15 Best TV Shows Similar to Peep Show

In one of A Man on the Inside creator Michael Schur’s previous series—The Good Place—there’s a moment when one character explains that, as humans, we all know that we will someday die. That means we all walk around a little sad, even during our happiest moments. That kind of melancholic joy is where his newest series dwells. It’s a show with lots of laughs, excellent characters, and the pervasive knowledge that there is an end somewhere out on the horizon. For most of A Man on the Inside’s characters, that end feels close indeed. That’s because the action primarily focuses on a Senior Living facility in San Francisco, Pacific View Retirement Community. That’s where private investigator Julie Kavalenko (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) sends her newest hire, Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson). The mission is simple enough. Someone stole a necklace from Evan Cubbler’s (Marc Evan Jackson, doing WASP with a side of withering contempt as only he can) mother Helen (Danielle Kennedy). He wants it back and the thief hauled in. Charles, lost in many ways after the death of his wife, sees it as an opportunity to honor his daughter Emily’s (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) request he finds something to spark his passion. Julie thinks she can’t find anyone his age nearly as spry or capable of using a phone. Stephanie Beatriz and Mary Elizabeth Ellis discuss fashion and wallpaper. Specifically, how pastels and neutrals are great for both. (Colleen E. Hayes/Netflix) In other hands, this could be an invitation to a bunch of jokes about how older adults are weird and/or gross and/or dumb. Thankfully, Schur and his collaborators Emalee Burditt and Morgan Sackett are not other hands. While there are some “this person/these people are weird” bits, they’re personality, not age-based. The show doesn’t pretend the bulk of the cast isn’t seniors but they don’t use that to other anyone. That’s not surprising given Schur plays in the same kind of “humane, but hilarious” sandbox as Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Shrinking), although Schur typically trends gentler and less ribald. Continue Reading →

Sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with a television show or film from a creativity or execution standpoint. Sometimes, it just has bad timing. It’s still unclear which--or how much of each--is true of St. Denis Medical after screening the six episodes (1-5, 7) provided to critics. Certainly, the series’ choice of the mockumentary with interspersed talking heads format does suffer for timing. There’s little to no freshness left in the approach made storytelling structure du jour back when the American incarnation of The Office entered its imperial era in 2006. While by no means ubiquitous, the subsequent critical and/or ratings successes of shows like Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, What We Do in the Shadows, and Abbott Elementary have made the subgenre’s pleasures familiar. That doesn’t mean it can’t work. After all, both Shadows and Abbott continue to be two of the more consistent pleasures on TV. But it does give a new show playing in that sandbox a bit tougher time. That acknowledged, the format still can give great performers an excellent stage. So St. Denis Medical’s sweet and pleasant but not hilarious vibes suggest that the familiar—perhaps tired—subgenre isn’t the only issue here. Of course, there might be a gulf between what appeals to this critic and what the show wants to do. At this juncture, it seems to be looking for a slower, gentler pace. A show that’s less a joke machine and more a “love and learn with laughs” style throwback. Lead nurse Alex’s (Allison Tolman) stymied efforts to get to her daughter’s musical in the pilot, capped by a milkshake and pep talk from veteran doctor Ron (David Alan Grier) supports this. Continue Reading →

Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman), River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), and the rest of the Slough House reprobates are back for Slow Horses Season 4, and things are, unsurprisingly, not good. While a bombing in a bustling London shopping center consumes most of Britain’s intelligence community, River’s grandfather, David (Jonathan Pryce), has wandered into a very different sort of fight. His memory and cognitive skills are unraveling, triggering, among other problems, a rapid increase in his paranoia. One night, someone close to him drops in for a visit, and moments later, David guns down the visitor. But is everything what it seems? Questions of what family members owe one another take center stage as David’s confused and deadly actions expose the previously largely unexplored complexity of the Cartwright family. As one member of Slough House runs to France to investigate a single errant clue, the rest of the team is left behind to protect David from Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley), the new head of MI5’s “dogs”. While seemingly far less corrupt than her predecessors, she’s just as disinterested in tolerating the Horses’ nonsense or willing to trust their pleas for more time. Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Christopher Chung, Tom Brooke, Kadiff Kirwan, and Rosalind Eleazar are all here. You got a problem with that? (AppleTV+) Coming at the Horses from the other side is a seemingly unstoppable black-ops mercenary (Tom Wozniczka) trying to clean up the loose ends of…something. David might have once been able to fill in the blanks, but with dementia steadily robbing him of his past and his present consumed with guilt and trauma, he can’t conjure any explanations. As he stalks the members of Slough House, Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) tries to push the new First Chair, the hesitant and PR-focused Claude Whelan (James Callis), to bury anything and everything having to do with the bombing and its apparent perpetrator. Continue Reading →

