20 Overlooked TV Shows to Stream During the Strike-Affected Fall Season
It took a while, but the dual strikes by the writers and actors of Hollywood have finally begun to affect viewers, with a much leaner slate of original scripted series than usual for the fall season. Even though the WGA was finally able to negotiate a deal with the AMPTP that will allow writers to return to work, the SAG strike continues. And even if that were to be settled tomorrow, it’s likely going to be several months into 2024 before the production apparatus can start pumping out enough content to satisfy the hungriest of bingers.
So while we wait for the pipeline to get moving again, it’s time to reconsider some shows you may have missed in the past. Obviously, you could just cross famous series like The Sopranos and 30 Rock off your bucket lists. But if you’re well-versed in the classics, then maybe it’s worth digging a little deeper, with 20 shows that didn’t get huge audiences at the time, but deserve attention, especially in strange TV days like this.
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‘The Carmichael Show’ (Hulu, Peacock)
Before he came out in his incredible Rothaniel comedy special, Jerrod Carmichael co-created and starred in a loosely autobiographical family sitcom where his parents (David Alan Grier and Loretta Devine), brother (Lil Rel Howery), brother’s ex-girlfriend (Tiffany Haddish), and his own girlfriend (Amber Stevens West) keep clashing with one another over the issues of the day. Carmichael Show was a throwback to topical Seventies comedies like All in the Family and The Jeffersons, and could be as poignant as it was funny. The traditional multi-cam sitcom format — shot onstage in front of an enthusiastic live studio audience — can feel corny and grating unless the material is excellent. Carmichael Show was excellent. (And if that works for you, move on to Netflix’s similarly pointed One Day at a Time remake.)
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‘Catastrophe’ (Prime Video)
Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan create and star in a dramedy about a romance that plays out in the wrong order: Two strangers have a transcontinental hookup, find out it’s led to an unplanned pregnancy, move in together, get married, and then fall in love. The crackling dialogue features some of the filthiest lines ever put on television: a friend, discussing the grossness of childbirth, says, “You see a little troll tobogganing out of your wife’s snatch on a wave of turds and part of you will hold her responsible.” But Catastrophe is also one of the best shows ever produced about the hard work required to make any marriage last, whether it’s a conventional relationship or a strange one like Rob and Sharon’s.
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‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ (Netflix)
As co-creator and star Rachel Bloom explains midway through the musical dramedy’s original theme song, both the title and premise of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend — about a powerful but lonely New York lawyer who abruptly moves to West Covina, California, to be closer to the guy she dated back in summer camp — is “a lot more nuanced” than you might expect. It’s also screamingly funny much of the time, and genuinely perceptive about actual mental illness when it wants to be. And every episode features at least two parody songs co-written by Bloom, Jack Dolgen, and the late Adam Schlesinger — a.k.a. the undisputed master of writing great earworms for fictional musicians — that cover a wide range of genres, and can be as dirty as they are catchy. Good luck getting “I Gave You a UTI” or “The Very First Penis I Saw” out of your head for a while.
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‘Detroiters’ (Paramount+)
So you love I Think You Should Leave but have perhaps watched the drivers ed sketch about the tables so many times that Netflix now starts recommending other shows in the middle of it? Then you will almost certainly enjoy Tim Robinson’s previous comedy, co-created by him and several ITYSL collaborators like Zach Kanin and Sam Richardson. Robinson and Richardson play lifelong best friends struggling to keep a small Motor City ad agency afloat. The ludicrous low-budget commercials the duo film are essentially sketch-like precursors to ITYSL, and Robinson and Richardson make a great buddy team.
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‘Enlightened’ (Max)
For most of his career as a writer, Mike White has made idiosyncratic, deeply personal TV shows and movies that seemed designed to be the favorites of a few dozen people and ignored by everyone else. Then he went and created a huge hit and awards magnet in The White Lotus, which it turns out isn’t all that different from his two-season masterpiece, Enlightened. The comedy stars a pre-Big Little Lies Laura Dern as Amy Jellicoe, a corporate executive who has a nervous breakdown, goes to an expensive Hawaiian retreat to get her head together (and, like some Lotus Season One characters, to swim with tortoises), and returns to work determined to save the company, and the planet, from itself. A noble idea in theory, but executed by the thirstiest, most discomfort-inducing character to ever appear onscreen and not be played by Nathan Fielder. Amy can be a lot to take, but White knows that, and surrounds her with enough characters who are less abrasive (played by, among others, Luke Wilson, Molly Shannon, and even White himself), and with enough awkward humor to compensate for her more difficult moments, to help the audience see the moments of great beauty and clarity that Lotus fans will find reassuringly familiar.
