This should give you a decent idea of whether it is for you or not. While I am not usually one for content warnings, Flowers literally opens with a suicide attempt, which sets the tone for all that follows. Created, written by, and starring Will Sharpe, it’s a portrait of a family group who are deeply odd yet lovable, in spite – or because? – of their myriad flaws and neuroses. This is the unusual balance that Flowers successfully manages, even if only for a mere two seasons. It is an incredibly rare work that can make you both laugh aloud and also weep, let alone do both within two minutes. You’ll more than likely recognise at least one of the ensemble cast from elsewhere (most likely the prolific Donald Glover) – or, if not, recognise it from the image macros (most likely Donald Glover walking into a room where everything’s on fire). Perhaps more importantly, it can make all of them funny. It might be a fairly pedestrian setting, but that doesn’t even slightly restrict the story – you’ll find episodes playing around with every genre and story type in the book, from zombie apocalypse to authoritarian dystopia. The show’s about nothing more complicated than a group of misfits attending the same community college who end up becoming friends. Although it ended in 2014, when the streaming service picked it up in 2020 it shot into their ten most popular shows almost immediately. This was a very long-awaited addition to Netflix’s stable. Humour doesn’t necessarily need to be painfully relatable, but in spite of everything, Peep Show definitely is. So yes, we are privy to all their absolute worst impulses, the kind of stuff you might think but never, ever say out loud. As they shudder and embarrass their ways through life, we see through their eyes and hear their private, inner thoughts. What elevates this from being a standard cringe comedy show, though, is the point-of-view filming style. David Mitchell and Robert Webb in Peep Show are the yin and yang of this: one uptight introvert, one party-boy extrovert, both awful little men who have awful little things happen to them. The troubles may come and go, but the love-hate relationship with your own adolescence is forever.Ĭringe comedy is a beast all of its own, where the laughs are equal parts ‘imagine if that happened to me’ and ‘thank God it didn’t’.
Refreshingly, most are improvising their way through life just as wildly as the main characters, and Grandpa Joe’s eternal, burning hatred of his son-in-law is really something to behold. Unlike a lot of the comedy shows dealing with the teen experience, the leads aren’t a pack of chiselled, wealthy 30-somethings, and the adult characters aren’t pigeonholed into being shouting, blank authority figures. Sure, you may be living in the midst of an ongoing campaign of sectarian terrorism, but that all pales into significance when you’re hungrily trying to land a boyfriend – or when the formidable nun who runs your school turns up. I’ve written about the charms of Derry Girls before, and while it’s undeniably tethered to a certain time and place (to wit, Stroke City in the ‘90s), its depiction of skin-crawling teenage angst crosses all borders. The Thick Of It also has the rare honour of a transatlantic adaptation, Veep (annoyingly not on Netflix), which was on par with the original. Even among the rest of the show’s gutter-mouthed crowd, he uses violent sexual imagery with real panache. And while the denizens of Whitehall are all wonderfully profane and self-serving, the standout can only be Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker, chief spin doctor and a creature of unrestrained bombastic fury.
The political parties are never named, and it doesn’t really matter. Most of the brainpower of our best and brightest seems to be spent on increasingly elaborate uses of swear words, with whatever’s left over used for covering their behinds. The Thick Of It is known for two things – incisive satire of the political class, and turning the use of profanity into an art form. Here are the best comedy shows on Netflix you should watch. They are here based on yuks, and yuks alone.
So while some of the entries on this list may make you think, or make you feel, and may well do those things very well, let’s make one thing clear now: that’s not why they’re in the top ten. In evaluating works of comedy, there is an awful tendency to try and praise the practitioners by saying they are ‘more than a comedian’ – as if the actual business they’re going about, what they do for a living, somehow isn’t enough. It’s home to plenty of stand-up comedy specials – but more importantly, as this list will tell you, some of the best comedy shows ever made. Netflix covers pretty much all genres, but it takes comedy more seriously than most.
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