What’s the antithesis of Arrested Development, Firefly or The Big Lebowski? Those may never have ‘found their audience’ but over time seemed to recognised by everyone. What are the deep cuts that you liked but it feels like everyone has completely forgotten they even existed.
The Man from Earth is not forgotten, it has never been recognized. I’ve never seen such a great movie. The plot: a bunch of techers talking. That’s it. But that talk is mindblowing.
Better Off Ted is still my favorite sitcom. Corporate came along and tried to pick up the mantle, but I still prefer Ted.
I would upvote this fifty times if I could. Better Off Ted was an absolute gem.
Yes! I was thinking of this when I wrote the question. I feel like it was great and just totally disappeared.
I kept thinking about it’s parody ads when all those ‘we’re in this together’ ads kept playing during the start of the pandemic.
Loved Better Off Ted. I still use Veronica’s “I’m going though a tunnel…” line when speaking to someone in-person.
The hair is up. That’s all they hear.
I often quote “deal with it, Ted”
There was a string of time between 2006 and 2009 where there were AMAZING new long format TV shows coming on… and promptly dying on the vine after a year due to bad advertising or ratings chasing.
Kings was a great TV show that deserved 4 more seasons.
Jericho Was an amazing show, that got dumped by Network after the first season… and the fans were so infuriated that they crowdsourced funding to send over twenty tons of nuts to CBS in protest, Which forced them to greenlight a second season for like…5 or 6 episodes (first season was 22 episodes, as comparison) and left it hanging on a painfully huge cliffhanger. before cancelling it again… Netflix even came forward and offered to buy the series and continue it on Netflix (Which all the actors were 100% on board with), and as a final FUCK YOU to the fans, CBS refused. They hated the show, tried to fuck over its second season hard, and hated the fans… and still refused to sell the rights to someone who would let it flourish.
God, typing this out has made me realize how irrationally angry I still am at CBS over the absolute fuckery they pulled with that show that I cant even think of the other shows at the moment.
Go watch Jericho. Its still a fucking awesome show, despite how much the c-suite hated it.
Any insight into why in the world they’d greenlight Jericho to begin with if they seemed so uninterested in supporting it? It’s certainly not the first show to run into a situation like that, but it’s always kind of interesting to see how the reasoning may vary across businesses with each show.
Network wasn’t underrated but has felt more relevant every decade but has been talked about less and less.
Showgirls tells a compelling story about poverty, fame, power, misogyny, and abuse. This film is severely underrated but also it is forgotten by most people who do not go looking for the lowest rated movies to watch ironically.
The second season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex was really good and I find the story centered around a refugee crisis to be a much more compelling one. I feel like this season gets talked about less than the first and the movies, which are generally seen as masterpieces.
You didn’t list books but I wanted to mention that Player Piano is one of the most precient books I have read and was written back in the 50s. Vonnegut is of course a well known and regarded writer but you’ll rarely see his first novel topping lists even among just his own works, and so it doesn’t get read and discussed as much as it should.
Mr Robot is a damn masterpiece and I don’t think I’ve ever participated in or heard a verbal discussion about it. But whenever it pops up in a thread or comment section there’s always tons of people giving it praise.
Blade Runner 2049. Extremely highly rated, just wasn’t popular enough
Heroes. The first season was so damn good and then the last writers strike completely killed it.
Remember when Peter’s girlfriend got lost in time and then was never mentioned again…
If memory serves, it was written as a miniseries, not a show that would span multiple seasons. Then the network saw how popular it was and demanded multiple seasons. But the writers had already written all the source material they had expected to.
A lot of great shows were ruined because executives saw dollar signs and demanded more seasons, ruining great story telling and pacing.
Clerks: The Animated Series
It was a show pitched to ABC and was cancelled after only a few episodes. It’s a masterpiece of adult animated comedy that I consider far superior to Family Guy and the Simpsons. It’s not on Rick & Morty’s level but almost nothing is, however I’d confidently place this show in between R&M and the other shows I’ve watched as far as ranking.
You may watch this show and not enjoy it, that’s okay. For me though, this show was a big part of my childhood and defined a lot of my humor as an adult. The way the jokes are structured and even some of the phrases said in the show are still in my vocabulary to this day. I thank the writers for putting together so much comedy gold in a show that barely saw the light of day.
