In the golden age of TV, it’s easy to miss shows that are well worth a look. We picked a handful of the criminally underrated for your viewing pleasure

Survivor’s Remorse

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Crudely positioned as “the black Entourage” upon release, this sharp LeBron James-produced show shares as many similarities with the Hollybro show as it does differences. There’s an initial setup which offers a similar culture clash: a young basketball player and his family move to Atlanta with more wealth and opportunities than they’re used to and struggle to adjust. But while the long-running HBO comedy relished hedonism, and little else, Survivor’s Remorse has far more to say. It weaves in issues of race, class, sexuality and gender without ever seeming heavy-handed, niftily gliding between topics with ease, as comfortable covering the underrepresentation of dark-skinned black women in fashion as it is debating the etiquette of whether to send a thank you note for a thank you note. The cast, including Chi-Raq’s Teyonah Parris, are all adept comic actors and they relish a set of scripts filled with lightning-fast quips and Curb Your Enthusiasm-style farce. It’s a curiously, frustratingly under-viewed show, on its third season yet still averaging fewer than 1m viewers a week yet it deserves its spot next to Atlanta, Insecure and Luke Cage as a rare multilayered new show where black characters dominate while white characters, well, who cares? BL



Difficult People

If you don’t already subscribe to Hulu, you should, just for this show (Casual is a fine bonus). Its greatness is not just manifest in its crackling dialogue and expertly madcap pacing, but also in the mere fact that it represents one of the last examples of the great snarky sitcoms of the 1990s. Increasingly, the modern American sitcom has leaned into one of two categories: the populist charm offensives typified by shows like Fresh Off the Boat or The Great Indoors and navel gazers in the mold of Louie, You’re the Worst, Master of None, Transparent, and Girls that mine pathos as often as they go for the laugh. This is a stark contrast to the misanthropic, neurotic tradition of Seinfeld and the Larry Sanders Show. Those shows neither sought to explain the human condition nor simply gloss over the darker aspects of it in favor of a laugh track.



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Difficult People’s protagonists, Julie (creator and writer Julie Klausner) and Billy (Billy on the Street’s Billy Eichner) make few apologies for their self-involved behavior or their lust for show business glory. While the narrative occasionally dives into earnestness, it tends to only be in service of reinforcing the bond between them rather than to teach them some dunderheaded moral lesson. It plays with form and structure in the way Seinfeld did in its finest episodes, and Klausner and Eichner have some of the best two-person comic chemistry on TV. This is as sharp and clever as pure TV comedy gets, even if it’s behind a $9.99 a month paywall. DS



Last Chance U

Since the election, we’ve been confronted with a country that feels more divided than ever, but if there’s one thing that always unites Americans, it’s football – and TV shows about football. Since Friday Night Lights isn’t coming back any time soon, Last Chance U – a six-part Netflix series documents one year at “America’s most ‘off the grid’ football team” – is exactly what you need to watch right now.



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Inspired by Drew Jubera’s 2014 GQ piece of the same name, Last Chance U spends a year with the highly successful but little known East Mississippi Community College Lions. At EMCC, young American football stars who have been kicked off their Division I teams (for things like drinking, bad behavior and failing grades) spend a year trying to get their NFL dreams back on track. Set in Scooba, Mississippi (population 732), the show takes viewers into the nation’s heartland.



Despite all the talent at EMCC, everyone from the coach to the players has demons they must confront if they’re going to succeed: there’s a fanatical, almost dangerous coach, Buddy Stephens, the overly emotionally invested academic adviser, Brittany Wagner, and the frustratingly inconsistent but lovable players. You can bet who’s gonna make it at the start of the show if you want, but the magic of Last Chance U is that you can’t help but root for every one of them. RS

Halt and Catch Fire

Halt and Catch Fire is TV’s ultimate underdog. An 80s-set tech drama from AMC, its purpose when launched in 2014 was no less than to fill Mad Men’s immaculately shined shoes. It didn’t manage the impossible. And it has never been a ratings smash. But it’s testimony to the faith the network have in this series that they are to give its handful of adoring fans a fourth and final run.

