The Good Place. Funny, compelling, I cried through the final episode. It also doesn’t waste your time, things will happen mid-season that any other show would have dragged out for the season finale.
Obligatory Firefly mention.
Community
My name is Earl.
Mr Robot. So many twists and turns, and had me absolutely fascinated from start to finish
(Staying spoiler friendlyish) My absolute favorite little bit in Mr. Robot is the thing that they do the thing on 5/9. In the IT infrastructure world “five nines” means 99.999% uptime/availability, which means you have less than five and a half minutes of downtime a year.
As a scifi buff: Battlestar Galactica, and The Expanse were excellent. Nightsky was also a really good watch even though it was slow moving, and was more about relationships than SciFi
I am surprised that I’m the first to mention Bojack Horseman here.
This series is for you if you want to cry out your mental health problems
Andor is the best piece of Star Wars media and the best TV show I’ve ever seen. You don’t need to like Star Wars. I don’t know if seeing Star Wars would even increase your enjoyment. I think seeing Rogue One would probably be good but otherwise just jump in. No space wizards or laser swords or destiny or whatever. It’s so adult and grounded. I can’t believe Disney let them make this.
arrested development
Barry Bojack Horseman
Since it’s not mentioned, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you liked Firefly, you’ll like Buffy. Yes, it has baggage, but that doesn’t prevent everyone else in the cast from having their work appreciated. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll dabble in witchcraft.
Avatar: the Last Airbender.
Fringe. Best Sci-Fi ending that wraps back around to an episode that broke the show open. The last season getting there is kind of rough. But the first 4 seasons are solid.
The Wire. It’s the best piece of visual media ever created. Not only is it the best portrayal of the inner city drugs trade but also the decaying institutions and social structures that allow it to flourish, and the corrupting influence of dirty money.
It also is consistently the best written show on TV and is grounded in it’s reality better than anything else. Half the cast were complete unknowns, in many cases plucked from the streets of Baltimore itself and there are standout performances all across it’s vast and diverse cast.
It’s a little slow to get going, the first few episodes have a lot of ground to cover to get the viewer up to speed, it also makes no effort to ease the viewer in, with a lot of jargon, slang and some very thick accents to content with, there’s also no “previously on the wire” to go over key points from earlier episodes so it definitely requires more participation from the viewer than most TV but it’s all the better for it.
Mr Robot
Came here to recommend Mr Robot as well. The ending of the series was perfectly planned, so it loops around perfectly to the beginning of the series. It was a nice contrast to something like Game of Thrones, where they clearly had no good ending planned and just rushed through to get something done.
I remember watching the end of Mr Robot and going “holy shit.”