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‘Freaks and Geeks’ (Prime, Hulu, Paramount+, Pluto)
So many of the people involved in making this high school comedy (which debuted in 1999 but was set in 1980) have become hugely successful — including creator Paul Feig, producer Judd Apatow, and stars Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and James Franco — that it feels hard to fathom that ratings were so low, and dislike from some NBC executives so strong, that it barely even lasted for a season. But it’s perhaps the best one-year TV wonder of them all, taking advantage of all that talent (see also less-famous co-stars Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley, Martin Starr, Busy Philipps, and, as the main parents, Joe Flaherty and Becky Ann Baker) to tell stories that were simultaneously hilarious, mortifying, and sweet. For a long time, it wasn’t streaming anywhere, so take advantage of its current ubiquity. (And if you need more short-lived Nineties high school brilliance, My So-Called Life is on Hulu.)
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‘Grand Crew’ (Peacock)
The success of Abbott Elementary and Ghosts has proved there’s still an appetite for well-made, broad-appeal broadcast network comedy. But not every good recent sitcom has been able to find an audience. Case in point: this charming series about a group of Los Angeles friends getting into various personal and romantic messes, and meeting up to talk about their problems over some good wine. There’s a long tradition of sitcoms as hangout shows, where the main appeal is to spend a half hour at a time with a group of appealing characters. (See also Happy Endings, currently on Hulu and Roku Channel.) There haven’t been a lot of them, though, with all-Black casts, and Grand Crew has a really strong one, headed by Echo Kellum and Nicole Byer.
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‘Halt and Catch Fire’ (AMC+)
When Halt and Catch Fire — a drama about the home computer revolution of the Eighties and the rise of the internet in the Nineties — debuted on AMC in 2014, it superficially seemed like a cheap knockoff of the two best shows in the channel’s history. The plot revolved around a Don Draper-esque charismatic businessman (Lee Pace’s Joe) whose expensive suits concealed a lot of personal dysfunction, and an engineer (Scott McNairy’s Gordon) who (like Walter White) felt his genius wasn’t properly appreciated. But right next to them were their sometime-romantic partners — respectively, Mackenzie Davis’ antisocial coding savant Cam, and Kerry Bishé’s chronically underestimated Donna — and as their roles expanded, Halt stopped feeling like prestige TV karaoke and began to seem worthy of genuine comparison to its influences. In the process, it became its own lovely story about the joys and frustrations of creating things, and about the many physical and virtual ways that human beings connect. The finale is an all-timer, and the rest of it isn’t far behind.
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‘Hannibal’ (Hulu)
In hindsight, it is shocking that a show as disgusting — and, more importantly, as weird — as Hannibal aired three seasons (albeit very low-rated ones) on NBC. The story of Hannibal Lecter had been depicted so many times onscreen before, and there were two separate movies about his rivalry with FBI profiler Will Graham. But Bryan Fuller’s take on the material — starring Mads Mikkelsen as everyone’s favorite cannibal psychiatrist, and Hugh Dancy as the damaged Graham — was so baroque that it almost felt like science fiction, and queer in every sense of the word. The visuals will haunt you, but you will also drool over the montages of every meal Hannibal lovingly prepares as he has old friends for dinner. An unforgettable show based on a character who had seemingly outlived his creative usefulness.
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‘The Knick’ (Max)
In the 2010s, Cinemax joined corporate sibling HBO in the original drama-series game. For the most part, these were pulpy action dramas (the best of them, Banshee, is also on Max) not unlike the B-movies that comprised much of the pay cable channel’s lineup. But there was also The Knick, a historical epic set in a turn of the 20th century New York hospital where the star surgeon (Clive Owen) was addicted to cocaine, while the most skilled doctor (Andre Holland) struggled to gain respect and advancement because of the color of his skin. With every episode directed, shot, and edited by the great Steven Soderbergh, and with a hypnotic electronic score by Cliff Martinez, The Knick feels less like a show you watch than an opium haze you float through. Had it spent its two seasons on HBO instead, it wouldn’t have seemed the slightest bit out of place.
