Better Than It Sounds / Live-Action TV

Although lots of people will swear that some of these are the greatest things ever transmitted, with so many slots to fill, some shows end up sounding really weird.

Please keep entries alphabetical to avoid accidental duplicates.

---

• 13 Reasons Why: A series of cassette tapes is found. Everyone's lives get miserable as a result.
• The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage: The ghost of a pirate must help the same number of people that he killed in order to "move on", but some type of guardian ghosts prevent him from leaving the island he died on. So he gets the island's new owner to help the people. Actually not that much better than it sounds.
• 1000 Ways to Die: Lots of everyday people get killed in different gruesome ways.
• "1984" Apple commercial: Some girl throws a sledgehammer at MS-DOS, much to the surprise of a bunch of skinheads.
• 24: A very determined government agent has a really bad day.
• 30 Rock: A woman who is Married to the Job is forced to add a Cloudcuckoolander to the cast of her sketch comedy show due to Executive Meddling.
  • The main character is a "socially retarded" nerd who loves Star Wars and can't get a date. Her best friend is a minor celebrity who beds numerous members of the opposite sex and has an ongoing rivalry with a strange black guy. Their boss is Crazy Is Cool incarnate.
• The 4400: A bunch of people abducted from random points in time come back all at once in modern day Seattle... WITH SUPER POWERS. And one of them's Jesus.
• Ace Lightning: A show in which a superhero from a videogame comes to life as a result of a well timed bolt of lightning. Thirteen year old is elected as his sidekick. Chaos, an all but absent functional social life and eventual unraveling conspiracy and author avatarisation ensues. Obvious Aesop every single episode. Also fits in Western Animation due to being multimedia-created.
• Adam Ruins Everything: Hipster points out in great, painstaking detail why life sucks.
• The Addams Family: An independently wealthy family of semi-recluses must cope with their very weird neighbours.
  • Wednesday: Their oldest daughter enrolls in the father's school, discovers the faculty has some long-standing issues.
• The Adventures of Pete & Pete: Brothers with the same name team up with a self-deluded superman to survive weirdness in their home town. Told in monologue.
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson: Classic British detective stories are reimagined for the sensibilities of Soviet Russia, which in practice seems to mean less cocaine and even more homoerotic subtext.
• The Adventures of Superboy: The adventures of the world's most famous superhero as an adolescent, often fighting younger versions of his future foes. Or Smallville with the star as an openly active superhero.
• The Adventures of Superman: A man from another planet uses his vast powers to fight a seemingly never-ending series of non-powered mobsters.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Wisecracking guy that died comes back to life to recruit a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits to help his government agency. Together, they fight crime, superpowered people and have UST with each other.
  • Agent Carter: The formation of said agency is told through a wisecracking gal whom no one respects, forcing her to do things by herself with the help of a stuffy English butler.
• Airwolf: A man refuses to return a helicopter he was ordered to retrieve..
• ALF: An intergalactic furball, played by a puppet, takes refuge in a SoCal family home and wants to dine on their pet.
• Alias: A supermodel genius with abandonment issues teams up with the group she thought she was working for to bring down the team pretending to be the other team. Then she goes back to working for the team she didn't know she was really working for when the real team hires the fake team to be on their team. Also, there's magic water.
• All in the Family: An ignorant, self-destructing bigot and his occasionally self-righteous child and her husband squabble about the issues of the day.
• All That: Recurring characters include a guy who's lactose intolerant, a kid who beats up a puppet, and a girl who is supposed to answer questions but just yells at people.
• Allein gegen die Zeit: Terrorists searching for a hiding scientist break into a middle school. The detention class tries to stop them á la 24.
• 'Allo 'Allo!: A series set in occupied France in WWII, whose protagonist is a middle-aged, adulterous Nazi collaborator. It's a comedy.
• Ally McBeal: An exceptionally thin lawyer, who suffers from delusions of a dancing cartoon baby, works at a firm with her ex-boyfriend and his wife, a loveable misogynist, and a man who uses a remote control to flush toilets.
