Discovering favorite shows you never knew existed

[23skidoo]

Before Thursday I had no inkling that the show Better Off Ted even existed. Well, that's not entirely true - I had heard of it, of course, but I never knew what it was about. It wasn't till I found some clips on YouTube (let's hear it for YouTube) that I realized what the show was about. I tracked down the DVD for Season 1 yesterday and it's gone from total obscurity to being one of my top 10 favorite shows.

Evidently I'm not the only one who had no idea what Better Off Ted was, seeing how the show barely scraped by in the ratings for 2 UK-length seasons on ABC before being canned in early 2010 with ratings that made Enterprise look like American Idol by comparison.

Yet Better Off Ted is one of those shows I should have known about, seeing as it's exactly the type of show I've been enjoying of late, sort of in that Archer mode. And it's not a case of the show being on some obscure cable network - this was ABC. I'd have watched it religiously had I known about it back in 2009-10. Part of the blame clearly lies with ABC since I'm definitely not alone on not knowing about this thing, so I think the evidence is strong that they didn't do a very good job promoting the thing. And apparently knowledge of the show is so low that they're not even bothering to release season 2 on DVD and 2 of the episodes only aired in Australia or something.

Are there other shows out there that you've never heard of before, but have turned around and said you'd have watched if you'd known about them at the time? I'm referring to recent shows, not something like, say, discovering Danger Man from the 1960s or Space Island One from the 1990s or whatever. I'll give another example - I never knew The Tick, as in the live-action version - even existed until I came across the DVD release. Yet the show had Patrick Warburton ideally cast as the Tick and was silly enough I probably would have tuned in. This past year there were many people who came out and said they had never heard of Doctor Who or Torchwood before the latest US push. Anyone out there just discover, I don't know - The Playboy Club, maybe?

Alex

PS. So what is Better Off Ted about? It follows a single dad as he works for an evil organization that will create anything for a price - from cryogenic technologies to nuclear weapons, to cowless meat and weaponized pumpkins. It's a bizarre show but one of the few sitcoms of recent years that I actually find funny as opposed to being just character pieces. I haven't watched the whole series yet, but it's actually classified as science fiction in some listings so the plots must get pretty bizarre as the show progresses.

 

[sojourner]

Try to find Breaking In. Very funny show that had a short first season and is supposedly being picked up as a mid season replacement. Very funny.

 

[Shurik]

Happened to me with Wilfred.

 

[shivkala]

I had heard about Better Off Ted, saw a good chunk of an episode, and even had a friend tell me how good it was, but still nothing. It took until I got Netflix to watch it, and that was after it was cancelled. It was, as advertised, really, really good.

Thankfully, between Netflix and Hulu, I've been able to watch shows like 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation while they're still on the air, by catching up on previous seasons.

 

[M'rk son of Mogh]

"Andy Richter Controls the Universe" was "Better Off Ted", attempt one.

They shared Jonathan Slavin and were both created by the same people.

I LOVED ARCtU, and tried watching the first few episodes of Ted (as they aired), but never really warmed up to it.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Sometimes a show doesn't grab me right away and when I give it another shot, I change my mind: Chuck, The Clone Wars, Justified and The Wire fall into that category.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Try to find Breaking In. Very funny show that had a short first season and is supposedly being picked up as a mid season replacement. Very funny.

Moderately funny, but has potential. They're retooling it into a workplace comedy. Not sure if that's going to fix what ails it, but since the missions-of-the-week were a bore, losing that aspect certainly won't hurt.

They're adding Megan Mullally and apparently scaling back Odette Annable, which is a good idea since her comic talent is nil.

 

[the G-man]

"Better off Ted" was great.

In regards to other great "lost" cancelled too early shows, try and track down "the Job," a Denis Leary comedy that ran briefly on ABC. It was sort of a proto-"Rescue Me" with Leary as a boozing cop who cheated on his wife and got in trouble with his superiors for being politically incorrect. It also had the same creators and a lot of the same cast members as "Rescue Me"

 

[sojourner]

Moderately funny, but has potential. They're retooling it into a workplace comedy. Not sure if that's going to fix what ails it, but since the missions-of-the-week were a bore, losing that aspect certainly won't hurt..

Ah, the old "bring it back in name only" tactic that always manages to kill the loyal fanbase that had managed to find the show and fails to find new fans. Sigh, well it was a fun show.

