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1 | Show | Brief description | Content notes for subjects people might want to avoid | Streaming Service | Anne's favorite | Notes from viewers who aren't the original listers but want to add additional perspective/content notes | |
2 | Gentle Comedies | ||||||
3 | The Detectorists | Lovely British comedy about friends who share a passion for metal detecting. Has a sweet and surprisingly moving heart. | Some stressful romantic relationship dynamics/bad choices | Amazon Prime, but this has been on Netflix and hopefully will be again | * | ||
4 | Gavin and Stacey | Totally charming love/family story about an international English-Welsh relationship with lots of lovable extremely quirky characters. | Lots of sexual content, haven't watched in a long time so I'm not sure but I think there are some jokes that gesture at homophobia, relationship drama | Amazon Prime/ Hulu | * | ||
5 | The Good Place | A wonderful and strange comedy about moral philosophy set in the afterlife | Death is necessarily a central topic of the show, but definitely not treated in a depressing way; family dysfunction | Hulu / Netflix | * | The last season has been accused of having a suicide theme. | |
6 | Spaced | A pair of quirky strangers pretend they're a couple to get an affordable lease in London | Stress of being a broke young person trying to break into job market, recreational drug use | Hulu/Amazon Prime | * | ||
7 | Mum | A woman deals with life after the death of her husband—the episodes each take the place over the course of only one day and involve a selection of the woman's oddball family and friends | WIdownhood, loneliness, frustrated romantic feelings, class snobbery | BritBox | |||
8 | Fortysomething | Good-hearted British family comedy in which a doctor and his wife and sons deal with his mid-life crisis | Marital problems, lots of sexual content | Currently not streaming (!!!) but has been available on Amazon Prime and Netflix and I'm sure will be again | |||
9 | Staged | Two restless British stars (David Tennant and Michael Sheen playing fictionalized versions of themselves) and a young, insecure director decide to rehearse a stage play over Zoom during the UK's first coronavirus lockdown. | Set in the early days of COVID lockdown; also these well-off actors have *really* nice homes to quarantine in! | Hulu | Note from Anne: I'm a sucker for actors playing somewhat unpleasant fictionalized versions of themselves (see Episodes below), so I found this delightful. | ||
10 | Abbott Elementary | An idealistic early-career teacher finds her place among the more established teachers at an extremely underresourced, predominantly Black Philadelphia school. The rare gentle comedy with actively good politics | Societal neglect of public education is necessarily a major background point. There's an unethical and chaotic school administrator. Some romantic side-plots: a dissatisfying relationship, someone starting to date post-divorce | Hulu; Season 1 now on HBO Max, too | Both seasons are on Disney Plus in countries that don't have Hulu, FYI | ||
11 | Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist | Zoey, a computer coder, develops the ability to see others' innermost thoughts and feelings through their singing of popular songs. She has to deal with this new-found power and figure out when and how to intervene with the information she has about others. She is also juggling her own work, love-life, and family concerns. The music is great and plot keeps you watching. | Terminally ill father; dating and relationship issues | Hulu | |||
12 | Grace and Frankie | An odd couple of women in their upper 70s are thrown together when they learn that their husbands have been having a decades-long affair. Jane Fonda and Lilly Tomlin are the incredibly delightful stars. | Aging, marital infidelity, closeted homosexuality, one character is a recovering addict and the time before he was sober is sometimes treated as a punchline; everyone is rich | Netflix | |||
13 | Kim's Convenience | Comedy about a convenience store and the 1st/2nd-generation immigrant family that runs it | Workplace romantic entaglements; there have been critiques from the show's cast about racism from the non-Korean show-runners | Netflix | |||
14 | Derry Girls | Comedy about a group of friends going about their teenaged antics amidst the Troubles in 1990s' Northern Ireland. | Teenage awkwardness, Catholicism, the Troubles in Northern Ireland. One teenager deals with coming out as gay in a somewhat conservative Catholic culture. | Netflix | As a now-grown '90s (Catholic) teenager, albeit an American, I found this show both hilarious and a nostalgia-bomb. The ensemble cast makes everything work - I was absolutely friends with kids like the main girl group when I was in high school ... and I absolutely knew nuns like the ones at the girls' school. NB - if you're like 99% of my US pals, and you find it challenging to tube your ear fast, you'll want to watch with subtitles on. (I grew up on BBC-on-PBS, so it's no biggie, but my husband absolutely would need the subtitles.) | ||
