- Netflix originals like House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, and Making a Murderer were groundbreaking hits that have since faded into obscurity.
- The Irishman, a Martin Scorsese gangster epic, cost Netflix $225 million to make and scored 10 Oscar nominations, but ultimately didn’t win any awards.
- Altered Carbon, a sci-fi show exploring a future where consciousness can be transferred between bodies, split its audience with a solid first season but a lukewarm reception to the second season.
Netflix is still the undisputed king of the streamers, having been doing it since 2007 and making its own shows since 2012. That means that while it has accumulated a vast number of hits, award winners, and record-breakers, it’s also had its fair share of originals that once broke new ground and ruled the conversations, but have long since slipped into obscurity.
Some were dogged by scandal, some left us hanging on a cliff with no resolution, and some were just a bit too out there for a return. But just because no one’s talking about them, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still great, groundbreaking shows. Here are five worth sparking a conversation over.
House of Cards
A political juggernaut stunted by its own star
Back when political shows could still be way more shocking and absurd than real life, Netflix outbid HBO and AMC for House of Cards, which would become its first original series to win major awards, including a directing Emmy for a little director named David Fincher (The Social Network). The cleverly written political drama followed Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), a House majority whip who gets snubbed for the job of Secretary of State and spends the series stomping and burying people to claw his way to the Oval Office, with his equally savage wife Claire (Robin Wright) by his side. The series ran from 2013 to 2018, but Spacey was fired during the final season amidst misconduct allegations that would essentially ruin his career, forcing a rewrite that centered the show around Claire instead.
Orange Is the New Black
A stellar ensemble that made prison jumpsuits look good
I’m proud to say that I was one of the millions of viewers glued to their screens for every episode of this massively popular prison drama put a brilliant ensemble of women at the center of a major series and saw the first openly transgender performer, Laverne Cox, get an Emmy nod for acting. In 2013’s Orange Is the New Black, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) is a soft Brooklynite who’s blindsided by a decade-old drug charge tied to her ex, Alex Vause (That ’70s Show‘s Laura Prepon), and sent to federal prison for 15 months. Piper gets a huge wakeup call as she tries to survive and navigate the often brutal life and hierarchies among the colorful cast of inmates. The series ran for seven seasons through 2019, and may have overstayed its welcome as viewership dropped by finale time.
Making a Murderer
Buried by the true-crime boom it started
I remember watching Making a Murderer when it first arrived on Netflix in 2015, before “true-crime” was booming. It was riveting, real documentary TV. There was nothing else like it, and it had enough power that it actually generated petitions to the White House. The two-part, 20-episode series traces the story of Steven Avery, who spent 18 years in prison for sexual assault before being exonerated by DNA evidence in 2003. It gets crazier from there. While Avery is suing the county that convicted him, he’s charged with murder, with his intellectually-disabled nephew Brendan Dassey’s interrogation and confession becoming a controversial focal point. The two parts landed in 2015 and 2018, but didn’t have quite the resolution viewers had hoped for.
The Irishman
Scorsese’s gangster epic that no one rewatches
Martin Scorsese’s 2019 Netflix Original gangster movie, The Irishman, cost the studio a reported $225 million to make. And while its gritty story of a mob hitman’s look back at his decades serving a ruthless mob boss and his entanglement with notorious union leader Jimmy Hoffa brings the genre’s masters—Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino—together for the first time, I really could have done without all the weird digital de-aging of its stars. Nonetheless, it’s a solid Scorsese mob movie that scored a whopping 10 Oscar nominations, but didn’t bag a single one. At 209 minutes, though, it’s a hefty rewatch, and it just kind of slipped out of the conversation.
Altered Carbon
A big Cyberpunk swing that split its audience
Netflix went hard at sci-fi with Altered Carbon—I still remember its massive publicity stunt at CES 2018 where “protestors” picketed the convention center and they had a booth inside about their technology for living forever. The show was excellent, though, with its steamy, Blade Runner-style and story about a future where a person’s consciousness lives on a cortical hard drive called a “stack,” that can just be put in another body, called “sleeves,” making death a minor inconvenience. It follows rebel soldier Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman) who is tasked with solving the murder of a centuries-old tycoon. Season one was solid, but when Kinnaman was swapped for Anthony Mackie in season two, the reception cooled. Two seasons ran from 2018 to 2020, plus an anime film, Altered Carbon: Resleeved, that did modestly well, but the genre that it helped open up ultimately swallowed it.
Five groundbreaking Netflix hits that just faded
Every one of these Netflix shows (and one movie) had a lively heyday and broke new ground for the streamer in one way or another. But alas, ye olde algorithm only has eyes for the shiny and new things. Don’t be deterred though, they were all everyone talked about at one point for a reason, and are still worthy of your time.
