The 10 Best Showtime Original Series: Yellowjackets, Billions and More
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The post The 10 Best Showtime Original Series: Yellowjackets, Billions and More appeared first on Consequence.
The Showtime network debuted a few years after HBO as one of the first pay cable networks in the 1970s, and in recent decades, as both networks moved from mostly broadcasting theatrical films to producing original series, Showtime has been HBO’s bridesmaid, scoring long-running hits of its own without receiving the same level of acclaim or Emmy glory.
Part of this may be by design: Showtime has never chased prestige projects in the same way, and many of their signature shows have aimed for simpler pleasures, from bloody dramas like Ray Donovan and Dexter to trashy comedies like Californication and Weeds. They may not have made a consensus classic like The Sopranos, but it doesn’t necessarily seem like they ever tried to.
Showtime has been on a roll lately, though. They’ve had a string of excellent miniseries like Escape at Dannemora and The Good Lord Bird, and have made significant inroads in the late-night comedy market with Desus and Mero and Ziwe. And most significantly, there’s Yellowjackets, which just wrapped up its first season and has been renewed for a second, and has achieved Showtime’s best balance of surging ratings and critical buzz in years.
So here’s a look back at the 10 best Showtime original series from the ‘80s to the network’s current slate of programming.
10. Black Monday (2019-present)
One of the most frustrating things about Showtime is how often they’ll put together a great cast for a show that never lives up to its potential. House of Lies with Don Cheadle and Kristen Bell ran for five seasons, and got Cheadle an Emmy nomination in four of them, but it was always a deeply mediocre show full of cheap cynicism. Black Monday looks similar to House of Lies on the surface — a dark comedy where an ambitious and unethical Don Cheadle makes lots of money — but it’s a far better, funnier show.
With the titular Wall Street crash of 1987 as its jumping-off point, Black Monday is an action-packed period piece about the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. But the cast, including Andrew Rannells and Regina Hall, is primarily occupied with delivering a constant stream of deeply silly, hyper-referential dialogue in the tradition of co-creator David Caspe’s previous cult sitcom Happy Endings.
09. Shameless (2011-2021)
Last year, Shameless wrapped up its 11th season as the longest-running scripted series in Showtime’s history, adapted from the similarly long-running British series of the same name. Though the show probably did go on a little too long, with star Emmy Rossum leaving before the last two seasons, the saga of the Gallagher family’s misadventures striving and surviving and stealing in Chicago managed to stay entertaining for well over 100 episodes.
William H. Macy got most of the awards show love as the scumbag patriarch Frank, but watching younger actors like Jeremy Allen White and Emma Kenney grow up onscreen and eventually carry Shameless managed to be pretty touching for such a bawdy, unsentimental show.
08. Huff (2004-2006)
Though it won three Emmys, Huff is a semi-forgotten gem of the mid-2000s, when prestige TV was just starting to get good at dramedies that mixed funny actors with dark subject matter. Hank Azaria, flexing his dramatic chops in between doing silly voices on The Simpsons, played the titular psychiatrist, Dr. Craig Huffstodt, who witnesses a tragedy in the show’s opening episode and realizes he can’t help everyone, after all.
His fantastic supporting cast included Oliver Platt, Blythe Danner, and an early breakout role for the late Anton Yelchin, but Showtime pulled the show after two seasons, leaving too many storylines unresolved.
07. Work In Progress (2019-present)
One respect in which Showtime led the way for other networks was by being ahead of the curve with LGBTQ-themed series like The L Word and the American adaptation of Queer As Folk. The network’s best current show in that lineage is comedian Abby McEnany’s semi-autobiographical Work In Progress, sometimes directed and co-written by exec producer Lilly Wachowski.
There’s probably never been a half hour comedy that hinges more heavily on the protagonist’s suicidal ideations. But Work In Progress is often a disarmingly funny show, which features Julia Sweeney playing a fictionalized version of herself who’s married to “Weird” Al Yankovic and wrestling with the problematic legacy of her famous Saturday Night Live character Pat.
