2023 - 2024
Beacon 23 is MGM+'s two-season sci-fi drama that ran from November 2023 to June 2024 before the network cancelled it. Developed for television by Zak Penn from Hugh Howey's 2015 novella series, the show pulls on a creative thread that also gave us Silo, since Howey wrote both.
Out in the far reaches of the galaxy sits Beacon 23 itself. It is a lighthouse in space, manned by a single keeper whose job is to warn ships away from a nearby dark matter field. The keeper is Halan (Stephan James), a former military man carrying damage he has not processed. One day a pod crash-lands on the beacon. The survivor is Aster (Lena Headey), a corporate investigator from QTA, the Quadratic Tech Authority that owns the beacon network. She is not there by accident. Something inside the beacon's equipment is sending out a signal that should not exist, and Aster wants to know what it is.
Two people stuck in one station with a mystery in the walls. That is the whole pitch for season one.
The show leans on Headey and James to carry eight episodes in a very small space, and for the most part they can. Headey is playing well below her Game of Thrones register here. Aster is watchful, tired, and hiding about three layers of motive at any given moment. James gives Halan a bottled-up anger that never quite releases the way you expect it to. Their push-and-pull is the actual engine of season one.
The supporting cast is small but works:
Season two pivots. Other beacons. Other keepers. Sandrine Holt joins as Coley, Aster's colleague, and the register shifts from two-hander chamber piece to universe-building ensemble. Some fans loved the expansion. Others felt the show stopped being the thing it was good at.
Underneath the signal-in-the-walls mystery, Beacon 23 is doing what the best contained sci-fi does. It uses a closed box to ask open questions.
Aster is the corporation's eyes. Halan does the job the corporation pays for. One of them has power, the other has the keys. What happens when the person sent to audit you shows up at your door, and there is nowhere to run because you are both twenty light years from anyone else? That is a very old workplace story dressed up in hard vacuum.
Zak Penn
Creator / Developer
Hugh Howey
Source Author
Sandrine Holt
Coley
Stephen Root
Solomon
Lena Headey
Aster Calyx
Wade Bogert-O'Brien
Bart
Glen Mazzara
Showrunner (S2)
Stephan James
Halan Kai Nelson
The show is also interested in what QTA actually is. Not just a company. A religion of its own, a bureaucracy with scripture, and a founder (Milan Aleph) whose relationship to his own creations gets weirder the longer you look at him. Fans of Foundation will recognise the pattern of a corporation so large it has turned into a theology. Fans of Westworld will recognise the slippery line between maker and made.
The best episodes play less like a thriller and more like a haunted house where the ghost might be the building itself.
Season two broadens the aperture. Characters from other beacons. New players. A mythology that gets bigger as the cast multiplies. For some viewers this was the show finally showing its ambition. For others it was the show losing what made it distinctive.
Visually this is a small show that knows it is a small show. The beacon itself is the star of the production design. A maddening spiral staircase wraps around a central core, catwalks hang over drops into mechanical shadow, and every window looks out onto the same churning dark matter storm. It is shot like a claustrophobic thriller, not a space opera. The Hollywood Reporter called the early episodes electric and the word fits. You can feel two people in the same tight room sizing each other up.
Ramin Djawadi does the theme music, which buys the show a register of prestige sci-fi weight most of its budget could not. Reviewers reached for Annihilation, Moon, Event Horizon, and Sunshine as reference points. I think Moon is the closest, emotionally. A lone worker. A signal. A slowly rising question about what is real inside a sealed environment.
Critics were split. Metacritic landed at 59 for season one based on a handful of reviews. Praise went to the premise, the production design, and Headey's control. Criticism went to pacing, to an ending that felt unearned, and to the creative choices of the back half. Season two received a lukewarm reception for broadening the scope at the cost of the intimacy that had been the hook. MGM+ cancelled the show in September 2024.
It is a niche genre play. The audience for a contained, character-driven space mystery on a mid-tier streamer was always going to be small, and the show did not try to broaden that appeal until season two, by which point many of its early watchers had drifted away. I would not call it a misfire. I would call it a show that did one thing well for a while and then tried to do a different thing.
The first four episodes of season one are among the more interesting things MGM+ has put out. Two strong actors. A confined location. A premise that earns its weight. If you are in the mood for deliberate, quiet science fiction, the kind that happens mostly on faces in small rooms, Beacon 23 has real moments.
Where it stumbles is the same place a lot of modern cable sci-fi stumbles. It gets greedy. It has answers to give, and the answers are never as satisfying as the questions were. Season two's universe expansion is a fair experiment, but it costs the show its particular flavour. Fans of The Silent Sea, Raised By Wolves, and Counterpart will find a familiar mood here. Less expensive than The Expanse, less polished than Severance, but with a small, specific identity of its own when it holds its nerve.
Worth a weekend if you like your sci-fi patient.
Jess Salgueiro
Saldana
Marc Menchaca
Keir
Barbara Hershey
Sophie
Natasha Mumba
Harmony
Ellen Wong
Iris
Eric Lange
Milan Aleph