Patriot is amazing, more people should watch it, everyone I know who has was enthralled by it.
Counterpart was great but structure made it hard for to watch knowing it'd been cancelled.
Scavengers Reign was great; I couldn't get into Common Side Effects.
Evil is exactly the Catholic X-Files, which is an amazing concept, but by the end of the 2nd season it is all the way off the rails and hurtling into a canyon.
Given your list, you might dig Lodge 49, which is somewhere in the intersection of HACF, Evil, The Big Lebowski.
Patriot is my single favorite show of all time. I absolutely adore it and every preposterous, absurd line.
So many quotable moments. Vantasner Danger Meridian. Structural Dynamics of Flow. The attaché badge.
So many phenomenal scenes. I’m not surprised it didn’t get more traction with the general public but it was unafraid to take some serious and weird risks. But they pay off in spades for me!
Are you me? Patriot is amazing and I will never stop recommending it no matter how many dumbfounded looks I get.
I have a framed "Structural Dynamics of Flow" poster on my wall in my home office, visible on Teams calls. Only 1 person has ever recognized the reference.
> So many quotable moments. Vantasner Danger Meridian. Structural Dynamics of Flow. The attaché badge.
My friends and I have found that Patriot phrases make excellent team names in pub trivia, even if no other teams get the references. (Also "double great", "disgraced veterinarians", "pin-flam-fastened pan traps", more I'm forgetting... clearly I need to rewatch the show yet again!)
> I’m not surprised it didn’t get more traction with the general public
I suspect the show would have had a larger audience if it had a better title. That seems to be an instant negative whenever I try recommending it to someone. Hopefully Steven Conrad's new hbo show will raise his profile enough to let more people rediscover Patriot. It's an absolute gem.
If you like Patriot, you might enjoy Mr Inbetween. It's one of my favourite shows ever. Different story, same level of dark comedy, with a heaping dose of Aussie humour.
If you want something more American, the show for you is Barry.
Evil got cancelled with a 6 episode finish, which is unheard of when making TV. It wanders around, and has highlights in each season. The x-files got real sloppy near the end too.
Also in the running for great title sequences as well
HACF only has four seasons, but it features great character arcs and a beautiful ending. I don’t think it’s on the level of The Wire, but it’s way more than enough to stand apart.
I've heard about the show on an episode of the podcast "Endless Thread", where the creator Joseph Bennett talked about how the show came to be and how his creative process worked.
It was very intriguing and I started watching it on the same day. This would have really deserved a renewal for another season, but sadly it got cancelled.
One of the few sci fi shows that makes an alien world truly feel alien. Where it clearly has its own evolution, ecosystems, rules, etc., but they are so... alien that it is barely comprehensible to the characters and audience.
He has something to do with this show as well which was obtuse enough to keep me at a distance. It's an unhinged, detective story with puppets in a noir-laden city grit setting.
I need to get around to Perpetual Grace; I've watched the first 15 minutes of it like four times and always ended up bouncing off of it for one reason or another; but I know if I got into it, I'd probably really dig it.
Funny thing about watching Patriot for the first time: my sister in law showed up on it. We had no idea. Just all the sudden there she is on my TV. She's the mute cop, Sophie.
If the first episode doesn’t draw you in, it’s probably not your kind of show. I’m not saying episode 1 is all it has to offer, but if you don’t enjoy episode 1 it’s doubtful you will enjoy the rest.
Station Eleven. Wouldn't have made it past a few episodes if I didn't know how good Mackenzie Davis was from watching HCF 1000 times. I stuck through a few things I didn't care for at first, now it will probably remain my favorite show of all time.
Station Eleven is so beautiful and human. Great pick. Highly recommend The Leftovers if you liked that one. Its exploration of life and grief and humanity following a secular rapture is stunning, and the performances are outstanding.
I have (re)watched everything Patrick Somerville has worked on because of Station Eleven :) I rewatched The Leftovers last month. Maniac last week (this time I noticed a funny reference by Sally Field's character pitching something on the phone about a guy with special hugging powers).
None of that was my type of thing before, now it's all I want. I think the genre might be called absurdist fiction, but I'm not sure that covers the full vibe.
Dan Romer is an excellent composer too, I listen to his stuff a lot. I have the Station Eleven soundtrack in my car, now my kid randomly sings Wandering Under The Moon, and it's one of my favorite things in the world.
