TL;DR — Start with The Expanse if you want the best serious sci-fi series here. Pick The Orville for a warmer, funnier space adventure. Save Total Recall for a terrific one-night dose of 1990s Mars paranoia. There is an embarrassment of sci-fi available to stream for free on SBS On Demand at the moment. Not the “a man is trapped in a simulation and there is a blue filter” kind, either.
Every month SBS publishes a wall of text listing what is about to vanish from On Demand. Every month it mixes Studio Ghibli classics in with season 7 of some cooking show and a documentary about sharks, all sorted by date, none sorted by whether they are any good.
As I did in previous months I leaned on Claude to build a searchable and sortable page to make it easier to figure out what I really want to watch. SBS really should do this for their audience.
I pulled the full July list, stripped out the series and the reality TV, ran every standalone film past its IMDB rating and kept the ones at 7.0 or above. That left 94 films. The result is a single sortable, searchable page you can filter by rating, genre or leaving date.