Preacher
AMC's adaptation of the Ennis and Dillon Vertigo comic: Dominic Cooper as an outlaw preacher who commands anyone with a word, Graham McTavish as the Saint of Killers. 4 seasons of blasphemy, blood and jokes.
Genre Comedy
Darkwing Duck (Disney+)
The 1991 classic gets the revival Disney+ took six years to order: Mark Hamill as Drake Mallard, Seth Rogen as Launchpad, Point Grey producing, Sean Tretta and Borja Pena Gorostegui running it. Early word, no score until episodes drop.
The Tick (2016)
Amazon’s version swaps joke density for heart: Peter Serafinowicz’s Tick is an amnesiac demigod in a blue suit moving to a city that runs on supervillain bureaucracy, and the show builds a serialized mystery around the character instead of a…
The Tick (2001)
The weirdest casualty of the 2001 fall season: a genuinely great live action superhero comedy starring Patrick Warburton as the Tick, aired by Fox at eleven p.m. against a lineup that buried it in nine episodes, half of which never…
Chappelle’s Show
Dave Chappelle walked onto Comedy Central with the tightest stand up hour of his generation (Killin’ Them Softly still owns any open mic conversation) and built a sketch show that behaved like none before it. The premise was simple and…
You Can’t Do That on Television
A room full of Canadian kids, a writers’ room that later ran half of American television comedy, and one rule that outlived the show itself: when a kid in a vest says “I don’t know” while the green slime descends,…
Unhappily Ever After
The WB’s answer to Married… with Children was to add a narrator who openly despises the family, rewrites their scenes mid episode, and dates the daughter. Unhappily Ever After took Ron Leavitt’s instinct that a sitcom family could be cruel…
Home Improvement
Tim Taylor hosts a home improvement show called Tool Time, grunts at anyone who disagrees with him, and invents power tools that violate three building codes at a time. Tim Allen built the character from stand up timing: the alpha…
Magnum P.I.
A former Navy SEAL turned estate security man on Oahu, driving a Ferrari he does not own, taking cases the resort needs solved while Higgins clocks his hours. The 2018 reboot understands that the original was a character piece pretending…
The Ren & Stimpy Show
John Kricfalusi took the buddy cartoon, deleted the plot, and filled the space with faces: the gross up close of Stimpy’s tongue on a honeycomb, the sweat, the snot, the veins. The Ren and Stimpy Show is the reason nineties…