From on MGM+ is absolutely fantastic. I love the mystery, the horror, and everything else about it. I am excited to see where it goes. I also absolutely love Foundation on Apple TV+, amazing CGI and fantastic world (or universe) building.
I don’t think it is very well known, but I thought Scavengers Reign was very good. It was a bit slow, but I thought it gave time to see the weird alien world.
If you are on the fence about it, the show is a followup to this short and has some similarities in its world building.
If you like para-military actions I highly recommend Spec Ops: Lioness.
Lioness is a CIA program who recruits military women to infiltrate terrorist organizations and destroy it from within.
It’s currently on its second season. Zoey Saldana is fantastic in the show.
I love the female lead on river. I’ll watch anything of hers based on her river performance.
There’s a phenomenal French horror series on Netflix called Marianne that my wife and I enjoyed immensely. I don’t usually shoot for that particular brand of horror (demon/ghost), but Marianne is fucking excellent. Can’t recommend it enough.
I could not get over the tone shift. It was so baffling for me, one moment a super sinister and serious tone and the next scene was all comedy with a soundtrack that would not be out of place in the 3 stooges. I saw it to the end but was constantly getting out of the immersion with the change to comedy sprinkled all over the place.
It’s been a few years but I don’t remember that at all, but I’d be interested to see if I’m bothered by it on a re-watch.
The Mighty Boosh!
The masses know nothing of the crunch. They’ve never even been to the crunch.
Better off Ted
From is underrated? I didn’t know that, been watching it religiously.
An older favorite of mine was The 4400 (the reboot is absolute dogshit though). Unfortunately they cancelled it after 4 seasons, but the original authors published 2 books afterwards to finish the storyline.
Other series I enjoy that aren’t on most people’s radar (primarily for being British, mostly crime):
- Vigil (crime series dealing with an investigation on board of a nuclear submarine, 2 seasons, closed storyline).
- Unforgotten (crime, every season starts with an old body being discovered and then showing all people affected by the loss of said person over time until they eventually get closure. Highly empathic actors and excellent character development, season 6 currently being filmed).
- Death in Paradise (iconic light entertainment crime series playing on a remote Caribbean island where changing inspectors from England with various degrees of clumsiness are being sent to solve murders. Every episode is usually a closed case. Season 14 to start end of year).
The 4400 was great. Fun writing and amazing casting.
Jeffrey Combs and Summer Glau together I think for the only time.
Updoots for The 4400. Might be my favorite show of all time. The theme song is still playing in my head.
Do /not/ make the mistake of watching the cw’s 4400 (without a The). I would rather watch Tommy Wiseau’s The Neighbors over it.
- The Terror (First season only) (Horror TV drama)
- Death Parade (Anime)
- The Duchess of Duke Street (Older period drama)
- Oshiete! Galko-chan (Short anime)
I second The Terror (never saw season 2 though). It was a slow burn horror for much of it, which I really appreciated. I liked the historical aspects and thought they conveyed the isolation well. I need to get around to reading the book at some point.
Raised by wolves (cancelled)
Dark angel
First Wave
Dollhouse
Seven days
The peripheral (cancelled)
Dark matter (the Canadian one, cancelled)
Outer range
See (appletv)
Raising hope
Sanctuary
War of the words (2019)
Sense8
The guild (Felicia Day web series)
Con Man (Alan Tudyk web series)
Hell on wheels
Halt and catch fire
Debris (cancelled)
Continuum
Defiance
Cult (cw low budget-ish show that only lasted one season. Very ridiculous weirdness)
Colony (kinda meh at times)
Bored to death
Californication
Brockmire
Party down
Ive watched way too much shit. I should become a tv tv critic.
Oh yeah, The Critic
Fuck HBO/Discovery
I really enjoyed Halt and Catch Fire, and I see so few people talk about it. The only issue I had with it was that each season felt like it was almost a reset point rather than a straight continuation of the plot. I wish they would have left a few more open plot points at the end of each season that flowed into the next. I felt the same way with Silicon Valley, even though I enjoyed that one as well.
Detectorists Lovely wholesome English comedy drama, it’s too good to be so rarely mentioned.
Dark I’d say this is my favorite time travel story. It’s more recognized though as I usually see vocal fans of it every time it gets mentioned but perhaps since it’s in German many are still sleeping on it.
Venture Bros An animated Adult Swim show that first aired 2003 on a shaky first season but has improved every single season since. Has grown into something quite special.
