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Mizu grew up mixed race in a Japan that kills anyone who looks like her, and she has spent years learning the sword for one reason, to find the four foreigners who could be her father and kill them all. Maya Erskine plays her as someone who barely speaks and rarely has to, letting a raised blade do the talking, while Ringo, the one handed cook who tags along, supplies most of the warmth. The animation renders blood, snow and lantern light like a painting that moves, and a midseason episode set almost entirely in one room becomes the one everybody brings up afterward. It runs eight episodes and wastes none of them. Watch it on a night when you can finish.

A vain, scheming courtier named Edmund turns up in a different century every season, forever stuck with a filthy, half witted servant called Baldrick, whose cunning plans never once work. Rowan Atkinson plays him with a permanent sneer, and each run mines a different slice of English history for petty court politics and doomed plots. Richard Curtis and Ben Elton write the scripts, and once Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry join the cast, the jokes get faster and meaner. The first season runs slower and stranger than the rest, and most people say to start with the second instead. Episodes run under thirty minutes, so trying one costs you almost nothing.

John Reese is a presumed dead CIA operative recruited by Harold Finch, a reclusive billionaire who built a mass surveillance machine that predicts violent crime before it happens. The two work off a single number at a time, stepping into someone's life just before they become a victim or a perpetrator, with Jim Caviezel playing Reese as a man who has stopped caring what happens to himself and Michael Emerson playing Finch as someone hiding his own past. It starts as a case of the week built around CBS procedural rules, then the story about the machine takes over from season two on. It rewards patience once the bigger picture kicks in. Come for the rescues, stay for how much bigger the story gets.

Jack Reacher carries no phone and barely any luggage as he drifts into the small town of Margrave, Georgia, and gets arrested within hours for a murder he did not commit. Alan Ritchson plays him as a man who solves most problems by being the biggest one in the room, calm until he is not, and each season adapts a single Lee Child novel over eight episodes, so you can start with almost any of them. The cases lean on plain, satisfying violence and a hero who stays three steps ahead of the room. Season two swaps the lone drifter setup for a team job and splits opinion, while season one and three are the ones fans point to first. Pick a season and go.

A human commander runs a five mile long space station built as neutral ground, where ambassadors from five alien governments trade favors and threats in the same corridor while he tries to keep the peace. The first stretch of episodes plays like a case of the week, customs disputes and diplomatic scuffles that Bruce Boxleitner and Peter Jurasik carry with a straight face while bigger pieces move in the background. Creator J. Michael Straczynski plotted the whole run in advance, and that shows once the standalone stories start paying off. The opening season is rough and slow to reveal its hand, but the show tightens hard by the second year and stays strong for a long stretch after. Stick with it past the pilot run.