Everyone has seen Breaking Bad. Everyone knows The Wire is supposed to be the greatest television drama ever made. The canon of essential television is reasonably well established by now, and the recommendations you see on most sites circle the same twenty or thirty titles. This is a different kind of list. These are the shows that do not appear on every best-of ranking but absolutely should.
Rectify, which ran for four seasons on SundanceTV from 2013 to 2016, is the most underrated drama in American television history. It follows Daniel Holden, a man released from death row after nineteen years when DNA evidence casts doubt on his conviction, as he attempts to reintegrate into the small Georgia town where the crime occurred. It is slow, contemplative, and deeply interior — nothing like what most people expect from American television. Aden Young's performance as Daniel, a man who has spent two decades alone with his thoughts, is unlike anything else in the medium.
The Americans ran for six seasons on FX and received enormous critical acclaim but never the mass audience it deserved. Two KGB agents living as a suburban American couple in 1980s Washington DC, raising their children, maintaining their cover, and conducting increasingly dangerous operations. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys are extraordinary — the show is about marriage as much as espionage — and the final season contains one of the best series finales ever aired.
Halt and Catch Fire, which ran on AMC for four seasons from 2014 to 2017, is about the early personal computer industry in the 1980s and 1990s. That description makes it sound dry. It is not. It is actually a deeply emotional character study about ambition, creativity, and the cost of building something new. The ensemble cast — Lee Pace, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy, Kerry Bishe — is exceptional, and the show gets better with every season.
Miniseries deserve a mention too. Show Me a Hero, David Simon's 2015 HBO miniseries about public housing in Yonkers, New York, is six episodes of quiet mastery. Patrick Melrose, the 2018 Benedict Cumberbatch vehicle about addiction and trauma, is raw and uncomfortable in exactly the right way. Both are available on streaming and neither has received the audience they merit.
The best undiscovered television is out there waiting. Turn off the algorithm for one evening and find something that is not on every trending list. The rewards are usually worth the small effort of looking.
