What’s the antithesis of Arrested Development, Firefly or The Big Lebowski? Those may never have ‘found their audience’ but over time seemed to recognised by everyone. What are the deep cuts that you liked but it feels like everyone has completely forgotten they even existed.
Great question btw, OP
Star Wars Galaxies. It really was really lightning in a bottle. No other game has come close to recreating the social player-driven sandbox experience that was SWG. This was the first MMORPG I played to feature a classless build system and I haven’t played another game which does it quite as well. Honourable mention goes to the Jump to Lightspeed expansion, truly the coolest expansion for any game I’ve ever experienced. We will never be able to recreate the experience of SWG again, the culture of gaming has changed too much. It was a game where you simply couldn’t solo the entire game or hang around with a dungeon finder or anything like that. You had to interact with other people - you had to kick back and hang out in bars together, you had to ask someone to help you change your hair colour or style, you had to ask doctors to heal you, or tailors to make clothes for you in a style you liked, or settle for off-the-rack fashions bought from player-owned stores. Players would also take the role of bounty hunters to hunt down criminal players for credits. You’d get to know a lot of the people you shared a server with, you’d remember who was fun to team up with, or who saved your ass, or who gave you some buffs, etc. and it really made the experience unforgettable.
I have good news for you! SWGEMU dot COM. Development has been going on for damn near 20 years now. Hope you have your original install discs or it’ll be the high seas for you, mate.
Shit, close to 10 years after we stopped playing, my wife was playing WOW and someone was all, “Icarii… from Corbantis? I bought so many weapons off you, yours were the best!”
Black books is brilliant and wildly underrated. Dylan Moran as a misanthropic book shop owner with an idiot for a sidekick
This is one of my absolute favorites. Few shows get a proper laugh out of me, but him coming out in a jacket made of his tax receipts me ever time.
Co-created by Graham Linehan who also did Father Ted and The IT Crowd. Shows about misanthropic priests and IT dept guys with idiots for sidekicks. It’s a winning formula.
Linehan being attached to something isn’t a plus these days…
Yeah, he really Rowlinged himself. Shame.
Network wasn’t underrated but has felt more relevant every decade but has been talked about less and less.
Showgirls tells a compelling story about poverty, fame, power, misogyny, and abuse. This film is severely underrated but also it is forgotten by most people who do not go looking for the lowest rated movies to watch ironically.
The second season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex was really good and I find the story centered around a refugee crisis to be a much more compelling one. I feel like this season gets talked about less than the first and the movies, which are generally seen as masterpieces.
You didn’t list books but I wanted to mention that Player Piano is one of the most precient books I have read and was written back in the 50s. Vonnegut is of course a well known and regarded writer but you’ll rarely see his first novel topping lists even among just his own works, and so it doesn’t get read and discussed as much as it should.
Welp, sound like I’ve gotta watch Showgirls. It sounds right up my alley. Thanks for mentioning it! I’ve saved your comment so that hopefully my forgetful self actually remembers to watch it when I have time!
Seconding Player Piano. Both it and Cat’s Cradle were almost explicitly based on his time with GE, and they’ve both gained more cultural relevance over the years.
I think we must be close to peak relevance for Network, maybe on the downhill side. Technology is transforming the whole industry in a pretty dramatic way.
I’m adding Player Piano to my reading list.
Farscape was an absolutely fantastic show with one of the best villains ever. Characters were well thought out, they had motivations you could understand and showed character growth. Highly recommend for anyone who hasn’t seen it.
Wayne Pygram should be a household name with his portral as Scorpius and Harvey.
All the damn Holocaust documentaries.
Oh man, and that’s by far the most talked-about genocide. Literally any other gets even less attention, and probably has sort-of-mainstream deniers.
Oof. It’s fucked, right? Growing up, I thought anti-Semitism was a joke, because how could anyone actually believe that?
I also was stupid and didn’t realise how near the past was, and that bad ideas don’t ever just disappear completely.
I only yesterday learned that some education instituitions in the US and Canada had limits on the number of Jewish students who could attend. The European countries who practiced this weren’t so much of a surprise to me, but the fact that universities like Harvard did this was an eye opener.
The first few Splinter Cell games should have had a more-lasting impact on gaming. Proper stealth gameplay in which lighting mattered for the first time (revolutionary), and the Spies vs. Mercs multiplayer still ranks among my favorite multiplayer games of all time. Then they made it into a (still good, but not the same) action series before letting it die completely.
I miss those games so much. Nothing out there now compares to
Agreed. I got an original Xbox and Spliter Cell was the main thing I wanted. It didn’t disappoint. Seeing those light rays through a rotating fan, shooting the bulbs and watching a room go dark, etc…never got old. It was a true “NOW THIS IS NEXT-GEN” moment.
Honestly, I’d say that Splinter Cell is considered to have had a larger impact on gaming than it really did. For example, you claim that Splinter Cell was the first game where lighting mattered - at the very least, Thief: The Dark Project featured that very prominently, four years earlier, but I doubt that was even the first.
Splinter Cell basically just copied Thief and Metal Gear Solid’s homework and changed it up a bit, I’d say it’s inferior to both games, and yet is often considered to be one of the best games ever made.
It’s common to see misattribution like this happen woth media, and it’s really not a big deal that someone is caught unaware. Like Thief actually does get a lot of praise and did impact gaming, but it’s easy for someone to not know of it depending on who they talk to.
