Fringe - one of the best science fiction series ever, IMO. It starts off as an X-Files clone, with an episodic “monster-of-the-week” structure, but by the end of season 2 and forward it becomes heavily serialized. Unlike The X-Files (of which I am a fan), Fringe actually delivers answers (mostly) and brings its long-term story to a satisfying conclusion. John Noble–who plays the character Walter Bishop–really does an astounding job, and the rest of the cast is pretty great, too.
I love the show opening and can watch it over and over. It reminds me of something but I can’t remember what. It’s a little annoying that his deck can’t possibly contain that pool though.
Completely agree. Indeed, if you are one of the “Lost fans”, who was left empty by that crappy series after the promises, watch Fringe. It does all the things Lost should have and much more.
Fringe was actually going to be my second recommendation. I had no idea this show even existed while it was on the air, but I ended up watching the entire series on Netflix. As you noted, there’s a lot of great acting on the show, particularly from John Noble, and especially since the majority of the cast act in multiple roles as their doppelgangers from an alternate dimension. I cracked up every time there was mention of “Walternate” or “Fauxlivia.” The monster-of-the-week stuff from the first season got a little repetitive, and the show kind of wandered around aimlessly for the first half of the fourth season, but it finished strong with its fifth season and overall I think it was a very good show.
My next recommendation is a classic from my youth: The O.C. Far more intelligent and witty than it seems at first glance, this show was like a glorious pornographic exaggeration of the American dream; everyone is beautiful and rich, but they still drink and get in fist fights constantly because their emotions are valid, damn it! The O.C. was the kind of series where they had a fashion show every week while simultaneously mocking a society that would tune in to watch a fashion show every week. The third season was pretty worthless but it rebounded with an improved fourth and final season. The O.C. was self aware trashy fun, and it proved, using peer reviewed scientific methodology, that they got more bounce in California than all y’all combined.
Seconding this. Netflix recently picked up season 2 and there’s a third currently in production.
If you don’t have Netflix, check your local PBS listings.
I watched the first couple episodes of both theses shows but then lost interest. Do they improve at all as they progress? I really enjoyed the all over the place absurdity of Sleepy Hollow but the shtick got old for me pretty fast. I’ll give anything Whedon is associated with a shot, but Agents of Shield bored me. It did seem like they were working towards building some good characters, particularly the Fitz-Simmons science duo. I also thought the actress who played Skye was incredibly beautiful. Literally, I had a hard time believing that the world’s greatest computer hacker who lives in a van would look like that. And the special snowflakeness of her character was a bit grating to me too.
Lilyhammer is a pretty perfect example for this thread. Steven Van Zandt’s sleazy charm and the fish out of water humor really work in that series. It’s interesting to learn a bit about Norwegian society, since it’s such an out of the way country with a tiny population. It sometimes strains credulity by going a bit over the top, and there’s way too many jokes where the punchline is nothing more than “this man is a homosexual.” But overall it’s definitely a fun and interesting watch.
Moone Boy Irish sitcom set in the 80’s.
Rev Britcom, very intelligent writing. About a Vicar of an inner city London church. The Rev himself is consumed with existential thoughts. Even if you’re an Atheist like myself, you’ll enjoy this show.
(I have other (non British shows) I’ll post later.)
Pushing Daisies – Comedy/mystery about a man who can raise the dead by touching them.
Going off a list of all shows on HBO and Showtime, here’s what I recommend among their second tier titles:
Six Feet Under, because HBO is like pizza: Even when it’s bad it’s good. But Six Feet Under wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as good as The Sopranos, Deadwood, Rome or In Treatment.
Speaking of In Treatment, the first season is stellar, and the second season is solid as well. I particularly liked Mia Wasikowska from the first season and Allison Pill in the second. This is really a first tier show, but I don’t think people watched it.
Big Love is officially in “bad HBO” territory, but there are still some great moments and performances throughout. I still occasionally think of The Happiest Girl, which won’t mean anything out of context but was a fairly powerful scene in the show. (The girl singing is a villain, and a pretty despicable one, but her life sucks and she’s legitimately miserable.)
