What to Watch
Genuinely Underrated 1980s TV Shows
By Jordan A. · · Updated · 5 min read
Most lists of forgotten 1980s television are not forgotten television. Cheers, The Golden Girls, Hill Street Blues and Magnum, P.I. were among the most awarded series of the decade and they have never been off the air. Calling them hidden gems is just calling them good.
These are different. Every show below aired in the 1980s, all of them are worth the time, and most of them were either canceled early, moved networks, or ran quietly while something louder took the attention. A few are hard to find now, which is part of why nobody talks about them. Each entry says what it is and what it costs you.
Crime, done strangely
Wiseguy (CBS, from 1987, four seasons) put an undercover federal agent, played by Ken Wahl, inside one criminal organisation per multi-episode arc, which is a structure nobody was using on American network television at the time. Serialised crime storytelling on modern streaming basically starts here. The first arc, about a Philadelphia crime boss, is the one to try. The picture quality on surviving copies is rough and the theme music is very much of its era.
Crime Story (NBC, 1986 to 1988, two seasons, forty four episodes) is Michael Mann's other 1980s show, and it is nothing like Miami Vice. A Chicago cop, played by Dennis Farina, who really had been a Chicago cop, chases one rising mobster from 1963 into the following years, and the show moves the whole cast to Las Vegas partway through. It was too serialised for 1986 audiences and it died. The pilot was directed by Abel Ferrara.
The Equalizer (CBS, 1985 to 1989) is the original, with Edward Woodward as Robert McCall, a former intelligence officer placing a small newspaper advertisement offering help to people with nowhere to go. Two films and a later series have used the premise since. Woodward's version is slower and much sadder, an old man doing penance in an unfriendly New York. Worth watching for the performance rather than the action.
The single seasons that got away
Max Headroom (ABC, 1987 to 1988, two seasons, fourteen episodes) is set twenty minutes into the future in a world run by television networks, where a journalist's mind ends up copied into a stuttering digital presenter. It is the only cyberpunk series a US broadcast network has ever aired, and its ideas about ratings-driven media have aged alarmingly well. Fourteen episodes and out. The effects are cheap and the writing is not.
Frank's Place (CBS, 1987 to 1988, one season, twenty two episodes) has Tim Reid inheriting a Creole restaurant in New Orleans and running it. It was shot single camera with no laugh track and lit like a film, years before anybody else did that with a half hour comedy. CBS moved it around the schedule until nobody could find it. It is the most quietly influential canceled show on this page.
Buffalo Bill (NBC, 1983 to 1984, two seasons) is Dabney Coleman as a small-market talk show host who is genuinely unpleasant, with no redemptive arc and no lesson at the end of the episode. Network comedy did not do that in 1983. Audiences hated him, which was the point, and the show was gone in a year. Everything from later comedies built around difficult men owes it something.
Grown-up drama for grown-ups
St. Elsewhere (NBC, 1982 to 1988, six seasons, one hundred and thirty seven episodes) ran a run-down Boston teaching hospital with a huge ensemble and a willingness to let doctors fail. It is less famous than Hill Street Blues, which shared its production company and its style, and it took bigger swings, including a final scene that is still the most argued-about ending in American television. It is also six seasons long, so treat it as a project.
The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd (NBC and then Lifetime, 1987 to 1991, five seasons, sixty five episodes) follows a divorced woman in her thirties in New York, and almost nothing plot-shaped happens to her. Blair Brown plays her. It had no laugh track, drifted between comedy and melancholy inside a single scene, and moved to cable when NBC gave up. Half the character-driven half hours of the last fifteen years are doing what this did first.
China Beach (ABC, 1988 to 1991, four seasons, sixty four episodes) is set at an evacuation hospital in Vietnam in 1967 and centers the women there: a nurse played by Dana Delany, an entertainer, a Red Cross volunteer. It is much less interested in combat than in exhaustion, and the later seasons follow the characters home, which is where it becomes remarkable. Music rights kept it off home release for years, which is most of why it vanished.
The British ones, which are six episodes each
Edge of Darkness (BBC Two, November to December 1985, six episodes) has a Yorkshire detective, played by Bob Peck, investigating his own daughter's murder into the nuclear industry, with Joe Don Baker as a very strange CIA man. It is a conspiracy thriller that turns into something close to a ghost story, and it holds up completely. Six hours, and it is the best thing on this page.
The Singing Detective (BBC One, November to December 1986, six episodes) is Dennis Potter's serial about a crime novelist immobilised in hospital by severe psoriasis, whose mind runs three stories at once: his childhood, his pulp novel, and the ward. Michael Gambon plays him. Characters break into lip-synced 1940s songs. It sounds unwatchable and it is one of the highest achievements of the form. Content warning for the illness scenes, which are graphic.
A Very Peculiar Practice (BBC One, 1986 to 1988, two seasons) is Andrew Davies writing a campus satire about a university medical center staffed by an alcoholic, a paranoid and a radical feminist, while the institution around them is quietly gutted by budget cuts. It gets funnier and blacker in the second season. Nobody outside Britain has heard of it.
How to choose tonight
If you have one evening, Edge of Darkness. If you want to see where prestige television actually started, Wiseguy or Frank's Place. If you want something gentle, Molly Dodd. If you want something genuinely unlike anything else, The Singing Detective. Several of these are hard to find; where each of them streams changes, and the title page on BingeNext shows current US options when there are any.
If you'd rather not hunt, our TV recommendation tool takes shows you already love and returns picks with a reason for each and where they stream.
Topics covered: underrated, 1980s, classic-tv, throwback, nostalgia
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and is responsible for every guide published on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu. Dates, season counts and where-to-watch details in these guides are checked against official sources before publishing, and corrections are welcome at Jordan@Bingenext.com.