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Before the 21st century, TV could be sorted into three categories: hits, flops, and cult classics. Hits that touched a societal nerve—The Twilight Zone, Norman Lear sitcoms—earned a place in our collective memory. Flops were soon forgotten, and usually deserved it. Cult classics like My So-Called Lifeand Dark Shadowsvaried in popularity during their runs but ultimately found the niche audiences that preserve their legacies. There just wasn’t enough programming, pre-Netflix and certainly pre-cable, for many great, nationally broadcast shows to fly under the radar.
But the golden age of cable that dawned in the late 1990s and streaming’s early-2010s rise multiplied the number of titles platforms were pumping out. In 2022, FX’s research team counted a record 599 original scripted series—a greater than threefold increase since it began keeping track 20 years earlier. (The number has declined since the streaming bubble burst.) During that time, it’s become possible for a brilliant series to get buried under an avalanche of content that boasts bigger names, heftier budgets, and more familiar IP. Sometimes the show is barely promoted. This is especially true of the imports streamers use to pad out their libraries but rarely push to American viewers. Other times, the platform is obscure or irrelevant to the appropriate demographic; if you ever want to elicit the dreaded Gen Z stare, mention cable. Recently, the streaming landscape’s contraction has led to platforms dumping titles that underperform, even if they’re new. In some cases they end up in a different library, but they can also just disappear.
So we beat on, critics against the current of media consolidation, borne back ceaselessly into TV’s underappreciated recent past. This list is my small effort to stop the undertow of history from sucking up my favorite underseen shows from this uniquely abundant—and turbulent—century. Given how much more TV was made in the last half of that period than in the first, you may notice that titles from the past 10-15 years predominate. Forgotten shows from the 2000s can be hard to find in any decent-quality digital format, which limits the usefulness of recommending them (sorry, Boomtown), though I have included a few extraordinary exceptions (The Corner, Undeclared) in hopes they’ll stream someday. Still, it surprised me how much good aughts-era stuff I didmanage to track down. Errol Morris’ Y2K Bravo docuseries First Person? Streamable on the filmmaker’s YouTube page! Some older series, Dead Like Me for one, have even moved from their original pay platforms to free services.
As for how I decided which shows qualified as underappreciated, well, I went in having accepted that there’s no such thing as objectivity in criticism. I did set some ground rules: A series had to have premieredafter the turn of the millennium. I avoided obvious cult classics (please don’t eat me, HannibalFannibals) because they are already duly appreciated by the people predisposed to love them. And if a show has been revived, chances are it’s a cult classic (see: Party Down, Arrested Development, Veronica Mars). While there are many former critical darlings and a few award winners here, I swerved away from Emmy sweepers and anything that ranked in canonical surveys like <a href="https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20211015-the-100-greatest-tv-series-of-the-21st-century” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>the one BBC Culture did a few years back. To narrow the options, I gave myself priorities. Early shows from talents who went on to widespread renown got preference, as did underexposed perspectives and anything that stretched or experimented with the episodic medium.
I spent the most time agonizing over what to do with shows from outside the U.S. Ultimately, I picked several English-language imports that didn’t get the attention they deserved stateside (but in many cases introduced talents who would later cross over to Hollywood), regardless of how many fans and trophies they racked up in their countries of origin. Just about every non-English show that isn’t Squid Gameis underappreciated by American audiences, so although its exclusion pains me, I don’t want to damn international TV with faint praise. The only way to do justice to that global bounty would be with another list of at least this length.
In the final accounting, I tried to do what I imagine the people behind these wonderfully strange, undersung shows must have done in making them: I trusted my intuition, embraced radical subjectivity, and let myself break some rules. Whether or not you agree with every entry in this list, I hope you discover something on it that inspires you to do the same.