Transparent Great drama comedy about a family after their aged father, played by Jeffrey Tambor, reveals some secrets. Very funny and hits you in the feels some times.
Dark is super famous, at least in my corner of the woods. IIt as all the rage if anything it is kinda overrated.
Farscape
Best alien puppets in any show ever
truly
Lost, but not the one you’re thinking of.
Travel back in time with me to September 4, 2001. It was a golden age, and reality television had taken off in a big way. NBC and CBS were each set to premiere a new show, with basically the same format: Teams of two Americans would start somewhere in the world and have to race back to the United States to win a cash prize.
NBC’s show Lost was the first to air, with CBS’s The Amazing Race airing the night after. The premise of Lost was great:
Three two-member teams knew only the final destination (thousands of miles away) and were given only a backpack full of clothes and other essentials. In addition, team members were not acquainted with one another prior to the show, and were assigned to teams. Contestants were blindfolded and dropped off with a single camera person in a remote location of an unknown country to find their way back to their home country…Teams were given no money until they managed to figure out what country they were in. During the first set, the teams were abandoned in Mongolia. (Source: Wikipedia)
The show did not do well. NBC blamed the low ratings on the fact that 9/11 happened shortly after, which actually preempted the second episode. Considering The Amazing Race debuted at basically the same time and went on to tremendous success (Lost had 1 season with 6 episodes, whereas The Amazing Race had 36 seasons and 418 episodes), I suspect something else was the cause.
So if the show was so bad, why did I like it?
First, I liked the idea that the teams started out in a location that was a mystery to them. Their first challenge was to figure out where in the world they were in a country where they (almost certainly) didn’t speak the language.
Second, although the they were two-person teams, any passage they secured for themselves, they also had to secure for their camera person. You want to catch a flight? Well, I hope you have enough money to buy three tickets!
And finally, I was hooked early on when this one moment happened. It’s still one of my favorite moments of reality TV. Remember, all three teams started out in the Mongolian desert. They were spread out from one another, so no two teams would cross paths right away. This meant that as they made their way to the nearest village, they were headed to different villages.
Two teams had a similar plan: To catch a bus that drove between the villages (and, IIRC, was headed to a larger city). So the first team gets on the bus in their village, and as the bus drives into the village where the second team is waiting, the first team spots them. They then quickly convince the bus driver not to stop and to just keep on driving instead. We’re then shown two shots: One from inside the bus, where we see the second team and their camera guy as they watch the bus go by, and then one from outside the bus, as the second team watches the bus blow past them and the realize they first team is on board.
It’s not exactly “unrecognized” because it’s fairly popular, but From – yes, that’s the name, and yes, it makes it very difficult to search for.
It’s pretty highly rated, horror/mystery show. It’s a lot like Lost except more horror less mystery. It even stars Harold Perrineau who played Michael in Lost.
The concepts and monsters are very scary and/or creepy. It gives me a Dead by Daylight “The Entity” and “The Entity’s Realm” vibe if you’re familiar with the game.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9813792/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_(TV_series)#Reception
I don’t recall how I heard about For All Mankind, and I never see it mentioned very much, but I have had such a great time watching that.
It’s an alternate history of the space race from the 60s onward, and it’s so exciting to watch what could have been. Each season jumps forward a decade, so the advances in missions and tech keep leaping forward.
If you grew up thinking we should be pioneering space by now, you will probably enjoy it.
I absolutely love For All Mankind. Such a great show, although it has been lacking in terms of intensity in recent seasons
Back when the X-Files was ruling the airwaves, in the 90s, there was a companion show called Millennium. The first season was a bit weak, focusing on serial killers and gore. Second season went completely off the rails in the best way possible. The third season was a lackluster attempt to regain a wider audience.
I would recommend watching the second season for sure. It has religious satire (you will know exactly who they are skewering when you see it), the occult, end of days, mixed in with humor and solid human drama. The season finale, when they thought that they weren’t going to be renewed, is extraordinary.
By that token, I would also recommend the one-season X-Files spin-off ‘The Lone Gunmen’. It can come across as a bit hokey for the first few episodes, but they found their pace and it became really enjoyable. I don’t think it was ever meant to be more than a single - and, by then-current standards, short - season but I really enjoyed it. The show blended the comic relief of the three geeks from the main series with some more serious storytelling and even had an episode with a plot that resembled a later real-life world-changing event.
They dropped 9/11 a bit early and got cancelled for it