• Almost Live!: An extremely low-budget provincial sketch-comedy show where rain, coffee, grunge music, and college were used as punchlines.
• America's Funniest Home Videos: Americans submit videos of themselves getting hit in the groin for a chance to win $100,000. The host makes snarky commentary over said videos.
• America's Got Talent: People across America will do anything for a shot at fame and fortune.
• American Gladiators: Physical competition against spandex-clad bodybuilders. Modeled off ancient Roman bloodsport.
• American Gothic (1995): A law-enforcement official tries to gain custody of his son.
• American Gothic (2016): A rich Boston family reunites just in time for them all to be implicated in a decades-old killing spree. Completely unrelated to another series with the same name.
• American Horror Story: Asylum: A woman is institutionalized because of her homosexuality, and a man is institutionalized for murdering his wife (a false accusation). Both are tortured by the mental hospital's staff.
• American Horror Story: Murder House: Due to full disclosure laws, a real estate agent is forced to admit that the house she is selling was the scene of a gruesome murder. As per usual, the buyers move in anyway, and surprise, surprise, the place is haunted.
• The Americans: Salt: the prequel series.
• America's Next Top Model: Twelve disparate young women allow fashion industry snobs and has-beens to play on their insecurities. Every season, er, cycle, there must always be a dumb one, an Alpha Bitch, a Sassy Black Woman and one with a troubled upbringing... that the show exploits for all it's worth.
  • The Tyra Banks Show: Supermodel/Narcissist/White eyeliner aficionado does an Oprah Winfrey impression to appeal to gullible teenaged girls and college students.
• Andi Mack: A diverse group of teens deal with a variety of issues including family secrets, coming out, relationship problems, and mental health in this tween dramedy. This is a Disney Channel show by the way.
• The Andy Griffith Show: Small-town sheriff holds absolute power over town. Often considered one of the most feel-good sitcoms of the era.
• Angel: A broody vampire with a soul, a former Rich Bitch, an Upperclass Twit, a formerly enslaved scientist, a green demon who reads people's futures when they sing Karaoke and a gang leader live in a hotel, then run a law firm.
  • Alternatively, a mass murderer claims to have reformed, but occasionally relapses. Also, all your favorite characters die.
• Are You Afraid of the Dark?: Unsupervised kids tell horror stories.
  • Alternatively: The Twilight Zone (1959) for kids.
• Ark II: What Fallout could be where the denizens of one Vault left their shelter to do something to help their world After the End.
• Arrested Development: A widowed man tries to redeem a corrupt organization, but his father won't have it; meanwhile, his brother is breaking his heart and his sister is having marital problems. It's a comedy, with a heaping helping of Large Ham.
• Arrow: A man keeps up his archery skills after coming home from an extended vacation.
• The A-Team: Four shell-shocked Vietnam veterans with varying levels of mental problems become criminals for hire. They get paid to help small businesses by harassing their competitors, cause massive property damage and even do illegal mercenary work.
  • The Army runs around Los Angeles looking for four fugitives who endanger the lives of everyone with their horrible shooting and reckless driving.
  • Army veterans who can't shoot straight try to solve people's problems with cunning and violence.
• Auf Wiedersehen, Pet: A mismatched gang of British builders, mostly from the North of England, bicker and get into scrapes on various international building sites.
• Babylon Berlin: He's a morphine-addicted, shell-shocked vice squad cop with family issues. She's a hooker-cum-Lower-Class Lout-cum-secretary with even more family issues. Together, they fight Communists! And Monarchists! And Nazis! And porn! Not nearly as moralistic as it sounds.
• Babylon 5: A war-hero, a cynical Russian bisexual, a recovering alcoholic police chief and a bunch of other people start a fight with God and The Devil, win, destroy the world government and take over the entire galaxy. None of that was hard. Meanwhile, the expies of Hitler and the new Moses get married.
  • Or: The Lord of the Rings In Space!
