Genre: Comedy, Drama
Actor: Anne Marivin, Assaad Bouab, Camille Cottin, Fanny Sidney, Grégory Montel, Laure Calamy, Liliane Rovere, Nicolas Maury, Ophélia Kolb, Ophélia Kolb, Stefi Celma, Thibault de Montalembert
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Actor: Anne Marivin, Assaad Bouab, Camille Cottin, Fanny Sidney, Grégory Montel, Laure Calamy, Liliane Rovere, Nicolas Maury, Ophélia Kolb, Ophélia Kolb, Stefi Celma, Thibault de Montalembert
Genre: Drama, Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Actor: Al Pacino, Ben Shenkman, Jeffrey Wright, Justin Kirk, Meryl Streep
Where’s Wanda? is a playful seesaw of odd comedy and crime/mystery. Its humor is over the top awkward, and it feels like it goes out of its way to test your limits for cringe. Wanda (Lea Drinda), in particular, is someone you can be naturally drawn to with an endearing but elusive presence, and they give you just enough per episode to care that she’s gone. The jumping timeline takes the scenic route at times, but if that scene involves the chemistry of the Klatts (Heike Makatsch and Axel Stein), I wouldn't mind at all. Altogether a lovably magnetic comedy you just can’t look away from.
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Actor: Axel Stein, Devid Striesow, Heike Makatsch, Joachim Krol, Kostja Ullmann, Lea Drinda, Leo Simon, Nikeata Thompson, Palina Rojinski
We follow the daily adventures of 3 bears that are individually lovable but collectively iconic. They rotate around as the centerpiece of an episode, each offering different flavors of humor namely dopey, slapstick, cringe, absurd, and when all else fails, funny animal. Some episodes take us into flashbacks of the bears as lost babies looking for a home, and it was a mistake to turn that into its own show, but it is in perfect quantity here. The recurring characters never overstay their welcome, changing the 3-person dynamic into even numbers where no character ventures off alone, or the inevitable 3 against the world, where the bears unite to overcome something else.
Genre: Animation, Comedy, Family, Kids
Actor: Bobby Moynihan, Demetri Martin, Eric Edelstein
So this is what City of Ghosts feels like in live-action. This series is just as candid, but it definitely takes the piss more. Maudie (Anna Cook) has excellent timing, loads of charm, and is far and away the most consistent character and performer. The show’s choppiness—you’ll know when you see it—can feel repetitive, cycling around to being memorable, then cycling back around to being a challenge, ad infinitum. But generally, it’s an investigative mockumentary delivered like an over-the-top cartoon (complete with the 2-in-1 episodes). It's got its challenges, but the sarcasm and earnestness makes it worth seeking out.
Genre: Comedy, Crime, Kids
Actor: Abby Bergman, Anna Cooke, Aston Droomer, Eliza Ong, Hana Struckett, Hannah Johnston, James Saunders, Jamil Smyth-Secka, Maria Angelico
Clocking just 15 minutes per episode, Special is like a candy bar. It’s quick to consume but sweet as sugar. This new Netflix Original is set around a gay man with cerebral palsy, a disability that affects his body coordination but not his brain. As Ryan puts it in the first episode, it’s a disability that doesn’t make him normal but also is not severe enough for him to be part of the “cool disabled crew”. Ryan decides to turn his life around by pretending his disability is due to a car accident. People around him, especially at the exploitative millennial magazine “eggwoke” where he is an intern, start treating him differently. The car accident story provides a more accessible framework for them to understand his condition. It’s hard to believe a TV show can come out today and still manage to be so different from the rest, but Special does it. In other words, and I’m sorry to be this cheeky; Special is special.
Genre: Comedy
Actor: Augustus Prew, Jessica Hecht, Julie Cude-Eaton, Kat Rogers, Marla Mindelle, Patrick Fabian, Punam Patel, Ryan O'Connell, Ryan O'Connell, Samantha Lee
Nadia is a game developer and proud aging hipster living in New York. Her story starts at her thirty-sixth birthday party looking at herself in the bathroom mirror. On her way out, she finds a friend who hands her a joint laced with cocaine, “that’s how the Israelis do it” her friend says.
