When you can’t sit around making fun of terrible films with your smartarse friends, do it with these guys instead

In our new series Stream Team, Guardian Australia’s arts writers dig out their favourite hidden gems of streaming to help you while away some isolated hours.

As we all hunker down in our homes and desperately watch things to help us cope with being trapped in crippling isolation, what better solution than to binge a show about a man desperately watching things to help him cope with being trapped in crippling isolation?

Friends, I present you with Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The show began in 1992 and has enjoyed 14 seasons (with some significant pauses) across multiple networks – from a local cable channel in Minnesota, to the Comedy Channel, to its current and hopefully not final home on Netflix.

While the cast has changed over the years, the premise has not: an everyday schlub is shot into space by evil scientists who hope to drive him mad by making him watch terrible films. To prevent descending into insanity, said schlub builds some robot pals, who accompany him in making fun of the films.

The entire premise is laid out helpfully in the theme song, which more shows really should make an effort to do. There’s only this and The Nanny, really.

Anyway, this is merely a deliberately hokey framing device for the show’s real purpose: watching terrible movies while three people (OK, one person and two puppets) make fun of what’s happening on screen. And those people/bots are hilarious.

For a long time I secretly tested friends and potential love interests by casually popping on a collection of MST3K’s riffs on 1950s and 60s educational shorts to see whether they correctly found people making fun of, say, a film about raising poultry called The Chicken Of Tomorrow to be cry-laugh hilarious, or whether I needed better people in my life. Never did it steer me wrong.

And now, in our time of global need, I present this gift to you.

The original schlub was the show’s creator, Joel Hodgson, who was replaced after a few years by the head writer, Michael J Nelson, and then, when Netflix succumbed to the then largest Kickstarter project ever and brought it back to life, the test subject became the Nerdist podcaster, Jonah Ray. Felicia Day is the current mad scientist, with Patton Oswalt as her henchman/sidekick.

Because 2020 has been nothing but a series of horrors, Netflix has confirmed it isn’t proceeding with a third season – and both the first revival season and the many classic episodes it used to host have inexplicably vanished from the Australian service at the time of writing.

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However, you still have the six-episode second revival series from 2018, dubbed “The Gauntlet”, which begins with Mac And Me: an ill-starred attempt by McDonald’s to cash in on ET with its own heartwarming family movie. It is exactly as bonkers as you’re imagining, and features cinema’s only scene involving a child in a wheelchair rolling off a cliff. You know, heartwarming.

Once you’ve gotten a taste for it, be advised that many of the classic episodes live on YouTube. But you’ll have to do some digging to find two of the show’s most magnificent efforts ever: Manos: The Hands of Fate – a film so gloriously terrible that even the scientists are forced to apologise to Joel and the bots – and Eegah!, starring the late great Richard “Jaws” Kiel as the mysterious titular caveman, which transforms the off-camera line “watch out for snakes” into a running gag of towering beauty.

So when you can’t sit around with your actual pals making fun of bad films, why not settle in with your new virtual besties and watch full-length terrible movies accompanied by quick-fire pop culture references, groan-inducing puns and cascading smartarsery? Oh, and watch out for snakes.

• The 2018 season of MST3K is available to watch on Netflix; a selection of other episodes can be streamed on YouTube