19+ Best TV Shows Like Hip Hop Uncovered (2021)

Story Line: Set against 40 years of music history, this six-part documentary series takes a deep dive into the paradox of America’s criminalization of the genre and its fascination with the street culture that created it and still exists within it. Instead of telling the story of hip hop from the top down, this documentary tells the story from the streets up, as it reveals the untold story of how America’s streets helped shape hip hop culture from an expression of survival and defiance into music’s most dominant genre.

Story Line: The docuseries follows people deeply involved in the group NXIVM — which is faced with various charges, including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy — over the course of several years.

Story Line: Chester Zoo is the most popular zoo in Britain. This observational documentary series uses micro-rig camera technology to capture, in incredible detail, the remarkable behaviour of the animals there.

Story Line: Famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson provides clarity for the vision of the cosmos as he voyages across the universe with never-before-told stories that delve into the scientific concepts of the laws of gravity and the origins of space and time.

Story Line: A documentary news series with a taboo-breaking team who deliver incredible news stories from around the world.

Story Line: Noted Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been helping people discover long-lost relatives hidden for generations within the branches of their family trees. Professor Gates utilizes a team of genealogists to reconstruct the paper trail left behind by our ancestors and the world’s leading geneticists to decode our DNA and help us travel thousands of years into the past to discover the origins of our earliest forebears.

Story Line: Meet modern-day treasure hunter Drew Pritchard. With demanding customers, high turnover, and one of the biggest decorative salvage yards in the UK, Drew is constantly on the road, crisscrossing the country in search of derelict gems and forgotten remnants. Drew loves the thrill of the hunt and while he gets his hands dirty in the country's architectural backwaters, his crack team of restorers is back at the shop giving old and rare finds a new lease on life.

Story Line: Meet the Gold family. As owners of Detroit's biggest pawn shop, they've bought and sold things you can't begin to imagine. Every day brings new danger as the Golds operate in the heart of one of America's most troubled cities. With 50,000 sq ft of cash and goods surrounding them, there are millions to be made, but their profits come with huge risk.

Story Line: A users' guide to the cosmos, from the Big Bang to galaxies, stars, planets and moons: where did it all come from and how does it all fit together? A primer for anyone who has ever looked up at the night sky and wondered.

Story Line: 30 for 30 is the umbrella title for a series of documentary films airing on ESPN and its sister networks and online properties. The series, which highlights people and events in the sports world that have generally received small amounts of attention, has featured two "volumes" of 30 episodes each, a 13-episode series under the ESPN Films Presents title in 2011-2012, and a series of 30 for 30 Shorts shown through the ESPN.com website.

Story Line: David Attenborough celebrates the amazing variety of the natural world in this epic documentary series, filmed over four years across 64 different countries.

Story Line: MythBusters is a science entertainment television program created and produced by Australia's Beyond Television Productions for the Discovery Channel. The show's hosts, special effects experts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, use elements of the scientific method to test the validity of rumors, myths, movie scenes, adages, Internet videos, and news stories.

Story Line: Pre-school fun, fantasy and education with colourful rotund characters Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po in a magical land called Teletubbyland.

Story Line: Intimate Portrait is a biographical television series on the Lifetime Television cable network focusing on different celebrities, which includes interviews with each subject. Among the people profiled were Grace Kelly, Natalie Wood, Carly Simon, Jackie Kennedy, Katharine Hepburn, Carol Burnett, Tanya Tucker, and Marla Maples.

Story Line: TV's most-watched history series brings to life the compelling stories from our past that inform our understanding of the world today.

Story Line: Natural World is a nature documentary television series broadcast annually on BBC Two and regarded by the BBC as its flagship natural history brand. It is currently the longest-running series in its genre on British television, with more than 400 episodes broadcast since its inception in 1983. Natural World is produced by the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol, but individual programmes can be in-house productions, collaborative productions with other broadcasters or films made and distributed by independent production companies and purchased by the BBC. Natural World programmes are often broadcast as PBS Nature episodes in the USA. Since 2008, most Natural World programmes have been shot and broadcast in high definition.

Story Line: Carl Sagan covers a wide range of scientific subjects, including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe.

Story Line: Now the longest-running music series in American television history, ACL showcases popular music legends and innovators from every genre.

Story Line: The best in the performing arts from across America and around the world including a diverse programming portfolio of classical music, opera, popular song, musical theater, dance, drama, and performance documentaries.

Story Line: Horizon tells amazing science stories, unravels mysteries and reveals worlds you've never seen before.

Story Line: Points of View is a long-running British television series broadcast on BBC One. It started in 1961 and features the letters of viewers offering praise, criticism and purportedly witty observations on the television of recent weeks.