    • Or Casablanca Recycled In Space and Istanbul Intrigues Recycled In Space meet The Lord of the Rings Recycled In Space.
  • A bunch of politicians meet on a space station to make schemes against each other. Then they team up to make schemes against giant space spiders covered in motor oil. They are very heroic.
  • A lizard man, a drunken Italian, and Joan of Arc plot against each other in front of two militaristic Ultimate Authority Mayors, the first of which is really Moses and the second of which is named after a famous Cavalry Officer. Then they all beat up space spider-demons, and then Joan of Arc and the second Ultimate Authority Mayor Take Over the World so that the two of them can get married.
    • After this, Joan of Arc's valet feels left out, the drunken Italian's valet is pleased to see Judas' head cut off, and the lizard man and the Italian become friends and then strangle each other. The Ultimate Authority Mayor then goes to heaven to talk with the space spider demons he used to fight while Joan of Arc just grows old.
• Baggage: A man/woman looking for love makes snap judgments about three potential suitors of the opposite sex based on their personal confessions. Later on, only one of the three suitors gets the chance to make a snap judgment on the original person's biggest personal confession. Punny reactions based on these revelations are inevitably made by the host.
• Balamory: The adventures of people who live in a Scottish island town.
  • For the spin-off Me Too: Replace "island town" with "big city."
• Balls of Steel: A cast of professional comedians take on characters in order to go out and prank people with a hidden camera recording them.
• Band of Brothers: What if Saving Private Ryan was 7 hours long. And more people died. And it actually happened in real life.
• Bates Motel: Mother and son run a small business together, and love each other very very very much.
• Batman (1966): Obviously insane rich white guy with a compulsion to label everything lives with a younger guy. They both put on tights and go out looking for other men in tights so they can rough them up.
• BattleBots: Remote controlled machines dubbed "robots" Duel to the Death in an arena for three minutes for the chance to win the Giant Nut.
• Battlestar Galactica (1978): A group of Big Damn Heroes re-enact westerns IN SPACE while fighting robots with no sense of tactics or stealth.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003): A group of dysfunctional people are chased by their pissed-off children. IN SPACE!!
  • Monotheists attempt to end paganism.
• Bear in the Big Blue House: A giant, talking bear invites viewers into his house and instills life lessons into the young animals who live with him.
• Beat the Clock: Ordinary people do silly, timed stunts on national television. For money.
• Beautiful People: Two young teenage boys get up to lots of gay hijinks. Often in public.
• Being Erica: A woman meets a time-travelling therapist who helps her with her regrets.
• Being Human: A recovering addict, a neurotic in denial, and a woman with serious confidence issues share a house in Bristol.
  • The original trailer simply said "A vampire, werewolf and a ghost all share a flat in Bristol".
• series/Benidorm: Mostly poor British people get a chance to visit another country and waste almost the entire time shut away in one commercial building complex lying motionless, destroying their skin, ingesting various poisons insulting or arguing with each other. We laugh at them.
• Ben Casey: An angry, hairy doctor tells people he’s better than them. His elderly mentor also has a hair problem.
• The Ben Stiller Show: A sketch comedy series, created for MTV, adapted for FOX.
• Best Friends Whenever: Teenage girls travel through time by touching each other.
• Better Call Saul: A manager of a Cinnabon in Omaha looks back on his life.
  • Alternatively, after defecating through a sunroof (don't ask), a former con-man attempts to impress his brother and his girlfriend by becoming a lawyer. It really, really doesn't work out.
    • Said sunroof-defecation leads to a series of events where, amongst other things, the brother commits suicide in a house fire, the girlfriend may or may not be alive, two planes crash and kill 167 people, a drug kingpin operates the largest meth empire in America, three drug cartels get dismantled, a man gets enslaved and is forced to run away to Alaska, and several hundreds of people get murdered.
• Better Things: A single mother spoils her over-entitled children.
• Between the Lions: A family of lions runs a library and teaches reading skills.
• Bewitched: A girl wreaks havoc by twitching her nose and fights with her mother about who she married.