I have seen two of your five shows and like them a lot, and heard of another and it’s already on my to-watch list. This is enough overlap to get the other ones added to the list (plus that pilot).
Given the agreement in taste so far, here’s a couple to try if you haven’t:
- Sweet Vicious — marred by getting cancelled after one season, but a fun season anyway. College sexual assault survivor becomes an anti-rapist vigilante. It’s, uh… more light-hearted than the premise sounds?
- Review with Forrest MacNeil — A guy has a review show where he attempts to review… life. Takes viewer requests for what specifically to review in each episode. He takes his job very seriously. Avoid seeing episode counts if at all possible. Trust me on that part. Doesn’t ruin it if you do see them, but being blind to that does improve it.
Another that I’m not sure counts as under-watched as it’s more recent, but I rarely see it discussed in the wild: Dickinson, a magical realism biographical show about the poet, that mixes in humor and some modern pop culture (think: A Knight’s Tale).
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My understanding was that if you know you're on the last episode then you'll expect things to be resolved or something like that. Similarly, you probably don't expect any twists on the second episode.
I've not heard of the series so I can't comment on it specifically but that was my take on their warning.
great recommndations, Patriot is amazing dark comedy with great atmosphere, SR is great semi-documentary about alien planet ecosystem, very peaceful, didn't like CSE and Counterpart though
I would suggest also Devs just for the visuals and Tales from the Loop for the most peaceful TV show I've ever seen
> Scavengers reign is from the same people as common side effects.
In case it matters to someone, the order is reverse. As in, Scavengers Reign came before. Also, be aware it wasn’t renewed for a second season. But it absolutely deserved it, just not enough people knew about it.
Rubicon is excellent. I was disappointed at the time it only got one season, but in retrospect it worked out okay because it's one season done very very well.
Recently discovered Satisfactory. It's roughly GTA2 vs GTA3 when compared to Factorio (2d top down vs 3d open world). I'd love to hear peoples thoughts on the two games and what one does well vs the other. What people get out of either.
Having sunk vastly too many hours into Factorio, and recently just about 'completing' Satisfactory, I think Factorio is the far richer factory game.
Satisfactory's unexpected joy is in exploration, such as finding all the alternative recipes. However mid game starts to be a bit of a drag, and late game is borderline miserable (the Smart! mod helps tremendously but I'm talking vanilla-only experience here). In particular in satisfactory you never out-tech problems. You never get tools to help you start abstracting away details like you do in Factorio with construction bots, beacons, modules, and substations.
Satisfactory makes me want to design & build pretty or well laid out factories. But since it doesn't give me any tools to help with that, I end up with just floating slabs in the sky of endlessly repeated simple connections.
Factorio feels far more rewarding when you come up with clever layouts for things, as you can then copy/paste it. Or design it to be modular for later expansion. There's the metagame there if making things tileable for rapid expansion later on. Satisfactory largely doesn't have that. It's too painful to expand anything, so it's all one & done stuff
Satisfactory is more designed for social interaction. That alone makes it worthwhile.
I suspect this is part of my own mindset. Satisfactory is all about watching the sunset over your factory as you goof around with good friends after a real world hard days work. There's no frantic action to be had by design. The factory is slower.
I really didn't like Factorio at all. It's either too frantic with enemies or just a grind with no enemies. I'm always down for Satisfactory and beer with friends though. That game has a relax and chill factor like no other.
Satisfactory is smaller scale (resource patches far apart, most of the build being about transport and linking a few buildings together, power being harder to achieve, and overall feels resource constrained) and Factorio feels like a blank canvas to paint factory on.
I really love this as it might obviate Trello - I have two details that might add to the experience.
Drag and drop functionality to move bullets and lists up and down so that points aren’t locked into the order you input them in (exactly how Trello works)
Support for link recognition (any link will auto underline and become a working web link)
Drag and drop exists in the current version, just click and drag the bullet point of the task you want to move. Also should work on mobile.
Link recognition exists for task descriptions and comments (select a task and click "Details & comments"). There is no link recognition for titles because clicking a title already has an action associated with it, this would lead to a UI problem if a task title is just a link with no other text.
Thanks for the feedback!
Me too, I will probably add this in the future.
In the meantime, you can kind of get around this by creating subtasks of the task that is blocked by more than one thing, and each subtask can be blocked by a different task. The benefit of this is that you end up being more explicit about what is causing a task to be blocked.
