13 sci-fi and fantasy shows you should watch this summer

Ms. Marvel — June 8 on Disney+

Three things in this life are certain: death, taxes, and Disney mounting another Marvel movie or TV show…both, if it can get away with it, which it usually can.

Already this year we’ve had Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness on the big screen and Moon Knight on the small. Marvel’s next swing is Ms. Marvel, a show about a superhero-obsessed teenager named Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) who comes into superpowers herself.

The Marvel series have hit different moods. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a straight-forward action thriller, Loki was a Doctor Who-like sci-fi adventure, WandaVision was…well, that one’s still hard to get my head around. In any case, Ms. Marvel is Marvel’s take on a coming-of-age story. Kamala isn’t jaded or faded or gritty or grey; she’s a young woman happy to bursting over the fact that she gets to be a superhero. The trailer has an infectious energy that could make this one of Marvel’s best series yet.

And that’s not the only new Marvel show coming out this summer. But let’s put a pin in that for now and talk about something completely different…

For All Mankind season 3 — June 10 on Apple TV+

For All Mankind isn’t the most popular genre show on the air right now…but maybe it should be, because it is excellent. This high-concept sci-fi series starts as a “what if” take on world history: what if the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was a lot more competitive, and stretched long beyond the pointed where it ended in our world?

The first season started off with a pretty standard ’60s-era space race setting familiar to anyone who’s watched movies like The Right Stuff. But the second season took things into the realm of pure sci-fi as we moved into the ’80s and see how the world had changed. And season 3 will take things into the ’90s, where billionaires are getting in on a project usually undertaken by governments.

In short, the space race in this sideways ’90s sounds more like the space race we’re seeing heat up today in 2022. For All Mankind has a great command of history, sci-fi, pacing and character, so whatever it comes up with, I’m sure it’ll be out of this world.