15 | The Guild | A group of online gamers meets and begins to navigate IRL friendships. | I'm afraid it's been a while so I don't remember all potential content notes, but there's quite a bit of awkward cringininess in social situations and definite romantic plotlines. | Netflix | |||
16 | Rutherford Falls | A pair of life-long best friends navigate the clash between her involvement in preserving the history of her Native nation and his commitment to preserving/whitewashing the legacy of his colonizer ancestors. All tied up in the format of a workplace comedy. | Naturally deals with lots of Native genocide discussion as well as struggles that face Native nations and individual Native people today. I was worried about the white lead's casual racism being treated as benign, but on the whole, I think the show managed OK with that issue. IDK, still thinking about it. A minor female character is sexually obsessed with the male lead and her sexual harassment of him is played for laughs. | Peacock (this is good enough to buy a month of Peacock for a binge-watch) | |||
17 | Miranda | A silly British sit-com starring Miranda Hart and Tom Ellis. Miranda's a shopkeeper who refuses to act like an adult, and the show is peppered with silly asides to the camera and wraps with a dance number. "Call me Kat" is based on it. | Mildly transphobic humor (just one episode, I think) based around the fact that Miranda is quite tall, and inadvertently shops in a store for female impersonators. | Amazon Prime | |||
18 | Good Omens | Very British comic retelling of Armegeddon from the perspective of an angel and a demon (played by real-life BFFs Michael Sheen and David Tennant) who have grown close over the millenia. | The first episode has a swapping/kidnapping of babies plotline that could be upsetting. Lots of mild and joyous blasphemy. Armegeddon is a main theme. Amnesia and a controlling romantic partner feature in the second season. UGH adding a note that Neil Gaiman—one of the original writers of the book this is based on and a writer on the first two seasons of this—has been exposed as a likely very shitty person. | Amazon Prime | |||
19 | Man on the Inside | Ted Danson plays a retired widower who's at loose ends and winds up taking a job infiltrating a retirement community for a private investigator | A lot of content about dementia (Danson's character's late wife suffered from it), grieving, and other issues surrounding aging. Everyone has ridiculous amounts of money to make aging in San Francisco easier; some strained family relationships. | Netflix | |||
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22 | Jokey-Silly Comedies | ||||||
23 | Schitt's Creek | A very improbable set-up somehow leads to a really wonderful family comedy full of quirky characters. Give it several episodes if you're skeptical. | Alcohol/substance abuse treated lightly, some playing of rural "backwardness" for laughs | Netflix | * | ||
24 | 30 Rock | Workplace comedy behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live–style live sketch comedy show. | Corporate culture, sexist/racist entertainment culture, fertility/adoption plotlines in later seasons, humor that arguably perpetuates oppression while appearing to critique it | Hulu/Amazon Prime | * | ||
25 | Flight of the Conchords | Pretty hard to encapsulate this one, but it is really delightful. A musical mockumentary about a musical comedy duo from New Zealand (Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie) trying to make it big in NYC. | A storyline about the duo's only fan obsessively stalking them and sexually harassing them is played for laughs. | Amazon Prime (also HBO) | * | ||
26 | Brooklyn 99 | Workplace comedy about an NYPD police precinct (yikes emoji!) | This show is obviously copaganda and it has other problems, too! The first season is very much "obnoxious and deeply inappropriate white boy genius charms a workplace" despite engaging in sexual harrassment, fatphobia, etc. All that said, subsequent seasons morph into actually quite a surprisingly good-hearted and sweet and very funny odball comedy. IF you can/want to move past the deep ideological problems with the show valorizing the NYPD, which is a heavy lift. | Peacock maybe? | |||
27 | Futurama | Philip J. Fry, a pizza delivery boy, is accidentally frozen in 1999 and thawed out on New Year's Eve 2999. | Some gross-out humor. Occasionally a moving/upsetting episode (avoid "Jurassic Bark" right now!). Some characters are sexist or otherwise biased, but the show mostly doesn't seem to endorse their views. | Hulu | |||
28 | Better Off Ted | Workplace comedy about a manager at a weird, whacky mega company. | Workplace relationships; some romantic drama | Hulu | |||
29 | Moone Boy | Comedy about an Irish kid and his imaginary (adult man) best friend | Slapstick violence | Hulu | |||
