Entertainment
10 Forgotten Netflix Shows That Are Perfect From Start to Finish
So you think you’ve seen every Netflix original the streamer has to offer. Well, no, you haven’t. Between the algorithm-driven churn, the relentless release schedule, and the platform’s habit of canceling shows before they find their audience, plenty of underrated Netflix shows end up slipping through the cracks.
In fact, some of the streamer’s best original series are still waiting to be queued up. We’re talking hidden gems that don’t fall apart in the final season and well-lit prestige storytelling you can actually see. Of these forgotten Netflix shows that are perfect from start to finish, each one, regardless of genre or popularity, offers a flawless binge-watching experience from the first episode to the series finale.
‘The Last Kingdom’ (2015–2022)
Based on Bernard Cornwell‘s Saxon Stories novels, The Last Kingdom chronicles the formation of England through the eyes of a Saxon-raised Dane named Uhtred of Bebbanburg (Alexander Dreymon) navigating loyalty, identity, and an endless series of kingly coronations and the religious upheavals that come with them. A historical action series that goes hard on the action — if you were to play a drinking game tied to the number of battles per episode, we’d worry about your liver after just one season — the show’s also got a cast that never lacks chemistry with Emily Cox, David Dawson, Ian Hart, and Mark Rowley.
It never quite got the prestige television conversation it deserved, possibly because it looked like Game of Thrones bait when it premiered. However, it outlasted the show it was compared to and finished on its own terms with a feature film that did Dreymon’s character justice.
‘The Society’ (2019)
We’ll be upfront here and admit that, despite how fun The Society is, it only lasted one season, which means its story is permanently unresolved. Netflix renewed it, then reversed course during the pandemic, so you’ll be ending on a cliffhanger should you take this one on. That said, you absolutely should watch this series because it happens to be one of the most underrated pieces of young adult science fiction streaming right now. It centers on a group of teenagers from a wealthy New England town who return from a cancelled school trip to find their entire community emptied of every adult and cut off from the outside world, with no explanation and no rescue coming.
With no one to defer to and limited resources, they have to either build a society from scratch or, you know, embrace the chaos. (A bunch of horny, rebellious young adults? We wonder which they’ll choose?) The show has a slew of young Hollywood talent — names like Kathryn Newton, Gideon Adlon, Kristine Froseth, and Rachel Keller — and a truly compelling premise that it wrings for every thrill and shocking twist you could hope for.
‘Godless’ (2017)
Scott Frank‘s seven-episode Western limited series is one of the most purely cinematic things ever made for television. Set in 1880s New Mexico, Godless has the scope of a dusty theatrical epic with a fascinating based-on-a-true story plot line to match. The show follows an outlaw named Roy Goode (Jack O’Connell) who flees his former gang and takes refuge in La Belle, a mining town whose population is almost entirely women after a catastrophic accident killed most of its men. His arrival makes the town a target, but the women of La Belle have no intention of becoming victims.
Jeff Daniels, Merritt Weaver, Scoot McNairy, and Michelle Dockery are all at the top of their game here. The finale, in particular, is an extended action sequence that rivals anything the genre has ever produced.
‘GLOW’ (2017–2019)
Set in the world of 1980s women’s wrestling, GLOW is a show about performance, reinvention, failure, and the specific experience of being a woman trying to make something of yourself inside a system that wasn’t built for you. Alison Brie and Betty Gilpin are extraordinary as Ruth and Debbie, former best friends with too much water under the bridge to traverse working together in the ring. And they’re joined by a ragtag group of outcasts (played by some severely underrated talent) managed by Marc Maron‘s Sam, a washed-up producer with an opportunistic streak.
The writing is sharp and filled with jokes, the period detail is impeccable, and the fact that Netflix cancelled it one day before the cast was due to begin filming its fourth and final season is one of the streaming era’s cruelest cancellations. Still, the three seasons of near-perfect television we did get weren’t really diminished by the streaming platform’s lack of vision.
‘Marco Polo’ (2014–2016)
In the early 2010s, everyone was chasing HBO’s Game of Thrones coattails, which is likely why Netflix dropped an absurd amount of resources into this sweeping historical drama chronicling Venetian explorer Marco Polo’s (Lorenzo Richelmy) time at the court of Kublai Khan (Benedict Wong). The result is one of the most visually lavish things the streamer has ever produced — an intricate, morally complex political drama wrapped in gorgeous fight choreography and stunning Central Asian landscapes.
