10 Most Underrated Animated Shows Of All Time

Across both television and film, the medium of animation has historically faced the paradox of enchanting and captivating massive, wide-ranging audiences around the world while struggling to be placed on equal artistic footing with live-action movies and shows. Some of the best TV productions of all time in any genre you could name — comedy, drama, action, horror, romance, musical — have been animated, but rare are the ones that actually find the prestige and recognition they ought to.

In that sense, pretty much every good animated series in history could be said to fall somewhere under the “underrated” umbrella. And, even if you adjust for that, the medium is also uniquely conducive to producing works that just don’t get talked up as much as they deserve to be. Several of the best, most inventive, most influential animated shows in history are essentially cult items, remembered by a few dedicated torchbearers — to say nothing of the ones that remain shockingly little-known even among animation fans.

To compile this list of the most underrated animated series ever, we looked for the ones marked by a stark mismatch between quality and cultural ubiquity. These are all genuinely great shows that rarely get their due even from those who make a point of seeking out the medium’s hidden gems; in other words, we tried to avoid the cult favorites with followings that grew large enough to break containment (e.g. “Home Movies,” “Æon Flux,” the recently-revived “Clone High,” and other niche giants), and look at shows that deserve significant boosts in the all-time cartoon canon.

There had never been something quite like “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist” when it premiered in 1993, and it could well be argued that the entire animation landscape of today would not be the same without it. For starters, it pioneered two canny formal ideas: Its “Squigglevision” animation style, consisting of lines and contours that undulated like drawings scribbled on paper, introduced a new way for animation to feel alive and dynamic on a budget. And the extensive use of retroscripting, improvisation, and sampled dialogue, which would then serve as the basis for the animation itself, made it possible for even the most crudely-drawn Autodesk sprites to feel like real, vivid human beings — to an extent that few other animated series had approached before.

Yet, despite those innovations and the show’s standing as one of the best Comedy Central shows of all time, “Dr. Katz” remains relatively little-known by non-enthusiasts of American animation, and rarely gets cited in discussions about the best ’90s animated series. It’s a darn shame, not least because, even if you take away its massive influence on subsequent adult-oriented animated comedies, it’s a self-evidently fantastic show in its own right. Jonathan Katz, starring as a fictionalized therapist version of himself with rotating celebrity patients and a host of frustrating family issues, found in low-budget animation the perfect vessel for a brand of scrappy, melancholy, sharply-observed, painfully relatable comedy that has aged significantly better than a lot of cartoons from that period. Together with series co-creator Tom Snyder, he ought to be remembered as a trailblazer.

The best Disney Channel show of the 2010s would probably not even rank among the top 10 most popular or best-remembered Disney Channel shows of the 2010s — which makes it severely underrated by default. Created by Doug Langdale and aired for only one 21-episode season between 2004 and 2005, “Dave the Barbarian” improbably aligns kid-friendly medieval fantasy storytelling with a scathing, goofy, enormously smart sense of humor that earned it an outsized cult following among older viewers.

Centered around the three children (Danny Cooksey, Erica Luttrell, and Tress MacNeille) of a medieval king (Kevin Michael Richardson) and queen (Luttrell) who left to “battle evil” around the world, “Dave the Barbarian” toes the line between genre satire and straight-up postmodern surrealism, with a finesse more indebted to Monty Python and Mel Brooks than to any actual Disney productions (with the notable exception of “The Emperor’s New Groove”). Each episode concocts its own take on one or more stock high fantasy plots, only for those plots to get more and more cartoonishly silly before crossing over into meta madness.

Contributing to the show’s sui generis excellence is the fact that its ensemble is populated by winning comedic creations — from the unconventionally timid and sweet-natured titular protagonist, to an arrogant porcine wizard (Paul Rugg) who doubles as the world’s most incompetent villain, to a talking sword with the personality of a snarky old lady voiced by Estelle Harris. It’s a show of counterintuitive choices that paid off handsomely, if only for the few viewers lucky enough to give it the deserved attention.

The Chris Prynoski-created “Downtown” was an extraordinary thing: An animated series with the relaxed, conversational flow and textural hyperspecificity of a naturalistic hangout movie. No other ’90s animated series this side of “Hey Arnold!” was so committed to spinning gold out of the rhythms of mundane big city life — but, unlike “Hey Arnold!,” “Downtown” was not the hit that it deserved to be, and got canceled by MTV after airing a single season in 1999.

The show’s unique, now-cult style was largely built on one brilliant decision: Casting mostly unprofessional voice actors, and then giving them space to riff and improvise on top of the scripts. This bold idea allowed “Downtown” to feel like a slice of grimy reality even as its animation became pointedly stylized and experimental — a one-of-a-kind marriage between visual exuberance and stringent aural groundedness. But this wouldn’t have worked at all if the scripts themselves for each episode weren’t also masterclasses in observational, psychologically acute dramedy, with characters who felt human in their actions as much as their speech.