But the worst example is several users and a couple YouTube essayist claiming Assassin’s Creed 2 was revolutionary, when it was basically doing nothing new, and was just ironing out the formula that was 99.99% established by a game that seemingly none of them heard of called… Assassin’s Creed 1.
Halo is the game I always think of. There’s a much cooler alternate universe where Red Faction was delayed six months and was an Xbox launch title.
I’m confused by the prompt. The Big Lebowski was an amazing movie with great social commentary, but it was poorly received and mostly only had a cult following.
Arrested Development was just okay, nothing special, but is talked about by everyone and absolutely overrated. It’s social commentary is nothing compared to Big Lebowski.
The two are antithesis of each other.
And then Firefly I have no idea what that even is. Is that a YA novel?
So your question is what’s the antithesis of all these unrelated things? Also what’s not underrated but has inadequate social impact, as if Big Lebowski or Arrested Development did have adequate social impact??
Firefly is an excellent space western. Made by Josh Whedon, it lasted one season and got the movie Serenity as a “wrap up”
Fox intentionally killed the show. There’s all sorts of drama that surrounded the series, but despite tons of fan support they couldn’t save the show.
Also what’s not underrated but has inadequate social impact, as if Big Lebowski or Arrested Development did have adequate social impact??
I think OP refers to the fact that they didn’t gain immediate popularity, rather they developed a cult following as time passed.
The Big Lebowski was almost a box office bomb, as it costed 15M$ and it struggled to raise 18M$ in the US, while Arrested Development poor scheduling didn’t allow it to gain a sizeable audience right away, halting the production after the 3rd season.Firefly is the okiest space western ever, but it got cancelled by fox around 2000 and people started sacrificing their left testicles to try to bring about it’s return.
Firefly had an great cast the stories were Okay, they were made better by the cast.
Corncob TV: Just hours of naked, dead bodies busting through shit wood.
There can’t possibly be that many dead bodies falling out of coffins every day. And there’s no way one in every five of them are nude.
I DIDN’T RIG SHIT
Mr. Freedom should be more widely known.
Deadwood.
I agree with the Mr. Robot take in this thread but nothing matches the infectious dialogue and energy that takes place throughout the entire Deadwood series. I never hear or see it talked about online or in my friend groups.
SAN FRANCISCO COCKSUCKA!
Yeeees. I’ve tried to get so many people to watch it. “It’s like literature in TV show form, you’ve just gotta!” Nobody has. It’s so, so, so good. I’ve watched it multiple times and, weirdly, it’s become comfort TV, despite how heavy it gets.
It took me a few tries to get through the first episode, but once it clicked I was hooked. The flowery vulgarity is such a great style of writing. It’s since become one of my favorite shows.
About a year or two ago, through a weird six degrees type situation, I got a surprise phone call from Leon Rippy, the actor who played Tom Nuttal. He spent hours chatting with me that night and over the few days that followed. He was so amazingly friendly and full of great stories about Deadwood and all the other shows and movies he’s worked on.
I was in Deadwood SD this summer, I’ll have to check out the series. Thanks for the suggestion!
Literally one of the greatest TV shows of all-time. You won’t regret it. Enjoy your first watch; I envy you.
I grew up playing the 3D version of Centipede on the Sega Dreamcast. The game was a fundamental part of my childhood.
For whatever reason, I’ve never spoken to even a single other person who has ever played it (aside from my brother).
The level design was crazy. Tons of replayability, a low barrier to entry, but so difficult in the later worlds I never got close to finishing it. Soundtrack and sound effects I never got tired of hearing. Yet, no one seems to have heard of it.
Dreamcast games are very easily emulated, fyi, if you haven’t played it in awhile. The Dreamcast is probably my favorite console of all-time. So many unique, warm and fuzzy late-night memories staying up with that bad boy.
Good shout. Been at least a decade since I tried emulating Dreamcast. Just need to make sure I buy a USB adapter for the controller, for the complete experience.
I nearly didn’t watch Am I Being Unreasonable because it appeared to centre around a developmentally challenged wee boy, and the trailer looked like it would just be him making sarky remarks
Couldn’t have been more wrong. Fantastic twisting story, often hilarious, and the kid was nowhere near as prominent or annoying as expected.
Also Daisy May Cooper is just legendary anyway
Highly recommended, but I think a lot of people didn’t watch it for the same reason I nearly didn’t
I’m late, but Six Feet Under is the best show ever made. Ever. It’s perfect. The ending is the best ending to a show ever. Ever.
Even my partner, who was in school to become a mortician, hasn’t heard of it. So we sat down and watched the whole thing together. I had seen it all before. We cried together.
Go watch Six Feet Under.
(Also it’s got Gay Dexter which is great)
Best show over is a stretch, but it holds it’s own in the face of the giants HBO has created over the years.
That’s totally fair! Everything here is subjective. But you’re WRONG
But in all seriousness, I have seen a bajillion shows, and I struggle for think of one that, beginning to end, is better than SixFunder. Game of Thrones was honestly HEAVILY on-track…
…
I never heard anything about ‘Crashing’ on HBO before just stumbling on it in the HBO app.
It’s a pretty funny show about a standup comedian trying to make it in NY while dealing with a divorce. It kind of feels like Louie if the protagonist had a positive outlook on life.
It’s not the greatest show ever, but it blows my mind that I’d never heard of it at all
I have vague memories of watching this years ago. It was amusing but not very memorable.
Pete Holmes is a treasure
