The Walking Dead is on Netflix right now, and I can’t in good conscience tell you to start it. There are lulls you have to grind through to get back to anything worthwhile, and once Andrew Lincoln leaves, the show is unwatchable.
Lost lost its edge the moment it started doing flash-forwards. Stranger Things fell off a cliff after season three.
That’s the deal with most series. You get invested, then you hit the stretch where the show forgets what it was doing, and even if it recovers, the whole experience has a dent in it.
These 10 don’t have that problem. Every one of them is on Netflix now, and every one of them is good from the first episode to the last.
Stephen King, JFK and a time traveler who gets too attached
11.22.63 is an eight-episode miniseries based on King’s book, about a time traveler trying to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Jake Epping (James Franco) is an ordinary English teacher handed the mission, and he makes every mistake you’d expect, starting with caring too much about the people he meets back there.
The smart move is how it welds classic sci-fi ideas onto one of the most familiar moments in American history, which gives everything a foreboding tint before anything goes wrong.
Best of all is the sense Jake picks up that time itself is “pushing back” against him. Like what’s coming is supposed to come, and he never had a chance.
Jonah Hill and Emma Stone take an experimental drug for three days
Maniac is a Netflix original miniseries from Patrick Somerville (The Leftovers), based on a Norwegian series from 2015. Two strangers with severe mental disorders sign up for a medical trial of an experimental treatment that promises to cure everything.
Across 10 episodes, the drug trial runs three days and sends Hill’s and Stone’s characters into fantasies they sometimes share. Some are ordinary, like the two of them married. Others aren’t, like Stone’s character dropped into an elf fantasy epic.
It’s weird and trippy and it lands, because underneath the strangeness it’s a show about self-acceptance.
The same body, the same London street, four different centuries
Bodies is based on a DC graphic novel by Si Spencer, and the concept does a lot of heavy lifting. The show moves between 1890, 1941, 2023 and 2053. At each point, the same dead body turns up in the same spot in London.
Four investigations run in parallel until they start feeding into each other. Think time travel crossed with film noir detective work.
You have to pay attention across its eight episodes because the plotting gets dense, but it pays off, and nothing else is using a premise like this.
Two live-action Ticks, and one of them is better
Netflix has both live-action series based on The Tick, and both are consistently funny. The Tick is a big, dumb superhero with super strength and near-invulnerability. His sidekick is Arthur, a weak, cowardly regular guy in a moth-themed flying suit that reads more as bunny.
The parody started as a comic book in the late 1980s. (Technically he was a newsletter mascot first, then got his own comic.) Then came the clever 1990s cartoon, and after that, these two.
The first stars Patrick Warburton from Seinfeld as the Big Blue Bug of Justice, and it’s a sharply written, sitcom-shaped series mostly interested in the downtime between adventures, when The Tick is sitting in a diner with Arthur and his superhero friends. Fox canceled it after nine episodes. Warburton was born to play this part.
The second series started on Amazon in 2016 and ran two seasons and 22 episodes, and it’s the better of the two. It shifts focus to Arthur (Griffin Newman), who gets built out into a three-dimensional person with real issues and insecurities. The Tick (Peter Serafinowicz) stays the same big dumb blue guy accidentally destroying things because he has no idea how strong he is.
Watch both if you can. If you’re only doing one, take the second, where each season tells a complete, funny story with a lot of heart underneath.
Tatiana Maslany plays 17 people and the Emmys took three seasons to notice
Before She-Hulk, Maslany broke out in Orphan Black, a Canadian sci-fi thriller about a woman who learns she’s one of many identical clones. The plot involves an illegal cloning experiment now killing off its own clones to bury the evidence.
But the premise isn’t the draw. Maslany is. Over five seasons and 50 episodes she plays 17 completely different characters, each with quirks and a personality shaped by a different life.
The Emmys snubbed her for two straight seasons. The outcry got loud enough that she was nominated after the third and won for the fourth, and that still undersells what she does here.
Yes, the Jurassic World kids’ show, and yes, really
I went into Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous with low expectations. A Netflix kids’ show built on one of my favorite movie franchises. Then I watched it and came away impressed.
A group of kids is on Isla Nublar during the events of Jurassic World and well after. They’re at a camp on the island when the dinosaurs get out, and the two counselors responsible for them end up forced onto an evacuation boat while the kids are stranded. Survival, then escape.
What sells it is the care taken fitting the show into existing Jurassic Park and Jurassic World lore. Remember how Henry Wu (BD Wong) is sort of a villain in the newer movies and nobody ever digs into it? Camp Cretaceous digs into it, and that’s one of its strongest recurring threads.
It also hands screen time to dinosaurs the films ignored, like Ankylosaurus and Carnotaurus. Five seasons, 50 episodes, consistent the whole way, and better than a few of the actual Jurassic movies.
The villains aren’t machines, they’re the CEOs
Pantheon premiered on AMC before moving to Prime Video for its second and final season. It’s set in a world where two rival technology companies, Logorhythms and Alliance Telecom, are cracking the science of uploading minds into a virtual world.
Three leads carry it. Maddie Kim (Katie Chang) is a bullied teenager who discovers her dead father isn’t dead, just uploaded by Logorhythms. Caspian Keyes (Paul Dano) is a 17-year-old computer genius who learns his entire life was staged by Logorhythms for a specific purpose. Vinod Chanda (Raza Jaffrey) is an engineer uploaded against his will by Alliance Telecom and now living in the virtual world.
The virtual-versus-real material covers ground The Matrix walked, but the antagonists here feel closer to now. The bad guys aren’t machines. They’re the ruthless, uncaring executives behind the technology, indifferent to whoever gets hurt in the name of discovery.
Visually it’s a marvel, especially when it leans into the mind-bending world the uploaded characters live in. And across 16 tightly crafted episodes it never forgets what’s at stake outside the machine.
The first smart home was built in the 1970s and it’s still awake
Cassandra is a German horror series about a family moving into the very first smart home, constructed in the 1970s. The AI features are dormant when they arrive, until the tech-savvy son switches the system on and wakes up Cassandra, a robot woman styled to match the decade.
Her behavior gets stranger. Then manipulative. Then the family works out that she isn’t a helpful household appliance at all.
Benjamin Gutsche created it, and across six episodes he takes his time, planting things methodically before the revelations arrive and the results turn horrifying.
A missing kid, four families and a conspiracy spanning generations
Dark is the other German import worth the subtitles, three seasons and 26 episodes from creators Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese. Four families in a small German town start looking into a local child’s disappearance. The trail leads to a time-travel conspiracy running back and forward across several generations.
The escalation is the trick. It opens as a missing person story and swells season by season toward consequences that could end the world.
What’s rarer is that it grows that big without losing hold of its characters as people.
Alan Tudyk crash-lands in Colorado and kills a doctor
Who doesn’t love Alan Tudyk? Voicing K-2SO in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, playing Wash on Firefly, the man is endlessly talented and likable, and he spends all four seasons and 44 episodes of Resident Alien cashing that in.
He plays an alien sent to Earth to wipe out humanity for the planet’s own good. He crashes in Colorado instead, killing a local doctor, then takes the doctor’s identity while he works out how to finish the job. Somewhere in there he starts wondering whether killing everyone is the right call.
The show is sweet, it’s funny, and it stars Alan Tudyk. What more could you possibly need?
