stranded in the frozen mountains.

A Terrible And Desperate Time

During the months leading to an eventual rescue, Society of the Snow compassionately points to the desperation that the survivors faced during this unthinkable time.

Enduring multiple avalanches that buried their shelter and meager food supply, they had to resort to cannibalism and had no choice but to rely on their friends’ corpses as a means to fight off starvation. It’s worth noting, however, that although such drastic measures had to be taken, their reluctance to commodify human life as a source of sustenance was one of many moral dilemmas they had to make peace with.

A Climb Through The Mountains

Arriving at the conclusion that nobody will ever find them while they’re still alive, Society of the Snow’s narrative shifts to Nando (Augustin Pardella) and Robert (Matias Recalt), who embark on a 10-day climb through the mountains after spending two months subjected to unimaginable living conditions with 14 other survivors.

With each passing scene that Society of the Snow delivers, the only thought that consumes your mind is “how can things get any worse?” The unforgiving mountains always find a way to deliver on this front up until the film’s conclusion.

Compelling Storytelling

Though Society of the Snow is a Spanish-language film, its storytelling is so compelling that you won’t mind the subtitles. In fact, the subject matter is so heavy that you’ll actually appreciate the storytelling on a whole other level because this layer of abstraction in the form of a language barrier will help keep you anchored.

Society of the Snow’s unrelenting storytelling won over audiences upon its limited theatrical release. Universally praised for its tense delivery of despair and insurmountable struggle, this survival movie garnered a 90 percent critical score against an 88 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.

You’re not going to form an emotional connection with a volleyball named Wilson when you watch Society of the Snow, but this movie is a must-see if you are looking for a gripping and emotionally jarring survival film.

SOCIETY OF THE SNOW SCORE

If you have the stomach for it, it comes with strong recommendations that you watch Society of the Snow on Netflix today.

Barbie star Margot Robbie is set to headline an Ocean’s Eleven prequel, scheduled for release on June 25, 2027. Robbie will star opposite Bradley Cooper in the next installment of the beloved heist franchise, as the parents of Danny Ocean attempt to pull off an ambitious heist during the 1962 Monaco Grand Prix. It was recently announced that Wagner Moura, the star of The Secret Agent who recently earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, would join a slowly-building star-studded Ocean’s lineup.

Robbie is no stranger to starring alongside Hollywood’s best leading men, including the likes of Ryan Gosling in Barbie, and she joined forces with Oscar winner Will Smith (King Richard) at a time when he was one of Hollywood’s headline names, in the crime flick Focus. A slick and stylish tale of con artists who push their luck too far, the film received mixed reviews upon arrival, with Collider’s review of the film claiming that there is “no romance and no con.”

Although it didn’t hit the heady heights of other Smith or Robbie blockbusters, Focus was a quiet success at the box office, earning a global haul of $168 million against a reported budget of $65 million. Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who previously dazzled with Crazy, Stupid, Love, Focus is an easy-to-watch film featuring two electric leads. If you want to try it out for yourself, you’re in luck, as the movie has just made its way to a new streamer. Starting July 1, Focus is available to stream on Paramount+.

Margot Robbie’s Recent Run of Movies Has Left a Lot To Be Desired

Image via Warner Bros.

Although she is one of the most famous actors on the planet, with plenty of top-tier performances in her filmography, Robbie’s recent run of movies has left a lot to be desired. In the past four years, she has starred in the likes of Amsterdam, Babylon, and A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, with her most recent project also proving underwhelming. Robbie teamed up with director Emerald Fennell and Euphoria‘s Jacob Elordi on a new interpretation of Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights, although much of the backlash came from those who deemed the interpretation both misinformed and lacking.

Margot Robbie’s Focus is available to stream now on Paramount+. For more of the latest streaming stories, make sure to stay tuned to Collider.

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Release Date

February 27, 2015

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105 minutes

Director

Glenn Ficarra

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Every sci-fi fan has a show they’d go to war for that nobody else has heard of. It aired on some cable network that’s since been rebranded, it ran for maybe three seasons before getting axed on a cliffhanger, and it’s the first thing out of your mouth when someone asks for a recommendation. Streaming has made most of these shows easier to find than ever, which means there’s never been a better time to catch up on the weird, ambitious, canceled-too-soon series that built cult followings for a reason.

