A lot of the comedy shows which leave a real impression on audiences are the ones with layered stories and an interesting exploration of different themes. While there are plenty of shows that people can go to for a quick laugh, it’s rarer to see a funny show that also balances plenty of emotional, clever storytelling.
Comedy shows need to be funny, first and foremost, but this doesn’t exclude them from also being incredibly deep and meditative if they want to be. These shows can often use humor to disguise some surprisingly poignant and affecting themes, which makes them stick with audiences long after they’re over.
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Ted Lasso
Ted Lasso Carries An Optimistic Ethos
Ted Lasso is often a great cure for stress in an age of cynicism. Its endearing, earnest optimism about human nature is surprisingly refreshing, and it’s filled with characters who are worth caring about and rooting for. Ted Lasso uses the competitive world of professional sports as a microcosm of society.
Ted Lasso‘s intelligent writing is driven by its detailed understanding of its characters.
Ted Lasso‘s intelligent writing is driven by its detailed understanding of its characters. They’re all perfectly designed to collide with one another in the funniest ways possible, like the way that Ted’s generosity chips away at Roy’s gruff demeanor, for example. Ted Lasso season 4 has been confirmed, but it’s the show’s most mysterious season after a season 3 finale that seemed to wrap everything up neatly.
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Atlanta
Atlanta Ventures Into Absurdity
Season 1 of Atlanta starts with Earn and his cousin trying to break into the competitive, insular music industry, but it soon evolves into a surreal, freewheeling comedy show with a much broader scope. By the time the show wrapped up, it was impossible to predict what was coming. There are even several anthology episodes completely unrelated to the main story.
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Atlanta uses its surreal, abstract humor to deconstruct the conventions and assumptions about modern life that people never question. It also takes aim at the absurdity of American society and culture, slipping in and out of a strange fantasy world at times. Atlanta‘s best episodes are like nothing else on TV.
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Flowers
A Hidden Gem With A Powerful Blend Of Comedy And Drama
Although it stars Oscar-winner Olivia Colman, Flowers deserves a much bigger audience. The show follows a peculiar, codependent family living in rural England, as the father struggles to get his next children’s book published, and the rest of the family struggle with their own personal lives in various ways.
Flowers is brilliantly written, and the cast make the most out of the hilarious script. It also has a lot of heart, as Flowers delves into the dysfunctional family, along with themes of grief, communication and memory. It was a short-lived gem, but Flowers is an underrated British comedy worth checking out.
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Call My Agent
The French Comedy Has Admirers All Over The World
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Thibault de Montalembert
Mathias Barneville
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Grégory Montel
Gabriel Sarda
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Liliane Rovère
Arlette Azémar
It can often be hard for comedy to translate into different languages, but Call My Agent is a French show with a global fan base. The show follows the daily lives of the staff at an illustrious talent agency in Paris, meaning there are countless French film stars who make guest appearances. Sigourney Weaver even shows up, underlining Call My Agent‘s worldwide appeal.
Call My Agent is wonderfully stylish and filled with quirky charms, but the quality of the writing and the performances are what make it so entertaining. The different agents each have their own troubles, which creates a chaotic workplace comedy with plenty of conniving drama to drive the plot forward.
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Deadloch
The Australian Mystery Show Doesn’t Try To Keep Things Light
There are plenty of great comedy crime shows on TV at the moment, but the likes of Only Murders in the Building and The Residence do a lot of work to brighten things up. Deadloch‘s tone is much more dour, and the dark humor is directly linked to the grim circumstances of the murders that occur in a sleepy seaside town.
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Deadloch is just as funny as other crime comedies, but it’s darker and more intelligent than the average whodunnit. People’s reactions to the murders reveal a lot about their cozy lifestyles, as if the crimes send a jolt through a town full of people trying their best to bury their heads in the sand. With Deadloch season 2 confirmed, it’s a great time to catch up on the first season.
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Veep
Armando Iannucci’s Political Satire Cuts Through The Bluster
Veep was Armando Iannucci’s first show in the United States, but he already had a reputation as one of Britain’s sharpest satirists after The Thick of It. He zeroed in on the role of the vice president for Veep, although the show quickly evolved into a sprawling exploration of the entire American political system from top to bottom.
Veep is a hilarious satire of the Washington political machine, with politicians often presented as bickering school children or self-important blowhards. Veep‘s best seasons tend to be those in which Selina runs for president, so the show can take in the absurd media wars of election season.
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BoJack Horseman
Netflix’s Animated Sitcom Gets Surprisingly Deep
For a cartoon about a horse who’s struggling to recapture his glory days in Hollywood, BoJack Horseman can get surprisingly emotional. The show is confident enough in its writing to allow entire episodes to pass without much comedy, especially in the final season when the exploration into BoJack’s psyche gets darker and more detailed.
The fact that BoJack Horseman can balance these thoughtful, heartbreaking episodes with zany, madcap farces highlights the show’s impressive range. The fast-paced chaos is supposed to evoke the absurdity of Hollywood and America’s fame-obsessed culture. Some of the best episodes of BoJack Horseman accelerate into an absurd frenzy, with Will Arnett’s deadpan charms working well.
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Barry
Bill Hader’s Dark Comedy Is An Interesting Character Study
Barry stars Bill Hader as an assassin who goes to Los Angeles for a job and gets bitten by the acting bug. His subsequent attempts to pursue his passion and get a foothold in the industry are tempered by his devotion to his criminal past, as he has to constantly put out fires to maintain his civilian reputation.
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Barry is a hilarious dark comedy, but it’s also a deep character study of a man who wants to believe that he can move on from his past. Many of the show’s supporting characters are just as interesting, and Hader’s underrated skills as a director often give Barry a meditative, cinematic quality.
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The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
The Period Comedy Captures An Era In American Culture
As one might expect from Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is known for its rapid-fire banter, gorgeous aesthetic and warm emotional storylines. Rachel Brosnahan stars as a woman who takes up a career in comedy during the 1950s and 1960s after her husband sleeps with another woman.
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has such a dense concentration of great jokes that it’s best to watch it a couple of times just to catch all the gags that may have slipped under the radar. It’s important that there’s a quick pace, because the show has a lot to get through, as it touches on societal change, women’s roles, families, divorce, romance and much more.
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Fleabag
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Comedy Creates A Unique Character
Phoebe Waller-Bridge initially developed Fleabag as a one-woman stage show, so she had a firm sense of the character and the story by the time she started making the TV series. This means that Fleabag has a confident, unique identity from its very first episode.
Fleabag has a confident, unique identity from its very first episode.
Fleabag‘s technique of breaking the fourth wall is often used to give a wry wink to the audience, but the show goes much deeper than this, questioning the layers of artifice that TV shows construct between themselves and their audiences, as well as the way that people avoid their own realities.