After six about 20-minute episodes of the Shane Gillis-Steve Gerben-created sitcom Tires, one can begin to understand why Netflix would want to work with him. He has a certain charisma and some acting chops. In one scene during the first episode, Gillis’ character, also named Shane, tries to snow a very unhappy reporter. In the sequence, Gillis has to convey to the audience that he doesn’t mean a word he’s saying and is using the moment to humiliate his boss and cousin Will (Gerben) while playing authentic convincingly enough that one can see why the reporter might fall for it. It’s not an easy lift, but Gillis makes it work. The story is fine enough for a hangout comedy. Will is a failure whose father owns several tire stores. Either as punishment or because it’s where he can do the least harm, Dad has exiled Will to manage one of the two lowest-performing branches of the chain. Physically slight and coded as a kind of nerd, Will doesn’t fit in with the mechanics, including their seeming ringleader, Shane. To save the shop and his job and earn his dad’s affection, he spends every episode of a “marketing” idea that derails spectacularly.  Catch a glimpse of Steve Gerben. (Netflix) The bad news is that, despite a sound enough premise, everything the show says or tries has the shape of jokes without actually including a laugh line. It’s the essence of humor without any of the pesky chuckles. Continue Reading →

Netflix’s new romance limited series offers a thoughtful, warm adaptation of the 2009 novel. The hook of author David Nicholls’ 2009 novel is irresistible. Readers catch up with two former classmates who are something more than friends but not quite lovers on the same day, July 19, every year from 1988 to 2008. It’s no wonder it has managed two adaptations in the 15 years since its release—first as a 2011 movie directed by Lone Scherfig from a script by Nicholls himself and now as a limited series created by Nicole Taylor, with only one Nicholls’ script among the fourteen episodes. Dexter Mayhew (Leo Woodall) is handsome, charismatic, and just rich enough not to worry about making a plan for his future. Emma Morley (Ambika Mod) is also quite attractive—although she can’t (or won’t) see it—and from a working-class background that makes her feel as though she can’t pursue her clear goal for the future: to become a writer. They travel in different circles, but on the night of graduation, they end up falling into her bed. While they kiss plenty, it never goes further, Emma preferring to chat despite her massive and evident crush on Dexter.  Continue Reading →

Gus Van Sant & Jon Robin Baitz collaborate on a miniseries rich in both vintage style & human drama. Nora Ephron once said “Everything is copy.” When you’re a writer, anything you see, experience, or hear, even in confidence, might be filed away to use as creative fodder later, despite the potentially sketchy ethics of it. If you’re lucky, maybe your friends won’t recognize themselves quite as easily as the friends of Truman Capote did when he wrote “La Côte Basque, 1965,” a short story published in Esquire. Though the story purported to be fiction, it was thinly veiled fiction at best. So thin, in fact, you could see right through it. The events leading up to the publication of Capote’s work in 1975, and the fallout afterward, is the focus of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans, a limited series that at first blush looks like it’s going to be camp nonsense in the vein of the interminable Real Housewives franchise, but has a deep sense of melancholy at its core. With the first four episodes directed by Gus Van Sant, where an easy approach would be to clearly delineate villains and heroes from the beginning, instead it offers something a little more complicated, and asks some uncomfortable questions about friendship, creativity, and trust. Continue Reading →

