The Best Episodes Of 2014’s Most Underrated Shows

2) Looking – Looking For The Future

Everyone always makes fun of HBO shows for either their uninhibited sexuality (if they’re female-centric) or tendency for bloody violence (male-centric). Looking, one of HBO’s newest half-hour comedy/drama/hard-to-describe things is about a group of gay guys living in San Francisco. Okay, so it’s not that hard to describe, but its very existence – a show about the more violent sex doing all of the things we expect more of Hannah Horvath and her brood – pretty much exiled it from public consciousness following its abysmally short eight-episode run.

But if you have one of those elusive “open minds,” the drama that swirls around the central best-friend trio of Patrick, Augustin, and Dom is not only enthralling, but also endlessly believable. Believable in that unique HBO way where you can tell characters are actually drinking real liquids, or the way they shovel spoonfulls of homemade mac-n-cheese into their mouth as they talk. It feels like the real world, starkly ominous shots of fog-lined San Fran streets and all, and not the carbon-fiber studio back lot every laugh-track comedy appears to be shot on.

All of this is best portrayed in “Looking for the Future,” a middle-season bottle episode that shirks the majority of its main cast to see Patrick and his new beau, Richie, digging deep into each other’s past as they tour San Francisco. Just when the show was losing its dramatic grip – Augustin’s slow hooker-for-hire downfall and Dom’s flailing business plans – “Looking for the Future” was a breath of fresh air, a move and counter-move battle of past lovers, hidden secrets, and Goonies playing cards.

It represents the show at its most culturally honest, “You’re like ‘I’m gay,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, so you’re butt-fucking now,” and its most romantically sweet. In a lesser show, the half-hour tangent could have felt wasted, but instead the episode builds up an endearingly believable relationship, and makes events later in the season all the more impactful.