30 | Party Down | A bunch of actors work for a catering company in LA, with pre-Parks and Rec Adam Scott and Jane Lynch. Probably an obvious one, but if you haven't seen it, definitely watch it. If you have, watch again. | Hulu | ||||
31 | Friday Night Dinner | A family with their two adult sons get together every Friday night for dinner. Awkward hilarity ensues. Starring Simon Bird (the main star of The Inbetweeners). | Hulu | ||||
32 | What We Do In the Shadows | A mockumentary about four vampires living together in America. Based on the fantastic movie (written and starring Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords). I didn't think the TV show could live up to the movie. It does. So good. | Lots of very fake gore, lots of explicit talk about sex (two of the vampires are sort of sex-obsessed) | Hulu | |||
33 | Letterkenny | A weird show about a town in Ontario. It has it all: farmers, hockey players, goths, drug dealers. All with Canadian accents and its own world of made-up slang. Very weird, very funny. Carrying on the Canadian comedy tradition. | Lots of crude and vulgar humor, tons of graphic sexual conversation, lots of fist-fighting, and generally really raunchy. But has a very good heart and surprisingly progressive politics. | Hulu | Be prepared that while there is significant body diversity among the male leads, all female leads are very thin. May not bother everyone, but it just got tiring to me after a while. | ||
34 | New Girl | Sweet roommate comedy focusing on its quirky characters. | Dating/relationships are a major focus. Some ugly weight stuff—one character appears in a fatsuit in flashbacks and his previous weight is treated as a punchline. The one Black main character becomes a cop in a later season and the police are treated as benignly silly. | Netflix | |||
35 | The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt | Comedy about a woman who was abducted as a young teenager and kept underground for ten years emerging (cheerfully) back into society. | Obviously the premise is quite dark, and it is referred to regularly throughout the show. Other issues treated lightly/goofily by the show include poverty/wealth disparities in NYC, alcoholism in a side character in early seasons, the coming out of a gay character. One character regularly tries and fails to diet. There is a sub-plot about one character's Native American identity that is treated with widely varying degrees of responsiblity. | ||||
36 | American Vandal | Mockumentary about solving crimes committed at a high school. | Some elements of high school like bullying, sexting, etc. | Netflix | |||
37 | The In-Betweeners | Four teenage boys in England go to high school and are immature little turds. Very raunchy, very funny. | Netflix | ||||
38 | Community | Study group at a community college engages in comic misadventures.Heavy use of meta-humor and cultural references, frequent parodying of genres (e.g. christmas specials, Law & Order) and tropes (e.g. bottle episodes, clip shows) | Alcohol and drug abuse; one main character has particularly racist/sexist views, albeit those views are swiftly condemned by rest of group. | Netflix/Hulu | |||
39 | Girls5eva | 90s girl pop group is sampled on a current rap song and the members decide to reunite as women nearing their 40s. Made by the folks who made 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt so there's some surreal elements, silliness, and revernce for NYC. Great songs and features Sara Barielles and Renee Elise Goldsberry (Angelica from Hamilton). | One of the group members died before the show begins in an infinity pool accident. Conversations about whether and when to try getting pregnant. Some self-aware portrayl of sexual harrassment in the music industry. | Peacock | Misogyny is a theme throughout, but addressed. | ||
40 | The IT Crowd | The comedic misadventures of Roy, Moss and their grifting supervisor Jen, a rag-tag team of IT support workers at a large corporation headed by a hotheaded yuppie. | Sometimes the characters are put in embarrassing situations, but nothing I've ever had to look away from. | Netflix | |||
41 | Our Flag Means Death | Hard to encapsulate this one! A rich man gathers an eclectic crew of pirates to live out his fantasy of becoming a pirate captain. They cross paths with Blackbeard and the two captains' fates intertwine. | Unhappy marriage, romantic tension, occasional over-the-top violence presented in a silly way | HBO Max | |||
42 | Doc Martin | Renowned very quirky, emotionally stunted doctor develops fear of blood, moves to beautiful Cornwall town, is encouraged by the community and love to become human | Really can't think of anything! | Acorn TV/Amazon Prime | |||
43 | Ted Lasso | Fish out of water comedy where American football coach becomes a British football (soccer) coach for a struggling team. Fantastic ensemble comedy, heartwarming, lovely. | Can't think of anything! Lots of references to very good buttery biscuits, so might want to have some on hand. Also lots of swearing. The third eason has a revenge porn sideplot that is ultimately dealt with sensitively (I think), but could be difficult to watch. There are also some unhappy romantic relationship dynamics central to the plot. | Apple TV | |||
