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This Incredible, 2013 Sci-Fi Series Was a Wildly Ambitious TV and Video Game Crossover
What’s not to love about SYFY's wild post-apocalyptic alien western — hatched from the same creative brain that brought us Farscape?
If you’re among the SYFY viewers who were tuned in a decade ago to Defiance (stream it here on Peacock!), memories of the ambitious retro-future science fiction series probably conjure a certain spiritual kinship with franchises like Firefly and Fallout.
Blending elements of lo-fi survival and far-flung technology while brandishing a frontier sort of lawlessness with a vaguely western vibe, Defiance lavished a lot of love on building out its unique post-apocalyptic world — and then giving its big menagerie of sentient species a lot of dangerously interesting things to do there.
From small screen to video game: How SYFY’s Defiance defied TV convention
Developed as an all-new IP from Farscape and Alien Nation creator Rockne S. O’Bannon alongside sci-fi writing veterans Kevin Murphy (Caprica) and Michael Taylor (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager), Defiance ran for three seasons on SYFY from 2013-2015.
Just as O’Bannon’s Farscape already had done in the early 2000s, Defiance also marched to its own creative beat: The show tapped a refreshingly unconventional spot on the map to serve as its home base (the bustling ruins of a St. Louis ravaged by runaway terraforming and alien warfare); it managed to juggle a large cast of human and alien factions, and — right from its very conception — it even set it sights beyond the mere small screen, taking aim at the video game world as a way to both extend and expand its TV-based story.
Yep, where Fallout started life as a video game and eventually evolved toward a television crossover, Defiance took a different approach, chasing its SYFY debut with the simultaneous launch of Defiance the game — a third-person MMO shooter for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC. The game came with its own in-world setting (the tattered environs around San Francisco) and eventually received an update — known as Defiance 2050 — for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation of consoles.
True to its mission, Defiance the game built on the world and story lore that its TV counterpart established on SYFY. Even after the series ended, the video game continued to receive robust support — so much so that its “Dark Metamorphosis” update, arriving almost a year after the series had wrapped on SYFY, touted its storyline as a “Season 4” continuation of the series.
How the Defiance game connected to the TV series
Though Defiance the game indeed spun new stories and explored more places than the show itself ever touched, describing its ongoing campaign as a full-blown “Season 4” might’ve been overstating things just a little. In part, that’s because there was never a ton of character overlap between the game and the SYFY series itself — a series that circumscribed a pretty enormous lore-verse in and around its own St. Louis setting (aka the titular city of “Defiance” that gave the show its name). By 2021, support for the game eventually ended — nearly six years after the series had gone dark for good at SYFY.
Though you can’t hop online and blast hellbugs anymore with your MMO gaming friends, Defiance the series is still easy to stream, with all three seasons available on Peacock. If you’re a first-time viewer, well — get set for a surprisingly elaborate and well-populated science fiction spectacle. Starring Grant Bowler (True Blood, Lost) and Stephanie Leonidas (MirrorMask, Snatch) as a grizzled wartime veteran and his alien adopted daughter, Defiance features more than half a dozen alien species, each realized onscreen with the same signature eye for creature effects that O’Bannon previously perfected on Farscape.
There’s oodles of faction-based intrigue, too, thanks to an ongoing effort to keep the fragile interspecies peace in the means streets shadowed by St. Louis’ ruined Gateway Arch. Julie Benz (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dexter) stars as the town’s shakily-established new mayor, navigating an endless web of science fiction treachery that involves everything from a warring family of organized-crime aliens to a secret spaceship hiding away underneath the city.
Along the way, expect to see even more familiar acting faces, including Jaime Murray (as an alien-blonde aristocrat who’s light years removed from Murray’s Warehouse 13 role as Helena G. Wells), plus Doctor Who and Daredevil veteran Tony Curran alongside awesome character actor Graham Greene (Dances with Wolves, The Green Mile), Mia Kirshner (Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds), and an entire constellation of recurring and guest stars (including The Terminator acting legend Linda Hamilton, who comes as part of a deep new Defiance story thread that spanned Season 2 and 3.)
Stream all three seasons of Defiance on Peacock here.