Weeds started out as a fantastic comedy about a soccer mom forced to sell pot in the suburbs to make ends meet after her husband dies. It goes off the rails in spectacular fashion in the third season finale, and is generally terrible from then on, but the first few seasons are great.
Californication is David Duchovny in all his sex addict glory. The first couple seasons were very good, and the third is notable for a stunning appearance by Eva Amurri, but then it quickly devolves into a caricature of itself.
The Borgias and The Tudors were Showtime’s period pieces. Neither were particularly great, but I don’t regret watching them. I think The Tudors was overall better, but The Borgias had its moments. Compared to HBO’s Rome, I’d give Rome an A+, The Tudors a C+ and The Borgias a C.
Dexter is yet another in the long line of Showtime shows that started out strong, put out two or three very good seasons, then kind of petered out over many seasons before finally dying with a whimper. However, Dexter departs from the standard formula by having excellent first, second and fourth seasons, with the fourth season (Trinity Killer) as far and away the best in the show’s run. Parts of that season are literally breathtaking. This magic is once again captured in the first two episodes of Season 7, but other than that, season 3 and everything else after season 4 can be reasonably skipped.
Episodes, a British-y sitcom starring Matt LeBlanc, is possibly my favorite show currently on television. In terms of how excited I get when a new episode airs, it’s on par with Walking Dead and Game of Thrones.
Ray Donovan is a total guy show despite being written by a woman. I love it, but I generally like stereotypically guy stuff.
Shameless is exactly that, an hourlong dramedy of terrible people doing terrible things for terrible reasons. I love it just for that alone, but the tons of gratuitous nudity make it even better.
I forgot I was going to do Starz shows as well. Let’s see if I can get them in before the edit window closes:
Spartacus is essentially a comic book, with all the stupidness you’d expect. Even still, it’s got some redeeming drama in between the teenage-boy-wet-dream sex and fight scenes.
Black Sails is a pretty fun pirate show. It’s only had one season so far, and it’s no Shakespeare, but it’s fun enough that I’m looking forward to next season.
Fourthing “Misfits.” I adored the first couple of season of this show, and the current one on Netflix is still pretty good.
Seconded. I picked this up on Netflix, and enjoyed the whole thing.
I started watching “Drop Dead Diva” just out of curiosity (it isn’t my kind of show at all), and I loved it. It’s much more clever than I expected, and it’s a perfect guilty pleasure of a show - everything happens pretty much as you expect it to, but you still enjoy the journey.
This isn’t even second-tier - it should be first-tier, it’s so good. So good.
Another BBC show I loved - Survivors. Post-apocalyptic world, pandemic kills 90% of the population - it was everything “The Walking Dead” should have been. I don’t know why it isn’t still on tv.
You’re the Worst - Fantastic, beautiful little show to come out of FX. It’s hard exact to say what this show is about and translate what it means to me. At first glance it’s about a toxic relationship between Gretchen and Jimmy, and the horrible things they say and do. However, what starts as a C-list Fox premise with too much sex in it winds up being fantastic through amazingly smart writing and careful, thoughtful character development. Like BoJack Horseman, you get hooked on it as a simple comedy but then it sinks it’s teeth in you as the stories and characters develop. I’ve been preaching to the skies how good this TV show is and, at 13 episodes, you can blow through it in an afternoon
Came to recommend Pushing Daisies, but it’s already here, so I’ll second. Cute, charming, sweet, yet dark and twisty. It really deserved more seasons.
Another great but short-lived show that I’m sure everyone already knows about is Freaks and Geeks. Still watch every episode every few years when I notice it’s on cable.
Also seconding Orphan Black, Psych and the first few seasons each of Drop Dead Diva and Weeds (yeah, my taste is all over the place). Weeds had some of the best one liners in, like, ever. Kevin Nealon stole the show.
On TV now, I love The Middle and it seems like not a lot of people I know are watching. They should be! It’s a family sitcom set in the middle of the US, mid-income, mid-achieving kids with Patty Heaton and Neil Flynn as their hardworking, tired but loving parents. Reminds me of my neighborhood growing up.