Nadia hooks up with a guy and they stop at a bodega on the way back to her place. So far everything seems normal (in a New York-hipster kind of way). But on her way out of the bodega, she is hit by a car and dies. The story restarts, at the same birthday party, staring at herself in the mirror.
Russian Doll can be summarized in what Nadia screams later that night: “the universe is trying to f*ck with me, and I refuse to engage”. Her strong personality and the events that happen to her allow the show to explore themes of vulnerability, trauma, and even life and death. Russian Doll repeats almost every episode, but its originality and plot twists make it more refreshing with every repeat.
This rhythm takes some quick getting used to, but the moment you do you will not be able to look away. Natasha Lyonne from Orange is the New Black is masterful at playing Nadia. She co-created the show with Amy Poehler and Sleeping With Other People director, Leslye Headland. She packs a lot of the originality and character that possibly makes Russian Doll the most fun and original show you will watch in 2019.
Genre: Comedy, Mystery
Actor: Brendan Sexton III, Brooke Timber, Charlie Barnett, Chloe Sevigny, Dascha Polanco, Elizabeth Ashley, George Aloi, Greta Lee, Jeremy Bobb, Jes Davis, Natasha Lyonne, Rebecca Henderson, Whitney Devlin, Yul Vazquez
If you’re expecting the sleek, playful, and totally over-the-top spy shenanigans of 2005’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, you’re not going to find it in this 2024 version, not that it’s a bad thing. In fact, this show stands on its own, reinventing the spy couple into a professional partnership rather than an immediate spark that leads to marriage. This decision makes the show feel like the film’s opposite– as the longer runtime and naturalistic aura enables more focus on the incomparable Donald Glover and Maya Erskine rather than the explosions– but it makes the danger feel more unpredictable and not just action set pieces. Mr. & Mrs. Smith may not be the star-powered, guns-blazing action comedy we’re familiar with, but it’s certainly a more thoughtful, fresh take that improves on the concept.
Genre: Action & Adventure, Comedy, Drama
Actor: Donald Glover, Maya Erskine
What a great allegory for love this show is. It's incredibly awkward and vulgar in the right places, best exemplified by dialogue scenes that are uncomfortably long and often uncomfortable to begin with. Our two lead characters are frustrating and manipulative, which might confuse you into thinking the show itself is frustrating because you see them so much, and sometimes it is. At which point, you might start to ask yourself why you keep watching, why you subject yourself to this emotional torture episode after episode, season after season—eventually, you stay for the other characters, they're funny and don't deserve to be abandoned.
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Actor: Chris Witaske, Claudia O'Doherty, Claudia O'Doherty, Gillian Jacobs, Iris Apatow, Mike Mitchell, Paul Rust
Director: Lyia Terki
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Actor: Alex Rich, Alison Brie, Annabella Sciorra, Bashir Salahuddin, Betty Gilpin, Britney Young, Britt Baron, Carlos Colon Jr., Casey W. Johnson, Chris Lowell, Eli Goree, Ellen Wong, Gayle Rankin, Geena Davis, Horatio Sanz, Jackie Tohn, Kate Nash, Kia Stevens, Kim Gatewood, Kimmy Gatewood, Lilly Sullivan, Marc Maron, Marianna Palka, Rebekka Johnson, Rich Sommer, Shakira Barrera, Sunita Mani, Sydelle Noel, Victor Quinaz
For those familiar with the original book series, you’ll already know what kind of show to expect. The Apple+ cartoon is centered on the two titular amphibians going through universal adventures that makes or breaks your day. From finding the willpower to resist eating delicious cookies, to hoping a friend would contact you when you’re lonely, each episode keeps a gentle sort of humor, poking lighthearted fun at the differences between the emotional Toad and more sensible Frog. With each episode’s twenty minute runtime, and two adventures per episode, Frog and Toad is a sweet, nostalgic series that’s easy to breeze through for millennial parents and their kids.
Genre: Animation, Family, Kids
Actor: Kevin Michael Richardson, Nat Faxon
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend starts with a very familiar setup. A girl leaves town to follow a boy she loves, and along the way, she picks up a best friend who blindly supports her, a rival who gets in romance’s way, and a second guy who, little does she know, loves her for who she is. That girl, Rebecca Bunch (played by writer-creator Rachel Bloom), is our romcom hero, and she knows it. She views life as one big musical movie where she’s supposed to get the guy and live happily ever after.
