Television

Lexx is one of the best science fiction shows. Season 2 is peak.

Penny dreadful - https://youtu.be/YFXHfEqMcis

Amazing story

I think my top pick has to be Ijon Tichy: Raumpilot. I gather it's pretty well known in Germany, but in the US pretty much no one has heard of it.

It's a sci-fi comedy, based loosely on The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem, who is one of my favorite authors. The first season was all web episodes made on a shoestring budget; the spaceship is just the main actor's apartment for the interior, and a coffee press for the exterior. There's also a lot of use of puppets and amusing costumes. It's just incredibly creative. The stories involve things like Tichy's navigation system malfunctioning, so he accelerates out of control around a gravitational anomaly and starts experiencing time slips. Which could be kind of convenient, because fixing the navigation is a two-person task, but the first time his future self asks for his help he thinks it's a dream, and the second time he knows it's real but won't help because if they actually got it fixed then obviously his future self wouldn't still be coming back in time to get his help, so what's the point? etc. I know Lem isn't the best-known sci fi writer these days, but it's criminal that this show hasn't gotten more attention.

It's a skit comedy show but The Upright Citizens Brigade was hilarious! In the vein of The State or Kids in the Hall.

chef!

the secret life of machines

clerks the animated series

miranda

Banished - I wanted a second season so badly

Peep Show - Peak cringe humor. One of the best shows ever.

Maybe not super obscure and more my wife’s suggestion than mine (though I also enjoyed it), but Merlin (2008) was a great show that unfortunately had a low budget for the first couple seasons and got cut short with very little warning to the directors at the end, but it’s still a great family friendly fantasy show. It’s my wife’s all-time favourite TV show, and while it’s not mine (I’d probably say Doctor Who for me), I totally get it. It’s very entertaining.

Kingdom (2014)

It’s a drama that follows this family of mma fighters. It aired on a small network and never really promoted. It’s actually really well written and entertaining. You really care for some of the characters. One of the characters is gay, the series finale has an interaction related to that had me crying.

Whites

Sports Night was a late 90s comedy-drama about a nightly sports show like Sportscenter.

Great characters, good storylines and created by Aaron Sorkin post-West Wing, so really good writing

Mr Show with Bob and David

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Show_with_Bob_and_David

The Goncharov TV mini-series was 5 episodes of pure perfection. Best thing NBC ever did.

The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret
11/10 show…

Metalocalypse which has probably one of the best first episodes of all time.

And Corporate

The line 'I think I lost some weight because my belt doesn't fit around my neck like it used to' had me rolling.

I liked the premise for The Lone Gunmen as a spinoff from the X-Files but I don't think they got the overall production quite right.

The Patriot on prime. It's the greatest show nobody's watched, no bad episodes. Acting, script and production values are top notch. Cancelled after 2 seasons...

I don't know how forgotten it is since I only learned of it a few years back, but Sliders. People say around the quality starts dropping in the 3rd season before the 4th season being pretty bad, but I enjoyed all 5 seasons with few exceptions.

Edit:

Probably plenty of episodes missing ( original English dub ) but I just remembered Class of 3000 and think that takes more precedent than Sliders because you can find all the episodes of Sliders through piracy. Same cannot be said about Class of 3000.

Class of 3000 has things Sliders would never have: amazing songs made specifically for the show. Songs like the jazz song My Mentor or the rap ( rock? ) song We Want Your Soul or the blues song Rich Shade Of Blues.

Mr Inbetween. Brilliant from the start to the very last scene. Everyone who watches it thinks its superb. Getting them to actually start watching it is hard work.

Love/Hate. Irish gangster show. I felt it got better each season. Loved the unhinged & dangerously unpredictable Fran (Peter Coonan).

First few seasons of Italian mob show Gomorrah were amazing but I think some were put off by it being in Italian language (fine with me as I'm an English speaker but watch everything including English language shows with subtitles on)

Ghosts. The British version, not the American remake. It is a heartwarming comedy about some ghosts that haunt a mansion.

Chowder - old Cartoon Network show about a purple bear raccoon thing who tries to be a chief making wacky dishes and breaking the 4th wall. ‘Tis was a good show.

Space: Above & Beyond and Earth 2.

The former is a gritty wartime drama against an unknown alien species, and follows a Marine squadron.

Come for the cool spaceships, stay for the great storytelling.

The latter is about the colonization of another planet that we thought was uninhabited and also never visited by humans.

Come for the wagon train, stay for Tim Curry saying “poppet”

Both only lasted a season.

a likely story; it was a reading show on wcvb (like reading rainbow) about a woman - alison martin - who was a librarian who drove a bookmobile around and read to kids. i watched it every day.

https://collection.oldfilm.org/Detail/occurrences/56859

https://oldfilm.org/more-than-the-news-programming-from-wcvb/