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46 | Super Gentle Reality TV | ||||||
47 | Great British Bake Off | The lodestar of gentle reality television—amateur bakers compete in an extremely gentle way to be named star baker. | Netflix | * | |||
48 | The Great Pottery Throw-Down | A clear (and successful!) effort to capitalize on the Great British Baking Show's success, another gentle British reality show featuring excellent amateurs. They make really beautiful stuff and it's very satisfying to watch the pottery processes. They are all very kind to one another and are interesting and from diverse backgrounds. | One of the judges is occasionally a little harsh. Light sexual innuendo | HBO Max | * | ||
49 | Taskmaster | A season-long competition between 5 British comedians (switched up each season) to best complete the (silly) assigned tasks and curry favor with the show's host for points. 5 seasons currently available free. | some swearing/sexual innuendo This is Anne adding after watching this recommendation (which I LOVED): there are very occasional weird consent dynamics, especially in season 5, episode 1, and sometimes in the banter between the show's hosts. | YouTube | * | ||
50 | Would I Lie to You | British panel show where comedians tell unlikely stories about themselves and other panelists have to guess what's true and everyone laughs a lot and seems to be having a genuinely good time | A lot of sexually creepy and some misogynistic/fatphobic/transphobic/ableist jokes, which is a shame because otherwise the show would be a complete delight. | A bunch are available on YouTube and some seasons are offered here and there by various streaming services. | * | ||
51 | Making it | Charming American show in the Baking Show style where super-skilled crafters compete in various challenges. | Hulu | ||||
52 | Tree House Masters | Each episode takes viewers through the process of building an elaborate tree house. Episodes are shot in woodsy areas all over the US (and there are some special episodes abroad), so there are just a lot of beautiful shots of lush green forests or beautiful autumnal scenes. The show always ends with the host delightedly sharing the tree house with the excited new owners. | there are no women in the tree house making crew and there are like zero people of color in the show. | Hulu | |||
53 | Lego Masters | Pairs of regular-people lego experts complete lego-based challenges. | In Season 1 there are two married couples but the hetero newly weds make a big deal of it, while the super supportive gay couple are pretty quiet about it but also adorable. Minority and all women teams appear to be leaving at a faster rate. [spoiler?] at one point there is a pregnancy announcement. | Hulu | |||
54 | The Masked Singer | Celebrities and minor celebrities sing while wearing elaborate costumes. A panel by similarly minor sometimes funny celebrities attempt to guess who is singing. | Hulu's ads are for scary shows during this show. | Hulu | |||
55 | Restoration Man | Home renovation show about historic graded properties in the UK | Season 2, Episode 1 features a wife dying of cancer before the house is finished. | Amazon Prime | |||
56 | Gardener's World | British series following a season in the host's garden with lots of how-to tips, and a variety of segments where other hosts visit gardners and gardens throughout the country. More recent seasons have featured gardens for people with impaired senses or mobility. Plus, lots of great quirky British people like the person who has the "national collection" of miniature hostas or whatever. | The obvious wealth of some of the people who own the gardens. Some are on old aristocratic estates. | Amazon Prime | |||
57 | MasterChef Junior | Kids from about 7-12 years old compete to win the title of "MasterChef Junior" | Not super diverse in early seasons, gets better in some later seasons. Kids sometimes cry a lot when they get eliminated or lose a challenge. | Hulu, maybe Netflix too? | |||
58 | Blown Away | Glass blowers compete in a series of artistic challenges | One of the glass blowers isn't very nice but the rest try to not engage I think | Netflix | |||
59 | Hyori's Bed and Breakfast | A former K-pop Star and her musician husband welcome "guests" to stay at their home on Jeju Island. The drama is, like, shopping for more comforters and making food for the guests. There are a LOT of scenes of people just puttering around the house and drinking tea and petting dogs. | Brief discussions of the rescue dog's former lives, some drinking | Netflix | |||