06. Homeland (2011-2020)
Homeland was in some ways a high water mark for Showtime, winning 6 Emmys in 2012 including the network’s first Outstanding Drama Series award. And that first season really was a phenomenon, a gripping political thriller with a tawdry, character-driven plot that raced towards unexpected twists where other shows would slowly draw out the suspense.
Claire Danes deserved all of the many awards she received for Homeland, but the show inarguably wore out its welcome, and you’re probably surprised that it was still on the air less than 2 years ago.
05. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
The two-season run of Twin Peaks on ABC in the early ‘90s may have been the strangest, most original series ever aired on network television. But after one spinoff film, creators David Lynch and Mark Frost stayed out of the fictional town of Twin Peaks, Washington for two decades, until the shocking news that Showtime would air an 18-episode third season with most of the original cast and crew returning.
Lynch, who hasn’t directed a feature since 2006, treated Twin Peaks: The Return like a vessel for a decade’s worth of ideas, some of which involved revisiting the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder, and some of which had little to do with the original Twin Peaks. There’s an absurd number of celebrity cameos (including incredibly silly ones, like Michael Cera doing an impression of Marlon Brando), and every episode ended with a performance from a musical guest, like a late-night talk show.
And yet Twin Peaks: The Return still managed to be an incredible achievement, and a fitting conclusion to a legendary series.
04. Yellowjackets (2021-present)
It may seem premature to anoint Yellowjackets as one of Showtime’s all-time best just a couple months after its premiere, but its first 10 episodes featured more twists, thrills, intriguing mysteries and poignant, relatable moments than a lot of series manage in a decade. Yellowjackets bounces between two timelines, a high school soccer team’s plane crashing in the Canadian wilderness in 1996 and the survivors’ lives in 2021.
Perhaps the show’s most remarkable achievement is that the show’s two parallel casts are so well matched. ‘90s It Girl actresses Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci are perfectly cast as the present day Natalie and Misty, but Sophie Thatcher and Sammi Hanratty are equally compelling as their teenage incarnations.
03. Billions (2016-2022)
Damian Lewis cemented his status as the MVP of Showtime when he exited one of the network’s biggest hits, Homeland, to star in another. Billions is in some ways an archetypal cable drama about powerful men on opposite sides of the law trying to take each other down, with Lewis and Paul Giamatti entertainingly bloviating at each other and occasionally forming an alliance.
But it’s also a show where Maggie Siff consistently gives a powerhouse performance as the woman in the middle of it all, and Asia Kate Dillon plays the most complex non-binary character on television. And with the sixth and final season currently airing, Billions is still managing to surprise with clever plot machinations and razor-sharp dialogue.
02. It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1986-1990)
The late Garry Shandling is most remembered for his HBO series The Larry Sanders Show, but first, he made an arguably more groundbreaking series for Showtime. Alongside Bob Einstein’s stuntman satire Super Dave, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show helped establish Showtime as a force in comedy, earning four Emmy nominations and getting rerun on the FOX network.
2It’s perhaps the most relentlessly meta sitcom of all time, right down to the theme song (“This is the theme to Garry’s show, Garry called me up and asked if I would write his theme song/ I’m almost halfway finished, how do you like it so far?”).
Shandling constantly broke the fourth wall, chastising actors for showing up late or castigating the show itself for lame jokes. In the second episode, he showed up in a bathrobe, declared himself “burnt out” from the first episode, and listened to a book on tape while directing the audience to focus on a B-plot about his friend’s marriage.
01. Dead Like Me (2003-2004)
Bryan Fuller has created a string of shows like Pushing Daisies and Hannibal that combine distinctive visuals and morbid humor. And the first cult favorite the former Star Trek: Voyager writer created was Dead Like Me, about George Lass (Ellen Muth), who dies at 18 years old and joins a team of “reapers” who help escort souls to the afterlife. Dead Like Me had a troubled production and Fuller left the show after 5 episodes, but the darkly funny fantasy series managed to last for two great seasons and a 2009 spinoff film.
The 10 Best Showtime Original Series: Yellowjackets, Billions and More
Al Shipley
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