Prynoski has stated that his express intention was to create a time capsule of New York City in 1999, with the trials and tribulations of the show’s multi-ethnic cast of young adults standing in for the broader complexities of life on the brink of the digital era. He succeeded so mightily that the only possible conclusion to draw from the show’s lack of viewership and premature cancellation is that people just weren’t ready for it yet. But, even years of renewed appreciation later, it still feels like we don’t talk about “Downtown” nearly enough.

Even within the all-timer crop of Cartoon Network original series of the turn of the 21st century, the Mo Willems-created “Sheep in the Big City” stood out for the sheer dry wit of its humor. Following a pilot that introduces a runaway Sheep (Kevin Seal), who has to escape to an unnamed “big city” to spare his farm from the wrath of a general (Seal) dead-set on fueling his Sheep-Powered Ray Gun, the show begins its inaugural season by having its narrator (Ken Schatz) declare that “Sheep doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘fear’ … which is why he’s taking an ‘English as a second language’ class.”

“Sheep in the Big City” only gets more quaintly hilarious and clever from there: In between pining for the affection of a pink-colored poodle (Stephanie D’Abruzzo) and working various menial jobs to make a living, Sheep must contend with the dastardly schemes of General Specific — whose second-in-command is named Private Public (James Godwin), and whose weekly plans are largely supplied by a robot known as the Plot Device (D’Abruzzo).

With a format that made room for numerous standalone sketches driven only by the writers’ imagination, and a simple-looking yet highly idiosyncratic Cubist art style that you wouldn’t mistake for anything else in the Cartoon Network lineup, the series was able to produce two seasons and 27 total episodes of brain-rewiring sophisticated comedy. Yet its brilliance has been mostly left by the wayside in contemporary discussions of the Cartoon Network’s heyday. By all rights, it should be remembered as one of the network’s finest offerings ever.

There are still precious few animated series — let alone adult-oriented ones — centered around Black female characters. And, when the Dorothea Gillim-created “Hey Monie!” began airing in 2003, the offer was even scarcer. It’s hard not to imagine that this leap forward in focal diversification may have played a part in the show’s subsequent obscurity, as it certainly cannot have been a product of the actual quality. Simply put, “Hey Monie!” was one of the very best animated comedies of the 2000s; even if it never got the chance to become a storied institution like “The Simpsons” or “Family Guy,” it absolutely deserved to.

Angela V. Shelton stars as Monie, a Chicago publicist who goes through the professional and emotional trials of self-reliant adulthood while frequently talking things over with her roommate and best friend Yvette (Frances Callier). With animation from the legendary Soup2Nuts studio and largely improvised dialogue by Shelton, Callier, and other Second City comics, it’s another example of a show so lived-in and natural-feeling that it almost makes you forget it’s animated.

Crucially, this time around, that spontaneity is deployed towards the fashioning of an intelligent and sharply-observed sitcom about the lives of urban, career-driven Black women — a television rarity then as now, and one that single-handedly opens up a number of comedic possibilities most mainstream cartoons couldn’t possibly access. Monie and Yvette’s friendship and comic chemistry alone would be the stuff of television legend in a just world. Here’s hoping a streaming service or home video distributor eventually gives “Hey Monie!” a long-overdue remastered release.

Adult Swim has historically made weirdness, surrealism, and no-holds-barred experimentation its brand — so it should say something about “The Shivering Truth” that it makes most of Adult Swim’s output look positively tame. A stop-motion anthology series created by Vernon Chatman, with a pilot and twelve additional episodes aired between 2018 and 2020, “The Shivering Truth” presents three separate tales per installment, and each of those tales can be an exercise in body horror, low fantasy, dark comedy, or just plain unclassifiable oddity.

Helped by extraordinary photographic refinement courtesy of a skilled cinematography team, the complex, gorgeously gnarly animation reaches such heights of fluidity — with such unpredictable variety of style, scenery, and color — that its punchier moments of emotional expression and gross-out gore feel more tactile than live-action. Coupled with this technical prowess is an enlivening degree of narrative creativity: The viewer starts every short story thinking they might have a handle on how it’s going to go, only for scene after scene to amp up the insanity until there’s nothing left to do but surrender to the journey.

Somehow, despite the popularity enjoyed by other Adult Swim releases in the same vein of morbid absurdism, “The Shivering Truth” remains comparatively little-known. The critics who did watch it generally loved it, but, outside of a handful of film festival honors, it went entirely ignored by awards bodies during its original run. Maybe the show is just too daring and willfully unpleasant to accommodate mainstream attention. But, if you’ve got a taste for bleak, singular, mind-boggling humor, it’s an absolute must-watch.

“Craig of the Creek” is one of the very best Cartoon Network shows of the 2010s, but it’s largely taken for granted in conversations about the channel’s output. Part of it may be down to how it makes itself look effortless: Acing the sweet, breezy, balanced, charmingly witty feel that “Craig” angles for is extremely difficult, but, by definition, this is not a feel that invites itself to deep critical scrutiny in the way that envelope-pushers like “Adventure Time” and “Regular Show” do.

