Farzar, In From the Cold, and 8 Netflix shows you forgot premiered in 2022 (for better or worse)

Back in the day, Netflix valued quality over quantity, but its content plan has changed quite a bit in recent years thanks to a significant increase in competition. Now, most streaming services are churning out more original content than subscribers can keep up with, and Netflix is one of the biggest offenders of content bloat. With so many Netflix shows released each week, it’s impossible to keep up with every single one.

While most people have heard of Netflix’s biggest hits from 2022, like Stranger Things season 4, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, Wednesday, Bridgerton season 2, Inventing Anna, etc., there were plenty of shows that flew totally under the radar or just got forgotten about not long after people finished binge-watching.

Maybe you saw a trailer for a show that initially caught your eye, but it’s just been collecting dust in your watchlist ever since. Did you even know that Melissa McCarthy had a new comedy series drop? What about the adult animated show Farzar from the Paradise PD creators? Or Neil Patrick Harris’s new romantic comedy Uncoupled?

Below we’ll highlight several Netflix shows that came and went without much buzz surrounding them—for better or worse).

Netflix shows you forgot premiered in 2022

Blockbuster

Blockbuster came and went so fast that it wouldn’t be crazy for some subscribers to have missed the series altogether. Premiering on November 3, the sitcom was axed just one month later.

That’s rare for a Netflix series as, typically, the streaming service takes longer to make renewal decisions. Blockbuster was a workplace comedy aiming to fill the void left behind by Superstore, but even Randall Park and Melissa Fumero weren’t enough to save this show.

Uncoupled

Darren Star’s hit series Emily in Paris is one of Netflix’s most successful comedies. Star tried replicating that success with the romantic comedy Uncoupled, starring Neil Patrick Harris. Uncoupled isn’t bad, but with hardly any promotion, the show struggled to find an audience.

It could be more successful if Netflix renews it and invests in marketing to the Emily in Paris/How I Met Your Mother crowd. If this is one of the series that completely slipped under your radar, you might want to check it out, especially if you’re a fan of Star’s other series, such as Sex and the City and Younger.

God’s Favorite Idiot

Consider yourself lucky if you didn’t check into God’s Favorite Idiot. Melissa McCarthy is excellent, as always. Actually, most of the cast is solid and has a nice rapport with one another. The problem is…everything else. The show looks cheap, the plot is disjointed at best, and the writing is terrible.

Netflix ordered 16 episodes upfront, but we haven’t heard anything about the back half of the season filming yet, which isn’t a great sign. If God’s Favorite Idiot didn’t land on your watchlist earlier this year, count your blessings.

Farzar

Paradise PD and Brickleberry creators Waco O’Guin and Roger Black re-teamed for another adult animated comedy series called Farzar. And if that’s news to you, I’m sure you’re not the first to say that.

Farzar started streaming back in July, and we haven’t heard anything about the show since. If you didn’t watch Farzar, don’t beat yourself up too much; it wasn’t good. Paradise PD and Brickleberry aren’t great either, and Farzar is somehow worse than both.

Keep Breathing

Did you know that Jenna Ortega’s Scream co-star Melissa Barrera also had a Netflix show premiere this year? Maybe not. Barrera delivered a decent performance in the Netflix survival drama Keep Breathing. But Keep Breathing also came out in July, and many were still riding the high of Yellowjackets, which had wrapped its first season a few months prior.

Yellowjackets is a phenomenal survival drama with a similar plot, albeit much darker. Anyone tuning into Keep Breathing while chasing the Yellowjackets high was bound to be disappointed. Keep Breathing takes things in a more grounded direction and focuses more on mental health and working through trauma than thrills.

Mo

Out of all of the shows on this list, Mo is at the top of those that were forgotten but shouldn’t have been. Mo is an excellent comedy-drama and even earned a 100% Certified Fresh seal of approval on Rotten Tomatoes!

It should have gotten some buzz during Emmy season (it did get a Gotham Award and an AFI Award, though!), but Mo came and went this past summer with minimal fanfare. Sadly, the series didn’t crack Netflix’s top ten, which is a shame because it is a good show, and I hope Netflix gives it another chance (and promotes it next time).

Honestly, it’s shows like this getting dumped on Netflix and forced to immediately sink or swim that sometimes make me resent the binge format. I wonder how Mo would have performed had it aired weekly on HBO, Showtime, or maybe Hulu.

In From the Cold

Premiering way back in January 2021, almost an entire year before writing this article, In From the Cold was a fun spy thriller starring Margarita Levieva as a CIA agent with a secret ability. Interestingly, Netflix decided to bookend the year with spy shows since December has given us The Recruit.

In From the Cold delivered a pretty strong start but fell off fast and never generated much chatter on social media or the all-important word-of-mouth. If you love the espionage genre, this one might be worth checking out, but otherwise, you’re not missing much, and odds are this is another one-and-done since we haven’t heard anything from Netflix regarding its fate.

From Scratch

From Scratch is another good show that fell prey to Netflix’s poor promotional strategies. Despite excellent performances from the cast, especially star Zoe Saldaña, From Scratch didn’t make a significant splash.

Based on Tembi Locke’s memoir, From Scratch stars Saldaña as an American student studying in Italy when she falls in love with a sous chef. The good thing is that From Scratch seems to have always been envisioned as a limited series, so if you did miss out, you can catch up and still have a satisfying ending (but I’m warning you to bring the tissues for this tearjerker!).

Mo, From Scratch, and Uncoupled are three Netflix shows worth revisiting if you missed them completely or forgot they existed upon their release in 2022.