• Big Bad Beetleborgs: Young comic fans become bug-themed superheroes thanks to a ghost that looks like a cross between Elvis Presley and Jay Leno.
• Beyond Scared Straight: Murderers and drug dealers scream profanities at children for an hour.
• The Big Bang Theory: Underappreciated Asexual Genius is mocked for his social difficulties despite large circle of close friends including hot neighbour.
  • It's like Red Dwarf only not In Space! And Cat, Kryten and Lister are replaced with toned down versions of Rimmer.
  • Two nerds who live across the hall from a hottie. One of them steals her mail just to get a chance to talk to her, the other gives her advice.
  • Nobody likes the awesomest guy on TV.
• Big Brother: People are locked in a house for three months and forced to obey the whims of a hidden task-master to beg for food. Swearing and fights ensue.
• Big Time Rush: Four hockey players from Minnesota are gathered and brought to Los Angeles to make music and become a boy band.
• Big Wolf on Campus: A hyperactive geek-goth, a hairy American football player, and a tomboy go on adventures together.
• The Bill: Police work in East London. Where the cops die a lot.
• Bill Nye the Science Guy: Man lectures children about science.
• A Bit of Fry and Laurie: Sketch show where almost all roles are played by two really tall, upper-class men from Oxbridge.
• Black Books: The weird life and homoerotic misadventures of a sadistic drunk who owns a bookshop, his Cloudcuckoolander assistant / punching bag and their best (and only) friend.
• Blackadder: A historical Sitcom, in which every generation of a charismatic but extremely unlucky man's family both looks the same and possesses the same name, as does almost everyone else he encounters. Each man is unfortunate enough to be surrounded by half-wits, incompetents and lunatics, and is waited upon by a servant whose standards of personal hygiene are barely human at best.
• Black Mirror: Cynical Brits tell various stories about how technology can get us screwed.
  • Aptly described by a reviewer as: "What if phones, but too much?"
• Blackpool: Murder investigation is frequently interrupted by song-and-dance numbers using well-known pop songs.
• Blake's 7: A bunch of people get together on a spaceship to battle a sadistic glam goddess and her massive personal army.
• Blood Over Water (no relation to a book by the same name): Murderous thugs can't figure out which twin brother they're supposed to kill. A friend of both brothers can't decide whether or not he prefers them to a fat paycheck.
• The Bold and the Beautiful: Blonde woman sleeps her way to the top of the fashion world. Some of her most famous conquests include a married man and both of his sons, having children along the way with two of them.
• Bones: A gorgeous but socially clueless genius anthropologist solves murders involving really icky decomposition with a street-smart and equally gorgeous wisecracking FBI agent. UST ensues. They are helped by a socially retarded supergenius, a conspiracy-theorist slime expert, and a good-hearted, free-spirited artist.
  • A crime drama which is mainly just close-ups of rotting bodies falling apart and scientists saying lengthy pieces of techno-babble. This may, if you are very lucky, be followed by just a few minutes of actual action with their Book Dumb Law Enforcement Liason.
• Boohbah: A bunch of multicolored creatures do strange dances. Each episode contains a segment where a man gives unnecessary narration for normal people doing ordinary things.
• The Book of Boba Fett: A mercenary crawls out of a hole and retires to a peaceful life in the desert. The story gets much more interesting when he is upstaged by the tangentially related adventures of a single father.
• Bottom: Two brainless alcoholic perverts beat each other up.
• The Boys (2019): After the death of his girlfriend, a young man is coerced into joining a group of mentally deranged people who use shady methods to fight against even more mentally deranged superhero expies, and ends up dating the only non-mentally deranged superhero.
• Boy Meets World: Immature kid grows up into a neurotic dork and marries the girl he used to torment, has the same teacher for every grade.
• The Brady Bunch: A widow and a widower get married and bring their children from previous marriages to live together in a really big house the man designed himself. (Which nonetheless has only one bathroom.)
• Brainiac: Science Abuse: An educational programme that does a lot of specials about caravans.
