Project Hail Mary finally made it to screens this year, and if you've seen it you already know the specific damage it does. You walk out fine, and then three days later you're standing in your kitchen at 1 AM thinking about an alien who solved a problem nobody on Earth could solve by being, fundamentally, good. The book did this to people for years. Now the movie's done it to a whole new batch of them, and MSN has assembled ten TV shows for anyone currently sitting in that hole.

I went through the list expecting the usual recycling, and it's smarter than that. The picks lean toward the part of Project Hail Mary that actually lingers, which isn't the astrophage or the countdown clock. It's the communication problem. Two beings who share no language, no biology, no assumptions about what a question even is, working it out anyway, one small mistranslation at a time. Rarer on screen than it should be.

So the list skews toward first contact done slowly. Shows where the alien, or the stranger, or the incomprehensible thing gets treated as a puzzle rather than a monster. Arrival gets name-checked in these conversations constantly for the same reason, and the TV equivalents tend to live in that same patient register: quiet, procedural, weirdly emotional when it finally lands. There's also, usefully, a streak of hard science in the picks, actual physics-as-obstacle storytelling, because the other thing Project Hail Mary did was make problem-solving feel like suspense. Watching someone reason their way out of a corner, with real constraints, is its own kind of thriller if the writers respect the audience enough to keep the constraints real.

What struck me going through it is how thin this shelf actually is. We are swimming in alien content, have been for decades, and almost none of it is interested in the alien as a mind. Most of it wants the alien as a wall to shoot at. The shows that treat the Other as someone you have to build a shared language with, where the relationship is the plot, you can count on your fingers. Ten is roughly the right number for this list because ten is roughly all there is.

And that scarcity is the interesting part, to me anyway. Rocky worked because the story never let either of them off the hook of being understood. No magic translator. No instant empathy. Just two very tired problem-solvers trading words for concepts across a gap that should have been unbridgeable. TV struggles with this format for understandable reasons, it's slow, it's talky, it's expensive to make ambiguity legible week after week. But when a show pulls it off, you remember it the way people remember Rocky, which is to say fondly and forever and slightly heartbroken.

If you finished Project Hail Mary and felt that silence afterward, the specific silence where you want to keep being in that conversation and there's nothing left to be in, the list is worth your time. Watch the shows with subtitles on. Half of these are about listening, and you might as well practice.