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‘The Leftovers’ (Max)
Some shows on this list provide great laughter. Some have audacious concepts and world-building. Others offer great thrills, or gorgeous artistry, or powerful catharsis. The Leftovers — a.k.a. the best show of the 2010s, and one of the greatest ever — offers all of that, and more. You just have to be patient to get to some of those things. Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta adapted Perrotta’s novel about a sideways Rapture — a completely random two percent of the global population vanishes, leaving the other 98 behind to struggle with the meaning of their loss — and at first painted their broken world in such unrelentingly bleak tones that many viewers who wanted to see Lindelof’s follow-up to Lost couldn’t take how much it made them cry. But those who stuck around through the first season and beyond saw The Leftovers evolve into a wild, intoxicating phantasmagoria where cop Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) could go from weeping with grief one minute to waking up as an international assassin the next, where the astonishingly stoic Nora Durst (Carrie Coon, in an inner circle Hall of Fame performance) could be invited to visit a parallel reality by Perfect Strangers star Mark Linn-Baker (playing himself!), and where half the cast wound up traveling to Australia on a boat whose other passengers included an orgy, a caged lion, and a man claiming to be God. And those examples barely scratch the surface of all the shock, all the explosive comedy, and, yes, all of the many, many reassuring tears that will be inspired by this awe-inducing series.
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‘Los Espookys’ (Max)
Speaking of both ghosts and general weirdness, but in a decidedly sillier overall vein, Los Espookys is a whimsical, absurd, endearing comedy about how the undead can be used to make people feel good. A group of horror-obsessed twentysomething friends in an unnamed Spanish-speaking country run a kind of reverse Scooby-Doo business, where they help local business owners, priests, and politicians solve their problems by staging elaborate — and at times, physically impossible — fake hauntings, monster attacks, and other supernatural tropes. Partially in Spanish with English subtitles, and partially in English with Spanish subtitles, the series — created by and co-starring Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega, and Fred Armisen — will strike you as either the dumbest or cleverest thing you’ve seen in a while, and often both at the same time. Either way, you’ll smile and chuckle a lot.
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‘Moonlighting’ (Hulu)
You’ll have to wait until Oct. 10 for this one, but considering how long fans of the Eighties private detective comedy have been waiting for a legal method to stream it, less than two weeks from today will feel like nothing. For a hot minute in the mid-Eighties, Moonlighting, a phenomenon that launched Bruce Willis into stardom, helped codify the will-they-or-won’t-they language of TV romance, and expanded the definition of how self-aware and experimental a TV show could be. But the series’ success evaporated quickly for a variety of reasons: notably, that episodes began to appear infrequently due to the perfectionist tendencies of creator Glenn Gordon Caron, and that main characters David and Maddie were separated for long stretches of time, in part because Willis and Cybill Shepherd didn’t get along. So despite its importance at the moment, it feels as if the show has been lost to history a bit. But soon everyone — both Eighties heads who were addicted at the time and younger viewers who may have heard vague things about it once or twice — can see what all the excitement was about, from the Willis/Shepherd, to the witty rat-a-tat dialogue, to big experiments like “Atomic Shakespeare,” where David and Maddie somehow became the central characters in Taming of the Shrew. And perhaps we’ll finally get answers to David’s all-important query: “Do bears bare? Do bees be?”
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‘NewsRadio’ (Roku Channel)
Like Moonlighting, this one is stretching the boundaries of this exercise a bit. Because it aired on NBC in the Nineties — a.k.a. the most popular network during one of the most popular eras for broadcast network television — NewsRadio’s average audience was greater than the combined viewership for at least a half-dozen of these other shows. But at the time, the workplace comedy was the unloved stepchild of Must-See TV, practically the only Nineties NBC sitcom to never get a shot on Thursday nights next to Friends and Seinfeld. And because it’s been a streaming nomad (Amazon Prime dropped it recently), it feels largely lost to history. That shouldn’t be the case. With a crackling ensemble (Dave Foley, the late Phil Hartman, Stephen Root, Maura Tierney, and more — including, yes, Joe Rogan, back when he was just an innocuous but amusing actor), witty writing (creator Paul Simms would later go on to work on Atlanta and What We Do in the Shadows, among others), and an appealing sense of chaos, its best episodes are just as funny as the hits NBC refused to associate it with, and vastly better than most of the ones that got a chance to draft off Chandler Bing and George Costanza’s success.
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‘Party Down’ (Starz)
Between the hype around this year’s revival season — one of the few TV reunions to actually live up to the original run — and how famous alums like Adam Scott and Jane Lynch have become in the past 15 years, Party Down isn’t entirely obscure anymore. But when it first aired on Starz in the late 2000s, so few people watched the comedy about Los Angeles cater waiters that the Season Two finale averaged a zero Nielsen rating. But the interplay among Scott, Lynch, Ken Marino, Lizzy Caplan, Martin Starr, Ryan Hansen, and Megan Mullally, and the way that their dreams are constantly thwarted in the most hysterically embarrassing fashion, deserved way more viewers than it got then, and will make you laugh very hard even now.
