The Walking Dead is streaming on Netflix at the moment, and I honestly can’t recommend you start it. You have to slog through dead stretches before anything worthwhile comes back around, and after Andrew Lincoln exits, it becomes unwatchable.
Lost gave up its edge as soon as the flash-forwards began. Stranger Things dropped off a cliff once season three ended.
That’s how it goes with most shows. You commit, then you reach the patch where the series loses track of itself, and even if it pulls out of the dive, the whole run is left with a dent in it.
These 10 avoid that trap entirely. All of them are streaming on Netflix right now, and all of them hold up from the opening episode through the finale.
Stephen King, JFK and a time traveler who gets too attached
Adapted from King's novel, 11.22.63 runs eight episodes and follows a time traveler attempting to prevent the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The mission lands on Jake Epping (James Franco), an unremarkable English teacher, and he commits every error you’d predict, beginning with growing too fond of the people he encounters in the past.
The clever part is the way it fuses classic sci-fi machinery onto one of the most familiar chapters in American history, lending the whole thing an ominous shade before a single thing has gone wrong.
The best element is Jake’s dawning sense that time is “pushing back” at him. As though what’s coming was always meant to come, and he never stood a chance.
Jonah Hill and Emma Stone take an experimental drug for three days
A Netflix original miniseries from Patrick Somerville (The Leftovers), Maniac takes its cue from a Norwegian series that aired in 2015. Two strangers living with severe mental disorders enroll in a medical trial for an experimental treatment billed as a cure for everything.
Over 10 episodes, the three-day trial launches Hill’s and Stone’s characters into fantasies that occasionally overlap. A few are mundane, such as the pair being married. Others are anything but, like Stone’s character landing inside an elf fantasy epic.
It’s odd and hallucinatory and it works, because beneath all the strangeness sits a story about self-acceptance.
The same body, the same London street, four different centuries
Drawn from a DC graphic novel by Si Spencer, Bodies leans hard on a concept that carries plenty of weight. The series jumps between 1890, 1941, 2023 and 2053, and in every era the identical dead body appears on the identical London spot.
Four separate investigations unfold side by side before they begin bleeding into one another. Picture time travel spliced with noir detective work.
Its eight episodes demand your attention, since the plotting turns dense, but the payoff arrives, and no other show is working with a premise like it.
Two live-action Ticks, and one of them is better
Both live-action takes on The Tick sit on Netflix, and neither one stops being funny. The Tick himself is an enormous, dim superhero packing super strength and near-invulnerability. Alongside him is Arthur, a timid, physically unimposing everyman wearing a moth-themed flying suit that everyone reads as a bunny.
The parody began life as a comic book in the late 1980s. (Strictly speaking he was a newsletter mascot first and only later got a comic of his own.) A witty 1990s cartoon followed, and these two series came after that.
The first casts Patrick Warburton of Seinfeld as the Big Blue Bug of Justice, and it’s a sharply written, sitcom-shaped show far more concerned with the lulls between adventures, when The Tick is parked in a diner with Arthur and his superhero pals. Fox pulled the plug after nine episodes. Warburton was born to play this part.
The second launched on Amazon in 2016, lasted two seasons and 22 episodes, and is the stronger of the pair. It pivots toward Arthur (Griffin Newman), fleshing him out into a three-dimensional person carrying genuine issues and insecurities. The Tick (Peter Serafinowicz) remains the same enormous dim blue guy who wrecks things by accident because he has no concept of his own strength.
See both if you have the time. If you’re picking just one, go with the second, where every season delivers a complete, funny story with real heart running underneath it.
Tatiana Maslany plays 17 people and the Emmys took three seasons to notice
Long before She-Hulk, Maslany made her name on Orphan Black, a Canadian sci-fi thriller centered on a woman who discovers she is one of many identical clones. Driving the plot is an illegal cloning experiment now eliminating its own clones to erase the evidence.