We’ve rounded up the best of these obscure sci-fi shows. They’ve all got inventive world-building, unfairly talented casts, and the kind of bonkers plotting that keeps you up until 3 AM muttering, “just one more episode.”

‘Dark Angel’ (2000–2002)

Image via FOX

Before she was running a billion-dollar company, Jessica Alba was Max Guevara, a genetically enhanced super-soldier on the run in a post-apocalyptic Seattle that James Cameron built for Fox’s Dark Angel. It was 2000, Cameron was fresh off Titanic, and he decided his next move was a cyberpunk television show about a bike messenger with cat DNA and an attitude problem. The show aired for two seasons and made Alba a household name, earned her a Saturn Award, and then got canceled because Fox moved it to the Friday night death slot to make room for 24.

The world-building is pure early-2000s grit. An electromagnetic pulse has crippled the U.S., Seattle looks like a tech-noir fever dream, and Alba’s Max navigates it all while searching for her fellow Manticore escapees, trading barbs with Michael Weatherly’s cyber-journalist Logan Cale, and outrunning government agents who want her back in a lab. Jensen Ackles joined the cast in Season 2 as a fellow supersoldier, and his chemistry with Alba gave the show a jolt it sorely needed. Dark Angel is a time capsule of a very specific era of sci-fi television, the kind that trusted its female lead to carry action sequences and moral complexity, usually in the same scene. We still miss it.

‘Killjoys’ (2015–2019)

Image via SYFY

Before Hannah John-Kamen was fighting Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) in the MCU, she was Dutch, a lethally charming bounty hunter chasing warrants across a distant planetary system called the Quad with her partner Johnny (Aaron Ashmore) and his ex-military brother D’avin (Luke Macfarlane). Created by Michelle Lovretta, who also gave us Lost Girl, Killjoys ran for five seasons on Syfy from 2015 to 2019 and delivered a fully realized sci-fi universe where class warfare, body-snatching parasites, and interplanetary barroom brawls coexisted with surprising ease. Think Firefly if Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) were a woman with a mysterious past and significantly better hand-to-hand combat skills.

What makes Killjoys such a satisfying binge is its refusal to take itself too seriously. The world-building is dense but never homework-y: you’ve got a feudal corporate hierarchy, a caste system that spans multiple moons, and an ancient alien threat that unfolds slowly across the series, all woven into a show that never forgets it’s supposed to be fun. The chemistry between its three leads carries even the weaker episodes, and the fact that it actually got to end on its own terms, with a proper finale, makes it a rarity in the graveyard of canceled sci-fi.

‘Revolution’ (2012–2014)

Image via NBC

What if every piece of technology on the planet just stopped working and never came back on? That’s the question at the center of Revolution, Eric Kripke‘s post-apocalyptic NBC drama that aired from 2012 to 2014 and featured J. J. Abrams as executive producer and Jon Favreau directing the pilot. Set 15 years after a mysterious global blackout, the show follows a scrappy band of survivors navigating a fractured America where former U.S. states have become warring militia territories and arrows have replaced drone strikes. Billy Burke, fresh off playing Bella Swan’s (Kristen Stewart) dad in Twilight, reinvented himself here as Miles Matheson, a former Marine turned reluctant hero with a complicated past and a very big sword.

The cast is stacked for a network show that only lasted two seasons. Giancarlo Esposito, doing what Giancarlo Esposito does, plays a militia captain whose ambitions rival Gus Fring’s in a post-electrical world. Elizabeth Mitchell brings gravitas as the scientist hiding the secret behind the blackout. Tracy Spiridakos leads the early episodes as Charlie, Miles’ niece. Kripke himself later joked that if Revolution had been a streaming show with a bigger budget and shorter episode order, it would have been The Last of Us. He’s not entirely wrong.

