Shows you recommend to others

Rather than echo a bunch of other suggestion, I’ll just throw in Intelligence

Sortof a mix of the Sopranos/The Wire/Spooks, about the Canadian marijuana industry.

Only two seasons but well worth watching. It’s by the guys who did Da Vinci’s Inquest, if you’ve heard of that, so it feels fairly realistic.

I watched this on the recommendation of people here in the Netflix thread and enjoyed it a great deal. Plus, extra Matt Frewer!

Trying not to post duplicates, so I’ll recommend Curb Your Enthusiasm and (since I saw a few animated shows suggested) the only anime I enjoyed, Cowboy Bebop.

A thousand times this. Best show on television.

I will throw in another anime series that is one of the few I’ve really enjoyed – both series of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

If you aren’t flustered and confused by the weird and absurd, Gregory Horror Show, a 3D animated series from Japan that bears no resemblance to what we think of as anime.

Holy crap, this is amazing.

Veronica Mars is pretty old now, but if you don’t mind that, I thoroughly echo the earlier posts. Season 1 is utterly, utterly brilliant. And Season 2 is definitely still worth watching.

Also the UK show Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace which I imagine was a pretty big influence on Children’s Hospital.

Ooh, totally. Darkplace is great. Very much in the vein of Look Around You, namely spoofing cheapo seventies/eighties British TV, but ostensibly fictional as opposed to ostensibly real.

The Wire
Breaking Bad
Community
Deadwood
Mad Men

I haven’t watched yet but my wife keeps pushing Downton Abbey on me

I strongly recommend the BBC show Bodies. What an amazing show.
Also Misfits, great show, at least season 1&2.

Long live BBC iPlayer.

That was my impression after watching the first two episodes. I stopped there.

Oh and one more, a newer show: LILYHAMMER. Crazy concept, surprisingly, wonderfully executed.

Watched the first episode of that last night…it was amusing, worth checking out anyway. :)

I have been enjoying America Revealed on PBS. A different look at various aspects of what makes up America. Episodes on transportation, agriculture etc.

If you like Children’s Hospital, the weird fake show that was in some commercials that they did in between parts of the episode at one point took on a life of its own and became NTSF:SD:SUV::, also on Adult Swim. Paul Scheer, his wife that doesn’t share a name with him at all (June Diane Rafael, I think), and various others, including Captain Janeway in a roll I don’t hate for a change.

If we’re recommending weird ass AS shows that we like, though:

Moral Orel - Three seasons, finished, except there will be specials in the future. It started out as one thing and then turned into something very different that kind of made me want to be dead a little bit, but in a good way? It’s a good program, but it just stops being funny at a point and starts being a show about a closeted man’s abusive relationship with his family. If you watch Community, this is Starburns’s first show.

Mary Shelly’s Frankenhole - This is Starburns’s second show. Not as consistently good as the first, but still a perfectly serviceable stop motion production. Ongoing.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force/Aqua Unit Patrol Squad 1 - So, this show changed its name and series ID last year for no good reason. You might call it postmodernist comedy. Many episodes are not the greatest, but when the show is the greatest (to name a few episodes, Love Mummy, Hand Banana, Ezekiel, Shake Like Me, and The Intervention), it is totally the greatest.

Lucy, Daughter of the Devil - Before Loren Bouchard got his big break making what seems to be the next bubble show on Fox (Bob’s Burgers), he did shows like this for AS. There is no dimension in which this isn’t really a superior show to Bob’s Burgers, except for the one where Bob’s Burgers is actually still on the air, whereas this one fell down with an audible splat after a single season. Still worth watching.

Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law - I’d watch it for Colbert alone. Three seasons, pretty much done since Colbert got his own show.

Robot Chicken - Probably a show that most of this board’s participants should be watching anyway, since it’s basically the crystallization of your childhood in humor form. Basically, Seth Green plays with toys for fifteen minutes in a stop motion fashion. Apparently every single human has done a voice for him at some point. Note that this is the thing that finally convinced me that maybe Tila Tequila is actually kind of awesome because she gets it, though the whole ICP incident that immediately followed her appearance leaves that suspicion unconfirmed.

Strangely, no-one has yet said The West Wing, so I’ll say it: The West Wing! If you haven’t seen it (at least seasons 1-4), you must do that right now.

Burn Notice - light dramedy about a spy who gets booted out of the game and wants back in. Along the way, he helps people with problems the police can’t fix. All that and Bruce Campbell, in a role that got more acting out of him than I’ve seen anywhere else.

Leverage - another light dramedy, this time about a team of super-criminals who grow a conscience and start helping people with problems the police can’t fix. Yes, these occurred to me back to back because of their similarities, but they’re quite distinct - Burn Notice tends to feature more action, where Leverage is about creating fantastically convoluted plans to con their target into self-destructing beautifully. Also features Mark Sheppard in a recurring nemesis role, if you like that sort of thing.

Stargate Universe - Vastly different in tone from the previous Stargate series, SGU takes its cues more from Battlestar Galactica. If you like space politics, paranoia, and privation, SGU is an underappreciated gem. Features Robert Carlyle as a magnificent bastard scientist who is totally the best thing about the show.

Burn Notice - light dramedy about a spy who gets booted out of the game and wants back in. Along the way, he helps people with problems the police can’t fix. All that and Bruce Campbell, in a role that got more acting out of him than I’ve seen anywhere else.

Eh. It’s fun, and Bruce Campbell is always great, but it gets painfully formulaic.