If you are a normal person like me and you don’t get aroused by TV shows about dungeons and dragons that take over the world on Sunday nights, then I have good news for you. I am writing this blog to provide you with a reasonable list of TV series that are truly entertaining and worthwhile.
If you have a simpleton brain and you are into shit like that documentary where the guy molests tigers and you find yourself proclaiming stuff like “Steven Avery didn’t do it!” then you should just stop reading now. You’ll get offended by this I’m sure. But if it makes you feel any better, you are only feeling offended because you have fallen for the classic case of “everyone said this thing is good, so it must be good!” If you were an adult that could formulate your own thoughts and opinions then you wouldn’t be the slightest bit offended by anything I’m going to say here.
Ok, we got that out of the way. Hopefully the Game of Thrones crew has stopped reading at this point. “Dungeons and dragons” probably had them throwing their cell phones across the room. “Snake doesn’t know what he’s talking about, I have spent 500 hours of my life binging episodes three times over and streaming podcasts that explain the show to me. It’s a great show!”
Since the inception of Netflix I have constantly struggled to find TV shows that I found entertaining enough that I would watch them from start to finish. Given my difficulties, maybe it’s best I begin this discussion by giving you a list of the overhyped TV shows so you don’t waste any of your time forcing yourself to watch them like I did.
OVERRATED – BREAKING BAD
l might as well come out of the gates hot with “the greatest television show of all time.” Who on earth decided that this was the greatest television show of all time? I think a bunch of people that like this show must have that “this is so foreign to me with my middle-class upbringing and I am fascinated by it” thing going on. Spoiler alert to all you Walter White fans: There is zero real-life Walter Whites in existence on earth. The premise of this show from the get-go was moronic. A high school chem teacher capable of winning a Nobel Prize elects to teach and make 40k a year. Money becomes tight and his first immediate thought is “I’ll cook meth on the side”? I love how teaching was option #1 and cooking meth was option #2. Seems like there may be some logical happy-medium between those two jobs. Maybe throw a resume at your local lab tech or research company, Walt.
The gf and me PAINFULLY tried to battle through this show. I think we were actually pretty excited to be watching it during Season 1 and then at some point it became “What do you wanna watch…I don’t know just put on Breaking Bad I guess.” I believe we tapped out sometime in Season 3. After about 20 episodes we just kind of cracked the code ourselves. Ok, the teacher is clearly addicted to the meth-cooking game. Let me guess – this won’t end well for him!?
The ONLY two memorable moments of this TV show for me were 1) when Walt watched Jesses gf choke to death and 2) when that short pudgy cop did an impression of a mexican drug dealer praying for the DEA not to catch him. Maybe that’s not an entirely accurate representation of the cop impression scene, but I think the cop was far and away the best character and that’s only because I laughed when he did meathead cop stuff.
To sum it up, this show is Snoresville, USA. Don’t make the mistake of trying to fight through the boredom waiting for it to put you on the edge of your seat. It won’t.
OVERRATED – GAME OF THRONES
Are you tired of hearing me bitch about Game of Thrones yet? Well good. Now you know how I feel listening to my meathead friends incessantly talk about this stupid fucking show every Sunday and Monday during the past 10 years. The only time I have ever been excited to hear you losers talk about Game of Thrones was when the last season came to a poorly written conclusion and it disappointed all you fanboys. Hold on a second. You thought a show about dragons and queens and magic spells was going to have a logical conclusion? Oh AND you’re 30 years old? Good stuff.
“But dude there is so much killing and sex scenes it’s a badass show.” If that’s what really gets you going just wait until you hear about LiveLeak for your murder needs and any of the thousands of existing porn sites for your naked girls needs. I have probably watched a total of ten episodes of this show (random and out of sequence) and every single second I spent watching my brain was constantly repeating “I can’t believe there are grown adults who enjoy this stupidity.” My most vivid memory was my roommates in college nagging me to watch an episode where some giant guy killed a small guy by squeezing his head between his hands. They were convinced it was the coolest thing ever. Meanwhile, I was convinced I could go write for HBO if that’s all the creativity it takes to get 50 million morons to tune into your show weekly.