‘Mutant X’ (2001–2004)

Image via Tribune Entertainment

Here’s a deep cut. Mutant X debuted in first-run syndication in 2001, created by Avi Arad under a Marvel Comics license, and it was immediately so X-Men-adjacent that 20th Century Fox sued Marvel over it. The lawsuit was settled, the show carried on for three seasons and 66 episodes, and it cultivated a following among fans who couldn’t get enough of the mutant-team formula on a weekly basis. The premise follows Adam Kane (John Shea), a geneticist trying to atone for his role in creating “new mutants” by assembling a team of them to protect others from a shady government agency. Victoria Pratt‘s feral Shalimar Fox, Victor Webster‘s electricity-wielding Brennan Mulwray, and Forbes March‘s density-shifting Jesse Kilmartin round out the crew.

Mutant X is not prestige television. The dialogue can be clunky, the effects are of the early 2000s variety, and the plotting sometimes feels like it’s making things up as it goes. But there’s something genuinely charming about its scrappiness, and the team dynamics carry it through the rougher patches. Lauren Lee Smith, who later turned up in CSI, adds a compelling energy as the tele-empath Emma DeLauro for the first two seasons. The show got abruptly canceled after Season 3 when its production company folded, leaving it on a cliffhanger that was never resolved, which is, at this point, basically a rite of passage for any self-respecting cult sci-fi series.

‘Falling Skies’ (2011–2015)

Image via TNT

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Noah Wyle spent over a decade playing a mild-mannered doctor on ER, so naturally, his follow-up was a TNT series where he plays a mild-mannered history professor who picks up a gun and leads a guerrilla resistance against alien invaders. Falling Skies ran for five seasons from 2011 to 2015 with Steven Spielberg as executive producer, and it wears his fingerprints all over it: the Americana, the emphasis on family bonds under impossible duress, and the weird aliens. Wyle’s Tom Mason becomes the reluctant leader of the 2nd Massachusetts Militia Regiment, and the show mines surprisingly effective drama from watching civilians figure out how to fight a war they were never trained for.

The supporting cast gives Wyle plenty to work with. Will Patton is grizzled and excellent as Captain Weaver, Moon Bloodgood brings gravity to the group’s medic, and Colin Cunningham is a scene-stealer as John Pope, an outlaw whose allegiances shift with the wind. The first three seasons are the strongest and the show’s willingness to keep introducing new alien species and political complications keeps the mythology from going stale. The final season rushes its ending, but the journey there offers one of the more satisfying post-invasion narratives cable TV has attempted.

‘Avenue 5’ (2020–2022)

Image via HBO

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Armando Iannucci, the acid-tongued genius behind Veep, set his satirical sights on space tourism with Avenue 5, and the result is a two-season HBO comedy so viciously funny it makes you wonder how it didn’t find a bigger audience. Hugh Laurie plays Captain Ryan Clark, the reassuringly handsome figurehead of a luxury interplanetary cruise ship owned by Josh Gad‘s obnoxious tech billionaire, Herman Judd. When a technical malfunction throws the ship off course, what was supposed to be an eight-week pleasure cruise becomes a years-long ordeal, and the passengers, who are exactly as awful as you’d expect rich people trapped in a tin can to be, start losing it.

The comedy here is bleak and unrelenting, which is probably why it struggled to find its crowd during its initial run in 2020, a year when being trapped in an enclosed space with terrible people hit a little too close to home. Zach Woods is perfect as the ship’s incompetent head of customer relations, as is the supporting cast of Nikki Amuka-Bird, Suzy Nakamura, and Lenora Crichlow. The second season improved significantly, which makes HBO’s decision to cancel it in 2023 sting even more.

‘Dark Matter’ (2015–2017)

Image via SYFY

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Six strangers wake up on a derelict spaceship with no memory of who they are, so they name themselves One through Six and start trying to piece together why everyone in the galaxy seems to want them dead. That’s Dark Matter in a nutshell, a Syfy series that ran from 2015 to 2017 and delivered the kind of pulpy, character-driven space opera that the network hadn’t managed since the Battlestar Galactica days. Created by Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie, who spent years writing for the Stargate franchise, it’s a show built on the bones of everything those writers learned about making sci-fi on a budget feel lived-in and propulsive.

