(no subject)
Day 1: A show that never should have been canceled
Day 2: A show you wish more people were watching
Day 3: Your favorite new show (aired this TV season)
Day 4: Your favorite show ever
Day 5: A show you hate
Day 6: Favorite episode of your favorite TV show
Day 7: Least favorite episode of your favorite TV show
Day 8: A show everyone should watch
Day 9: Best scene ever
Day 10: A show you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving
Day 11: A show that disappointed you
Day 12: An episode you've watched more than 5 times
Day 13: Favorite childhood show
Day 14: Favorite male character
Day 15: Favorite female character
Day 16: Your guilty pleasure show
Day 17: Favorite mini series
Day 18: Favorite title sequence
Day 19: Best TV show cast
Day 20: Favorite kiss
Day 21: Favorite 'ship
Day 22: Favorite series finale
Day 23: Most annoying character
Day 24: Best quote
Day 25: A show you plan on watching (old or new)
Day 26: OMG WTF? Season finale
Day 27: Best pilot episode
Day 28: First TV show obsession
Day 29: Current TV show obsession
Day 30: Saddest character death
I'm interpreting this in a slightly different way than the similar Day Two prompt, I guess.
If there is one "lost gem" of which I think more people should be aware -- if only because of its complete, jaw-dropping audacity -- it is Profit, which originally aired on Fox for less than a month in 1996. It stars Adrian Pasdar (in what could have easily been a career-wrecking role), and was co-created by David Greenwalt, who had a hand in Buffy and Angel. I guess it's kind of a soap operatic Mad Men/American Psycho hybrid. Way soap-operatic. I mean, get a load of this biographical sketch of the program's main character (Pasdar) from Wikipedia:
Jim Profit was raised in a cardboard G&G shipping box (G&G is the unscrupulous multinational corporation where all the show's action takes place) with the television on at all hours by an abusive father in Tulsa, Oklahoma, until he set his father on fire and ran away. The experience left him with a complete hatred of TV and a desire to insinuate himself into the G&G family by any means necessary...but he still sleeps in a G&G shipping box in a secret room of his apartment. Worked in Auditing before ascending to junior-vice president of Acquisitions. He intends to climb the corporate ladder at G&G by secretly engineering the ruin of those who stand in his way and/or refuse to assist him.
Yeah. Pretty much.
If you can hang with that plot, the only major downfall of Profit is how utterly, embarassingly dated the computer technology -- which is portrayed as "cutting edge" -- looks to a contemporary audience. But the entire series is only, like, 10 episodes long, so that element is easy enough to withstand. You'll definitely see how Profit paved the way for other shows with morally ambivalent protagonists, notably Dexter.
Click to viewthe final scene of "Walkabout": Lost, Season One