The hook isn’t really the premise, though. It’s Maslany. Across five seasons and 50 episodes she inhabits 17 entirely distinct characters, each with their own quirks and a personality forged by a different life.
The Emmys passed her over two seasons running. The backlash grew loud enough that a nomination followed the third season and a win came for the fourth, and even that fails to capture what she pulls off here.
Yes, the Jurassic World kids’ show, and yes, really
My expectations for Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous were low. A Netflix kids’ series hung on one of my favorite movie franchises. Then I actually watched it and walked away impressed.
A group of kids finds itself on Isla Nublar during the events of Jurassic World and long afterward. They’re attending a camp on the island when the dinosaurs break loose, and the two counselors in charge of them wind up forced onto an evacuation boat while the kids are left behind. Survival first, then escape.
What makes it work is the attention paid to slotting the show into established Jurassic Park and Jurassic World lore. Recall how Henry Wu (BD Wong) is sort of a villain across the newer films and nobody ever explores it? Camp Cretaceous explores it, and it becomes one of the show’s best running threads.
It also gives screen time to dinosaurs the movies skipped over, such as Ankylosaurus and Carnotaurus. Five seasons, 50 episodes, steady throughout, and stronger than several of the actual Jurassic films.
The villains aren’t machines, they’re the CEOs
Pantheon debuted on AMC before shifting to Prime Video for its second and final season. It unfolds in a world where two competing technology firms, Logorhythms and Alliance Telecom, are unlocking the science of uploading human minds into a virtual world.
Three protagonists hold it together. Maddie Kim (Katie Chang) is a bullied teenager who finds out her late father isn’t gone at all, merely uploaded by Logorhythms. Caspian Keyes (Paul Dano) is a 17-year-old computer prodigy who discovers Logorhythms staged his entire life for a particular reason. Vinod Chanda (Raza Jaffrey) is an engineer uploaded against his will by Alliance Telecom who now resides in the virtual world.
The virtual-versus-real territory is ground The Matrix already covered, yet the antagonists feel far more contemporary. The villains here aren’t machines. They’re the ruthless, uncaring executives behind the technology, unbothered by whoever suffers in the name of discovery.
It’s visually stunning, particularly when it dives into the mind-bending world the uploaded characters occupy. And over 16 tightly crafted episodes it never loses sight of what’s at risk outside the machine.
The first smart home was built in the 1970s and it’s still awake
Cassandra is a German horror series following a family that moves into the very first smart home, built back in the 1970s. Its AI features lie dormant on arrival, until the family’s tech-savvy son flips the system on and rouses Cassandra, a robot woman designed to match the era.
Her conduct grows odder. Then manipulative. Then the family realizes she is nothing like a helpful household appliance.
Creator Benjamin Gutsche uses all six episodes to take his time, methodically laying groundwork before the revelations land and the outcome turns horrifying.
A missing kid, four families and a conspiracy spanning generations
The other German import that justifies the subtitles is Dark, three seasons and 26 episodes from creators Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese. Four families in a small German town begin digging into the disappearance of a local child. What they uncover is a time-travel conspiracy stretching backward and forward across several generations.
Escalation is the whole trick. It begins as a missing person case and expands season by season toward stakes that could end the world.
Rarer still, it swells to that scale without ever losing its grip on its characters as people.
Alan Tudyk crash-lands in Colorado and kills a doctor
Who doesn’t love Alan Tudyk? Between voicing K-2SO in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and playing Wash on Firefly, the man is boundlessly talented and likable, and he cashes all of that in across four seasons and 44 episodes of Resident Alien.
His character is an alien dispatched to Earth to exterminate humanity for the planet’s own benefit. He crashes in Colorado instead, kills a local doctor, and assumes the doctor’s identity while figuring out how to complete the assignment. Along the way he starts questioning whether wiping everyone out is really the right move.
It’s sweet, it’s funny, and it stars Alan Tudyk. What else do you need?