So much television is produced nowadays it’s impossible to keep track of everything that comes out. Between the usual network and cable content and the ten thousand or so streaming services that are starting to pop up, there’s probably been more TV made in the last five years than the previous fifty put together.
That’s what makes it all the more special when something can actually surprise you, whether it be for its unexpected quality, the circumstances around its production or just for being something so entirely strange it’s unbelievable such a piece of entertainment was made.
Here are four new shows that surprised us the most for the last year of the decade.
Doom Patrol (DC Universe)
If you would have told me a few years ago they were going to adapt the Doom Patrol to a live-action television series, my first reaction would have been that there’s no way whatever came from that would touch the true spirit of the comics. Originally released in 1963, they were the X-Men slightly before the X-Men (the team was introduced a few months before the beloved mutants were in that same year). A team of outcasts who were deemed expendable and sent on doomed missions, a revolving cast of oddball heroes who found themselves on the forefront of the strangest threats. The team has been rebooted and retooled multiple times for the comics throughout DC Comics history, but the team finally went live action when they were introduced in 2018 via the live-action Titans, which lead to their own series this year.
Doom Patrol blew up in popularity in the 1980s when Scottish comic writer Grant Morrison took over the series, leaning hard into the freakish and outsider nature of the characters. Drawing from his own feelings of isolation within the comic industry, it was like nothing else and featured the likes of a gender queer street, interdimensional threats made of candles, imaginary friends coming to life, musclemen using the cosmic powers of muscle and a homosexual couple consisting of a brain in a jar and a Nazi gorilla. You’d never expect any of that to even be considered for a live-action adaptation, but surprisingly, we got a lot of it.
The Patrol is made up of Robotman, a former race driver whose brain is in a cyborg, Rita, a former golden-age Hollywood starlet who can’t control her shapeshifting abilities, Negative Man, a closeted gay pilot who is possessed by an entity who tortures him physically and mentally, Crazy Jane, a schizophrenic woman whose personalities transform her into a new person and Cyborg, a half-robot half-man who finds out his memories may not be what they seem.
They lived for decades in a manor overseen by The Chief, a wheelchair-using scientist who helped each one through their tragedies. Mr. Nobody, an old foe of The Chief who is aware he’s in a TV show thanks to some interdimensional experimentation from a group of Neo-Nazis, drag them into the bigger world. Through fifteen episodes, the team must grapple with their own inner demons as well as a revolving door of bizarre situations, from a ruined city inside a donkey’s ass to having to battle a beard obsessed bounty hunter who consumes hair from drains with glee to hunt his targets. It’s even weirder than it sounds.
It’s not just the odd existence of Doom Patrol that makes it a surprise, it’s also the great quality the whole first season has.
While a few episodes here and there could have been shaved off, it’s largely a consistent show and the genuine struggles of the characters in their outcast roles are played well by the entire cast. It also saw the return of one of my favorite actors, Brendan Fraser, who has been gone from our screens for too long and was yet another pleasant surprise for me.
Doom Patrol has been a constant DC presence, but they generally don’t stick around too long before being put on hiatus, usually being killed off in some bizarre fashion. Hopefully, with the second season renewal, this incarnation of the team will be with us for years to come.
Bless the Harts (Fox)
There was a lot of buzz in the early previews for Bless the Harts, but it seemed to died off largely by the time the series premiered last September. Fox goes through so many failed animated shows, it became a running gag when Family Guy returned from cancellation years ago. That’s why it’s so refreshing, and surprising, that they seemed to have nailed the landing so well with this one.
Fox hasn’t really had a new animated hit since Bob’s Burgers all the way back near last decade’s beginning in 2011. While it’s hard to say how successful the show will be in its staying power, it’s managed to do something few shows do in successfully conveying a down-on-their-luck family with genuine heart.
I’ll admit that initially the only thing that got Bless the Harts on my radar was its loose connection to King of the Hill, my favorite animated sitcom. The connection comes in the form of Mega-Lo Mart, a supermarket chain that was a key background setting for Hill, but there feels like somewhat of a spiritual connection there as well since Bless the Harts reminds me a lot of Mike Judge’s beloved series.
The show follows the Hart family. While they are dysfunctional in their own way, it’s not nearly to the degree we’ve become use to of families that are borderline psychotic to one another (see shows like Family Guy and Shameless for extreme examples of this). Bless the Harts shows a much better harmony between characters who are struggling to survive in a low-income household. They may have their differences in worldviews and how they deal with their less-than-ideal situations, but you leave each episode knowing they love one another no matter what they just struggled through.
The first season is clearly trying to find itself still. There are several characters you can tell the writing team haven’t quite got the voice down for just yet, and some elements that don’t gel with the rest of the show. For instance, the lead character Jenny has conversations with Jesus in the Christian-themed restaurant she waitresses at that add little to the narrative. But all the parts are there, and it’s not hard for me to see this being Fox’s next big hit if they can keep it up.
The Morning Show (Apple TV+)
Put a gun to my head and make me choose which TV show of 2019 was the best and it’d have to be a toss up between The Righteous Gemstones and The Morning Show. Unfortunately, in the case of the latter, it’s also a case study on how poorly Apple has marketed its newest streaming service.
Despite having several major stars front and center, Apple did little to convey what the show was really about in its advertising up to the launch of Apple TV+. Without getting into spoilers, it goes down some of the darker aspects of entertainment that have been revealed over the last few years in the wake of the #MeToo movement through the unexpectedly cutthroat world of morning talk shows. It’ll leave you frustrated and infuriated by its final moments in a tightly scripted drama. Aniston, Carrell and Witherspoon all give fantastic, against-type performances among great pacing and writing with no episode feeling like a waste, even if there’s a lot of the first season that remains unclear by its end.
I’m keeping vague on this one intentionally, because The Morning Show sneaks up on you in what it’s trying to do. I imagine if this show had landed on a major cable network it’d be all the buzz. Hopefully, the second season will be just as good.
Watchmen (HBO)
While the other three shows on this list could easily fly under your radar for a variety of reasons, you can’t quite say that for the last one. Watchmen was a big-budget affair for HBO that saw tons of advertising and its pilot got a lead in by the ever popular Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. It’s surprising for entirely different reasons than visibilities, however.
First and foremost, it’s a major surprise to me that Warner Bros. decided to gamble on adapting the property again after the 2009 film based on the famous comic series flopped. It’s always been a difficult task since Watchmen was tailored so specifically to its medium by the legendary Alan Moore and the stellar artist Dave Gibbons, and the film was a mess of tone clashes.
Despite technically being a sequel, HBO’s Watchmen is more a reinvention of the original story. While Moore and Gibbons perfectly captured the dread of the 1980s, of a world that felt on the brink of nuclear warfare, the TV show perfectly captures a new type of dread of today’s world with rising fascism and white supremacy that feels like society is ever tipping on the edge of ruin. While some characters do return from the classic graphic novel, they don’t feel quite right (which is something many comic fans had issue with); it’s very much its own thing.
While I wasn’t as high on the show as many were, and thought it could be trimmed down despite being on the shorter side with only nine episodes, it’s still a surprising and fascinating show to watch. The original Watchmen series was the first of a deconstruction the superhero genre that’s still felt to this day. We just had a direct prequel and sequel in the comics as well, though I’d say all of them were quite poor, especially compared to HBO’s fresh take.
Who would have thought that the same property that helped redefine the superhero over 30 years ago is part of it again in live-action form as the superhero genre expands and branches out on the big stage of HBO? Life really can be a constant circle sometimes, but at least there’s always surprises along the way.
Image credit: Jan Vašek