It’s easy for great shows to get overlooked during this era of Peak TV, especially with the content spread over a variety of providers. Here are three that are must-sees, just in time to binge with your visiting relatives.

‘WATCHMEN’ (HBO)

The nine-episode series — no word yet on a second season — is based on the famous 1985 graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, but is not a slavish adaptation. (For that, see Zack Snyder’s 2009 movie.) Instead, it’s the most courageous, unblinking look at racism I’ve ever seen on television, and almost as an afterthought, it’s dressed in superhero drag.

That merciless gaze at a controversial problem is one of the ways the TV show is, at least in spirit, like the graphic novel. But, while it feels the same and the 2019 show uses the same alternate history as the 1985 book and some of the characters are the same … it’s not the same.

For example, the graphic novel starts with a murder investigation, then a surprising find in a hidden closet changes everything about the murder. The TV show starts exactly the same way, only with all the nouns changed.

Further, the graphic novel ends with a hand reaching for something that may change everything again — but we fade to black and are left wondering if that hand reached its object, and whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing if it did. Similarly, at the end of the TV show a foot stretches forth, and if it reaches its object it will change everything … or it will change nothing.

But the show fades to black, and we are left with the same anxiety, the same uncertainty, the same questions, as at the end of the book 32 years ago.

The show and the graphic novel are similar in other spiritual ways, too — both embrace complexity, and refuse to give us simple answers. Both enjoy deflating archetypes and thwarting audience expectations. The print version, for example, delights in demonstrating that its superheroes are neither super, nor heroes (and all are damaged).

The screen version is similarly involved in showing how all the simplistic methods and attitudes we associate with tough-guy, maverick law enforcement (like Jean Smart’s FBI Agent Laurie Blake) are counterproductive (sorry, ’70s cop shows), and that even the narrative assumptions of the villains lead to unexpected, unpredictable consequences.

And both have a major existential theme — just not the same one. “Watchmen” the comic book addressed the Cold War and the possibility of nuclear Armageddon, the biggest threat of its time. “Watchmen” the TV show does the same — only it posits today’s biggest danger to be white racism/nationalism, and the show tackles it with surprisingly naked honesty.

‘FOR ALL MANKIND’ (Apple TV+)

The elevator pitch for Apple’s effort is right there in the first five minutes of the first episode: What if the Russians got to the moon first?

Obviously, the space race would never end. The first season (a second is already in the works) takes us from 1969 to 1983 with a full-blown embrace of the era in which it is set. The technology is limited. The rah-rah, patriotic bravado is unironic. Men drink a lot and cheat on their wives.

Women are shunted into kitchens and roles as help-meets, some embracing their role with a fixed, glassy smile and some daring to fight for more. (And that’s just the middle class white folks. God help you if you were “other” in 1969, which we also get to see.) Everyone smokes, and they smoke all the time, and they smoke everywhere.

Then there are the space scenes. If you were there for Apollo, you will remember being on the edge of your seat as you stayed up for liftoffs from Cape Canaveral, listened to scratchy radio transmissions from lunar orbit, watched grainy footage of astronauts moving in slo-mo in a lifeless, alien environment. It was thrilling. It was riveting.

It was terrifying. While no one liked to talk about it out aloud, this was the most dangerous work imaginable.

“For All Mankind” gets it all exactly right, including the terror.

That would be enough to make “For All Mankind” extraordinary. But then a more subversive consequence begins to raise its ugly head. Yes, the space race continues unabated, but so does the Cold War. In our world, the Soviet Union fell into decay in the ’80s, and fell apart soon after. Not in this world, in which space success reinvigorates the moribund society.

And the second season is going to show us just how hot the Cold War can be, especially in the frigid lunar atmosphere where there is no law.

‘THE EXPANSE’ (AMAZON PRIME)

“The Expanse” is such an incredibly well-done show, one based on a popular series of sci-fi books, that I can’t imagine any genre fan not liking it.

“The Expanse” is set in a future solar system that has nowhere else to go, and friction increases among the three major power bases as elbow room decreases: an overpopulated, pseudo-democratic Earth; an authoritarian Mars engaged in a generations-long terraforming project; and “The Belters,” people who basically live in spaceships, mining the asteroid belt and the outer planets for mineral wealth.

The Belters are the most interesting, because they are the most unusual: They live basically in tribes/factions, united only in their hatred of the “Inners” who take advantage of them; after generations in zero gravity they can no longer live in normal gravity; and they have developed their own language, a pastiche of various slangy lingos that sounds like you should be able to understand it, but you don’t.

In the midst of all this political fervor — which “The Expanse” explores thoroughly, and though it sounds boring it isn’t — comes the first thing from an extra-solar civilization. A “protomolecule” that everyone who learns about it wants to keep secret, and control. But the protomolecule has plans of its own — it likes to overwrite life wherever it finds it — and embeds a contact with one specific person who becomes, with his three-man crew, the viewers’ POV.

Since this series is based on novels — basically each season covers one book — it is not static. No sooner do we think that we understand the Earth-Mars-Belter problems well enough to see a way out, than everything changes at the end of the third season (the last on Syfy, before the move to Amazon Prime).

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