There was a time when I lamented the cheesiness of televised science fiction. Sure, Star Trek and Babylon 5 played with cool ideas— ideas you wouldn’t encounter anywhere else on the broadcast landscape— but why, when recommending them to the uninitiated, did I always have to start with “If you can look past the acting/writing/production values…”? It was like some Faustian deal: we’ll give you your Big Ideas, but by God, you’ll cringe at the way we dole them out…

Of course, that was before the rebirth of Battlestar Galactica and Westworld. It was before The Handmaid’s Tale transcended not just genre but Television itself, erupted into the real world as protesters marched down the streets of Washington DC in white hoods and red cloaks. It was before Game of Thrones won more Emmy Awards than any other show in the history of television.

And it was before an obscure little show called Counterpart lived and died and left scarcely a ripple. It is Counterpart I mourn today: one of the most underrated, understated SF series in recent memory.

You can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of it. You can be even be forgiven if you have heard of it— watched it, even— and never realized it was SF. The dialog, the acting, the sets— nothing about that show so much as whispered SF except the premise. In this way Counterpart shares a lot with Ronald Moore’s Galactica reboot. Moore explicitly wanted to make “science fiction for people who hate science fiction”: something that would sneak under your guard and let you think you were watching a drama set on a present-day aircraft carrier until some unexpected FX shot gave it all away with its starfields and spaceships. Parts of Counterpart‘s world looked downright retro (another parallel with BSG), for reasons which only gradually emerged over time.

The premise: back in eighties-era Berlin, a supercollider mishap splits our timeline into two parallels, Alpha and Prime. A bridge exists in the sub-basement where the experiment went awry: a portal between worlds. People go back and forth. There are no special effects, no cheesy CGI lightning or ripply Stargate water-disks. There’s a booth where you get your visa from a bored civil servant; a flight of stairs leading down into the tunnel. You walk through that dingy neutral zone and emerge into a parallel universe. It’s all very hush-hush; only a few in either timeline know of the existence of the other.

You are never allowed to make contact with your alternate self— your “other”, in the series’ vernacular. That’s assuming your other is even alive— because, of course, those two universes diverged over time. Not much, not at first; for a decade or so, their histories were almost identical. Then Prime was struck with some kind of superflu pandemic, while Alpha sailed on serenely unscathed.

At which point things diverged really fast. Earth Prime lost 7% of its population; their efforts combating the superflu put them miles ahead of Alpha in terms of medical research and expertise, but languishing in other areas. Prime still uses old-fashioned monochrome cathode-ray displays while Alpha races ahead with flatscreens and iPads. Now we understand why Alpha operatives leave their smart phones behind when crossing timelines, why even showing such technology to visitors from the other world is a violation of protocol; Earth Prime never developed the smart phone. We come to understand why there’s so much security at the crossing, so much distrust between worlds, why this show feels so much like a cold-war drama even beyond the obvious symbolism of its Berlin setting. Where did that superflu come from, after all? Why did it affect one timeline and not the other? Are both sides already in a state of war, undeclared?

The beautiful irony, of course, is that the people running the UN’s “Office of Interchange” aren’t suspicious of foreigners or aliens or incompatible ideologies; the timelines, after all, are parallel. These people literally do not trust themselves. There’s some seriously warped commentary on Human Nature right there.

All of what I’ve described is backstory. All of it has gone down before the first episode even begins; we get to fill in the pieces retrospectively, over the course of twenty compelling episodes. The series proper begins with Howard Silk: a bureaucrat in a dead-end job, someone so low on the totem pole that even after thirty years at the Office of Interchange he still doesn’t know exactly what he does there. It begins when he meets his other self— a supremely self-assured, ultracompetent field agent equally at home— and equally lethal— in both worlds. And it continues with an exploration of how such utterly different people could have emerged from a common starting point.

J.K. Simmons— the actor playing the Howards— is a one-man master class in understatement. He doesn’t have to speak a word and you know which iteration you’re watching by the tension in his shoulders, the way he holds himself. The body language is simultaneously subtle and unmistakable. And the scripts do something similar, convey epic divergence in the lowest of keys. Who would have thought that history could hinge so irrevocably on whether or not some middle-aged man gave his daughter a cassette tape of popular music? I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a nuanced exploration of Butterfly Effects.

While you won’t find any special effects in Counterpart, you will find terrorist attacks and germ warfare, violinists and assassins (big surprise, they’re the same person); massacres and love stories. High-energy physics. Gulags and realpolitik and broken people in broken marriages. Science fiction, after all, isn’t just about change. It’s about the impact of that change on people and society, and in that sense— while the genre has frequently been both described as “the literature of ideas” and derided as “the literature of cardboard characters”— you can make a case that SF without good characterizations fails in its mission almost by definition. Counterpart most definitely does not fail as SF.

It failed as a TV show, though. A couple of months ago, its creators announced that Counterpart is dead after a mere two seasons. It just couldn’t attract enough viewers, out of all the people on two Earths. And I think that’s a shame; Counterpart was more than just SF for people who hate SF.

It was SF for people who love the stuff, too.