There was a time not so long ago when all new TV shows and seasons debuted in the fall, and episodes were doled out on a weekly basis. If you missed an episode, you'd have to wait until summer to catch a rerun.
It was a dark, dark time.
We now live in the binge-watch age, where streaming video services mean TV is a constant. New shows appear year round, from all corners of the globe, and services frequently drop an entire season all at once.
For that we have to thank Netflix, which changed the paradigm of TV watching enough that many now mimic it. But few come close to what Netflix is willing to spend on original content. It debuts dozens of original TV series every year across live action and animation (and anime).
That's a lot to watch. For selections from all genres, read on.
Big Mouth
Prefer your animated shows to be adult in nature, even when featuring little kids?
Big Mouth, helmed by Nick Kroll and a cast full of his comedy friends, treads where even
South Park or
Family Guy has rarely, if ever ventured—the sexuality of budding youth. All told from a total gross-out, hilarious point of view. There are three seasons, and the show is so hot, Netflix has renewed it for three more already.
Bojack Horseman
There's a lot of animation on the streaming services, but few do adult storylines with the aplomb and wit of
BoJack, where half the adults are talking human/animal hybrids for no reason whatsoever other than it's funny.
Bojack Horseman himself is a former sitcom star (from the 80s show
Horsin' Around) trying to cash back in, and also find love. Voiced by Will Arnett, he's the epitome of anxious, obnoxious, and sympathetic—perfect for a satire on Hollywoo (there's no D, it was stolen on the show) and beyond. Six seasons are streaming, with part two of the final season coming Jan. 31, 2020.
The Crown
Post-WWII Britain was thrown when the King died unexpectedly, leading to the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II, who reigns to this day.
The Crown is the fictional retelling of her ascendancy to the throne, and how her family and the English government coped along the way and thereafter. It's told with approximately one decade passing per season—enough so that the stars of the first two seasons were replaced for the third (they'll continue into the fourth, then get replaced in the fifth). Relish the star turns by Matt Smith as Prince Philip, Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret, John Lithgow as Churchill, and the award-winning performance by Claire Foy as Elizabeth herself in the first episodes. You may even see some corgis. For season three, the cast now includes Oscar-winner
Olivia Colman as the Queen,
Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip, and
Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret.
Dear White People
This adaption of the award-winning 2014 movie was in good hands, since the movie's director, Justin Simien, also directed the first and last episodes of the 10-episode first season. Not many shows have a 98 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes, but
this one does, though unsurprisingly it got lots of online hate early on as well for being "racist" to white people. Logan Browning takes over the lead roll of Sam, who runs a campus radio show also called
Dear White People on a mostly white campus
. A fourth and final season arrives in 2020.
GLOW
If you liked wrestling in the 1980s, you probably were utterly agog at the
Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling—a real-life all-female wrestling show. This is a fictionalized telling of the origins of
GLOW, starring Alison Brie (
Community), Betty Gilpin (
Nurse Jackie), and comedian and
podcaster Marc Maron. Come to watch gals grapple, stay to be charmed by these women's stories, many of whom were chasing a dream but got sucked into
GLOW and decided to make the very best show possible. The 80s soundtrack will have you nostalgic for more than just wrestling in its heyday. The final season is coming in 2020.
Master of None
Master of None is a tour-de-force series personified entirely by one personality: co-creator and star Aziz Ansari. It would remind you perhaps of Louie, the once-considered-great single-camera dramedy from Louis C.K. over on FX—but it's hard to think of Louie much there days. Ansari almost suffered similarly, but controversy hasn't tarred his reputation as thoroughly as that of C.K.
Master of None remains a master-work. It's funny, it's romantic, it's melancholy, it's surprising. It won the Critic's Choice Award for Best Comedy, a Peabody, an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a comedy (twice) and for editing, and Ansari won the Golden Globe for the second season. It may not be back for a third season... even before the accusations, Ansari said he'd need a long break before he'd come back.
Which would honestly be a shame. With the introspection displayed in this show, what played out for Ansari in real life would have a serious impact on his storytelling, potentially a very positive impact. He'd already tried to address the issues of harassment in season two—perhaps in a way that echoes his tangential closeness to harassment (some say he kept silent about C.K.) and not speaking up in the past. It would surely be different if he wrote it today.
Stranger Things
This is the crown jewel in Netflix's bid to make a show with as much audience chatter as rival HBO used to get with
Game of Thrones and hopes it gets with
Watchmen and
Westworld. The first three seasons of
Stranger Things are a phenomenon in and of themselves. Set in the 1980s in a small town called Hawkins that just so happens to have a lab full of mad scientists who experimented on children and opened a doorway to a nightmare dimension dubbed The UpsideDown, it's like all the disquieting-but-addicting horror/sci-fi you remember from the 80s distilled into one stunning and macabre series. Season 4 is a foregone conclusion, but who knows when it will arrive.
One Day at a Time
Multi-camera situation comedies (sitcoms) were the mainstay of TV for decades—you can tell them apart from the "single-cam" comedies because they're staged like a play, sometimes in front of an audience—think
I Love Lucy, Mary Tyler Moore, Cheers, Friends, All in the Family, etc. They've kind of fallen out of favor these days (
The Big Bang Theory notwithstanding). However, when Netflix revived the classic 70's sitcom
One Day at a Time—complete with original exec producer Norman Lear—it did it as a multi-cam show shot on stage. The big changes were instead in the family makeup, as the new show is about a Cuban-American family dealing with lots of modern issues faced by Latinos. All that and some kick-ass performances from the likes of Rita Moreno made it one of the top shows the streamer had. That's past tense, because Netflix cancelled it after 3 seasons. However, it's still available to watch; and a new season is
coming in 2020 from POP. Making this the first show to jump from Netflix to another network, rather than vice versa.
Unbelievable
Put a stellar cast including Toni Collette and Merritt Wever into an adaptation of this caliber and you've instantly got a winner. This mini-series is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning article, "An Unbelievable Story of Rape," written by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong, and the This American Life radio episode, “Anatomy of Doubt." It will leave you guessing and breathless through all eight episodes, as you watch a traumatized teen (Booksmart's Kaitlyn Dever) report, then recant, her own rape. But cops (Collette and Wever) in a completely different jurisdiction discover the truth of what she said.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Sometimes the TV networks are dumb. NBC had Tina Fey and Robert Carlock—who helmed the classic
30 Rock—develop a show for star Ellie Kemper (
The Office) but passed it on to Netflix. Silly, silly NBC.
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt quickly became one of the go-to Netflix classic comedies in its four seasons, displaying the rapid-fire sensibility it earned from its
30 Rock DNA. A catchy theme song doesn't hurt, either. It's been nominated for an Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy four times in a row, among many other nominations. It also has the best opening theme song of the last decade.
Other Top Originals
For more, check out our picks for the best original:
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