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 suspect a lot of folks are going to be quite upset by the news that Community‘s being put on hiatus, along with Prime Suspect, though both shows are supposed to return to the air. I don’t think it’s particularly surprising that either show is taking a break — given NBC’s failures in the early going, it was inevitable that things would get moved around to make space for some of the shows the network has yet to try out, like The Firm and Smash. And I tend to agree with Todd VanDerWerff that this probably doesn’t mean anything particularly new or different for Community‘s chances of a renewal. More to the point, though, the tenuous status of the show seems to make the case for more single-season shows or shows with a defined number of seasons from the beginning. Even if something like Community could have gone on forever, it does seem like it could be a fairly neat four-season story, and that treating it that way from the beginning could have made it seem less like a low-rated risk and more like a contained, wildly innovative project.

And honestly, though I love Community, I’m just as sorry that Prime Suspect is gone, and seems less likely to come back. I was skeptical of the show the entire time it was in development, and I was wrong. It’s a smart, funny, serious procedural that’s also found a way to be consistently intelligent about workplace sexism, at a time when sexual harassment has become an issue in the presidential campaign and sexual assault allegations at Penn State have become a national scandal. At a time when the Law & Order franchise has been winking out, it would have been wonderful to see a modern, intelligent cop show, especially one that’s as well-acted as it is by Maria Bello, Peter Gerety, Kirk Acevedo, and Tim Griffin. In a fall full of exasperating girl-children, Jane Timoney’s the most exciting woman on network television. We should root for both shows, one for experimenting wildly with genre, one for sticking to form and elevating it.

This was supposed to be a great fall for women on television, but several weeks in, it feels like it may be better at the cause of getting women acting jobs than at providing entertainment aimed at women viewers. With that odd disconnect in mind, my friend Lux asked me what I thought made a show woman-oriented a while back, and I was reminded of it again reading Nellie Andreeva’s meditation on The Playboy Club, Charlie’s Angels, and Prime Suspect*’s ratings troubles when she wrote:

For Playboy, there was a lack of clarity who the show is for. With a popular mens magazine in the title and the promise of scantly-clad bunnies, the series seemed to be targeting men. But it was at its core a female soap. The confusion with its mixed identity was clearly visible in the pilot, which looked like a soap, felt like a soap and behaved like one until it suddenly veered into dark territory with a murdered mafia boss’ body being dumped in the river.

As with most of these things, I think it’s easier to narrow down a definition by figuring out what’s not aimed at women. New Girl, despite its name and female protagonist, really don’t feel to me like it’s aimed at women at all. The show’s advertising focuses on how the character is perceived (thus, “adorkable”) rather than who she is. Most of the episodes I’ve seen so far are on the surface about problems Jess resolves, but are actually about the things her male roommates learn from helping her solve problems — the show is about their emotional growth more than hers. Up All Night, by contrast, could work for either gender of coastal elites, but I think is slightly more aimed at women. It’s not that Will Arnett’s stay-at-home dad Chris doesn’t have a character arc, because he clearly does. But there are also women wrestling with a whole range of career and life issues, and the core couple’s storylines are, obviously, interdependent. Raising a small human tends to do that. And I can’t quite figure out if 2 Broke Girls is supposed to be aimed at women or not: it’s got female protagonists, but it remains unclear whether they’re meant to be points of entry or objects of consumption (which may be more a problem of execution than artistic intent).

Tone isn’t really determinative, either. New Girl may be all Dirty Dancing-themed sing-a-longs and sunshine, while Prime Suspect looks gritty and muted, lots of grays and washed-out purples, plus, you know, omnipresent brutal murder. But the show is essentially a funhouse version of what it feels like to work in a bad male-dominated environment. It’s kind of a horror story with a female protagonist who gets to be a hero without having to be a virgin. And it’s not really tone that’s wrong with Playboy Club. It’s that the show puts women’s bodies on screens but no concrete ideas in their heads to relate to. Finding your dad by posing for Playboy is not an idea Viewers at Home can relate to, or analogous to any situations we are likely to face in real life.

*You should watch Prime Suspect. Maria Bello is very good, and the show deserves to survive.

I was looking for something fun to watch while crunching a lot of numbers yesterday, so I watched the first six episodes of Cagney & Lacey. While it’s not remotely challenging in terms of format or dynamics — the show’s an entirely conventional slightly melodramatic New York police procedural, and even though the two cops are both women (that is kind of revolutionary — you can have two men or a man and a woman, but not two women) they’ve got a similar dynamic to a standard pairing, one tougher than the other — it’s so awesomely, naturalistically feminist I’m not surprised it was canceled and retooled. And it offers a good look at what the Prime Suspect remake should try to do if it’s going to move away from a caustic depiction of sexism in the police department.

