Misfits

Howard Overman's Misfits launched on E4 in November 2009 and ran for five seasons through December 2013, totalling thirty-seven episodes. E4 — Channel 4's youth-oriented digital channel — had been looking for a replacement for the soon-to-end Skins as its flagship original; Misfits won the slot and went on to outlast it commercially.

The original cast — Robert Sheehan, Iwan Rheon, Lauren Socha, Antonia Thomas, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett — was assembled largely from young actors with no major prior screen credits. Sheehan's performance as Nathan in seasons one and two became a reference point for British anti-hero comedy and was widely covered in the trade press; he left after the second season to pursue a film career, with Joseph Gilgun replacing him as new lead Rudy. Rheon would go on to play Ramsay Bolton in Game of Thrones; Stewart-Jarrett would later appear in Candyman and The Spider.

The series won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Drama Series at the 2010 ceremony — an unusual win for a sci-fi-tinged genre commission against the year's prestige drama field. It is now widely treated as one of the foundational works of the late-2000s British genre-television revival, alongside Being Human, Black Mirror and the early seasons of Doctor Who's post-2005 run. Howard Overman would go on to create Atlantis, Crazyhead and War of the Worlds for ITV/Sky/Fox.