What to Watch
Underrated 2010s Shows That Actually Went Unwatched
By Jordan A. · · Updated · 5 min read
Most lists of underrated 2010s television are lying to you. If a show won Emmys, ran six seasons and gets quoted in group chats, it is not a hidden gem. It is a hit you personally missed, which is a different problem with a different fix.
The bar here is stricter: shows that were canceled early, aired on a channel nobody had, or ended without the audience they earned. Nothing that swept an awards season. Season counts and networks are included because a two-season show and a five-season show are different asks. Where each one streams changes, and several of these have moved services more than once, so the title page on BingeNext shows current US options.
The ones that got canceled too early
Terriers ran thirteen episodes on FX in 2010 and is the most cited cancellation of the decade among people who write about television. Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James as unlicensed private investigators in San Diego, doing small jobs badly. It is funny for six episodes and then quietly becomes a show about two men who cannot stop damaging their own lives. A terrible title and a worse poster killed it. Thirteen episodes is a weekend.
Lodge 49 got two seasons on AMC in 2018 and 2019. A surf shop employee in Long Beach joins a fraternal order that may or may not have alchemical secrets. It has almost no plot momentum and that is the design: it is a show about people at the bottom of an economy being kind to each other. If nothing happening is a dealbreaker for you, skip it. If you are burned out, it may be the most restorative thing on this list.
Enlightened ran eighteen episodes across two seasons on HBO from 2011 to 2013. Mike White wrote it, years before The White Lotus, and Laura Dern plays a woman who has a breakdown, goes to a retreat and returns to her company determined to be better, which makes her impossible to be near. Season two turns into a corporate thriller. It is the best thing Dern has done on television.
Rectify ran four seasons on SundanceTV from 2013 to 2016, thirty episodes, about a man released from death row after nineteen years when his conviction is vacated. It is not a mystery about whether he did it. It is about a person who cannot rejoin a world that moved on. Slow in a way that will lose some viewers in episode two and hold others for life.
The prestige dramas that never got their audience
The Leftovers ran three seasons on HBO from 2014 to 2017. Two percent of the world's population vanishes with no explanation and never gets one. Season one is punishing, season two is one of the great seasons of television, and the show is finally about grief rather than about the event. Give it four episodes before you decide.
Halt and Catch Fire ran four seasons on AMC from 2014 to 2017 and improved every year, which nobody watched happen. It starts as a Mad Men imitation about the personal computer boom and becomes a show about two women building companies together. Seasons three and four are the reward.
The Knick ran two seasons on Cinemax in 2014 and 2015, every episode directed by Steven Soderbergh, with Clive Owen as a cocaine-addicted surgeon in a 1900 New York hospital. Surgery scenes that are genuinely difficult to watch and an electronic score that should not work. It is the most formally adventurous thing on this page.
Treme ran four seasons on HBO from 2010 to 2013, David Simon's New Orleans show after The Wire, following musicians and cooks rebuilding after Katrina. It is deliberately plotless compared to The Wire and that is why it got dismissed. Watch it for the music and for a portrait of a city that no other American series has attempted.
Hannibal ran three seasons on NBC from 2013 to 2015, which remains an astonishing fact. Bryan Fuller turned the Thomas Harris material into something operatic, with Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy, and the second half of season two is as good as network television has ever looked. It ends unresolved.
The comedies you have not heard of
Review ran three seasons on Comedy Central from 2014 to 2017, with Andy Daly as a critic who reviews life experiences on request and destroys himself doing it. The episode where he is asked to review divorce is the funniest and cruellest half hour of the decade. It is a comedy that commits to consequences.
Patriot ran two seasons on Prime Video from 2015 to 2018, about an intelligence officer whose cover job is at an industrial piping firm and who processes his feelings by singing them in folk clubs. Deadpan to the point of hostility. Nothing else is like it.
Getting On ran three short seasons on HBO from 2013 to 2015, adapted from the British series, set in a geriatric care ward. Laurie Metcalf, Alex Borstein and Niecy Nash. It is bleak, humane and eighteen episodes long.
One Mississippi ran two seasons on Prime Video from 2015 to 2017, with Tig Notaro playing a version of herself returning to Mississippi after her mother's death. Twelve episodes total, and the first is the one that convinces you.
Where to start
If you want the shortest way in, watch Terriers. If you want the show most likely to matter to you for years, it is The Leftovers, and you should start it when you have the emotional room. If you want to laugh and then feel strange about it, Review.
If you would rather hand over the sorting, BingeNext's TV recommendations take shows you already love and return picks with a reason and where each one streams. A run takes about a minute.
Topics covered: underrated, 2010s, streaming-era, hidden-gems, recent
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.