Melissa O’Neil is the standout as Two, the crew’s de facto leader whose backstory turns out to be far wilder than anyone’s, and Zoie Palmer brings a warmth and dry humor to the ship’s android that quickly makes her the fan favorite. The show’s three seasons build an increasingly complex web of corporate wars, alternate dimensions, and identity crises, and it got canceled on a cliffhanger that its fanbase has still not forgiven Syfy for. It never got the sendoff it deserved, but the ride to that point is engaging enough that it’s worth the frustration.

‘The 4400’ (2004–2007)

Image via USA Network

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USA Network’s The 4400 debuted in 2004 as a miniseries and was so well-received that it earned three additional seasons before the 2007 writers’ strike killed its momentum. The hook is irresistible: 4,400 people who vanished at various points over the last century all reappear simultaneously near Mount Rainier, dumped in a ball of light with no memory of where they’ve been and not having aged a day. The catch is that many of them come back with new abilities, and the government isn’t thrilled about it. Joel Gretsch and Jacqueline McKenzie anchor the show as the Homeland Security agents tasked with monitoring the returnees, but the real draw is the sprawling ensemble.

A young Mahershala Ali plays Richard Tyler, one of the 4,400 who disappeared in the 1950s, and Billy Campbell is magnetic as Jordan Collier, a charismatic millionaire returnee whose intentions stay murky right up until they don’t. The 4400 was doing the “ordinary people with extraordinary abilities and a shadowy conspiracy” thing years before Heroes made it mainstream, and its willingness to go truly dark with its mythology still holds up.

‘Continuum’ (2012–2015)

Image via Showcase

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Continuum is the kind of Canadian sci-fi export that flies completely under the radar in the U.S. and then slowly builds a following that will not shut up about it, for good reason. Rachel Nichols plays Kiera Cameron, a law enforcement officer from a corporately controlled dystopia in the year 2077 who accidentally gets transported back to 2012 Vancouver along with a group of terrorists she was supposed to be guarding. Stranded in our timeline, she teams up with a young tech genius named Alec Sadler (Erik Knudsen) and a local detective (Victor Webster) to hunt down the fugitives while secretly trying to find a way home to her husband and son.

What elevates Continuum past its time-travel premise is the way it complicates its own morality. The “terrorists” Kiera is chasing, a group called Liber8, are fighting to prevent the corporate oligarchy that Kiera serves and protects. The show asks you to root for its protagonist while slowly revealing that her side might be the wrong one, and it threads that needle across four seasons without ever fully tipping its hand. Created by Simon Barry (who went on to make Warrior Nun), it aired on Showcase in Canada and Syfy in the States from 2012 to 2015, and while the truncated final season of six episodes means it wraps up faster than ideal, it does actually wrap up, which counts for something, right?

‘The 100’ (2014–2020)

The elevator pitch for The 100 sounds like every other CW show circa 2014: pretty young people, love triangles, post-apocalyptic setting, based on a YA novel series by Kass Morgan. And the first few episodes do lean into that formula hard enough that plenty of viewers bounced. Their loss. By the end of its first season, The 100 had evolved into something ruthless and morally knotty that regularly shocked even its most devoted fans. Eliza Taylor‘s Clarke Griffin starts as a reluctant leader and ends up making the kind of decisions that would give war-criminals nightmares.

Set 97 years after a nuclear apocalypse, the show follows 100 juvenile delinquents sent from a failing space station back to Earth as expendable guinea pigs. What they find down there, surviving ground-dwellers, a militarized mountain bunker, an AI that wants to end all human conflict by ending most humans, keeps escalating in ways that The CW rarely allowed. Bob Morley, Marie Avgeropoulos, and Henry Ian Cusick round out a strong cast, and the show ran for seven seasons. It’s a slow starter that rewards patience with one of the more ambitious sci-fi arcs network television has produced.

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The 100

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Release Date

2014 – 2020-00-00

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The CW

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