Q. I’ve been especially interested in your comments about underappreciated shows such as “Nurse Jackie.” If they’re good, why didn’t they get viewers? What are some others?
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A. Ah, if only we lived in a TV universe where everything that I think is good becomes popular! But yeah, viewers’ tastes are so varied, and then TV outlets are not always good at promoting and scheduling their strongest material. One of the best examples of the latter was “Freaks and Geeks,” which NBC moved around primetime too many times after it premiered, confusing the show’s audience and dooming it to become a one-season wonder.
Sometimes, it’s the subject matter. “Nurse Jackie,” which originally ran on Showtime but is now available on Netflix, was an uncompromising portrait of an extremely functional pill addict. There was humor on the show — it was often categorized as a comedy — but the gist of it was relentlessly dark as Jackie continually spiraled down into self-destruction. That topic may have kept some away from what was one of the few female antihero shows of the time. It’s not usually recognized in the conversation about the best of the best, which is too bad.
“Rectify” is another series that deserves a lot more recognition. It aired on Sundance, and it’s an intimate look at a guy — played with great wounded heart by Aden Young — who has been let out of Death Row after 19 years thanks to DNA evidence. He has not been exonerated, though, and he must face wary friends and a mother (played beautifully by J. Cameron Smith from “Succession”) whose buried ambivalence is excruciating. The action moves slowly, in the deliberate way “Breaking Bad” did, as he faces the double-edged sword that is freedom. All four seasons are currently on Netflix.
I was completely charmed by a little Australian series called “Please Like Me,” whose four seasons are now on Hulu. Created by and starring comic Josh Thomas, it’s just a small indie comedy about a sweetly eccentric group of pals looking for love. Thomas’s Josh is the endearing gay man at the center of it all, who helps care for his mentally ill mother (whose friend, by the way, is played by a then-unknown Hannah Gadsby). Another Hulu series, “The Bisexual,” also slid by without getting much attention. From Desiree Akhavan, who directed and co-wrote the movie “The Miseducation of Cameron Post,” it’s a six-episode, one-season treat about what happens when an American lesbian in England comes out as a bisexual.
There are, of course, so very many more — David Simon’s local-politics HBO miniseries “Show Me a Hero,” Hulu’s “Difficult People,” which almost out-“Seinfelds” “Seinfeld” with its pair of misanthropes in New York City, and Comedy Central’s cheeky, recently finished “Corporate,” which takes internal mega-company politics to some nihilistic and highly entertaining levels. I could go on!
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at matthew.gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.
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December 07, 2020 at 11:56PM
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There’s a lot of great TV you may have missed the first time around - The Boston Globe
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