Take a step back, though, and the achievement that “Craig of the Creek” sustained for six seasons is just as admirable as anything in 21st-century children’s television. Starting from the winning idea of a magical wilderness away from the adult world that comes alive with the reveries of its pint-sized explorers, “Craig” moves dexterously between fantasy and realistic situational comedy, allowing one mode to inform the other.

It’s the perfect template for a show about how it feels to be a child with a boundless imagination out and about in the world; with Craig’s (Philip Solomon) inquisitive, map-making spirit as a driving force, a mysterious sewer maze, a massive game of Capture the Flag, an elaborate blanket fort, and a high-stakes Thanksgiving dinner can be equally enthralling narrative foundations. And the show’s humor similarly benefits from the structural duality, getting in consistent S-tier gags focused both on the eccentricities of suburban life (with lots of welcome Black cultural specificity) and on the outsized importance that the silliest of make-believe games can take on when you’re a kid.

The history of modern animated TV arguably begins with “Wait Till Your Father Gets Home,” an adult family sitcom that ran on syndication between 1972 and 1974, standing out as one of the few primetime animated shows to last longer than one season on American TV between the end of “The Flintstones” in 1966 and the start of “The Simpsons” in 1989. Not only that, but it also pioneered the idea of an animated series using humor to tackle delicate themes and hot-button political issues.

And yet, despite those history-making feats, “Wait Till Your Father Gets Home” got canceled early and became something of an obscure quantity, better-known among TV and animation historians than among the general public, with nowhere near the level of iconicity it truly deserves. It may be time for a rediscovery: Give a watch to any of the 48 episodes of this Hanna-Barbera-produced gem, and you may be surprised to find that it has aged incredibly well for a show about the sociocultural transformation of the early ’70s.

While the premise — a conservative family man (Tom Bosley) butts heads with his family and acquaintances over a variety of Nixon-era political matters — does invite a certain amount of caricatural both-sides-ism, “Wait…” mirrors its live-action contemporary “All in the Family” in the way that it manages to start from a blinkered everyman standpoint and then move towards trenchant critique of reactionary values. It’s an exceedingly sharp and brazen show that arrived at a time when the American public wasn’t quite ready for it.

Created by Everett Peck and animated with characteristic expressionist crunchiness by Klasky Csupo, “Duckman” catapulted adult animated sitcoms into a new echelon of formal, comedic, and narrative boldness — which is saying a lot given that it premiered during the golden age of “The Simpsons.” Arguably the most artistically significant scripted series in USA Network history this side of “Monk” and “Mr. Robot,” this incomparable mélange of droll family comedy, hardboiled noir, and grungy surrealism never let its own fundamental strangeness deter it from laying down some of the funniest, most entrancing television of the ’90s.

Jason Alexander stars as Eric Tiberius Duckman, an anthropomorphic duck who works in Los Angeles as a private detective, with eyes that remain inexplicably attached to his glasses instead of his face. Duckman is a bitter, selfish, resentful, hot-tempered piece of work — none of which is helped by his perpetually dreary existence as a widower with a troubled and unfulfilling family life. Like Alexander’s other ’90s sitcom about unabashedly terrible characters, “Duckman” commits to mining the humor from its antihero’s follies with no care for positivity or propriety, and reaches deliriously, hilariously mean heights as a result.

This willful sourness of spirit may account for why “Duckman” isn’t universally remembered as one of the best animated TV shows of all time, even if its reputation among alternative animation connoisseurs is rightfully lofty. Like other too-sharp-for-their-time animated series, it’s pretty much just waiting to be widely rediscovered by the generation that grew up on the caustic cartoons of the 2000s and 2010s, a great many of which were directly influenced by it.

The Sam Kieth-created Image Comics series “The Maxx” is one of the most unique and entrancing works in the history of graphic literature — a feat of artistic thaumaturgy that snuck profound existential and psychological investigation into an ostensible superhero adventure structure, using the very nature of the superpowered dream-realm to comment on its characters’ relationships to power, trauma, escapism, and perception. In 1995, MTV adapted it into a short-lived animated series that captured the comics’ innovative visual style to a T, while honoring all of its brainy, gut-wrenching themes.

It was a stunning, vastly underseen showcase for the creative fertility of MTV’s animated production, which now doubles as one of the most underrated superhero shows of all time. Created by Kieth himself alongside Bill Messner-Loebs, the TV show of “The Maxx” aired only 13 episodes, all of which map faithfully — sometimes down to the panel — to the first handful of comic issues. And, even if it never got to reach the point at which the characters’ complex backstories would have added new dimensions to the first few episodes’ events, its all-too-brief run remains a hauntingly beautiful achievement.

If the comics were primarily concerned with how the characters’ lived realities were shaped by their minds, the show creates an indivisible alchemy between the characterizations of the Maxx (Michael Haley) and Julie (Glynnis Talken) and the fluidity of the animation. It’s a full-fledged alignment of form and content that has scarcely been matched in the history of American television, and deserves to be much, much better-known.