Sell Me On Your Shows

Galavant

It's 2 seasons, bingeable in an afternoon, with a soundtrack that will have you reliving such fun memories.

The princess is captured by the evil king and the heroic knight charges off to save her. Except the princess is a bitch and stays with the king, the king is incompetent and tries way too hard to be likable, and the knight is a little past his prime.

And the whole thing is set in medieval times, and it's a musical.

It should've never gotten a second season, it was way too good to have a second season, and when they got a second season they went so hard on it.

If you're a fan of fantasy, or musical theater, or comedy, you have to check it out, because I doubt you've heard of it.

Other Space

It is a brilliant little space comedy that died the worst type of death. It was a Yahoo Screen original. As you might infer from that it only got one season before the whole platform imploded. I think it might still be available on Netflix or Hulu?

A young space cadet is made captain for an exploratory deep space mission. His second in command is his older sister and she is not happy about it. He also appoints his best freind to the bridge crew and a girl he likes as the coms officer. The Chief engineer is a spaced out hippy type played by Joel Hodgson of MST3K and his robot companion is voiced by Trace Beaulieu who voiced Crow on MST3K. First episode is a little it of a slow start but the show is hilarious. I rewatch it from time to time.

My wife recommends "better off Ted" a workplace comedy centered in a corporate research facility. It's like witnessing the business side of aperture science (if you play videogames). The fake commercials they run in every show are so unbelievable in parody that they're starting to become actual corporate practices. The cast is amazing, and if you haven't seen it you're missing a surprising amount of inside jokes on the internet.

Terriers.

One season, 13 episodes. Great writing, great acting, real-life bffs playing bffs on screen and that chemistry shows (also real-life brother-sister relationship with the same dynamic). Not super trope-y and the ones they do lean on don’t end up playing out in the way you’d expect. It’s just a great show. I place it up there with Firefly and Freaks and Geeks when thinking about shows that only got one season and could have gotten sooooo much more love.

Station 11. I know it’s only a couple of years old but I’d missed knowing about it until recently. It is hands down the tightest, best written (plot and dialogue), best acted miniseries I’ve ever seen.

It took me four episodes to realize what I was watching and get hooked. The thing that blows me away is that it feels, unlike so much other fiction, like you are watching real but extraordinary people going through real but extraordinary events. Everything is believable, save for some minor gripes with a couple special effects.

I’ve been devouring quality TV series for 4 decades and this is the best show I’ve ever seen.

In The Flesh is a zombie show about what happens after they develop a cure for zombism and reintegrate them back into society. Unlike most modern zombie settings, "Partially Deceased Syndrome Sufferers" are your classic "crawling out of the grave" type of undead that aren't capable of spreading it through bites. Instead, if they eat a person, that person just dies. On top of this, scientists only know how to treat it through an injectable medicine, but many physical effects of dying are permanent and they are capable of reverting back if they go off of their meds or take a drug called Blue Oblivion. Underneath their makeup and contacts, they still look like corpses and have some degree of decay. This leads people to be very cautious around PDS sufferers because they're unsure if they're taking the meds properly or worse- not absorbing them. There is a local militia called the HVF who used to actively fight the undead who are now adjusting to both civilian life and also the fact that the enemy is now considered human. They don't get much action anymore with the exception of catching the few untreated undead that still roam around in the wilderness and bringing them in for the reward, though this is a step up from their original stance of killing any they find included treated ones.

The show follows Kieren Walker as he returns to his family after years of being dead from a suicide at 18. His younger sister, Jem, was a member of the HVF and found him and another zombie eating her girlfriend, Lisa. Jem couldn't bring herself to kill either of them, and this led to them both being able to be treated. However, she struggles with the guilt that she could have done something to stop him from killing Lisa and is initially hostile towards him when he returns home. To complicate things, his old "hunting buddy" finds Kieren and introduces herself as Amy Dyer. She's an outspoken hippie who tries to seem like she doesn't care about what people think and believes people should get used to the situation. She also doesn't cover herself up with the makeup and contacts, while Kieren can't stand to look at himself without them. She's wild enough to push him outside his comfort zone so he can get comfortable with socializing with people again, and she becomes his best friend. His BDFF, (Best Dead Friend Forever) as she calls it.

There is a group called the Undead Liberation Army who are first introduced to Kieren by his roommate while he was still in the treatment facility. They live on a commune like peaceful hippies, but are extremist in their beliefs and want to cause the Second Rising to get revenge on the living. They are also creators of Blue Oblivion, the drug that can temporarily revert the user back into a predatory state before it wears off. They use it to coordinate terrorist attacks on the living, and his old roommate in the facility took the drug to attack the staff.

On the polar opposite side to the Undead Liberation Army, there is a political party called Victus who was formed in opposition to reintegrating the undead back into society. They gain political control over the town, and push an already hostile environment even further.

iZombie

I wrote it off for years because of the stupid name, but it's no shit fantastic.