First, on Cagney & Lacey, the cops who are sexists are also people, rather than just creeps who wander around talking about a “beef trust,” a phrase that makes me feel pretty physically disgusted, as they were in the Prime Suspect pilot. Some of the sexism is occupational, like the fact that the characters get put on an assignment where they have to go under cover as hookers to catch a murderer. “You see, when you’re doing a man’s job, you don’t want anyone to think you’ve lost your femininity,” Cagney jokes. And some of it’s personal. When Marcus Petrie, the African-American vegetarian cop they work with is having a baby shower for his wife, you’d think his female colleagues would be logical invitees. But Petrie doesn’t invite them, out of fear that the cop’s wives will be uncomfortable and suspicious about the fact that the male cops have attractive female coworkers. It’s hurtful, and it illustrates the critically important fact that well-meaning guys can do hurtful things.

Second, there are actual debates between women. When Cagney is chasing a dangerous assignment too hard, Lacey tells her partner “I’m a mother-wife cop, emphasis on mother-wife. I’m not going to go looking for trouble.” Neither of them is right—they just have different preferences informed by the different places they’re coming from. The show also isn’t afraid to throw in a duty guarding a notorious anti-feminist spokeswoman, a kind of Phyllis Schlafly, and to show that both women hate it. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” complains Lacey. “I could be out finding Harvey our anniversary present.” “Helen would love that,” Cagney quips back at her. Feminism isn’t just an issue between women and men — it’s between women and women, too, and it would be too bad to leave Jane hanging by herself without a female counterpart in the department or outside of it in Prime Suspect.

Third, don’t be afraid to show the characters having setbacks, especially those that relate to gender. Whether it’s Jane realizing she might have offended by her boss by asking for a dead colleague’s job too soon after his passing, or Lacey complaining that a date’s gone badly, telling Cagney, “Check me out. See any hickeys? Any beard burn? Nothing…We had this little argument about the criminal justice system. I might have ruffled his feathers,” the path to victory’s boring if it’s smooth. There needs to be actual debate, discussion, and mistakes on both sides for this to seem real.

As long as we knew it was coming, I’ve been a vocal, even loud skeptic of the idea of a Prime Suspect remake. Helen Mirren’s performance as Jane Tennison is definitive, I thought. American network television would never portray a character who’s that actively and interestingly difficult, an alcoholic who kind of uses the men she dates, who has an abortion as if it’s matter-of-fact. And most importantly, I thought that the way the show dealt with institutionalized sexism might feel kind of unfortunately dated. But you know what? I was wrong. And I’m quite sorry to hear that the show is going to sideline sexism in future episodes.

What changed my mind was a summer where two now-former New York police officers, Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, were acquitted of raping a woman they were supposed to help get safely home, in part because one of the jurors wondered, “What if [Moreno and the victim] became close? What if they hit it off, somewhere between the taxicab and the dead roach? A moment that turned into conversation, that turned into flirting? What if it all led to something that Moreno thought was consensual?” It was a summer where another cop, Michael Pena, was charged with 10 counts of rape and assault, and is now under investigation for attacking two other women. And it was a summer where the Manhattan district attorney walked away from a sexual assault prosecution but not before utterly hanging the victim out to dry.

I don’t believe all cops are rapists. I don’t think that Special Victims Units always let women down, though I’m confident what happens there is more complicated than what I see on Law & Order: SVU. But you know what? I do believe a force that includes people who abuse their power to assault people might also include people who say things about women detectives like “A squad is only as good as its beef trust, because the beef trust only cares about the work…The beef trust can’t flutter their eyelashes. All the beef trust can do is the work. That’s why the beef trust deserves the jobs. All the jobs.” That there are probably cops who hate sexual harassment laws and complain that “You scratch your batteries and it’s a hostile work environment…She’s one of us until it suits her not to be.”

And I believe that it’s important for there to be, among all the other shows that lionize our police forces, one that explores and is attentive to that reality; that explains that men can be both loving fathers to their daughters and awful to their female coworkers. The show is smart enough to have her obnoxious coworkers have a sense that they’ve crossed a line, even though where they draw the line is not even close to where I’d draw the line. At a benefit, when Jane offers to buy her coworkers a drink and one of the guys on the squad goes off on her, telling his colleagues not to take her money because “Tell that bitch it’s no good in here,” calling her an “opportunistic whore,” their other male coworkers tell the guy to can it, and get him out of the way. They may not comfort Jane, but they aren’t totally monsters, which makes the portrait of them as sexists much more convincingly damning than making them all monsters.