60 | The Repair Shop | Not really reality TV? but this felt like the best category! A bunch of British craftspeople repair other people's sentimenal belongings, ranging from teddy bear to grandfather clock to the most hideous ceramic dog statue I have ever seen in my entire life. Three items per episode, at least one person cries upon the return of their item. One story in each episode usually involves a trip to return the item. | Sentimental items, right? So often death in the stories of the people bringing things to repair - but the focus is on the craftspeople and their work and relationships. | Netflix | I love this show - the craftspeople are incredibly skilled and do extraordinary things, and the vibe is friendly and upbeat - but people bringing in things to repair must pay the Sentiment Tax and explain how they feel about the item, which occasionally gets tiresome. | ||
61 | The World's Most Extraordinary Homes | More not really reality TV but that doesn't seem to belong elsewhere. Two British celebrities (? srsly don't know who these people are) tour the 'world' to view amazing homes. I think there's usually 4 homes per episode. They trend toward Western places - a lot of Western Europe and America - but also India, Israel, and Japan. | Not very diverse in early seasons, does get (slightly) better. Hosts occasionally say cringey-awkward things, but are generally okay. Show depicts the homes of very wealthy people and is therefore occasionally massively infuriating. | Netflix | |||
62 | Ugly House to Lovely House | UK couples and families renovating their dated homes with the help of visionary architects. I really appreciate how they work with true variety of periods and styles to update living spaces for modern needs and growing families. | pretty much no matter what the budget, everyone goes over (sometimes massively so) | YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz-W1zRgSUo&list=PLZGEwZWvEixNTFLtCvH0P9zCzHPFGzdj6 | ||
63 | Gourmet Makes | Bon Appetit Test Kitchen chef Claire Saffitz tries to recreate classic junk foods and make them more gourmet | None I can think of | YouTube | |||
64 | Richard Osman's House of Games | Game show format with 4 British comedians/celebs competing over the course of a week for rubbish prizes; enough weird British stuff thrown in to keep even smart quizzers guessing. Not too competitive and host has very calming presence! | none | YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/c/MundoUK/playlists | ||
65 | Portrait Artist of the Year | Prime | |||||
66 | Escape to the Country | A team of friendly and diverse real estate agents show British people who want to move out of the city three rural homes. At the end they discuss which one they liked best, but there's almost always no firm decision made, so there's nothing really at stake. Also the host and the home buyers engage in educational and folksy tasks in the region to which they hope to move. | Sometimes people's reasons for wanting to move to the country equate to something like, "the city now doesn't look like the England I grew up in." Yikes. Also, be prepared for some budget envy (i.e. "She's a part-time interior designer, he's a fourth grade teacher, their budget is £600,000!"). Sometimes people want to move because the family has been through a hardship or loss. | One season on Amazon Prime (with ads), many more on YouTube | |||
67 | Beau Miles | Australian weirdo attempts various typically natural or physical challenges, with and without his family. I think kids would also find these videos amusing. | none | YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@BeauMiles/videos | ||
68 | The Great British Sewing Bee | As you might expect, this is a Bake Off-style series featuring sewing. Typically, episodes feature a pattern challenge, a refashion challenge, and a made-to-measure challenge with actual models. Contestants are very supportive of one another and the skill on display is amazing. | None I can think of | Cottage Life and RiverTV for recent seasons (Canada); SkyGo, BBC iPlayer, Apple TV (UK) | |||
69 | Time Team | Long running British documentary series presented by Tony Robinson (Baldric from Blackadder). A team of archaeologists excavate a site over the course of three days. There is a lot of camaraderie, good natured banter, and delightful expert nerdy enthusiasm. | Sometimes skeletal human remains are shown. | YouTube | |||
70 | Big Dreams Small Spaces | Monty Don helps people with small gardens build the garden of their dreams. | None | Tubi in the US | |||
71 | The Great Big Tiny Design Challenge | Sandi Toksvig presents as amateur crafters put their miniature-making skills to the test and compete to transform a derelict mini mansion into the ultimate fantasy house. It's an elimination style renovation show where the house being renovated is an oversized dolls house, with contestants being judged on skill and being period correct for the weekly challenge. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19386914/ | BritBox AppleTV in some countries | ||||
