The Best TV Shows To Watch With Your SO This Fall
The best TV shows are a great way to escape the purgatory that we all live in. They unite families at dinner tables who would otherwise be yelling at one another. TV shows can be a third parent when they insist on growing up with you. They can create an environment where you can go from casually cuddling with your SO—all the way to streaming and sexy time—without all of that awkward wooing. Fall is the time for leaves, cocoa, pumpkin purée, and pent-up sexual frustration.
Bojack Horseman
At every turn, this show will throw you a curveball on the emotional spectrum. People abandon each other, the characters feel real, and nothing ever seems ok (like real life). It has a great sense of dark humor. It gets very dark at some points.
Bojack has a lot of trauma. That trauma is explored throughout the series. Characters that are introduced and scarred by Bojack may disappear and never return or we the audience might not get the kind of closure that neither we nor Bojack feel is enough.
I Think You Should Leave
This is one of the funniest shows that I’ve ever watched. It’s a form of cringe comedy that doesn’t make you cringe. It doesn’t have that anticipatory dread that comes with the buildup of a cringe joke, because it is so absurd. It starts each sketch out as though it’s a perfectly normal scenario and then leads its viewers into craziness, like the boiling frog.
Stranger Things
Nostalgia for individuals who grew up in the 80s. It has a Lovecraftian-King horror vibe with a telekinetic heroine. Everything is done well. The characters, dialogue, story, etc. It almost creates a remixed type of nostalgia for those of us who’ve never experienced the 80s. It’s predictable in a lot of places, but that’s ok because it’s enjoyable. The actors do a great job conveying their thoughts and feelings, despite some not having gone around the sun too many times.
Friends
Like reruns of M*A*S*H and Cheers, this show is something you throw on in the background. Everyone on the show is trying to…play baseball with each other…at all times. Many people think it’s a less funny, carbon copy of Seinfeld.
That’s not what matters. What matters is that you and your SO need a TV show to binge on that’s lighthearted and Autumn-y. Go watch Seinfeld, too.
Maniac
This show is an interesting spin on experimental sci-fi technology engineered for mental health treatment. It has two huge actors who star in it and the story is unique. It’s also just really well done.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Laughing at characters who will always be terrible people can make you feel very good. This show is probably one of the funniest shows to ever exist. There’s always drama, tension, and stupidity—and no one ever learns anything. Perfect for Fall.
The Good Place
The universe that this story exists in, is amazing. Worldbuilding at its best. It has a great sense of humor and makes fun of things like the trolley problem and creates jokes like Jeremy Bearimy. This brand of humor means that it might just be an anachronism, ready to be rewatched by people who don’t exist yet.
Mindhunter
Everyone loves a show about serial killers. They’re kind of like Nazis and aliens that way. We get to live vicariously through the FBI agents who are trying to get into the killers’ minds.
Archer
This is one of the most quotable shows in existence. It has somehow been able to reinvent itself into staying fresh, even though it’s gone on for ten seasons. H. Jon Benjamin also voices Bob from Bob’s Burgers.
Broad City
The series ended recently, and that’s good for people who have never seen it. You can binge it all at once. The storyline itself comes out of character development, so it flows better. This show is undeniably funny and has genuinely good writing.
Mr. Show with Bob and David
This show is such a cult classic that many shows were influenced by it. One of the best things about Mr. Show is its ability to fold the plot into itself like an infinity-scarf-like Russian doll. The continuity of seemingly disparate subplots happens within the same universe of that particular episode. It’s really clever.
Breaking Bad
It is the best TV show ever written, by many accounts. The story arc of this masterpiece takes us on a journey that only ever raises the stakes. Walter White’s transformation into Heisenberg humanizes our enemies. As a culture, we’ve moved away from Bond villains and impervious superheroes and traded them in for antiheroes.
True Detective
The first season is so strong that it’s been hard for the others to keep up with. The second season has superfluous characters that draw the audience away from what made the original good in the first place: caring what happens to the characters. Not dividing the story up into so many subplots.
Rick and Morty
This is a cartoon loosely based off of the Back to the Future series (Doc and Marty). The motif of this show is cosmicism—Lovecraftian horror. We, humans, are an infinitesimal piece of gum that’s stuck on the bottom of a classroom desk—with decades of nose-pickings and other gum beside it—from the lack of funds to buy a replacement desk.
The reason this is a reliable show to watch with your SO: co-creator Dan Harmon uses this thing called the “hero’s journey” when configuring the plot. Harmon breaks down his usage of the device on this wiki-link and in a video here.
The humor for this series is phenomenal. They have everything from poop jokes to complex, existential humor. The universe is similar to Gravity Falls.
The show exists outside of itself, too. There are non-canonical music videos, whatever this is, Bushworld Adventures, Rick-and-Morty-old-sci-fi-movie parodies, and Rick and Morty in different animation styles. Co-creator Justin Roiland even has a videogame called Trover Saves the Universe (similar humor).