And it helps that Bello is very good, and her character isn’t a direct copy of Mirren’s Jane Tennison. She’s in a steady relationship with a divorced man, Eddie, whose ex-wife uses Jane as an excuse to make it harder for Eddie to see his son. She’s also aware about when she’s screwing up, as when she asks too quickly after one of the officers in the squad dies if she can have his case. “I just thought I gotta ask now while they’re distracted, before they can regroup, right?” she agonizes to her father. “I thought that was my only chance, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe I should have waited. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked at all. Or maybe, I should have called Dan Costello and ask for the job because that’s what they all think I do anyway.” Just because she’s treated badly doesn’t mean she does everything right. After she discovers major new information in a case, she’s prickly with a coworker who is acknowledging the merits of her work. “Can I ask you something?” he says, exasperated. “You ever worry that someone might drop a house on you?” “This car won’t drive itself,” she tells him dourly. It’s not quite the moment in the original where Mirren tells a coworker who keeps calling her Ma’am and suddenly switches to Sir that “My voice suddenly got lower, has it? Maybe my knickers are too tight. Listen, I like to be called Governor or The Boss. I don’t like Ma’am – I’m not the bloody Queen. So take your pick.” But it’s it’s own thing. And in its own way, it’s as important a story now is it was in 1991.

Like a lot of other culture writers, I’m a nerdy Anglophile, so I’m sick over the riot reports coming out of London. And from a cultural perspective, it’s particularly devastating to hear about the burning of Sony’s distribution warehouse and the impact it’ll have on independent artists and independent record stores. So if you want to support British artists, and in particular, to consume some art that’s about the socioeconomic and racial divisions that have played a role in British unrest over the past year, not just the past few days, here are a couple of suggestions:

1. Prime Suspect, Series Two: The second season of the show that made Helen Mirren a star is all about underinvestigations of crimes in London’s Afro-Caribbean neighborhoods — and about the role that race and gender expectations play in the way police officers present themselves in the larger context of the force:

2. Logic’s “For My People.” I’m not comfortable with everything the conscious rapper Logic is saying on Twitter about the riots—I don’t think celebrating burning police stations is productive — but “For My People” is a great explication of how difficult it can be for poor people and people of color to get a place at the policymaking table, or to get media attention by peaceful means:

3. Spooks, Series One. American spy shows tend to focus on foreign threats rather than domestic ones. This show, about a fictional MI-5 unit, is all about the threats to British stability from within, whether it’s anti-abortion extremists, racists who want to forment ethnic conflict in England as a means of cleansing it, and even a post-Buffy Anthony Head as racial environmentalist.

4. Misfits. I’ve written about Misfits before, but if you’re looking for pop culture that will force you to empathize with people who are not inherently likable, or a show about the unfashionable parts of London that are in the process of getting torn up, it’s worth checking out.

-Batgirl beats DC.

-This is a great list of cynical Tom Lehrer songs, but incomplete without “I Got It From Agnes.”

-George Pelecanos on his childhood and why he likes writing not about racists, but about “people who don’t think they have any of those bad feelings.”

-Chuck Lorre is killing off Charlie Sheen.

-It sounds like NBC has absolutely no idea what made Prime Suspect a great show, and has decided instead that it’s cigs and a fedora.

Last week, Paulie asked me in comments on my post about Miss Representation, “Say I’m a stereotypical guy looking to watch/read something new. What stuff written by or starring women am I likely to enjoy?” Here, in no particular order, are 18 things that I think would appeal to men. I’ve omitted classics because I assume you know. All of these, for me, pass Ta-Nehisi’s test in that these are not things you should watch or read out of obligation, but because they’re very good. Got more suggestions? Toss ‘em in comments.

1. Prime Suspect: Helen Mirren is so universally understood to be an amazing actresses, a salty dame, and a foxy lady, that it’s difficult to think about a time when she wasn’t a phenomenon in the U.S. as well as in the U.K. But if you want to understand Mirren’s general awesomeness, it’s worth checking out her seven-season run as DCI Jane Tennison, during which Mirren puts away serial killers, works with immigrant communities, challenges institutional sexism, has affairs and an abortion, and acknowledges her drinking problem. In other words, she’s an actual person rather than a saint, a living illustration of the costs of breaking gender barriers in the working world. And she’s funny, too.

2. Anything Barbara Stanwyck: The woman was tougher than most of the guys she was on-screen with, even in a dress so tight she couldn’t run in it, even in heels that she broke strategically as a way to get back to a mark’s stateroom on a cruise ship. “I love him because he’s a kind of a guy that gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk,” she declared in Ball of Fire. “I need him like the axe needs the turkey,” she glowered about Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve. Stanwyck is the apotheosis of the idea women can be equal — even superior — to men with an entirely different toolkit. Read this profile and critical reassessment of her by David Denby. Then rent The Lady Eve and prepare to die laughing during the mirror scene.

3. Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility: Jane Austen is, indeed awesome, but Emma Thompson is the only woman who possibly could have improved upon her, turning Sense and Sensibility into a pitch-perfect examination of why women get emotionally attached too quickly, or don’t explain why they’re thinking — and how social pressure, particularly when it comes to class and money, leads men into bad decisions. The movie is sharp, very funny, and quite moving. Yeah, it’s Austen and it’s understated, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s boring.
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