The perfect Oppenheimer follow-up (and best show you’ve never watched) is free on Tubi
A terrible thing about the modern era of television isn’t just the sheer number of great shows that frequently fall through the cracks on services like Netflix, but great shows that are overlooked because people simply don’t know where to find them. Manhattan was one of those shows, a gem of the mid-2010s twilight of TV’s second so-called golden age. It was a time when streaming TV was just getting started and there already seemed to be too many shows, many of them great. Breaking Bad had ended and Mad Men was winding down, people still liked Game of Thrones, and exciting, buzzy shows like Mr. Robot and The Americans were premiering all the time.
This included Manhattan, but the series went largely unnoticed in part because of its network home. The show aired on the now-defunct WGN America as its second scripted drama after the supernatural horror series Salem, an attempt to rub shoulders with the acclaimed lineups boasted by AMC, FX, and HBO at the time. In some regards, it was successful: contemporary reviews championed the show as equally worthy of attention as those Emmy-winning dramas. However, the viewers never came, and Manhattan ended after two seasons.
But what wonderfully rich seasons they were; 23 episodes that are ironically easier to watch now than they were when they aired, since the entire series is currently streaming for free on Tubi and Freevee.
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The perfect follow-up to Oppenheimer, Manhattan follows the scientists of the Manhattan Project and their families in Los Alamos, New Mexico, as work on the atomic bomb begins in earnest. A dazzling work of historical fiction, the series follows a largely fictional cast that intersects with the history of the project, telling smaller, more personal
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