OVERRATED – MAD MEN
I think I might have had some negative bias from the moment I saw the cover art for this show because I am usually not a huge 1970s era drama TV show guy. I don’t know what a soap opera is, but I was kind of half-worried that I was watching a soap opera when I started this show. Don’t get me wrong, it had a good storyline and there was plenty of entertaining and comical scenes. But similar to Breaking Bad I just started to get bored with it. Every night when I went to bed for a couple month stretch I would turn this show on and I gradually began falling asleep earlier and earlier into the episodes as the show progressed. I’m pretty sure I made it at least halfway through this series before calling it quits. It wasn’t even like a conscious decision to quit watching it. One day I just realized that a month had gone by and I hadn’t watched the show. That kind of sums up my feelings on it, I guess.
Also I could have done without 50% of the ‘men treating women like dogshit’ scenes. Ok, Mr. Tv Show writer I GOT IT – men treated women horribly in the 1970s. You made your point with the first 17 jokes by the white-haired guy. That aspect of the show for me was like watching a UFC fight where one guy gets the living shit beat out of him from start to finish. It’s VERY apparent from the start that the fight is over, but the guy just won’t stay down. At some point I get that feeling where I want to wave the white flag and say “I’ve seen enough!”
Overall this show gets a big ole indifferent MEH from me.
UNDECIDED – THE WIRE
I wanted to like this show so badly. Between the detective stuff, a drunk Irish guy, and me living in Baltimore this should have been the coolest show ever. I’ll never forget when I was watching a scene of some drug dealers sitting in Chaps Pit Beef and thinking “Hey that’s where my buddy took me to lunch the other week. We were sitting at that table!”
I think similarly to Breaking Bad I get annoyed by all of the middle-class nerds who are in awe of watching people sell drugs. That part doesn’t really get my juices flowing, it just kind of depresses me. I started watching this show several years ago, and from what I recall I stopped watching during the third season. That second season where they just flipped to a complete new set of characters and the guys were stealing shit out of shipping containers really turned me off. To be completely honest, I think I’m going to give this show another shot. I really did enjoy watching the drunk Irish cop. When he tied that “Baltimore knot” on the boat and the heroined out guy did a way better job than him that was the most I have ever related to someone down here.
Ok – now it’s time to get to the meat and bones of this dissertation. Let’s talk about the shows that I have watched that I think are genuinely entertaining, in some cases even addicting. Before I begin, I’d like to acknowledge that a handful of these shows are critically acclaimed, but another handful of them might have you thinking – ‘what the hell is he talking about?’ I am well aware that some of my picks may seem unorthodox, but as a guy who has started and given up on like 100 tv shows, I feel experienced enough to weed out a shitty show. And the bottom line is these shows didn’t get weeded out by me.
GOOD – YOU
I was convinced I was going to hate this show, but I have to admit it was pretty compelling. This might be the only example in history where a show NEARLY met all of the hype it was getting. It seemed like shortly before COVID arrived that everyone in the world was asking me if I had seen this show. I finally caved and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
I’m not a huge fan of those documentaries where Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy rape and kill everybody in site. In fact I’d go as far as to say that I don’t enjoy watching serial killers become A-list celebrities due to simple-minded idiots lapping up news stories. Like when some asshole shoots up a movie theater or a school and then everybody starts googling his name and slapping him on the cover of the newspaper…that shit makes my blood boil. Talk about feeding into the ego of an egomaniac. Ok, I feel like we are slightly off topic here. Back to You.
