Perhaps this should be part of the Braindrain, but today’s NOT is asking what obscure, cult, bad or forgotten TV shows and movies that aren’t in the popular culture that you inexplicably love?
British TV Shows (THANKS PBS and TVO)
1 Blake’s 7. Oh so dreadful special effects, but the characters and writing made up for it.
2 The Sandbaggers. Not James Bond, but if more MadMen than anything. A semi-realistic look at life as a secret agent and the bureaucratic wars they fought amongst themselves.
3 Space 1999. Dreary, depressing and stupid (that’s just the 2nd season.) Oddly philosophical but with lots of explosions and aliens speaking the proper Queen’s english.
4 Coupling. Mostly because I wanted to have a circle of friends like that. Sort of the British Friends, but much better human beings than the folks in Friends. Even more non white folks in the background. NOT THE NBC remade pile of shit.
5 The Tomorrow People. Fun silly show about outcast kids. Inadvertent laughs because one of the alien species looked like a big yellow veiny dick with a hand.
6 Red Dwarf.
American TV Shows
1 Babylon 5. It was the Expanse of its time (at least in my opinion.) Supposed to be rebooted by the original writer in the near future. It was the start of the Story Arc TV show (each episode was a chapter in a longer story) that was abused to the point of parody by JJ Abrams and Ronald Moore among others. At least the writer knew where the fuck the show was going unlike JJ and Ronnie.
2 The Job. Precursor to “Rescue Me” with a lot of the same actors. A show about cops that was more akin to Barney Miller if he were an asshole like Dennis Leary.
Canadian TV Shows
1 Seeing Things. A reporter with psychic powers. It sounds dumb, but I quite enjoyed it.
2 The Littlest Hobo. Sure the acting was… crud, but it’s the Hobo and the theme song.
Movies
Gross Pointe Blank – John Cusak as a killer with a killer soundtrack
When Trumpets Fade – a story about the horrible Hurtgen Forest campaign ignored by WW2 historians.
Dark Blue World – a story of Czech fighter pilots during WW2 and the price they paid.
The Hidden – a B movie SF horror that was better than many A list movies
Fail Safe – if Kubrick took Dr Strangelove seriously.
Fierce Creatures is a delightful comedy. I like it more than A Fish Called Wanda.
Something missing in Fierce Creatures that I can’t quite grasp vs A Fish Called Wanda.
Frank’s Place isn’t exactly forgotten, but it’s close.
Tim Reid (Venus Flytrap on WKRP) played an Italian lit professor from Boston who inherited a restaurant in New Orleans from a father he never knew.
It only ran one season. CBS jerked it around in the schedule so the ratings suffered, but it got rave reviews. It was renewed for a second season, but the last episode mocked hedge funds, and friends of financier Laurence Tisch, who controlled the network, started whining. Because of course they did. Tisch jumped in and cancelled it.
It was a half hour sitcom/dramedy that was a big inspiration for David Simon’s Treme. It had great depictions of Creole food, and it was astonishingly brave in the way it dug into race and class issues.
Unfortunately rights issues around the soundtrack have made it almost impossible to reissue digitally.
Laurence Tisch. As Spy Magazine described him, “churlish dwarf billionaire.”
Yes! David Letterman used to mock him for being a hopeless penny pincher. He blew fantastic sums up front and then tried to micromanage the number of coffee filters employees were using after the sale went through.
I remember the show, but only saw one or two episodes.
They came from outer space.
Two teenage aliens, Abe and Bo, travel the United States in a red sports car in an effort to pick up chicks and learn more about life on Earth. They are pursued by a pair of bumbling U.S. Government soldiers who would like to capture Abe and Bo for study.
That’s obscure for me. Never heard of it before.
Speaking of Canadian shows, I will confess to knowledge of The Friendly Giant and Mister Dressup despite being an American.
Do I know about the rocking chair? Yes I do.
I enjoyed them as a kid. Kids shows for a long while were the most exported Canadian entertainment.
Thunderbirds was a staple I’m my house when I was very young. We didn’t have cable so we were stuck with three channels one of which showed Thunderbirds reruns. I mostly watched it in horror of the glassy eyed marionettes and didn’t understand what was going on.
Did you know about this remake?
Was Red Dwarf obscure at the time? It also got a remake.
My list would include:
Tarzan. I loved that show as a kid. Living with wild animals was the dream.
Dark Matter. I’m still sad that this show got cancelled.
Red Drawf… maybe not so obscure. It’s definitely a cult show.
I never really got into The Thunderbirds or any of Anderson’s Supermarionette stuff. I never liked human lite marionettes so that might explain why. Sort of creeped me out.
Never saw the remake, but I saw the trailers for the live movie which made Bill Paxton more Marionette than human.
One sister is a big fan of Dark Matter. I admit to laughing when the stars of Kim’s Convenience showed up in it.
Have any of you heard of Ringo the Refugee Racoon? I have yet to meet someone who has. It was a Disney show about a racoon whose tree was destroyed by construction workers and was forced to seek refuge in an empty model home. He gets up to many a shenanigan and ends up burning the place down.
Yes! After Disney’s big budget movie ambitions collapsed, they made a bunch of nature movies.
That was one of them. They also did some adaptations of Ernest Thompson Seton’s nature stories. Their movies disappointed me as a kid, but I would highly recommend his books. They are a little bit sentimental, but still wonderfully evocative of the vanishing Western frontier.
Project Gutenberg has a bunch.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3031
Obscure for America but not for Canada, I seem to relate more to Red Green than I should…
Anybody remember the best show ever on MTV? Night Flight?
and the most obscure Sci-Fi Comedy Movie …
For some reason the show reminds me of SCTV Gerry Todd commercials.
Was Red Green really obscure down here?🤯🤣
It was Sooooooo well-known in the region where I grew up, that we *high schoolers* watched PBS back in the 90’s!
So I thought *everyone* knew about the show!😆😂🤣
Outer Limits wasn’t an obscure show, as far as I know…
But this episode seems to be-and it’s the only one I really remember seeing in re-runs:
https://theouterlimits.fandom.com/wiki/The_Origin_of_Species
It stuck with me, back when I saw it in the early 00’s, because we *seemed* headed to a place societally, where *someday* gene-editing *might* become a possibility…
And now, with all the GOOD science around gene-editing, it seems like it’s just a matter of time, before we start creating super-tall/super-smart people, and ones with wings, and generally screwing around so much we run our entire species directly into the ground, like happened in ^that^ episode🙃
One obscure show i LOVED, even though it was totally formulaic & had the Lead characters basically playing versions of characters they’d already done elsewhere, was Back To You.
It was a little bit like The Office, combined with Fraser & Just Shoot Me… (after looking up JSM, I realize *why* there are echoes–they’re both Steven Levitan shows!).
The reason I loved it was the ensemble of the cast–i didn’t realize Ty Burrell was *that* Ty** until around mid-season or so, i just liked the show, and the way the characters interacted with each other.
Here are some clips from it;
https://youtu.be/icC5uASwy1s
The other shows I liked a lot, in the last few years were Sanctuary & Flashpoint. I’d watch the late-night reruns on one of our local TV stations, as I did my homework, during my associates degrees.
**he was one of my actors, the first summer i worked at the Shakespeare festival. He was a grad student at the time, and happened to be one of the many college students filling out the acting corps at the festival that summer.