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‘Rectify’ (AMC+)
At the beginning of Rectify, Georgia native Daniel Holden (Aden Young) has spent nearly 20 years on death row for the murder of his high school girlfriend. When new DNA evidence throws doubt on his guilt, he’s set free and moves back in with his family (including a pre-Succession J. Smith-Cameron as his mom). This premise could lead to an intense revenge thriller where Daniel seeks vengeance against the real killer. But while Rectify does explore that mystery in the background of things, its main concerns are psychological and spiritual. Having lived in a tiny cell since he was a teenager, Daniel returns home so puzzled by ordinary life that he’s almost like an alien visiting Earth for the first time. He tries seeking various types of comfort, from the religion of his new sister-in-law Tawney (Adelaide Clemens) to visiting an art gallery, but finds true peace elusive. If all of the above sounds like a bummer, it’s really not. Creator Ray McKinnon’s love for these characters is so palpable that the series soon becomes the prestige drama equivalent of a hangout show. Very little happens in terms of plot — Daniel spends multiple episodes painting a motel swimming pool — and yet it feels like everything is happening emotionally, for people you will soon come to care about as much as McKinnon does.
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‘Reservation Dogs’ (Hulu)
By far the most recent series on this list, since its finale dropped [checks notes] yesterday. But this comedy about four Indigenous teens growing up on a reservation in rural Oklahoma is, without exaggeration, one of the very best TV shows ever made. Created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, Reservation Dogs is so specific and immersive that within a few episodes, you will feel like you’ve known the kids, the local elders, and everyone else all your life. The series is also wildly, invitingly unpredictable — hilarious one minute, tearjerking the next, and eerily mystical the one after that. One episode is about the reservation coming together to say goodbye to a dying elder; the very next is a raucous road trip comedy where four of the middle-aged “aunties” attend an Indian Health Service conference, looking to get high and/or enjoy anonymous hookups. Whatever it wants to do, it does, masterfully. If you just finished the beautiful finale, we don’t blame you for wanting to go back and watch the whole thing over again. If you’ve never seen it, consider yourself incredibly lucky that you get to experience it all for the first time.
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‘Terriers’ (Hulu)
Another one-season show that deserved so much more. Perhaps Terriers was done in by its name, which convinced potential viewers that it was about dogs — or, worse, dog fighting. Or perhaps the premise — two buddies (played by Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James) work as disreputable, unlicensed private detectives in a Southern California beach town — felt too quaint and low-concept to draw in crowds. Whatever the reason, almost everyone missed out on an enormous charmer, featuring near-superhuman chemistry between Logue and Raymond-James, and an expertly balanced mix of standalone mystery episodes and ones dealing with a serialized mystery about rich and powerful people doing very shady things. The finale ends on an ambiguous note that you can either read as a cliffhanger that never got resolved, or as a thematic summation of everything Terriers was trying to say. But you will get a very satisfying experience from these 13 episodes.
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‘Underground’ (Hulu)
Had Underground, an action drama about Black men and women finding ways to escape the shackles of slavery in Antebellum Georgia, aired almost anywhere else, it likely would have been a crowd-pleasing hit and made much bigger stars of leads Aldis Hodge and Jurnee Smollett-Bell. Instead, it had the poor fortune to wind up at WGN America, during the brief window where the superstation was trying and failing to become a big player in the prestige drama game. Viewers were not prepared to look for that kind of content on WGN — they also ignored Manhattan, a terrific show (also on Hulu) that would surely be of interest to Oppenheimer viewers who want to dig even deeper into the Manhattan Project — and after a couple of years, all those scripted originals were gone. But the two seasons that exist are awfully exciting, with sensational performances from Hodge, Smollett-Bell, and others.
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‘Vida’ (Hulu)
In this drama that ran for three seasons on Starz in the late 2010s, two estranged Mexican-American sisters — one a type-A businesswoman (Mishel Prada), the other an unapologetic free spirit (Melissa Barrera) — are reunited when their mother dies and they inherit the family bar that’s become an East L.A. institution. It’s a deliberately small story, with a suitably compact format — 22 total episodes, all of them about a half-hour in length — but one told with such warmth and detail that every corner of the sisters’ world felt like it could support its own show. Since many of the show’s characters are queer as well as brown, there’s a lot of smart material about how complicated intersectionality can be, and it’s a rare show where all of the sex scenes are filtered entirely through the female gaze. And it’s just charming throughout. It’s also a nice way to cool down after the bombast and huge emotions of many of the other shows on this list, like popping into your own neighborhood bar for a calm last drink after a wild night on the town.