Five years ago tonight, FX gave us "Terriers," a wonderful show with a terrible name and and a frustrating difficulty at breaking through the clutter even in the years before we hit Peak TV in America: there was no real way to sell it except to tell people they had to watch it. Every aspect of the show sounded done to death: detective show, buddy show, one's a recovering alcoholic, one's a reformed thief, they don't get no respect, blah blah blah blah blah.
None of the ideas were special, but the execution was, particularly in the chemistry between those two buddies, played by Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James. And even that worked in such a sly, low-key way that even if FX had done nothing but run promos of the two of them bantering, it wouldn't have entirely come across. No, you had to watch it to get it, and unfortunately, almost nobody did, whether they thought it was a show about dog-fighting or not.
Fortunately, 13 episodes were made, they expertly told a noir story over the 13 episodes, and they ended in a place that was meant to be a cliffhanger for a second season, but which works as the perfect ending for this strange and marvelous drama. And they're all streaming on Netflix.
