12 Most Underrated TV Shows Ever
4. Surviving Jack
One of the careers launched by Oz was that of one Christopher Meloni, the star of yet another prematurely cancelled Fox show, Surviving Jack, which scraped its way to eight episodes in 2014. The blunt, no-nonsense ex-military Jack Dunlevy steps into the parental drivers seat when his wife Joanne decides to go back to school - something their kids arent prepared for. Jacks methods are those of an inventively unorthodox drill sergeant, and he soon becomes a holy terror for the teenagers unlucky enough to fall under his watch.
Just as the similar but inferior The Goldbergs was set in the 1980s and based around creator Adam F. Goldberg's autobiographical experiences growing up back then, so Surviving Jack was based on writer Justin Halperns own autobiographical book, I Suck At Girls. The show was actually Halperns second bite at the cherry: CBS cancelled Sh*t My Dad Says three years earlier, the sitcom version of his notorious Twitter account detailing the profane wisdom his father used to dish out to him.
The episodes that Fox actually put out are absolutely worth searching out, even if they didn't amount to a full season. The cast has impeccable comic timing, but Meloni is extraordinary, a tyrannical yet oddly appealing authority figure, both genuinely appalling and yet always absolutely right. If the rest of the show was ropy as all hell, it'd still be worth watching just for his towering performance fortunately, it's witty, articulate and savagely clever instead. Which is nice. Come on, Fox. You dont want to carry on being those guys, do you?