I’m ready to start the last season of Buffy and Angel, which I finally sat down to watch a few months ago. My husband started watching Castle not too long ago while away on a trip, so we caught up this winter. Bones we have watched off and on for several years, but always on streaming or hulu, and still aren’t totally caught up. Heroes, until we just couldn’t take it anymore, was always a buy the season and watch it all at once. 30 Rock, The X-Files, and plenty more too!
Archer
Breaking Bad
Chuck
Dead Like Me
Dexter
Eastbound and Down
Firefly
Flight of the Conchords
Freaks and Geeks
Justified
Mad Men
Modern Family
Pushing Daisies
True Blood
Veronica Mars
Wonderfalls
On the queue:
The Wire
Deadwood
Six Feet Under
My wife did the same thing. She is breezing through the episodes right now. She’s going to have withdrawal when she’s run out until the new season.
Does this thread include series that are long-past and considered classics? Hopefully it does, as I never really got into the original “Hawaii Five-O” before I started getting the DVD releases four years ago. Since then, I have esteemed it one of my most favorites.
All of the big ones. I don’t have cable and I enjoy watching a good series at my pace, one episode a night or maybe an all night marathon.
Indeed it does include those oldies. “Hit TV Shows” that you missed the first go-round but managed to get caught up on by way of other media. (I left off the On Demand option on the title and OP but others have corrected for that oversight.)
The main issue is being able to use the “catch up” tools we have today instead of hoping for reruns that somebody else controls. But even those ways of getting “caught up” are worth noting, if you want. Make it easy on yourself. Maybe a mention of a show will trigger someone else’s memory.
Hadn’t watched much tv in a long time but decided to start watching The Big Bang Theory, Doctor Who, Fringe and The Sarah Connor Chronicles on DVD. Well, I guess the latter wasn’t much of a hit. 
Thanks for the confirmation! With that in mind, there are quite a few others that I missed when I was younger, one of them being “Hardcastle and McCormick,” the 1983-86 ABC action/adventure series starring Brian Keith and Daniel Hugh-Kelly. I didn’t see it then when it was on ABC, but by way of the DVD releases from VEI of Toronto, I got to enjoy all of what I missed, and I now have all three seasons of it. It is, at least to me, as highly esteemed as “Five-O” is.
Lost.
I didn’t start watching it until it had been on air for three years.
Fringe. When it first came out, I went with other shows of a similar vein. They were cancelled. As Fringe seems to have gained intrigue as it went along, I decided to retry it, and was glad I did, especially all in one go. Took me two months to watch them all.
X-Files
Six Feet Under (but only the first 1.5 seasons because it turns out that I grew to hate all of the characters)
Ideal (since they’re up to series 7 now, I assume it’s a hit)
Dead Like Me
I caught up with Doctor Who, but not on DVD or Netflix. Series 1-4 aired four nights a week on Space (rough Canadian equivalent of Syfy), with a re-airing the following morning. The first episode I caught was “Turn Left,” and then after the two-part series 4 Finale "The Stolen Earth / “Journey’s End,” it cycled back to “Rose.”
I made a sincere effort to get into the X-Files thing by way of DVD, but somewhere along the way, from a combination of a really bad cold and some really funky episodes, I just threw in the towel and haven’t resumed the process since then.
I think Fringe has picked up the spirit of the show well enough for me not to regret not being an authority on the older show.
I record a huge amount of shows but with some of them I don’t watch until a second or third season comes out. So they’ll be eating up drive space for a year or two before I commit to watching them or just deleting it.
I’m getting better recently, having more free time and I’ve been watching more current television.(only a week or two behind)
A few I just caught up with recently were The Wire, and West Wing. After getting used to these stupid 9-12 episode seasons catching up on West Wing was daunting, 22 episode seasons makes for a hell of a lot of catching up to do.
I attempted Farscape. I got 1.5 episodes in, decided it was horrendously awful, and gave up.
One day I may try the complete Stargate. It seems to have been a generally decent show.
Babylon 5
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Life on Mars (BBC)
Psych
Making progress with Top Gear and its relatives.
Deep Space Nine
Battlestar Galactica
Curb Your Enthusiasm
How I met Your Mother
Coming up:
Voyager
Enterprise
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Angel
Battlestar Galactica
Weeds
Monk
South Park
Mad Men
Slings and Arrows (not a hit show, but frakking great)
Extras
The Office
Pretty much all the TV we watch is not from broadcast TV. Frankly, I don’t understand why anyone bothers with broadcast TV except for sports.