 

[Scout101]

Better off Ted was great, I miss that one.

I've picked up plenty of good shows later on in the runs. How I Met Your Mother, House, 24, Walking Dead, Two and a Half Men, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, didn't start Stargate (despite liking the movie) until Universe started, have now seen all the series.

Sure there's a few more, but that's a pretty good list of shows I missed when they started. Some just didn't grab me with promos, some conflicted with other things I wanted to watch more, others I found on a whim later on...

 

[Trekker4747]

: plays his "Firefly" card::

 

[Goliath]

Boomtown. Or at least, the first season thereof.

I had never heard of this show, but a friend of mine recommended it to me after we both saw Justified. The two shows were created by the same guy.

My reaction to Boomtown was, "this is really good--how did I miss this?" The nonlinear narratives and multiple points of view gave it a really distinctive flavour.

So of course, those were exactly the elements that the network discarded for Season 2.

 

[Kirkman1987]

Firefly, Deadwood and 24 spring to mind.

 

[WillsBabe]

Hustle falls into this category for me. I barely knew that it existed until I caught half an episode a few months back. I've now watched five seasons back to back. I love it.

 

[OmahaStar]

: plays his "Firefly" card::

Oh? So before today, you never knew Firefly existed? Sorry, I'm calling bullshit on that one.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Mentioned it before, but Murdoch Mysteries. I never knew it existed until recently, and it doesn't help that it's only on one channel, at times that aren't convenient, but the premise is interesting and fresh. It's pretty much hidden due to obscurity though.

 

[Scout101]

: plays his "Firefly" card::

Oh? So before today, you never knew Firefly existed? Sorry, I'm calling bullshit on that one.

Wasn't the point of this thread to mention shows that we missed when they started airing, and then we found later (either in later seasons, or after the show had finished/been cancelled)?

Not sure your bullshit flag matters much when he's like the 4th person to mention it in this thread.

Seems like a pretty good example of a show that didn't get many viewers when it aired, but became a favorite when people finally got around to discovering it...

 

[Kegg]

For years I had no idea that the Simpsons episode "A Star is Burns" was actually a crossover with another series, The Critic, no matter how much it tipped its hand in that general direction. This is probably because the Critic never aired on Sky One, which is where the Simpsons were run endlessly on British TV, and where it did air on British TV I have basically no idea.

When the internet vaguely informed me that it was a series, I pretty much forgot about it. And then I think I stumbled on some clips online somewhere and pretty soon I had to see the entire series. The best episodes were hilarious, and the weaker ones also had plenty of laughs. When I think of my favourite sitcoms now - say, a top ten - I really can't leave the Critic out.

Oh and I only had the vaguest damned idea what Raumpatrouille was before I watched it. Some German space opera series that was pretty much it. Loved it though. It's just has a lot of fun with familiar space opera plots, has clearly drawn characters, and actually had an episode where an obnoxious science fiction writer is let onboard the ship.

 

[byron lomax]

The MTV cartoon show Downtown, which was made in the late 90s and only lasted one season; I can't remember how exactly, but I found out about it on the internet, and discovered the show's creator sold DVDs through his animation company. I went ahead and bought them pretty blindly, but really enjoyed the show. It was the last of MTV's grungy, left-field animations, made at a time when the channel was making a transition to all-day reality TV and abandoning any remnants of late-night creativity. It's no wonder the show got so little exposure or support.

The show is focused on Alex, a twenty-something nerd who was split between an urge to grow up and the geeky fixations he couldn't let go of. It had very funny characters (who felt a lot more like real young people than a lot of live-action shows) and created a vivid picture of NYC during that time. It was cool to see Goat live on in Megas XLR, but this show and its characters deserved more than thirteen episodes.

 

[Owain Taggart]

When the internet vaguely informed me that it was a series, I pretty much forgot about it. And then I think I stumbled on some clips online somewhere and pretty soon I had to see the entire series. The best episodes were hilarious, and the weaker ones also had plenty of laughs. When I think of my favourite sitcoms now - say, a top ten - I really can't leave the Critic out.

Yeah, The Critic was really good for what it was. I kind of wish they'd bring it back with new episodes as I think it would likely do better today than it did in the past. I think if I remember correctly, they even had an episode with Roger Ebert.