One of the major effects of Netflix and other streaming services’ move into the original content market has been the prospect of reviving cancelled television shows away from the networks that did them in. Netflix showed that it was serious in part by inking a deal to bring back cult favorite Arrested Development, which chronicles the experiences of a deeply dysfunctional family after its real estate empire collapses. Shows like that, and the long-mourned Firefly will always have their defenders. And now, any cancelled network show seems like it’ll go through the same process that Terra Nova did, where after its network cuts it loose, there will be at least a semblance of discussion about whether it should live again on one of the streaming services. But what of the shows that were cancelled before that option was added to the lifecycle? Or that haven’t developed Freaks and Geeks-like followings, but were solid and worthy shows none the less? Here are five shows that deserve a second lease on life—or a first look, if you haven’t checked them out yet.

1. Better Off Ted: Think The Office, but higher up on the food chain. The main character, Ted, runs a research and development division of a cheerily evil corporation, Veridian Dynamics, where he works for the conscienceless but strangely endearing Veronica (Portia di Rossi, absolutely on comedic fire). At a time when we’re both intensely aware of corporate callousness, but the economy doesn’t have a lot of room for us to run off and pursue our dreams, like Linda, the show’s product-tester-turned-children’s-book-author, Better Off Ted was both hilarious and cathartic.

2. Kings: Look, I’d pay money to watch Ian McShane curse the heavens as a standalone weekly enterprise. But there were terrific, long-game stories to be told here about the governance of Gilboa; Jack Benjamin’s repression of his sexuality in the name of dynastic succession (Sebastian Stan should have won Emmys for that performance); the role of the media in public opinion; and how health care reform affects a nation at risk of plague. Plus, it was a gorgeous example of how production design can create a new world that should have been a role model for other science-fictional and futurist shows.

3. The Unusuals: The casting was just ridiculous: Amber Tamblyn and Jeremy Renner as cops partnered in the wake of Renner’s partner’s death; Adam Goldberg and Harold Perinneau as another pair, the first of whom was dying of a brain tumor he refused to treat, the later terrified to die young; Chris Sarandon as Tamblyn’s wealthy father she’s trying to prove she doesn’t depend on. And the show was a smart, sometimes surreal reinvention of the cop genre, moving the cases away from murders to explore everything from New York’s old crime families to Alzheimer’s. If I could have only one show back, it would probably be this.

4. Prime Suspect: That this smart remake failed to find an American audience is a failure of that audience. We still need shows about sexism in American law enforcement. And Maria Bello was fantastic. Not every show has to be high-concept. I wish this smart, solid, fun procedural had survived.

5. No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency: I wish this show was still going less for the show itself, and more for the fact that it helped stand up Botswana’s film industry. It’s disappointing, if inevitable, that we’d get a show set in Africa and with African characters through the creation of a white male writer. But it would be really nice to get American audiences used to watching shows set in non-American countries, and with characters where the default setting isn’t white American. Especially when it comes to solving mysteries.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally started playing Portal over the weekend, got through level nine, and enough cannot be said about how charming the game is. Because I haven’t played video games or been around gamers in any substantive way in a decade, I wasn’t as struck as Becky Chambers was by the opportunity to play as a woman (though Chambers’ piece is excellent). Instead, what struck me is the way the game’s sense of humor dovetails with larger trends in entertainment, particularly comedies set in corporations.

The minute GLaDOS declared in her menacingly chipper way: “Remember,’Take Your Daughter to Work Day’ is a great opportunity to have her tested,” I immediately thought of Veronica Palmer, the hilariously amoral executive from Better Off Ted. Veronica’s the kind of person who is perfectly comfortable freezing a man for science only to be annoyed when he emerges from the experience with a tendency to shriek unexpectedly; who when Ted, the senior vice president who works for for her, brings his daughter Rose to work and asks Veronica to look after the little girl, teaches Rose how to lay people off; who works with Ted to fake a major company initiative when rumor accidentally spreads that they’re on to something awesome. In other words, she is beyond the realms of usual corporate malfeasance into the realm of the hilariously evil. If she were Jack Donaghy, she’d be turning children orange and selling dangerously defective grills to North Korea. If she were Michael Scott, she’d run an office so depressing and No Exit-y that day-to-day life would become a comedy of the absurd. GLaDOS offers chipper warnings that various force fields might yank out Chell’s fillings, and that under certain circumstances, you’ll die and get a note in your permanent record (and I understand that worse is yet to come).

This mismatch between tone and content feels like an important hallmark of our corporate comedy to me. The things all these characters are doing are wildly malfeasant, but they’re not actually so malfeasant as to be unrealistic—in fact, sometimes, reality is worse than what we can imagine. Even Veronica Palmer would quail at Don Blakenship. But I think most Americans don’t really think we’ll do without corporations, or that we’ll radically change their role in American life. I’d like to believe that’s different. But until it is, joking about corporate power helps us reconcile ourselves to big companies’ role in our day-to-day lives, whether they’re employing us or building the world around us. It is to cry, but day-to-day, it helps to laugh.

The AFL-CIO debuted a new series of comedy videos at Netroots Nation as part of a website they’re launching about collective bargaining. They’re a useful illustration, I think, of how to strike a comedic balance in critiquing corporate power—and of how much harder it is to use comedy to sell ideas rather than to criticize bad ones. Take this first video, with a Snidley Wiplash-esque corporate board discussing how to implement a new “Maximum Fun Workday” with extended hours and declaring, “We are discriminating against Americans under the age of 12 who should have the right to work should they so choose.” You can practically hear the moustache-twirling:

Now, contrast that with Portia di Rossi’s performance as Veronica on Better Off Ted:

The things the character is saying are much, much more ridiculous than the evil executives in the AFL-CIO’s video, and they’re funnier because of the utter sincerity of di Rossi’s delivery. She isn’t aware that she’s an avatar of corporate evil, and the juxtaposition of her evident conviction with the craziness of her ideas is simultaneously disconcerting and hilarious. It’s the same thing with Jack Dongahy on 30 Rock: his conviction that inventing dangerous microwave ovens or turning children orange is part and parcel with the American dream is a lot scarier than if he didn’t believe any of it and was just pure evil.

But any negative depiction of corporations is a lot easier to make funny than it is to make union organizing look wacky and hilarious. For a long time, the union narrative was essentially a dramatic one: life or death stakes, organizing as a means to reclaiming human dignity. That’s still the brand. Wacky things might happen along the way in a union campaign, whether it’s sexier-than-intended signs in Made in Dagenham or Pilar Padilla sneaking Adrian Brody out of an office building in a giant wheeled recycling bin in Bread and Roses. But the mechanics of the story are essentially dramatic ones, the power of the brand in stuff that’s tear-jerking.