5 Near-Perfect Netflix Shows That No One Remembers Today

Some shows do not get forgotten because they were bad. They get forgotten because streaming trained people to move on too fast. It’s like pop-culture gripped other shows way too fast, for way too long, and these shows got sidelined. Netflix especially has this ugly habit of swallowing its own history.

A show arrives, finds the exact people it was made for, wrecks them a little, gives them a mood or a world or a relationship dynamic they start living inside for weeks, and then the platform buries it under the next wave of content until it starts feeling like you imagined the whole thing alone. That is what happened to these series. And what makes it so frustrating is that they were not half-successful curiosities. They were the kinds of shows that had texture in the bloodstream.

‘Dead to Me’ (2019–2022)

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What people miss about Dead to Me is how viciously exact it was about grief. Not movie grief. Not prestige-TV grief. The real kind. The kind that makes you angry at the wrong person, funny at the wrong time, controlling when you should collapse, clingy when you should walk away, and weirdly attached to the exact person who seems most dangerous to your emotional survival. Jen Harding (Christina Applegate) and Judy Hale (Linda Cardellini) were the greatest damaged pairing Netflix ever stumbled into.

The show understood immediately that if you put a woman held together by rage next to a woman held together by apology, the result will not be healing at first. It will be combustion. And that is why it stayed so good. It never turned their bond into a neat friendship arc. Every time it got close to sweetness, it would remember the blood under the floorboards. Another lie. Another guilt spiral. Applegate gave Jen that clenched, exhausted, punishing intelligence that grief sometimes sharpens into cruelty, and Cardellini made Judy feel like someone whose need to be loved had already broken every internal boundary she had. The show’s brilliance was that it kept letting both women be unbearable and lovable in the same breath. That is near-perfect writing to me.

‘The OA’ (2016–2019)

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This one still feels like a robbery. Not a cancellation. A robbery. Because The OA was not just another ambitious Netflix mystery where you wait for clues to click into place. It was doing something much stranger and much riskier. It was asking the audience to surrender to belief as an emotional act. Prairie Johnson (Brit Marling) returns after seven years, is able to see, gathers those five lonely people in that unfinished house, and tells them what happened to her. That should not have worked as powerfully as it did. On paper, it sounds almost absurd. On screen, it felt sacred and unstable at the same time. The show understood that stories can function like portals long before they function like explanations.

The real genius was that it never treated the listeners as furniture. Steve Winchell (Patrick Gibson), French Sosa (Brandon Perea), Buck Vu (Ian Alexander), Jesse (Brendan Meyer), and BBA (Phyllis Smith) mattered because the show was also about the kinds of lives that are so emotionally starved they become vulnerable to miracles. Prairie was not just giving them exposition. She was giving them a shape of meaning large enough to interrupt despair. That is a huge thing for a show to attempt without irony. Then Season 2 somehow got even bolder, wider, more structurally deranged in the best way, and instead of being rewarded for that nerve, it got cut off just when it was opening into something enormous. That is why people who love The OA talk about it the way they do.

‘Sense8’ (2015–2018)

There are shows people admire. There are shows that people binge. And then there are shows people attach to in this almost embarrassing, full-body way, because the show touches a need they do not get met anywhere else. Sense8 was that kind of show. It was not just clever sci-fi about psychic connection. It was about how unbearable isolation is, and how intoxicating it would be to be truly reached by other people, not politely understood, not “related to,” but reached.

To have somebody else inside your panic, your desire, your shame, your language, your body, your memory. The premise itself was already emotional dynamite. What made the show special was that it actually believed connection could save people. That sounds cheesy when written plainly. Good. It was. It was gloriously, vulnerably earnest about human interdependence in a television era that often hides behind detachment. Watching the cluster become a real cluster was the whole thrill. Sun Bak (Bae Doona)’s control, Lito Rodriguez (Miguel Ángel Silvestre)’s fear, Wolfgang Bogdanow (Max Riemelt)’s damage, Kala Dandekar (Tina Desai)’s divided heart, Nomi Marks (Jamie Clayton)’s courage, Capheus Onyango (Aml Ameen and Toby Onwumere)’s optimism, Riley Blue (Tuppence Middleton)’s ache, Will Gorski (Brian J. Smith)’s steadiness, each one becoming part of the others without disappearing into them. It was brilliant.

‘Marco Polo’ (2014–2016)

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This is one of the easiest shows for people to dismiss lazily, which is exactly why it belongs here. People remember the budget, the early-Netflix prestige push, the fact that Marco Polo did not become the platform-defining sensation somebody wanted it to be. But if you actually watched it, really watched it, you know it had heft. It had an appetite. It had that old-fashioned historical-drama pleasure of stepping into a world where every glance, every seduction, every ritual, every silence around the throne might change somebody’s fate. It was not always elegant, and honestly that was part of the charm. It had a little excess in its bloodstream, which a court drama should.

The smartest thing it did was refuse to make Marco the entire point. Marco Polo (Lorenzo Richelmy) is there, yes, but the world around him kept threatening to outgrow him, which made the series richer. Kublai Khan (Benedict Wong) had gravity. Hundred Eyes (Tom Wu) had mystery. The women around the court were not decorative wall decor but players that read power with terrifying speed. The whole show felt built around the idea that empire is theater and blood at once, and that anybody surviving inside it has to learn how to perform before they can even think about freedom. When people call it forgotten, what they usually mean is that Netflix did not turn it into a forever brand. That is different.

‘Bloodline’ (2015–2017)

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Bloodline should not be forgotten. This one feels personal. It should still be sitting right there at the center of any serious conversation about Netflix’s best dramatic work, because season one in particular is one of the most suffocating family thrillers the platform ever produced. The setup was already poisonous in the right way: the respectable Rayburn family, all local charm and inherited standing, slowly coming apart when the damaged son comes back and starts pressing on every buried bruise. But the show’s real power was not in its secrets — it was in the humidity of the secrets. The sense that this family had been breathing around the same lies for so long, they had forgotten what clean air was supposed to feel like.

And then there was Danny Rayburn (Ben Mendelsohn), who gave one of those performances that changes the chemical balance of an entire series. He was not a villain in the neat sense, but a grievance with memory. He was the family’s guilt returning in human form and refusing to stay at the polite distance they had assigned him. Every scene with him felt unstable because he knew where the emotional rot lived, and he had the cruelty and hunger to keep pushing there. That made John Rayburn (Kyle Chandler), Meg Rayburn (Linda Cardellini), and Kevin Rayburn (Norbert Leo Butz) more interesting too, because the show never let their damage separate cleanly from his. They were all trapped in the same family myth, just occupying different corners of it. Bloodline understood a truth a lot of family dramas miss: love does not cancel rot. Sometimes it protects it.

Bloodline

Release Date

2015 – 2017-00-00

Network

Netflix