5 Great Cult Comedy Television Shows

Not all great TV shows are big hits. In fact, some of the best shows ever made barely saw the light of day--others kept enough ratings to stay on the air, but were consistently under the mainstream radar.

If you only watch the popular stuff, you're missing out. Here's a list of great comedy series that never made it past cult-hit status (although some of them have gotten quite a bit more popular since their cancellations.

5. News Radio - With Dave Foley, Andy Dick, Phil Hartman, Joe Rogan, and many more, News Radio ran for five seasons and was consistently hilarious despite the loss of Phil Hartman after his death in 1998. It's the story of Dave Nelson (played by Foley) who takes the job of radio manager at a talk radio station in New York, a station populated with an oddball staff and eccentric boss. Available on DVD and runs in syndication on A&E every weekday.

4. The Norm Show - Norm McDonald doesn't really have a lot of success to his name, with two failed sitcoms, numerous unsuccessful movies, and even a poor-selling comedy album. It's really a shame, because he's a very funny dude, with a dry sense of sarcastic humor that's somewhere darker than Bill Murray yet a little less hopeless than Bill Hicks. The Norm Show failed to captivate audiences through a set of low-key seasons, plagued by time slot changes and a renaming of the show (it became "Norm" after season one). It's always at least chuckle-inducing with moments of absolute genius.

3. Mystery Science Theater 3000 - The Satellite of Love is known to nerds everywhere as the home of Crow, Tom Servo, Joel Hodgson, and Mike Nelson, a bunch of jackasses who mock old movies with incredibly referential comedy. If you missed this show the first time around, it's worth getting a Netflix account just to sift through the old episodes of terrible movies getting torn to pieces.