While few viewers remember the most underrated sci-fi series of 2020 on Prime Video, the show borrowed from Isaac Asimov and Steven Spielberg in equal measure to tell a truly enthralling story. Spielberg’s many unmade projects prove that the director loves the sci-fi genre in its many forms. Spielberg’s fascination with aliens is well-documented, from 2026’s recent Disclosure Day to 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
However, it is worth remembering that while Total Recall’s Paul Verhoeven and Blade Runner’s Ridley Scott famously adapted author Philip K. Dick’s cyberpunk stories to the big screen, Spielberg offered one of the most underrated cinematic takes on the writer’s work with 2002’s Minority Report. This influential sci-fi crime thriller went on to shape the Orwellian sci-fi series Person of Interest, but Minority Report is still rarely listed among Spielberg’s best sci-fi movies despite its killer premise and strong cast.
Similarly, while the legendary director wasn’t directly involved in the production of 2020’s Prime Video show Tales from the Loop, Spielberg’s fingerprints are all over the underrated adaptation. Based on the art book of the same name by The Electric State creator Simon Stålenhag, Tales From The Loop follows a group of citizens in the small town of Mercer, Ohio, home to the underground facility The Mercer Center for Experimental Physics, also known as “The Loop” by local residents.
Tales From The Loop Incorporates Conflicting Styles Of Science Fiction
Rebecca Hall‘s Loretta and Paul Schneider‘s George are a pair of physics researchers who work at The Loop, while Jonathan Pryce plays its founder, George’s father Russ. The show starts with a young Loretta, in a flashback, returning home from school to find her house no longer exists. In its place is a mysterious rock that defies gravity, and so begins a bizarre, immersive storyline that takes the time-twisting narrative approach of Lost, but transposes it to an average small-town American setting.
Stunning to look at and often strange and offbeat in its storytelling choices, Tales from The Loop features the sense of awe found in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, but none of their clear plot explanations. This confounded some critics, who were beguiled by the show’s visuals but frustrated with the lack of clarity provided by its cyclical story.
However, for viewers who can allow the deliberately ambiguous strangeness of Tales from The Loop to wash over them, the Prime Video show rewards its audience with a mixture of Lynchian weirdness and Spielbergian whimsy. The show’s fictional metaphysics are complex enough to warrant comparisons to the writings of Isaac Asimov, but like Dennis Villeneuve‘s Arrival or Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, the series never gets too bogged down in over-explaining its sci-fi elements at the expense of its humanity.
Tales From The Loop Deserves More Love Here In 2026
While 2016’s Westworld was easily as complex and unyielding as Tales from The Loop, that HBO show was a bigger mainstream hit. Perhaps this was thanks, at least in part, to its gorier, more mature story.
Critics seemingly weren’t sure what to do with Tales from The Loop when the optimistic, odd sci-fi show arrived in 2020. Sadly, its trippy meditations on reality and temporality never earned the streaming show the sort of mainstream acclaim that met later genre hits like Severance, Silo, or Foundation.
While the show doesn’t share the propulsive plotting and comforting nostalgia of Stranger Things or Super 8, Tales from The Loop does feel like a similarly warm throwback to the sci-fi movies of an earlier decade. The difference is that, while those shows and movies owed a lot to Spielberg productions like Explorers,<em>Tales from The Loop is more indebted to Spielberg’s more esoteric sci-fi productions like Deep Impact and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
