10 TV Shows On Netflix You’d Be Crazy To Ignore

It’s becoming a little difficult these days to talk about television without sounding like an agent of the Netflix marketing department. Not only can you find most of its original content no matter where you are in the world, but their library of TV shows and movies is changing the way we watch stuff. We binge watch, we peruse the Netflix archive for hidden gems and we signal boost what we find on social media.

Isn’t that why you’re reading this? Netflix and the digital content boom has turned us all into adventurers on the high seas of modern television. Our remote has become our tall ship and our next digital box set is the tropical island paradise we just spotted on the horizon. We want to explore the island and spread the word. Like electronic Walter Raleighs on an ocean of ones and zeros we want to be the first to find the new world. So, as we bring this clunky metaphor to a close, here’s ten islands you should explore next.

 

1. Peaky Blinders

The TV crime sagas you’re more likely to have heard of are the American ones: The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, or perhaps even Daredevil are undoubtedly on the tip of your tongue. Peaky Blinders though, can hang with any of them. Set in the smoggy cobbled streets of 1920s Birmingham, the story follows working class criminal entrepreneur Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) as he turns the Peaky Blinders street gang into a family run crime syndicate. It’s The Godfather trilogy if Michael Corleone was a ruthless evil genius from the very beginning.

 

2. iZombie

I’ve talked about iZombie before, but the truth is none of you seem to be listening to me. For my money this is the best zombie show on TV (and yes, that includes The Walking Dead – gasp!). iZombie follows the life of coroner’s assistant Liv Moore as she tries to balance work and friends around the fact that she’s secretly a zombie. She must, of course, keep eating human brains or else devolve into a “full on” Dawn of the Dead walker. Also, those brains she chomps give her visions of the deceased’s lives and the ability to solve their grisly murders.

 

3. Republic of Doyle

Unless you live in Canada, you’re unlikely to have ever seen a TV show set in Newfoundland, which is why you could easily write this one off. Father and son private investigators Malachy and Jake Doyle are the go to guys for all your PI needs in the city of St Johns. This frequently brings them friction with local law enforcement – especially Jake, who has a tendency to get hit in the face or unwittingly wind up at crime scenes just as the police show up. It’s not prestige television, but it has some strong relatable family humour whenever the Doyle clan interact.

 

4. Dramaworld

Imagine you’re a sad sack loser with no friends forced to work in your dad’s deli to help pay for college, which you waste because you spend all your time watching Korean soap operas. That’s the life of Claire Duncan until she is magically sucked into the world of her favourite Korean drama. The premise looks clunky but the execution is exceptional, as Claire finds new resolve and zest for life in ensuring her two favourite characters wind up together in the end. Dramaworld doesn’t really require a huge time commitment either and you could easily burn through it in a single afternoon.

 

5. Stranger Things

This one is on this list for a single reason: when it first landed on Netflix I didn’t give it a chance. I’m not a huge horror fan, so Stranger Things only ever got a shot thanks to a pretty boring weekend in August. As a result I can assure the rest of the world that Stranger Things is most definitely not just for horror fans. Sure there’s a mysterious entity out there taking people, but the show is drenched in the Spielbergian small town America of the 80s. The gang of kids who set out to find their missing friend, only to come across a mysterious young girl instead, feels like an ode to the likes of ET and Close Encounters mixed in with distinct patches of Lovecraftian horror.

 

6. Scream

Speaking of horror, UK Netflix viewers are currently sitting on two full seasons of the unexpectedly fun Scream TV show. As you might expect with Scream, the show is self reverential to a fault, calling out the peculiarity of its own existence in its current medium. If you’re a fan of the original movie series and can’t decide whether the TV show lives up to the legacy, let Uncle Chris tell you that it delivers in all the right places. There’s a killer on the loose who seems to be playing religiously from the slasher movie handbook. Whoever they are, they’re using the internet and social media to taunt their prey. More than ever, everyone is fair game and every character is a suspect.

 

7. Zoo

Everyone needs to watch Zoo. Once in a hot while, a TV show comes along that covers itself so much in straight faced dumbness it becomes impossible to stop watching. Zoo, with its 1970s B-movie premise squashed into modern network TV gift wrap, is content to be exactly this. See, the animals have gained sentience. As in all of them. Lions, bats, dogs and wolves are trolling the human race in revenge for thousands of years of domesticated enslavement. The show and its cast never shy away from how frequently ridiculous it turns out to be though. Billy Burke’s scientist and Kristen Connolly’s journalist in particular form a hilariously goofy double act.

 

8. W1A

This British Mockumentary series takes aim at one of the country’s most vital yet painfully baffled organisations: the BBC. Deadpan to the point of occasional cringeworthiness, W1A follows the day to day work life of the BBC’s newly appointed Head of Values. If you’re looking at this job title in confusion that’s kind of the point. The Beeb have long been under pressure to reform and look more modern, and it’s almost as if the public broadcast made this series as an indirect middle finger to all the idiots calling for it to be downsized or commercialised. Everything here is deadpan, down to the brilliant documentary style narration from David Tennant.

 

9. Chuck

Chuck probably shouldn’t have ever gotten a first season, never mind five, but a fair few of us are glad it did. Set in a world where spies are glamorous and bad guys indulge in Bond villain levels of overacting, Chuck took the spy genre and made it about the average schmuck. When Stanford drop out Chuck Bartowski gets an email from his old College Buddy, he winds up with the combined databases of the American Intelligence community zapped into his brain. Suddenly he has an entourage of secret agent handlers and every bad guy in the world is after him. Chuck has been on Netflix forever, but it feels like its goof ball brilliance has gone unnoticed for too long.

 

10. The League

The first thing you need to know about The League is that every character in it is a terrible person. Centred around a bunch of friends and their obsessive fantasy football league, there is no one here who won’t go to sociopathic lengths to win. The show’s semi-improvisational humour gives the show a horrific looseness, so if you’re not a fan of dark jokes this one isn’t for you. Once you accept that the characters are the butt of most of the show’s worst gags though, it’s like watching a bunch of obsessed idiots trapped in their own hilarious misery. If, like me, you’ve ever been part of a fantasy football league, there’s an added level of fascination in seeing what these people will do to further their league and their own chances of winning.