72 | QI | A comedy panel game in which being Quite Interesting is more important than being right. Each season has topics that are themed around a letter of the alphabet - Season one is topics starting with the letter A, the most recent Season is Season 20 with topics starting with the letter T. The initial host was Stephen Fry, the current host is Sandy Toksvig. Alan Davies is the only panelist who has appearred in every episode and is obsessed with Blue Whales. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0380136/ | |||||
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77 | Lighthearted Dramas | ||||||
78 | Northern Exposure | From the early 1990s, set in a quirky small town in Alaska where a doctor from NYC chafes against the local culture, which is one where the eccentric people are generally kind and caring toward one another and have all sorts of interesting interactions. | Mortality is often raised as an issue with a philosophical tone I find very comforting and beautiful. | ||||
79 | Brokenwood Mysteries | Small town New Zealand Mystery series | There's always a murder at the beginning, but otherwise VERY little violence. There's one episode in Season 5 that deals with a bad psychiatrist and his patients, there are a few jokes but mostly the mental illness is handled well. There's also occasional racism against the Maori characters, but that's always seen as negative and treated accordingly. | Acorn TV | |||
80 | Doctor Who (the rebooted series starting in 2005) | I have never paid much attention to science fiction as a genre, but I nevertheless totally enjoy this often-silly, sometimes creepy, very fun British escapist drama about a time-and-space traveling thousands-of-years-old alien and their human friends. | Can be quite creepy and mysterious, often deals with apocalyptic scenarios that threaten all life on earth. | Amazon (you have to pay for it even if you have Amazon prime) | |||
81 | Mozart in the Jungle | Quirky, charming and kinda whimsical fictional story about members of the New York Symphony orchestra and their new conductor. Lots of chemistry between the two leads. | Workplace romantic entanglements, relationship drama | Amazon Prime | |||
82 | Being Erica | Not quite sure if this should be classified as a comedy or gentle drama. It's humorous but some plotlines are a little more drama to them. Erica is a wannabe literature editor who tends to dwell on things she regrets. She finds a supernatural therapists who literally sends her back into her past to face her regrets, sometimes to change things, but mostly to remember / come to grips with why things happened the way they did and making peace with her actions | biggest one: death in the family, with regrets, break ups, work drama, the idea of regret writ large, especially tied to the, "if one thing changes, what happens the rest of your life? touches on infidelity, drug addiction, post partum depression very lightly in anciliary characters | Amazon Prime | |||
83 | Finding Joy | Joy, a copy editor, is thrown in the limelight of a feel-good news show, and is tasked with gonzo-journalism to investigate various health and wellness services and products when the star goes out sick -- often with hilarious brushes with her ex and his new girlfriend in the process | break-ups | amazon Prime | |||
84 | Psych | Goofy buddy mystery show in which the main character pretends to be a psychic and uses his unusually good perception to help police solve crimes. | The whole premise of the show is "cis-hetero white guy makes good by not working very hard and fooling everyone." Many/all episodes center on a murder, but they are not generally realistic or disturbing | Amazon Prime | |||
85 | Monk | Adrian Monk is San Francisco's greatest detective, and he also suffers from a number of debilitating phobias | At times, especially earlier in the series, characters are insensitive about mental health problems. This too is a murder mystery show | Amazon Prime | |||
86 | Poldark | Modern remake, miniseries version of the novel series | adultery, children die due to illness, poverty and labor exploitation | Amazon Prime | |||
87 | Foyle's War | A compassionate, wry police inspector, Christopher Foyle, and his enthusiastic, ravenous female driver Sam Stewart solve crimes and explore home-front life in a British coastal town during WWII | Another mystery show, so people get murdered and injured. WWII is going on and frequently is felt, though on-screen war violence is rare. 1940s-era attitudes about gender/sexuality/disability/PTSD/etc, but the main characters generally come out on the right side of things. | Amazon Prime (and I think you have to pay extra for Acorn) | |||
88 | Death in Paradise | Modern mystery series set in a fictional Caribbean town, filmed on Guadeloupe. Fish-out-of-water British detective assigned to help the police in St Marie. Fun characters, relaxing island life. | There's always a murder at the beginning, but generally a very gentle and kindhearted show, except for one season finale around season 9 that is darker. | Britbox | |||