It was expensive, ambitious, and ahead of its time, especially for a Netflix original series, which is probably why it got cancelled. What remains is two seasons of genuinely exceptional television that hold up better now than they ever got credit for.
‘Maniac’ (2018)
Cary Joji Fukunaga directing. Patrick Somerville writing. Jonah Hill and Emma Stone in the lead roles. A limited series that mashes up pharmaceutical dystopia, dream logic, and genre parody, all in one heart-pounding psychological thriller. What more could you want? Maniac is one of the strangest, most formally daring things Netflix has ever greenlit, a show that changes aesthetics from episode to episode while somehow maintaining a coherent narrative throughline.
The episode in which Hill and Stone find themselves inside a bizarre, ’80s-set thriller — complete with a con, a lemur, and a mistaken-identity caper — is a peak example of the show’s ability to be hilarious and heartbreaking within the same 30 minutes. It was too weird to market when it landed nearly a decade ago, which meant most people never found it. Their loss.
‘Sense8’ (2015–2018)
This 2015 sci-fi series is the Wachowskis swinging for the fences on a global scale. The show follows eight strangers across eight cities, all psychically linked and hunted by a shadowy organization while discovering what it means to truly share consciousness with another person. Sense8 is maximalist in every sense: emotional, inclusive, ambitious, and expensive. There’s a Season 1 sequence in which all eight sensates — scattered across the globe — simultaneously experience 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up,” cutting between their separate worlds in a moment of pure collective joy, which kind of serves as a thesis statement for what the show would end up being.
Netflix, not knowing what they had, cancelled it, then reversed course after some online fan outrage, ultimately delivering a feature-length finale that gave the story the ending it deserved. The complete run is a one-of-a-kind viewing experience that’s utterly unlike anything else on the platform. Treat yourself to a watch soon.
‘Bodyguard’ (2018)
Richard Madden plays war-veteran-turned-protection-officer, David Budd, who’s assigned to guard a politician he despises in Jed Mercurio‘s propulsive, tightly wound political thriller. Bodyguard, which also stars Sophie Rundle and Keeley Hawes, unfolds over six episodes of nearly unbearable tension, with a central performance from Madden that should’ve convinced the world he could do more than traipse around Winterfell in thick furs.
The British drama is a masterclass in sustained dread with an extended train sequence in which Budd talks a suicide bomber down from detonating her vest, that doubles as one of the most gripping cold opens in recent television history. Every episode after only raises those life-or-death stakes. Nothing is wasted here, and the finale delivers in a way that feels earned rather than convenient.
‘Sex Education’ (2019–2023)
Sex Education used the trappings of the British teen comedy to do something radical for its time: treat adolescent sexuality, identity, and emotional confusion with intelligence and compassion, without ever becoming preachy about it. Asa Butterfield plays Otis Milburn, a sexually inexperienced teenager whose mother is a renowned sex therapist. Armed with secondhand knowledge and a knack for giving advice he can’t follow himself, he starts an underground sex therapy clinic at his British high school and things spiral magnificently outward from there.
The show introduced a fresh batch of talent from across the pond when it dropped, names that included Ncuti Gatwa, Aimee Lou Wood, and Emma Mackey, with TV vet Gillian Anderson doing brilliantly restrained comedic work as Otis’ mom, Jean. It ran four seasons, said everything it needed to say, and ended with grace. In the landscape of streaming television where shows are either cancelled too soon or run until the goodwill is gone, that kind of clean, complete arc is genuinely rare.
‘Dead to Me’ (2019–2022)
Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini are two of the most underrated performers of their generation, and Dead to Me is the show that proved it beyond any reasonable doubt. A dark comedy about grief, guilt, and the kind of female friendship that can survive almost anything — including murder — it threads a needle that almost no show manages. Applegate plays a sharp-edged widow named Jen, still raw after her husband’s hit-and-run death, who forms an unlikely friendship with Judy (Cardellini), a warm, eccentric, seemingly guileless woman she meets at a grief support group.
There is, of course, a secret. Several, in fact. And fans learn them, often before the characters do, across three seasons that are devastating, surprising, and laugh-out-loud funny, often all at the same time. With a finale that more than sticks the landing, this is a show worth pouring your weekend into.
Dead to Me
- Release Date
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2019 – 2022-00-00
- Showrunner
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Liz Feldman
- Directors
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Liz Feldman
- Writers
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Liz Feldman
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