Ok, click-baity title aside, you seriously need to find and watch these five underrated TV shows as soon as possible.
5. The Tick (2016)
Not to be confused with the 2001 original starring Patrick Warburton as the titular character, the 2016 reboot was commissioned by Amazon to be Prime exclusive content at a time when the streaming wars were really ramping up and the race to secure new content and old intellectual property was insane.
The reboot clearly didn’t have the audience numbers during it’s two-season run on Prime with Amazon pulling the pin fairly quickly, but in the 22 episodes that were aired we have a lot to enjoy.
The special effects were pretty clunky at times, but don’t let that detract from a fun little show where Peter Serafinowicz takes on the mantle of Ben Edlund’s satiric superhero.
4. Superstore (2015)
Ok, I’m going to be honest, I straight up love Superstore. It’s a quirky, upbeat and over-the-top look at a bunch of employees at a Walmart-style giant superstore and it’s a whole lot of fun.
More than fun, though, the show has heart, the characters have depth and development and invite you to come along on the journey with them as they face new and old challenges like automatisation of the work place, union issues and the dynamics of a close crew of people working minimum wage jobs in America’s heartland.
Stars America Ferrara and Ben Feldman and there ‘will they/won’t they’ relationship from the get-go isn’t tacky or cliched in anyway. The rest of the cast play tremendous roles and flesh out an amazing set of characters with unique personalities.
The show is also a reminder for anyone who has ever worked in retail just how awful that can be, so there’s that too!
3. Hannibal (2013)
Straight up, Hannibal is one of the very best shows I have ever watched. Somehow, Hannibal, staring the incomparable Mads Mikkelsen as the eponimous Dr Hannibal Lecter, Hugh Dancy as criminal profiler Will Graham and Laurence Fishburn as the hard-nosed head of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit Jack Crawford, slipped under a lot of radars.
2013 was a good time for big-budget blockbuster television, so it’s understandable but it’s criminal just how little recognition Hannibal gets across the board. There is some critical love for the show, thanks in large part to some great writing and camera work, but the broader audience just wasn’t there at the time. Having missed the show during it’s run and come late to the party after it was snapped up by Netflix, I totally get it but now that’s available on one of the big streaming platforms there’s no excuse not to watch it.
2. Stan Against Evil (2016)
My two favourite genres are comedy and horror so if you throw them together, IO’ll probably go out of my way to watch it. That said, even with my expectations pretty high, this creation by Dana Gould is simply fantastic.
John C. McGinley, of Scrubs fame, plays a grumpy retired Sheriff who must assume the mantle of his deceased wife who was apparently keeping the lid on a whole bunch of shifty supernatural freakiness buried very shallow below the surface of their small town.
Throw in the new sherriff, ably played by Janet Varney, his daughter played by Deborah Baker Jr. and the role of Gould himself as Kevin the Gravedigger and there’s plenty of lauighs and a good jump-scare or two as well.
1. Brockmire (2017)
You’ll probably notice a theme with my top two choices, they were both aired by IFC a channel which I feel is criminally underrated in its own right and also gave us gems like Portlandia, Documentary Now and a whole bunch of crazy shit (check out ‘Bullet in the Face’ and ‘Year of the Rabbit for more on that!) and offered up both Stan Against Evil and the utterly amazing Brockmire.
Jim Brockmire, played by Hank Azaria, is a Major League Baseball play-caller who suffers the ignominy of being cheated on by his wife and having a mental breakdown over it live on air. That’s bad enough, but throw in years of seedy dive bars and copious amounts of illicit substances and you’ve got the wrecked husk of a man rolling into a town destroyed by fracking with a crappy Minor League team and an ambitious owner.
No spoiler alerts on where it goes from there (that’s all in the first episode!) but the twists and turns paired with the truly perfect announcer’s voice Azaria is able to call into action and you’ve got the most underrated show on television. Oh, and there’s four whole seasons to enjoy too!
What’s your favourite underrated television show? Let us know in the comments below.
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