Misfits

Howard Overman's Misfits launched on E4 in November 2009 and ran for five seasons until December 2013, thirty-seven episodes in all. E4, Channel 4's youth-oriented digital channel, had been looking for a flagship original to replace the soon-to-end Skins; 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 screen credits. Sheehan's Nathan in seasons one and two became a reference point for British anti-hero comedy and drew a good deal of trade-press attention; he left after the second season to pursue a film career, and Joseph Gilgun came in as the new lead, Rudy. Rheon would go on to play Ramsay Bolton in Game of Thrones, and 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 genre commission with a science-fiction tilt against that year's prestige drama field. It belongs among the foundational works of the late-2000s revival in British genre television, alongside Being Human, Black Mirror and the early seasons of Doctor Who's post-2005 run. Overman went on to create Atlantis, Crazyhead and War of the Worlds for ITV, Sky and Fox.