It’s easy to miss a lot of good TV in a year’s time. Whether you heard of a show and just didn’t have time to watch it, or weren’t sure it was worth your time at all, lots of quality TV can slip through our fingers (thankfully, plenty of crappy ones can, too). But, a few years later, when the show has reached a fever-pitch and all of your friends and family won’t shut up about it, you have one of two options: bite the bullet and join the hype-train, or leave it all in the dust.
Both sour the experience of a show: one could leave you hating the show for ego’s sake, saying you’d never watch it and going in with negative expectations even when it could be great. And the other, well, the other you end up denying yourself what may have ended up being your favorite television show of all time.
Okay, so maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic, but with all of this in mind, we decided to make a list of the best episodes from a group of underrated and overlooked half-hour drama/comedies that all premiered this year, ensuring you exclusive premiere early-access to future hype-trains. Besides a few exceptions, these are not the best episode of each series, remember, just a microcosm example of each series’ respective wholes.
Each episode is picked to included the smallest amount of plot-loaded content so as to give you an idea of each show’s tone and characters and let you go back to the beginning if you do so choose (and believe me, you will definitely so choose).