Television Worth Surrendering To
Some shows only work if you give in completely—one episode after another, one season bleeding into the next, until the characters feel like people you actually know and their problems carry real weight. The weekly ritual, one episode every seven days, kills certain shows dead. They need momentum. They need you still thinking about the last scene when the next one starts.
Here are five I’d been watching that way. All underseen at the time. All available season by season. None of them old enough that watching them felt like catching up on homework. I love each one of them unreservedly, which feels worth saying before I say anything else.
Community might be the only network sitcom that genuinely improves with every episode it produces. The setup—a disbarred lawyer coasting through a community college study group on charm alone—sounds like a premise in search of a show, but the characters are what make it. Jeff Winger, the smooth operator who keeps getting caught caring. Britta Perry, who is wrong about almost everything but not in a mean way. Abed Nadir, who processes the world entirely through film and television and turns out to be the most emotionally functional person in the room. Ken Jeong as the deranged Spanish teacher is one of the great recurring comedy performances of its era. The paintball episodes have become almost ceremonial. The cultural references are so dense and executed with such genuine love that they stop feeling like references and start feeling like the actual language of the show. I would have taken drastic action if NBC had cancelled it.
30 Rock sounds dry on paper—a head writer struggling to keep a late-night sketch show alive while her new executive boss imports a scandal-magnet movie star to boost ratings—and then you watch it and realize it’s completely deranged. Tina Fey wrote from personal experience, and the show doesn’t soften the satire or change the names the way most TV does. Everything feels real and entirely unhinged at the same time. The characters have specific, earned damage that makes you want to protect them even when they’re being idiots, which is most of the time.
Louis C.K. is one of the most direct comedians working—he comes out on stage and tells you things about his body, his kids, sex, and failure all in the same breath, and you end up laughing in a way that’s almost painful. Louie on FX takes that energy and runs it through a different container: half stand-up footage shot before a live audience, half semi-autobiographical vignette that could theoretically happen to anyone. Except nothing about how it unfolds is normal. Not for people who need their comedy to stay comfortable. Not for anyone afraid of watching a protagonist make consistently bad choices for comprehensible reasons.
Modern Family needs no introduction by this point—it had already accumulated enough awards to guarantee that. Three related American families, filmed in mockumentary style, with Ed O’Neill holding the whole structure together as the ageing patriarch. What keeps it from feeling like a machine producing sentiment on schedule is the situational comedy that comes from the characters rather than being imposed on them. Phil Dunphy stumbling through fatherhood with complete sincerity. Jay Pritchett navigating a second marriage and refusing to understand why anything is complicated. You need a few episodes to find your footing, but once you do, the rhythm carries you forward without effort.
Wilfred—the American version adapted from the Australian original—had only one season at that point, ending on what remains one of the most infuriating cliffhangers I’ve sat through. Elijah Wood and a man in a dog suit in a friendship that may or may not be a psychotic episode. You develop a specific hate-love relationship with Wilfred: he saves Ryan in the most perverse possible ways, fills him with bad advice and genuine warmth and the occasional controlled substance, and yet you spend half the season hoping he gets hit by a car. And then the finale ends and the only reasonable response is to immediately need more.