Television series

The Cleaners

Name: The Cleaners
Genre: Science Fiction

The Cleaners imagines a world where every object retains a psychic residue of the memories brushed against it — and where a certain kind of touch can relive them. It's speculative fiction as detective story: procedural mysteries wrapped around a family trade nobody wants to inherit. Moody, tactile, intimate scale, for people who like their science fiction domestic and melancholic rather than explosive.

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Warehouse 132009

Agents who collect and defuse dangerous, emotionally-charged artifacts — the same job posture as a 'cleaner' — played as breezy adventure with a genuine ache underneath the weirder cases.

But The tone leans campy and case-of-week; if you want The Cleaners' hush and dread, this is louder and sillier.

Pushing Daisies2007

A young man inherits an unusual family trade and discovers his touch can undo death, solving a mystery each episode — the blueprint this show seems to be riffing on, wrapped in candy colours.

But Whimsical and narrated like a fairy tale; if you want grounded near-future melancholy, its sweetness might grate.

Severance2022

The same core question of what a company should be allowed to do to your memories, filtered through gorgeous, eerie production design and a slow-burn mystery about identity.

But Deliberately opaque and paced for patience — several episodes pass before anything meaningfully resolves.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Stone Tape1972

Same core mechanic — trauma imprinted on inert matter, and a technical crew trying to erase it — but treated as folk horror instead of near-future drama, and it got there fifty years early.

A team of scientists discover a wall that recorded a woman's death centuries ago and try to wipe it clean — literally the premise of The Cleaners, told as ghost story decades before anyone called it science fiction.

But A single ninety-minute TV play, stagey and slow by modern pacing standards, shot on cramped studio sets.

Devs2020

Alex Garland's miniseries about a tech founder obsessed with the past, told with the same hushed, high-concept dread this show is promising, minus objects but full of consequence.

But Heavy on philosophy and light on plot momentum; a talky, meditative watch rather than a thriller.

Ghost Whisperer2005

An earlier, cheesier take on the same idea — a woman handles objects and spaces to release the emotional residue the dead left behind, case by case.

But Broadcast-network sentimentality and dated effects; it plays its supernatural premise soft and comforting rather than eerie.

Black Mirror2011

An anthology of near-future technologies that mess with memory, grief and intimacy, told with the same nervous 'what would this actually do to us' curiosity.

But No through-line character to attach to, and quality swings wildly from episode to episode.

Fringe2008

A procedural built on investigating strange, half-scientific phenomena week to week, with a family business at its emotional core and a slow mythology underneath.

But Five seasons of escalating mythology and monster-of-the-week filler — a much bigger commitment than this premise likely needs.

Legion2017

Psychic, memory-warping visuals and a genuinely strange sense of interior space, for anyone who wants the 'reliving someone else's mind' idea pushed to its most stylised extreme.

But Superhero scaffolding and increasingly abstract plotting; style sometimes outruns story in the later seasons.

The Dead Zone2002no page yet

A man gains psychic visions through touch, spun into mystery-of-the-week television — the plainest, most old-fashioned version of this show's central gimmick.

But Workmanlike early-2000s genre TV — competent rather than remarkable, and visibly of its era.

Serial Experiments Lain1998

Swaps the object-touch mechanic for network-and-technology-as-memory-vessel, and the shift to animation lets it get far stranger and more abstract than live action ever could.

A hushed, unsettling Japanese anime about memory, identity and consciousness bleeding into networks and objects, told with interior dread rather than action or explanation.

But Deliberately cryptic and slow, more mood poem than story — frustrating if you want clear answers.

Departures2008

Strips away the science fiction to expose the story underneath — a reluctant new tradesman learning to sit with strangers' most private losses — as one of the most sincerely serious films ever made about mortality.

A young man loses his job and stumbles into becoming a ritual mortician preparing bodies for the afterlife — the same shape of story, an unwanted inheritance into a trade that handles other people's emotional debris.

But No genre hook at all — a quiet, unhurried drama about death and family, subtitled, that asks for patience rather than mystery.