Created by P. J. Hammond, this is the cultiest of cult shows, a low-budget, small-scale British sci-fi procedural whose crummo special effects have weirdly enhanced and prolonged its ghostly spell. Where a slicker, flashier production might have dated quickly, Sapphire and Steel, as the critic Mark Fisher wrote in 2013, “seems even stranger than it did at the time”—a flickering dispatch from deep space. Sapphire (a pre-Absolutely Fabulous Joanna Lumley) and Steel (a post-Man from U.N.C.L.E. David McCallum) are a team of interstellar entities assigned to investigate and repair anomalies, breaches, and leaks in the structure of time. They are not a pair of wisecracking detectives. Persistent and methodical, they are terse and snippy with each other, snippier with the clumsy humans they’re compelled to assist (when Lumley graces us with a smile, it’s like a beautiful reprieve). Each season-long case is more eerie, confounding, and surreal than the previous one (there are four seasons in all), and taken together they make for a perturbing, transfixing mindtrip. Available for viewing on Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, Crackle, and other streaming pop stands. —James Wolcott

James Wolcott is a Columnist for AIR MAIL. He is the author of several books, including the memoir Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in the Seventies and Critical Mass, a collection of his essays and reviews