The reason I can enjoy watching this show is because I am intrigued by a good ole fashioned full-on functioning psycho (probably because I am one). The main character’s personality is actually pretty fascinating. He’s good with kids, he’s relatively normal around women, but he clearly has some SEVERE trust issues. I enjoy watching him in action as he digs himself into a deeper and deeper hole and stalks women, but I also like to pretend this type of person doesn’t exist in real life while I watch it (even though there are probably 10 of these guys in every major US city).
This is a pretty easy watch and there’s quite a few moments that will actually have you on the edge of your seat, unlike Breaking Bad. This will probably become a terrible show over the next few seasons, but as far as the episodes that exist today – the juice is worth the squeeze here.
GOOD – BLOODLINE
I feel like this is one of my recommendations that people may disagree with, but this was one show I can think of that I was truly having a hard time not clicking ‘watch next episode.’ I think I spent like 6 hours on back-to-back Sundays watching this shit. What a waste of time that seems like in hindsight. But this pretty much had all of the makings of a show that I was going to enjoy. That laid-back chill Florida lifestyle, flickers, booze, and a dysfunctional psychotic family. I’ll take a round of all of that stuff, bartender.
I watched this quite a while back, but from what I recall I would say Season 1 was outstanding and then the next however many seasons were all pretty good. Once that Danny flicker started losing screen time I definitely lost a little bit of interest. Also I’ve always kind of liked that actor that plays John. I have no rationale for this claim, but he just seems like the type of dude who would be down to barhop and drink like 20 beers with me.
GREAT – NARCOS (SEASONS 1 & 2 ONLY)
I had no idea how interested I was in Pablo Escobar’s life until I started watching this show. To be honest, I kind of get all of those Mexican drugs dealer guys confused with each other…El Chapo, Escobar, Guillen, Fidel Castro (I just googled to double check and I realize he is not a drug dealer). All these guys are kind of the same person to me. It seems like Mexico is so far gone that anytime you capture one of these guys a new guy just pops up out of a hole and steps into his place. Mexico’s drug dealer bullpen is like 5000 guys deep. It’s exhausting to try and keep up with. In a way I’m sure it’s similar to the Mayor of a major US city like Baltimore. Plug one criminal in there, wait for them to steal, catch them, and then repeat the process with a new criminal.
I’m fully aware that the writers of this show probably overdramatized every aspect of Pablo Escobar’s life, but even a scaled back version of this story is still incredible. The guy built his own fucking prison before agreeing to be locked up. He got so good at dealing drugs that he became more powerful than the PRESIDENT of the country. Imagine if we could have harnessed that skill and energy into him researching cancer or something like that.
I was hesitant to give this show a GOOD or an OUTSTANDING rating so I just went with a tweener of GREAT. It’s not like I was pulling all-nighters to binge episodes of this show, but I was definitely going to bed one episode later than I should have been. I think the first two seasons were pretty damn riveting despite the fact that I knew how the story was going to end.
I will say that I started to watch Season 3 of this show, which does not feature Pablo Escobar, and gave up after a couple of episodes. So I highly recommend giving it a watch, but don’t feel like you have to continue past the second season.
OUTSTANDING – THE OFFICE
How much do I really need to say here? If you haven’t seen The Office, then I’m guessing you already know that you need to invest the time and watch The Office. It honestly doesn’t make sense how goddam funny and well-written this show is. Literally every character in it is mildly to extremely funny with the exception of Nellie Bertram. Also Gabe and Robert California make me a bit uncomfortable.
OUTSTANDING – OZARK
No two ways about it, this show is terrific. I think it just comes down to Jason Bateman being the man. I’m pretty sure he’s writing this sucker and starring in it. Unlike Walter White, I feel like it’s feasible that there are a few real-life Marty Byrdes in existence. Definitely not to the extent where the show has progressed, but I think the Season 1 Marty Byrde accountant and money launderer is pretty realistic. And there’s something extremely satisfying about watching Marty Byrde day-to-day. The guy is in the business of getting shit done. Have you ever tried to build like a shitty IKEA table on a Sunday morning and the tools are cheap and some bolts are seemingly missing and you just say “Fuck it, I want to watch football so I’m going to get my own tools and bang this thing out.”? That’s the feeling I get watching Marty figure out ways to keep laundering and keep the family alive. I guess he has a little more at stake than me wanting to catch a buzz on my couch at 1pm, but you get the point.
