By The biggest TV events of this year might have given you the impression that the medium had gone all-in on the 90s revival: Home Secretary-exploding spy thriller Bodyguard brought back the communal cliffhanger, Queer Eye was massive again, and just over 24 million people watched England lose a semi final.
Frantically trying to cram in watching the above plus Making A Murderer 2, Killing Eve, The Staircase, The Haunting of Hill House, Derry Girls, The Good Place, BoJack Horseman, The Handmaid's Tale and everything else you were told you absolutely had to watch this year means you're going to miss a few gems. Once we hit Christmas proper you're looking at a couple of weeks of relative social slack tide - an ideal time to burrow into the shows that didn't get enough noise. Here's the 10 most unfairly slept-on programmes of the year to help.
Barry (HBO)
Not really slept on in America, but Barry has barely made a dent in Britain. Bill Hader is a lonely hitman who trudges to LA to bump off a Chechen mob boss. The hit goes wrong, though, and Barry ends up stumbling into the circle of struggling actors, playing along with them, and realising that he wants to be an actor himself. Unfortunately, being a successful thesp doesn't exactly sit well with having to anonymously murder people, and Barry's old life won't go of him. It's a sitcom, but with the slyness of Grosse Point Blank and shades of Fargo.
Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing (BBC)
Following the format of sending two middle aged blokes on some kind of journey and letting them just chat for a bit (cf The Trip, Travel Man, Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee), Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse spend a lot of time dicking about on riverbanks, where quietly studious Paul is meant to be teaching wilfully daft Bob how to fish. However, the whole thing is shot through with little ruminations on mortality and ageing: they started fishing together when Paul decided he needed to get Bob out of the house after his triple heart bypass. Plus, Bob's Robert De Niro impression needs to be heard to be believed.
Salt Fat Acid Heat (Netflix)
Samin Nosrat's adaptation of her cult-smash book of the same name feels like it's quietly reinvented food on TV. Instead of pitting cooks against each other or letting some ker-razy genius chef wang on about himself for an hour, Nosrat breaks cooking down into understanding and balancing four building blocks of flavour: she heads to Italy to understand fat, Japan for salt, Mexico for acid and America for heat. Rather than geeking out about technique or traditions, Salt Fat Acid Heat celebrates experimentation and has a playful, joyful feel. It's a bit odd that an unpretentious, effervescent cooking show which is really in love with the idea of cooking and wants you to be able to do it too feels so groundbreaking, but perhaps it'll help to curtail food telly's general air of smugness.
Succession (HBO)
Jesse Armstrong's back catalogue is full of back-biting and powerplays - Peep Show, The Thick of It, Babylon - and his move into American drama keeps the squabbling-as-entertainment quotient up. A TV mogul played by Brian 'No Not The Scientist' Cox is stepping back from his empire and his family are jockeying to get themselves in line to take over. It's not a particularly subtle or dramatically nuanced watch, but if you go into it assuming you're watching a waspish dark comedy rather than a family dynasty drama you'll have a lot more fun. It doesn't take an enormous leap to map the Roy family onto the Trumps, and, in an unexpected bonus, Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off is in it.
Bobby Kennedy For President (Netflix)
We've shouted for this before in our round-up of the year's best docs, but what with it being much less mad than Wild Wild Country and much less full of good boys and girls than Dogs, it's not got anywhere near the the props it deserved. The story of Bobby's turnaround from McCarthy-supporting legal aide to crusading civil rights lawyer and the idealism which carried him and his followers through his tilt at the presidency before his death in 1968 feels like a very bittersweet inversion of where we're at now.
Last Chance Lawyer NYC (BBC)
This slice-of-life documentary follows the Danny DeVito-like defence lawyer Howard Greenberg, the oddest and most New York-ish of New York oddballs. His hair looks like its been combed with a fork, he collects remote control cars apparently endlessly and he defends the city's most hopeless cases. Aside from his, uh, unconventional methods (most lawyers tend not to admonish their clients because they "look like a f**king criminal") the doc does touch a deeper nerve: Greenberg is rabidly anti-government, and is convinced that the state is out to put away vulnerable people. The collision of hard-hitting reality and Greenberg's harrumphing bizarreness is gripping.
The Bisexual (Channel 4)
There's a section of Twitter which reckons Desiree Akhavan's sitcom about Leila, who breaks up with her partner Sadie when she realises she's bi and has to move out into a grotty flatshare while she works out what she wants, doesn't have enough jokes in it. That section of Twitter - as with most sections of Twitter - is wrong. If you go into it expecting it to be built like Mrs Brown's Boys you'll be disappointed; like most really good British sitcoms it's also very sad, full of messy, confused, deeply narcissistic people saying the wrong thing at the wrong time because they're far too wrapped up in themselves to realise it until it's too late. Plus, it does have great gags in it: see "I know you fill your Aesop bottles with Imperial Leather, and I think that describes you both as people" for proof.
Inside Number 9 (BBC)
Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's anthology series might now be the James Milner of British TV drama - so broadly considered to be underrated that it becomes just normally rated - but it still feels like a cult hit. The viewing figures are up - the first episode of the last series got about 1.8 million viewers in the 30 days after broadcast, which isn't bad - but given how incredibly inventive the discrete stories of Inside Number 9 routinely are, it wouldn't be too much to see it on big-screen TVs in town squares up and down Britain. Watch 'Bernie Clifton's Dressing Room', about a bickering old-school comedy double-act getting together for one last gig, and see why: funny, tender, sad, nuanced, and wrapped up in 28 minutes.
Informer (BBC)
This complex, timeframe-shuffling thriller follows Raza Shar, an extremely normal second-generation British-Pakistani bloke from east London who gets muscled into becoming an informer by Paddy Considine's counter-terrorism officer. The strain of Raza's double-life starts to tell, as it becomes clear that he really can't trust anyone. That probably should have been obvious anyway, but the way that the strands of the story slowly encircle and overlap made Informer a sophisticated and nuanced counterbalance to the crash-bang-wallop of Bodyguard.
The Great Model Railway Challenge (Channel 5)
Every year needs a low-key televisual refuge from the storm outside, and the combo of zero jeopardy and small-scale sniping between middle-aged men made this one the connoisseur's choice. Basically, teams of railway modellers are given a rough theme - British TV one week, 'fire and ice' the next - to build a model railway around. No, it's not a must-watch, but the moment when the big highlight of a half-finished Doctor Who-themed layout - a spaceship - turned out to be a wok wobbling shittily about on fishing line is up there with any of the big reveals on your glossy American dramas.