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In season one, we met smooth-talking suit Joe MacMillan. A Steve Jobs type who manipulates his own Steve Wozniak, computer genius Gordon, his equally brilliant engineer wife, Donna, and a 22-year-old punk programmer called Cameron into creating the perfect PC. The second season proved the depth of this sleeper hit, focusing on the two women as they set up their gaming company, Mutiny. By the third season, Halt and Catch Fire’s momentum was unstoppable.



Every episode is gripping, jaw-dropping and prophetic. (Joe is trying to invest in the internet years before any billionaire benefactor can even fathom it.) These are finely drawn characters to truly love, and the fallout for them is vast. There are secret HIV tests, shotgun weddings and suicides. But, this being the 80s, there are also Super Mario Bros marathons and people dancing to the Pixies. What could be better than that? KA

Baskets

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, this comedy starring Zach Galifianakis as a woefully over-qualified rodeo clown (Chip Baskets) didn’t get that much love when it premiered in early 2016. Who needed another show about an angry middle-aged clown man going back home to wrestle with some unsettled scores, a horrible ex-wife and equally dickish relatives? No one, really. But creators Louis CK, Galifianakis and Portlandia’s Jonathan Krisel manage to harness the things they’re best known for: daftness, pathos-meets-comedy and baiting the pretentious, and somehow make this show about a clown work. The segments in the French clown school he studies in are bizarre and offbeat, his only pal Martha (Martha Kelly) is brilliantly downbeat and there’s a storyline with a Juggalo that is as weird as you’d expect. Even if you just watch it for Louie Anderson (who plays Chip’s mother and won an Emmy for his performance), it’ll be worth it. Oh, and there’s a second season coming in 2017, which may or may not reference that ridiculous killer clown trend from the summer. LB



The Eric Andre Show

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In the horribly pally world of late night, Eric Andre stands out as a gloriously anarchic aberration. His series The Eric Andre Show, which recently completed its fourth season on Adult Swim, might seem to share the same structure as Fallon, Kimmel et al, but it’s less interested in maintaining chatshow norms and more interested in smashing them to pieces. His live band is made up of dishevelled avant-jazz weirdos, his man-on-the-street segments are likely to get him arrested, his in-show games are less meme-worthy than maim-worthy, and you get the sense that he’d be more likely to surround Donald Trump with rats than ruffle his hair. Sure, at times it’s painfully puerile – Andre eating his own vomit and causing guest Lauren Conrad to flee the set, is a good recent example – but at its best, the show has a sense of danger and playfulness that nothing else on TV (with perhaps the noble exception of Billy On The Street) comes close to matching. Plus, anyone willing to risk life and limb to take the piss out of Alex Jones is surely worth cherishing. GM



Search Party

A new millennial mystery full of unlikable people, TBS’s Search Party starts off like many other shows but ends somewhere rather different. It stars Alia Shawkat (best known as Maeby from Arrested Development) as the lead character Dory. Dory is the hipster loser trope made famous in Girls, High Maintenance and Master of None. Mid-20s malcontent, anxious about her lack of life direction and seeking purpose. She finds it when Chantal Witherbottom, a girl she vaguely knew in college, goes missing. Dory turns Nancy Drew, convinced she spotted Chantal and can solve her disappearance. A whole film noir element emerges, which is what really makes the show worth watching.

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Search Party feels very 2016, with texts appearing onscreen, people meeting on Bumble and zingers about current Twitter hashtags. Its creator Sarah Violet Bliss said recent hits like Serial and The Jinx inspired the whodunnit aspect. It’s not the best television show you’ll see all year. But it’s charming, the finale is suitably eyebrow-raising and you can watch the pilot on YouTube to get a taster. AJ