A quick ranking of the characters in this show:
1. Marty Byrde
I already pretty much covered Marty. The guy is the shit. Brilliant, selfless, and personable.
2. Buddy the old guy
Buddy is basically the dream version of the geezer that everyone hopes to be some day. He’s got all kinds of terrific stories, everybody loves him, and he blew a home invader to smithereens with a shotgun. Also at the age of 27 I can already relate to his ‘I don’t give a shit what some know-it-all doctor has to say’ attitude.
3. Ruth Langmore
I like this girl. She doesn’t take shit from anyone. She’s made a few mistakes along the way, but she’s generally pretty damn smart. She also has that perfect amount of ‘flicker’ in her that I can relate to her lifestyle a little bit (as I crack open a beer at 11am) and she isn’t worried about getting punched in the face. Plus her loyalty is off the charts…aside from that one minor incident where she tries to murder Marty.
4. Del
Del strikes me as an intelligent, self-made man. He also has that ‘I’ll figure it out on my own’ attitude that Marty has. Plus he’s kind of a low-key bro when he’s outside of the work office. He’s down to play golf and crush cocktails when he’s not instructing one of his bodyguards to torture somebody. I knew I liked this guy as soon as he made that “top-rated minivan” comment to Marty when he loans Marty’s own van back to him. The guy has swagger.
5-98. Every Other Character
99. Wendy Byrde
This lady needs to chill the fuck out. Everything she does is nearly detrimental to the family’s survival. Marty is constantly cleaning up gigantic piles of shit that she creates. She basically represents what happens every time a new president comes into office. She stirs up a bunch of bullshit and wastes valuable time and resources making terrible decisions that the next person will have to come in and try to fix.
100. The Federal Agent
OUTSTANDING – PEAKY BLINDERS
Gun to my head if someone asks me what my favorite TV show is I’m probably blurting out Peaky Blinders. This is another show I did not expect myself to enjoy given the World War timeframe, but about halfway through the first episode I realized I was going to have an issue with the amount of time I was about to waste watching this. I don’t even know if I can consider it wasting time because the show is so effing good. I could watch this show for 8 straight hours and not even feel guilty about it.
There isn’t anyone on earth smoother than Tommy Shelby’s character. This dude does whatever the hell he wants and always finds a way to get whatever the hell he wants. A successful businessman who isn’t afraid to pull a razor blade out of his flat cap and slit your throat. Plus he’s constantly running a moderate-to-heavy whiskey buzz and his life revolves around gambling on the ponies. How do I sign up for this shit?
I don’t consider myself a film critic, but even a complete moron like me can recognize when he sees great acting and a great storyline. Ever since the last episode ended I have been sitting around fully prepared to burn 15 hours at a moment’s notice when the new season comes out. I’ll include one of my favorite scenes below, but I’m going to write SPOILER ALERT non-sarcastically. Because if you haven’t watched this show then for the love of god drop what you’re doing and watch this show.
That’s it ladies and gentlemen. I guess that’s all of the shows that come to mind for the time being. If you know of some TV shows that you feel are worth watching that I have not mentioned above then please feel free to share your recommendations. But be forewarned if you send me something like “Tiger King” it’s going to affect our friendship for the rest of our lives.
You may be trying too hard to be different
If you like Game of Thrones past season 3, maybe 4, you’re a braindead pop cultist.
just passsing thru but holy shit your takes are terrible.
The fact that you consider Mad Men and Game of Thrones to be slop for the uncultured masses and then hail The Office as some achievement in entertainment is the most contrarian “please read my dead ass blog” shit that I’ve ever seen.