Zombies are real, they only become mindless violent freaks if they go without eating, but they must eat brains.

The main character becomes a zombie and conveniently has access to brains because she works in a police mortuary. When she eats a brain, she adopts the memories and personality of the victim including flashbacks. She then uses these flashbacks to solve the victim's murders and bring peace to the families.

Buuuuuut that is just the entry point.

The show explores a lot of zombie/sci-fi tropes but I think it really comes into its own in the last few seasons where it alternates between zombies as an allegory for marginalized groups, while also trying to portray what a government response to this kind of epidemic would look like.

It has a lot of comedy, a lot of drama, and a lot of heart. You could tell each season was written in a way they didn't know if they would get renewed or not. Ultimately they tell a tight story that does get completely wrapped up by the end.

I do not know if they did the source material justice (it's based on a comic), but my wife and I really enjoyed it.

Sorry for doing two but this one is REALLY obscure and Wild

Riget (The Kingdom) (1994)

Wikipedias first sentence is a banger:

Riget (English title: The Kingdom) is a Danish absurdist supernatural horror miniseries trilogy created by Lars von Trier and Tómas Gislason. Set in the neurosurgical ward of Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet (lit. 'The National Hospital', nicknamed "Riget", lit. 'the realm' or 'the kingdom'), each episode of the show takes place over a single day, and follows the hospital's eccentric staff and patients as they encounter bizarre and sometimes supernatural phenomena. The series is notable for its wry humor, its muted sepia colour scheme, and the appearance of a chorus of dishwashers with Down syndrome, who discuss in intimate detail the strange occurrences in the hospital.

A film school friend of mine turned me on to this show many years ago and for a while I was obsessed with it. It's one of the strangest yet and captivating things I have ever watch. I need to watch again as I haven't seen it in maybe 10 years or so. Thinking about it, I may make a run through and make a post about watching it again soon.

Punky Brewster (1984) is wholesome and funny and cute. It also shines a light on social issues in the early 1980's. There is a bit of fat shaming and misogyny that made me cringe, but in later episodes they end up battling those issues. They also showed that black folks and white folks get along just fine and are in the same middle class, just living lives and raising families.

Bored to Death (2009 - 2011)

Jason Schwartzman, Zach Galifianakis, Ted Danson form a weird and wonderful friendship that revolves around being detectives, drinking white wine, and a little bit of weed.

I don't think I've met anyone else who watched it, but I loved it and watched it all.

United States of Tara (showtime, hulu)

A wacky dramedy about a suburban mom and her family dealing with her DID (aka multiple personality disorder). I actually don't remember the series storyline well enough to recall the ending but I remember it not making me rage or feeling there was a steep decline in quality. I rewatched some of it recently and all of it held up well. There are hijinks from her multiple characters but also real hurt and damage caused from it too.

It also had a scene I'll never forget involving a balloon and Brie Larson.

I'd like to recommend GBH , a dramedy series from the early 90s starring Robert Lindsay as a corrupt politician and Michael Palin as a head of a school for special needs children who end up clashing.

But it's more than that. Lindsay's character is deeply mentally messed up in more ways than one, and seeing his character slowly unfold and his background revealed is really well done. Palin's family life is also well done, and his stubborness in the face of even the secret service getting involved is well acted.

I couldn't really do it justice without writing an essay, there's so much going on with this one.

But it's funny, serious, eerie, very surreal in places... I'd very much recommend it.

Gets mentioned but not proportionally to its quality. Peep Show is such a comfort show for me. So many quoteable lines that crack me up weeks after watching. Often the side characters are the best, Johnson, Tony and Toni etc.

These two are going to be harder to find (Amazon should have them for purchase), but in the 90s there were two made for tv miniseries, Arabian nights, and the tenth kingdom.

Arabian nights is a meta-ish story of shaharazad (who had a thousand tales), weaving tales every night to keep her ultra paranoid husband from killing her, her strategy is to weave tales with all different characters that somehow tie together and end on a cliff hanger every morning, so her husband can't kill her because he needs to hear how the story ends. In the meantime she's trying to figure out how to save the king from whoever is driving him insane (they're childhood friends so she doesn't want to just kill him, she cares about him). It covers all of the middle eastern tales you know, and adds pretty fun twists to them, along with a very engaging overarching story.

The tenth kingdom is a modern fairytale setting, with a much less twisty more continuous plot and characters. The modern world is separated/connected to the fairy tale (brothers Grimm) by a magic mirror..... I really can't give too much away, a couple new yorkers find themselves in fairy tale land (the nine kingdoms) being brought there by a prince who was cursed by the evil queen to be trapped in a dog's body, and a mercenary werewolf who's conflicted between his feelings for the girl and his allegiance to the evil queen. They're also being followed by a trio of shoe obsessed trolls. They have a number of encounters with identifiable fairy tale characters, each with modern takes/habits. It'll have you booked in the first twenty minutes, and next thing you know you'll be finishing the last episode.