89 | Shakespeare and Hathaway | Modern mystery series set in England in Stratford-upon-Avon. Retired detective-turned PI Hathaway meets salon owner now looking for a job Luella Shakespeare in the pilot. They also have their assistant/stuggling actor Sebastian. | Again, it's a mystery, so there is often a murder at the beginning, but it's very silly and lighthearted, and plenty of pretty old buildings and historical reenactors. | Britbox | |||
90 | The X-Files | Two FBI agents run a secret branch investigating paranormal phenomena, every episode there's a new mysterious phenomenon to be investigated | Can be quite creepy, there are overarching plots of sinister global conspiracies. I can't remember, but I'm guessing there are numerous pandemic-themed episodes. | Hulu | |||
91 | Only Murders in the Building | I wasn't sure whether I should even describe this as a drama, it's so madcap and silly, but the subject matter is the solution of a murder so I guess it counts. An odd trio of lonely apartment dwellers (Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez)—all of whom are addicted to true-crime podcasts—join together to try to solve/make a podcast about a murder that occurs in their building. | It starts with a death and continues to center around that death—sometimes in grizzly ways. Teenage hijinx-gone-bad, including suggestions of domestic violence, are dealt with in later episodes. Lots of loneliness and estrangement from family and friends. One character has just been released from prison after a long sentence. | Hulu | OMitB has one of the best ensemble casts on TV, plus a veritable galaxy of NY theatre people, from Ali Stroker and Nathan Lane to Jackie Hoffnan and Jane Lynch, and that's only 4 names in a long list. It's over-the-top and bombastic but also quiet and intimate (the dialogue between Nathan Lane & James Caverly's characters in S1 broke my damn heart, OK?) | ||
92 | Veronica Mars | A very smart high-school-aged social misfit helps her private investigator father solve mysteries | This is a tricky one—the topics tend to be quite dark (the death of a teenager, substance use, rape, revenge porn, unwanted pregnancies) and they only get darker as the seasons progress, but the characterizations are generally sweet and goofy and there is a sweet father-daughter relationship at the center of it. Approach with caution. | Hulu/Amazon Prime | |||
93 | Jane the Virgin | Comedy that is both in and offering meta-commentary on the telenovela soap opera style; about a virgin who is accidentally artificially inseminated. The focus on a Latinx grandmother-mother-daughter trio is the best and sweetest part of the show, but Jaime Camil as an endearingly self-centered soap opera star is the funniest. | Religion, fertility stuff, relationship drama, family drama, cancer in later seasons. Like all good soap operas, the show definitely messes with your emotions, but in a genuinely funny and sweet way. Unfortunately, one of the stars—Jason Baldoni—appears likely to be a sexual harasser and creep. | Netflix | |||
94 | Miss FIsher's Murder Mysteries | Miss Fisher is a detective in 1920s Melbourne Australia. She's decades ahead of her time in her views, and she gets into marvellous capers and tells us who-done-it. Bonus are her charrming adopted children, and the rediculously glamorous fashion | It is a murder mystery show—and it is set in the 1920s. So some characters say offensive things. | Netflix | |||
95 | Call the Midwife | 1950s/1960s-era midwives assist an impoverished district in London | childbirth / pregnancy; deals with poverty & other social issues as well as societal prejudices, it'll make you cry | Netflix | |||
96 | Heartstopper | Heartwarming drama focused on two male high school students in the UK whose friendship develops into a romance, bringing some of their other relationships under strain. | Some homophobic bullying and language | Netflix | |||
97 | Sex Education | A sexually repressed, nerdy high schooler starts a business giving sex advice to his peers | Lots of sexual content, much of it extremely awkward. Teenage drama, infidelity, family disfunction. In the first season, there is violence against a gay, Black teenager and the show doesn't treat it well in my opinion. Dealing with the aftermath of a sexual assault is a plot arc in the second season, and the show does deal with it well in my opinion. | Netflix | |||
98 | Stranger Things | A nostalgic 80s sci-fi show about a team of nerdy school kids who find themselves trying to save their friend/the world | [Note: some of us do not find this the least bit "gentle" or light-hearted] Creepiness, trauma, abuse, threats to all civilization, a mistreated child, gets more gory and horror-y as seasons progress | ||||
99 | Pride and Prejudice (1995) | Miniseries version of the Jane Austen novel | Prime or Hulu | ||||
100 | Due South | A plucky Canadian Mountie and a hardboiled Chicago cop solve crimes, with the help of the mountie's pet wolf! The mountie is super polite and believes the best of people, and it almost always works in his favor | It's a crime-of-the-week show, so there's often violence/death. Typical 90's levels of -isms. | YouTube |