TV Shows that Inspired the Song of the Midnight Rider
- Lex Enrico Santí, LCSW, MFA
- Mar 31
- 6 min read
Lex E Santí, A Key Therapy LCSW, PLLC
There are shows that pass through your life like a rest stop on the highway — you pull in, get what you need, pull out, and forget the exit number by the next mile marker. And then there are shows that stay with you — not because they're prestige television or because someone told you they were important, but because they did something to you. They changed the way you see. The way you drive, metaphorically speaking. The way you sit with the dark. This is the case with me, the following shows, starting with The Wire, and ending with The Band of Brothers are shows I still think about, live in, talk about and have shaped the way that I think about the world around me.
You could say, what follows isn't a list. It's a road trip. These are the stories I return to the way Jordan Samson returns to the highway — because the road knows you better than anywhere else does.
I hold The Wire the way some people hold sacred texts. It's the Bhagavad Gita dressed in Kevlar — a meditation on what happens to a person when the system they're in doesn't care whether they survive. I've been told I'm somewhere between Lester Freeman and Jimmy McNulty — some hybrid of patience and chaos — and honestly, that tracks more than it should.
The show is a meditation on life, the realities of the complexity of any issue. Every season has a magic to it and with rewatching you find more and more that moves you. There are moments, in every season, whether it is the dialogue, the tragedy or the character arcs which still shock and pain me.
I return to it every few years. Not for entertainment. For orientation. To remember that the rules were written long before any of us showed up, and that the small human struggles still matter anyway. Every character is a study in how systems sculpt souls — and if you've ever worked inside an institution that was supposed to help people and watched it slowly eat itself instead, you know exactly what I mean.
Sense 8 is neon tenderness wrapped in a high-speed chase scene. It's the show that refuses cynicism like it's a bad exit ramp — keeps its foot on the gas and insists, loudly, that we belong to each other. That connection isn't just emotional — it's existential. It tells me, it gives me hope, I should say that our love is plural and that we can transcend beyond these forms. It is a series that pushed the boundaries of all senses, it asks us to understand on a deeper level who and what we are as a species. Boldly, it is trans-positive, as it fn' should be and tells me that we are all painfully trying to connect to one another.
I cry almost every time. Not from sadness. From recognition. What if we could borrow each other's courage? What if we could actually feel each other's breath across a thousand miles?
That's the thing about found family — it's not about blood, it's about the people who show up in the dark. I didn't set out to write a novel about found family either. Somewhere along the road, that's what The Song of the Midnight Rider became. Kelli Jo Ford saw it before I did. This show showed me why it mattered.
BSG arrived in the long shadow of 9/11 and felt like both a mirror and a warning — humanity on the brink, limping through space, trying to hold onto meaning with bloodied hands. Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck is a character built from contradictions and fire, and I will go to the mat for her as one of the greatest characters in the history of the medium.
The show taught me more about leadership, trauma, and the cost of survival than most real-world institutions I've ever worked inside. And as an LCSW who's spent years sitting across from people who are just trying to keep moving — to stay in the game long enough to get somewhere safe — that's not nothing.
It begins with a pilot episode where the main character, Benjamin Sisko, is forced to confront grief and becoming more than he is comfortable with. It is such a shock to most of the Star Trek world of vulnerability and pain, that I can imagine many who first watched it would be shocked. The only parallel to most Gen Xers and Star Trek was the TNG episode, Chain of Command Pt. II. DS9 sits in this umcomoftable place of the true audacity that Sci Fi asks us to sit in. Wheras I grew up on Trek's optimism-- Deep Space Nine shifted everything.
Suddenly, the world wasn't episodic or neatly tied up in 30 minutes. It was messy, consequential, morally layered — it had weight. Captain Sisko's journey begins with the low point of his life, and that grief quietly shapes every decision he makes for seven seasons. He grows around the wound. He doesn't resolve it. He carries it. AND, lest I say, I haven't even mentioned that Benjamin Sisko is a black man in the Delta quadrant, rocking our leadership orientation and what a captain is supposed to look and act like.
Every character here is layered and complicated and evolves in 7 seasons and the show has given me hope at some of the darkest tims of my life. Lastly, I'll say, a friend pushed me toward this show years ago — someone who's no longer in my life. I still thank them, silently, every time I return to it. That's the thing about the stories that really get you: they come attached to people. And sometimes, what remains is the story.
Shakespeare wandered into a saloon, demanded whiskey, and started writing new scripture. That's Deadwood. The dialogue is filthy poetry — sermons delivered by swindlers and drunks, every line a small miracle of language. The show is full of grime and humor and cowardice and courage, all the inconvenient truths of being human running together like grease in a pan.
I adored it. I mourned it when it ended too soon, mid-sentence, like someone cut the power right when the story was getting honest. Few shows have ever felt so alive. Fewer still have made me feel the way I feel when a paragraph is working — that dangerous feeling of language moving at the edge of control.
I almost left The Expanse off this list.
Not because it didn’t belong—but because it sits differently than the others. It doesn’t arrive all at once. It builds. It drifts. It fractures in places. Some seasons feel like they’re searching for their own gravity. But then—out of nowhere—it finds it. And when it does, it opens something. What The Expanse gives me isn’t perfection. It gives me scale.
It reminds me that the world—this world we fight over, define ourselves inside of, build systems around—is not the center of anything. It’s just the starting point. A small, fragile origin story in something far larger, stranger, and more alive than we can fully understand.
There’s something about the Belters—their language, their bodies shaped by space, their refusal to belong to Earth—that gets under my skin. They are human, but not in the way we’re used to thinking about it. Adapted. Changed. Expanded. I catch myself wanting to speak like them, to feel that shift in perspective, to loosen my grip on what “normal” even is.
It asks: what happens when we leave the conditions that made us? What parts of us hold? What parts evolve? And what new kinds of connection—or conflict—emerge when we’re no longer bound to the same ground? For all its flaws, The Expanse carries a quiet kind of wonder. Not the polished, optimistic kind. Something rougher. Earned. The kind that says: we don’t know what’s out there—but we’re going anyway. And maybe that’s the point.
I do not return to this often--it is too painful to do so. The horrors of war are painful. I based one of my short stories in my collection Homer's Last Line, on the European edition of Band of Brothers. I also, must admit, when Pacific came out I had a recurring nightmare for years that I was in the battle of Midway myself--such that I don't know if I actually was or was not in a previous life.
Band of Brothers doesn't glorify anything. It sits with terror and exhaustion and the impossible intimacy forged under fire. It reminds me what human beings endure — and what they should never have been asked to endure in the first place. It's the quietest, most devastating war story I know.
Every time I watch it, it leaves fingerprints on my mind. The kind of thing you can't shake and wouldn't want to.
These shows raised me. Not instead of the people who raised me — alongside them, through them, sometimes in spite of what was happening around me. Stories have always been the thing I reached for when the world got too loud. When I needed to remember what it means to keep moving. When I needed someone to remind me that the human stuff still matters, even inside systems that say it doesn't.
That's what The Song of the Midnight Rider is, in the end. A story I had to tell to remember that. I hope it does something similar for you.
Thanks all--drop a line with your favorite shows below, I'd love to get more recommendations or shows that I've missed on the list?
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