18. Alfred Hitchcock Presents
We’re pulling this one out of the vaults, but it’s a classic TV series and appears on Time’s list of best TV shows ever for a reason. That reason is Alfred Hitchcock, the legendary director. In this show, aptly named Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he provides a brief introduction to each story told, then returns at the end to wrap things up.
It’s an anthology series, which means that you won’t have to worry about skipping an episode here and there if the stories don’t grab you. Although Hitchcock Presents actually ran for seven years under that name, and then for another three under the name of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour when it was expanded to, well, an hour, Netflix only has 39 episodes available. (We wish it was a reference to The 39 Steps, but we might be reading too far into things…or are we?)
Before you start worrying that you’ll need to sit yourself down and watch 39 hours of content, take a minute to process the following: these episodes come from the initial run. In other words, they’re each less than half an hour, and, again because they’re unrelated stories, you can easily skip one. We’ll put this one at a medium commitment level.