A quick overview of the high highs and middling disappointments in horror this year. With the social media app formerly known as Twitter now a shell of its former self, horror fans have been forced to return to Facebook to continue such interminable debates as “What does or doesn’t qualify something as ‘horror’?” “What the hell is ‘elevated horror,’ anyway?” “Are remakes inherently bad?” “Have horror movies gotten too ‘woke’?” “Were we wrong for letting women make horror?” In a year when both David Gordon Green and M. Night Shyamalan released new movies, the horror discourse was especially spicy, and that’s before we get to the really interesting stories, like the surprise viral success of Skinamarink, which, with the way time seems to be passing nowadays, feels like it was released five years ago. Both indie and mainstream horror made daring choices, not looking to appeal to as broad a range of audiences as possible, and treating the genre as a serious art form, as opposed to just a machine that prints money. But the biggest surprise came in October, with the release of Saw X, the tenth film in a seemingly unkillable franchise, which ended up being one of the best, most coherent entries in the entire series. Continue Reading →

The crime drama returns to the Land of 10,000 Lakes and rediscovers its best storytelling self. Throughout the six episodes of Fargo Season 5 screened for critics, the series isn’t exactly subtle. From opening the season with an on-screen graphic defining “Minnesota Nice” as neighbor attacks neighbor during a school board meeting to Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm) staring up at a campaign billboard of himself, the show loudly states its theses at the viewer over and over. However, it never feels like creator Noah Hawley has lost control of the storytelling. It’s methodically over-the-top. The audience is on a roller coaster, but they can feel the quality of the engineering keeping them on the tracks. In other hands, this approach can feel alienating or blunting. Fargo Season 5 benefits from meeting Hawley’s signature energy with a game cast and impressively insightful art direction. As a result, the series turns in its best offering since Season 2’s near-perfect effort. Continue Reading →

Screenwriter Josh Olsen (A History of Violence) used to tell anyone who would listen that his passion project was an account of the life of Bass Reeves, a man whose life and career were the stuff of fables. Reeves was the first Black deputy sheriff west of the Mississippi, with an arrest record in the thousands by most accounts. Best of all, legends assert that he almost never killed or shot anyone he didn’t have to. Continue Reading →

As the TV series Everything Now begins, Mia (Sophie Wilde) is eager for freedom. After spending months in a hospital undergoing treatment for her anorexia, her supervisor, Dr. Nell (Stephen Fry), has decided she’s well enough to return to school with her best friends Becca (Lauryn Ajufo), Cam (Harry Cadby), and Will (Noah Thomas). Cooped up inside for what seemed like an eternity, Mia is bursting with enthusiasm about finally undergoing many teenage rites of passage like first dates and big parties. Continue Reading →

When Frasier premiered in the fall of 1993 it had massive shoes to fill. That's probably an understatement. Its parent show, Cheers, was a critical and commercial monster in a way that can only happen when there are only three shows for two hundred million people to choose from. It was nominated for almost two hundred Emmys over the course of its eleven-year run, and its series finale aired to 90 million people (40% of the country’s then population) three months before Frasier’s start. So yeah, expectations were pretty high, and Frasier ended up pretty much meeting them all. While never as popular as Cheers (nothing has been as popular as Cheers since Cheers), it was nevertheless a solid commercial hit that carved out its own identity and won more Emmys than its parent show over the course of its own eleven-year run. A lot of that success was rooted in Frasier’s ability as its own, independent show with its own characters and rhythms instead of being Cheers 2.0.   Continue Reading →

In 1983, a group of crooks broke into a vault at the Heathrow International Trading Estate in London, patrolled by Brink’s Mat security conglomeration. The Brinks company was already famous for a famous robbery, one that was carried out in the '50s in the North End in Boston, an incident that turned into a charmingly strange movie by William Friedkin in 1978. Continue Reading →

Hulu’s new series How I Met Your Father attempts to recreate the magic of the - wait for it! - legendary status of the original series How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM for short). This update proves a nostalgic ride for fans of the original series and an enjoyable journey for newcomers, even if it lacks some of the fresh qualities of its predecessor.   Continue Reading →

The formula isn’t a new one: the hot, hyper-competent wife who gave up her master’s track to marry the boorish, underachieving man-child. Just add three cameras and some annoying in-laws/neighbors, and you could be watching King of Queens, Everybody Loves Raymond, or (God forbid) According to Jim. Some shows have put a unique spin on the formula, the most successful being Gloria Calderon Kellett’s One Day at a Time reboot. But overall, when you see a three-camera sitcom, you usually know what you’re getting. It’s like gas station coffee or dinner at Applebee’s. It’s just there. Continue Reading →