I’m with tenacious j, that Pushing Daisies and The Middle are both great. Hell, The Middle is one of my favorite family sitcom shows ever and I put it up there with Roseanne in the sense that I feel like I know these people.
I’m going to put up an oldie but goodie: Homicide:Life on the Streets. If you like The Wire or Treme or saw The Corner miniseries, you will enjoy it. It’s based on David Simon’s novel Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and it grew from what he wrote about spending a year with the homicide detectives in Baltimore. It was filmed in Baltimore.
A special place in my heart, b/c it’s the first series I really fangirled (even visited Baltimore just for it) and got into heated arguments with others online about characters.
It’s on Netflix on DVD only.
A couple of series cut a bit short:
Dollhouse: Joss Whedon was cursed, I think - this series was quite interesting to me, and thoughtful as well. A shady organization hires out mind-wiped people who have been programmed with particular personalities and skills. Only two seasons.
Life: Damian Lewis kills it as Charlie, a cop who had been sent to jail on false charges, then exonerated (and paid a nice settlement for the inconvenience). He returns to police work. Again, only two seasons, but they did manage to wrap up the central mystery, albeit in a rather rushed way. Good stories, good acting all around.
I love Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad as much as any discerning TV watcher, but I also like watching shows that don’t demand that level of attention while doing other stuff. For my recent-ish picks,
Justified - I don’t quite put it in the top tier, but it’s definitely up there. For me, it’s the odd kind of show that has great serialized season long plots, but I often wish it would slow down a bit to let us just hang out with the characters a bit more. Tim and Rachel are sorely underutilized.
Arrow - It really shouldn’t be a good show, being on the CW and constantly threatening to collapse under the weight of its soap opera elements, but somehow it manages to navigate around the pitfalls and be solid superhero fun after a sort of shaky start.
Burn Notice - Breezy, kinda silly fun for at least the first few seasons. Never a great show, but as far as I’m concerned watching Bruce Campbell lying to stupid criminals will always be fun to watch.
Person of Notice - Much better than “CBS procedural” would suggest. Starts off as a decent though unexceptional show about a couple guys helping people with a fairly magical premise, but over time veers toward the techno thriller category with some decent insight into the surveillance state.
Psych - A very silly show with a premise that strains credulity the longer it goes on. Really, though, it’s almost always fun to watch the leads getting into trouble and bicker with each other. Notable for having a lot of concept episodes. The Twin Peaks inspired episode in particular seems to be a favorite of a lot of people.
Sleepy Hollow - This is the kind of show that I really, really would not have expected to be good. The American Revolution was actually tied up in a battle with various supernatural forces of darkness and General Washington’s agent Ichabod Crane Rip Van Winkles himself into modern day where he joins up with a police officer to fight the horsemen of the apocalypse as the pair prophesied to combat the apocalypse? Yeah, I would expect it to deliver a bit of camp and collapse in three episodes. And yet, it somehow manages to be all around solid and fun.
I really liked Black Sails. I even started a thread about it a while back.
Lately Law and Order: SVU. I’m addicted to watching this on Netflix. Writing is pretty cliched, bordering on the surreal at times, acting is fine (nothing special), and it follows a pretty set pattern. But damned if you can’t watch just one.
I started watching Justified. I just cant get past my dislike of Timothy Olyphant as an actor. I hated him in Deadwood and have for some reason disliked him as an actor ever since.
All my faves have been listed already, but I’d also recommend:
The Musketeers, a swashbuckling adventure series from the UK with a lot of humour. Tonally very fun and exciting, the kind I like best.
In a similar style, Merlin, also from the BBC.
And finally Brooklyn Nine Nine, a cop sitcom that has an unusual premise of having the characters actually be good at their jobs, so much of the humour comes from their downtime shenanigans within the Precinct rather than laughing at their incompetence.
We just watched Olive Kitteridge on HBO. It’s a four episode mini-series with Francis McDormand in the lead role. The four episodes cover about 25 years in the life of this woman, her husband and her son. We thought it was pretty good.
Sonic Highways, a six part HBO series produced by Dave Grohl of The Foo Fighters. Very interesting, if you like music. His band travels to six different cities where various genres of music were born.