Except, in real life, things are never as simple—and people never as one-dimensional—as that. This confuses Rebecca, who then goes out of her way to craft the perfect happy ending, even if it means hurting people (including herself) along the way.
In a series of wackily addictive songs, playfully subversive twists, and heart-aching breakthroughs, we join Rebecca as she learns to overcome her demons and live in the real world. Her journey to self-awareness and self-love can get frustratingly slow and surprisingly bleak, but it’s also deeply comforting and reassuring.
Watch this if you’re interested in subversive takes on love, affecting female friendships, genuinely catchy tunes, proper mental health representation, and seeing reductive stereotypes, the “crazy ex-girlfriend” just being one of many, fleshed out and reclaimed with great aplomb.
Genre: Comedy, Music
Actor: Donna Lynne Champlin, Rachel Bloom, Scott Michael Foster, Vella Lovell
This new six-part comedy series is as razor-sharp as a vampire’s fangs, skewering everything from the horror genre’s historically iffy treatment of people of color, lazy media stereotypes of Muslims, and real-life fixtures of Islamic communities. It never feels bogged down by the weight of the issues behind it, though, always staying true to the lightness of its silly — but ingenious — concept.
The show follows the goofy Abdulla (Arian Nik), a British-Pakistani trainee doctor and horror nerd who has enough on his plate — what with an unavailable crush and the social pressures of being a not-so-perfect Muslim — without also having to contend with being turned by vampire-dominatrix Kathy (played with gusto by Jaime Winstone). Writer Kaamil Shah manages to pack an impressive amount of cutting humor into each 20-ish-minute episode, whether through Kathy railing against the appropriation of vampire culture during Halloween (presented less as an anti-woke joke and more as a wry analogy to media misrepresentation of real minorities) or a wink to Muslims about the epidemic of hypocritical haram police in our communities. This balance between universal humor and inside jokes that speak directly to — rather than over the heads of — British Muslims makes Count Abdulla a very welcome addition to TV comedy in general, as well as a refreshing widening of the horror genre.
Genre: Comedy, Horror
Actor: Jonny Green, Manpreet Bambra, Mariska Ariya, Sia Alipour
Director: Asim Abbasi
Alexa and Katie greets us with vintage Nickelodeon sitcom acting, which is far from the most inspiring. But the same can’t be said about this show’s premise and execution, which is incredibly heartfelt and commendable. Characters are supportive and mature where it counts, though it’s structured to feel like any other kids’ sitcom—which is to say that the intrinsic heaviness is handled well, and in line with Alexa’s desire that people not treat her any differently. The show is vulnerable and sweet, packaged in a familiar and comforting way for younger audiences learning to be brave with Alexa.
Genre: Comedy
Actor: Eddie Shin, Emery Kelly, Finn Carr, Isabel May, Jolie Jenkins, Paris Berelc, Tiffani Thiessen
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery
Actor: Baard Owe, Benny Hansen, Benny Poulsen, Bente Eskesen, Birgitte Raaberg, Birte Tove, Bodil Jørgensen, Claus Nissen, Claus Strandberg, Danica Curcic, Dick Kaysø, Else Petersen, Erik Wedersøe, Ernst-Hugo Järegård, Finn Nielsen, Ghita Nørby, Gordon Kennedy, Helle Virkner, Henning Jensen, Henrik Koefoed, Holger Juul Hansen, Holger Perfort, Jens Okking, Julie Wieth, Kirsten Rolffes, Kurt Ravn, Lars Lunøe, Lars von Trier, Laura Christensen, Lene Vasegaard, Lise Schrøder, Mette Marckmann, Mette Munk Plum, Michael Moritzen, Morten Eisner, Nis Bank-Mikkelsen, Ole Boisen, Ole Dupont, Otto Brandenburg, Paul Hüttel, Peter Gilsfort, Peter Mygind, Solbjørg Højfeldt, Solveig Sundborg, Søren Hauch-Fausbøll, Søren Lenander, Søren Pilmark, Thomas Bo Larsen, Tove Maës, Udo Kier, Ulrik Cold, Vic Carmen Sonne
Director: Lars von Trier, Morten Arnfred