It’s absolutely worth watching at least the first episode if you’ve never seen it before. If you do, please let me know if you liked it as much as I did. I’d be interested to hear if you didn’t find it enjoyable as well.
“This here’s an m80, it’s like a quarter-stick of dynamite. Tape four of these bad boys together, it’s like half a stick of dynamite!”
That show deserved better, as did the Clerks comic series. My father was so fucking proud the day he brought home the DVD, and we watched it over and fucking over. “Bear is driving, how can that be?!” lives right up there with “Haha! Cookies on dowels!” in my head.
Hell, I’ve wanted to do the “Is it safe?” bit before when doing overnight/early morning stocking in a store. Sometimes you get that one person who comes in the moment the store opens, and somehow manages to get in the way.
I showed my wife the first episode of the show just so she understand the “is it safe?” joke I use with my friends time to time. She didn’t enjoy the show much but she liked that joke a lot 🤣
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,
Only two seasons and it ended before it ever had a chance to get bad. The acting is phenomenal, sets are well designed, the background music choices are very unique for what you would expect in that time period. But it works! Cannot recommended it enough! If you can find it or “acquire” online I think it would be worth your time.
Game Cube- Eternal Darkness
Farscape was an absolutely fantastic show with one of the best villains ever. Characters were well thought out, they had motivations you could understand and showed character growth. Highly recommend for anyone who hasn’t seen it.
Wayne Pygram should be a household name with his portral as Scorpius and Harvey.
I’m confused by the prompt. The Big Lebowski was an amazing movie with great social commentary, but it was poorly received and mostly only had a cult following.
Arrested Development was just okay, nothing special, but is talked about by everyone and absolutely overrated. It’s social commentary is nothing compared to Big Lebowski.
The two are antithesis of each other.
And then Firefly I have no idea what that even is. Is that a YA novel?
So your question is what’s the antithesis of all these unrelated things? Also what’s not underrated but has inadequate social impact, as if Big Lebowski or Arrested Development did??
Most Terence Malik films I guess? He’s popular amongst film buffs, but I feel like his reach ahould be broader rhan that.
My friends and I went to see The Thin Red Line in the theater on opening night. It was literally a sold out showing. We ended up having to sit in the second row.
After the first 40 minutes or so we noticed a few groups of people walking out. 20 minutes later a few more groups left. It became a slow trickle of people just getting up and leaving.
When the movie ended and the credits began I turned around to look at who was left. There was literally just one other guy sitting a few rows behind us.
I get it. It came out on the heels of Saving Private Ryan, it was marketed as a similar style “war movie”, it had a laundry list of big names who were only onscreen for a few minutes… all those people ended up watching a deep, languid reflection on life, love and the very nature of humanity. So yeah, not a typical formula for box office dynamite.
I understand why so many people would not be able to sit through the entire run time, but it’s honestly their loss. I loved the movie, and the shock of turning around to see an empty auditorium made the experience even more memorable.
The first few Splinter Cell games should have had a more-lasting impact on gaming. Proper stealth gameplay in which lighting mattered for the first time (revolutionary), and the Spies vs. Mercs multiplayer still ranks among my favorite multiplayer games of all time. Then they made it into a (still good, but not the same) action series before letting it die completely.
Honestly, I’d say that Splinter Cell is considered to have had a larger impact on gaming than it really did. For example, you claim that Splinter Cell was the first game where lighting mattered - at the very least, Thief: The Dark Project featured that very prominently, four years earlier, but I doubt that was even the first.
Splinter Cell basically just copied Thief and Metal Gear Solid’s homework and changed it up a bit, I’d say it’s inferior to both games, and yet is often considered to be one of the best games ever made.
It’s common to see misattribution like this happen woth media, and it’s really not a big deal that someone is caught unaware. Like Thief actually does get a lot of praise and did impact gaming, but it’s easy for someone to not know of it depending on who they talk to.
But the worst example is several users and a couple YouTube essayist claiming Assassin’s Creed 2 was revolutionary, when it was basically doing nothing new, and was just ironing out the formula that was 99.99% established by a game that seemingly none of them heard of called… Assassin’s Creed 1.
Person of Interest - it not only anticipated NSA mass surveillance (with some SciFi elements but anyway) but also ethical questions about AI, the singularity of human intelligence and human nature in general. All while being a well told crime show with comedic and heartwarming moments.
Really good series. I was particularly happy to see Amy Acker get a juicy long-running role after getting screwed in Dollhouse.