• Breaking Bad: Quiet family man takes up a second job to pay his medical bills.
  • High school chemistry teacher shows how badass he is by claiming he would knock on a door.
• The Brittas Empire: Arnold Rimmer runs a leisure centre. Chaos ensues.
• Broadchurch: A grumpy Scottish detective with zero social skills teams up with a local detective to solve a murder case in a seaside town where a bunch of Doctor Who characters (including the two detectives) live in for some reason.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Seven possibly mentally endangered cops save New York from crime - mostly drugs. Starring a sexy black man as a side villain.
• Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: All-American guy takes a 500-year-plus nap, wakes up, and promptly sets about saving the Earth from fascistic regimes with help from a talking clock, a robot with a weird Verbal Tic, and a Colonel Fanservice. (Depending on whom you ask, it might be just as bad as it sounds. In its defense, it was popular when it first came out.)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: A cheerleader, a nerd, a slacker, and the school librarian fight the horrors of American High School while their lives turn into a soap opera. Beloved people die with depressing regularity.
• Bullseye (UK): People throw things. If they do it well, they might win a vehicle they can't possibly use.
• Burn Notice: A spy loses his job and tries to find out why while helping the helpless.
  • or three spies make clever plans while gorgeous women in bikinis walk around. One of the spies gives lectures.
• California Dreams: A re-imagining of The Zack Attack but with better music, more drama and somewhat more likable people. One of the most noticeable differences is while its original vision had high school students who also had a band, here it's members of a band who also attend high school.
• Cannon: Crimes are solved and conspiracies are broken up ... by an obese insurance investigator.
• The Cape: A cop gets fired for being too honest by a guy with the creepiest contact lenses ever. He resorts to a comic book character's wardrobe for vengeance, and is aided by a gang of carnies and a sneaky hacker who he has much sexual tension with.
• Caprica: A teenage girl is killed in a terrorist attack organized by her friends. A copy of her soul ends up in the body of a robot killing machine that will one day destroy human civilization. It's a family drama.
• Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons: A group of colour-coded soldiers with very odd accents try to stop a bunch of glowing green lights from destroying all life on Earth.
• Cash Cab: In New York (and Toronto!) , taxi pays YOU!!
• Castle: Mystery author stalks hot detective, hitting on her and making cruel jokes about murder scenes. Then he writes about it and gets even more rich and famous. She loves him for it.
• Catchphrase: Robot with a neckerchief plays charades. People get paid for solving his clues.
• Celebracadabra: Pseudo-celebrities try to perform magic tricks. Seriously.
• The Champions (1968): Three people survive a plane crash and learn new skills, which they put to very good use.
• Charmed (1998): Ordinary people are given magical powers, forbidden from using them for anything but fighting deadly monsters for no pay, while getting punished for violating arbitrary rules and suffering from romantic problems and being expected to uphold the masquerade at the same time. This is considered a good system, and disobeying it is always evil.
  • Charmed Season 1: Women get magical powers and use them to kill people, while trying to avoid letting their cop friend know about it. Many cops are killed by collateral damage. God sends the ghost of a medic killed in World War 2 disguised as a handyman to help them cover up.
  • Charmed Season 2: Three women learn three separate times that they should let their sister die if it came to it. Meanwhile, one of them is caught in a Love Triangle between her neighbor and the ghostly handyman.
  • Charmed Season 3: Amoral Attorney seeks redemption after having sex with a college student, gets it, is turned evil again by magic against his will, then turned good again by more magic. Meanwhile, the most heroic and active woman with powers is killed by wind because of off-screen drama.
  • Charmed Season 4: Two women go looking for a new sister to replace the one who died, just in time to battle the demonic ruler of the underworld. Meanwhile, the attorney becomes fully good by giving up his powers, is turned evil by magic again against his will, tries to turn good again with more magic, and is prevented from doing so by his wife, who willingly turned evil. She turns good again and kills him for being turned evil, refuses to bring him back to life, and leaves him in demonic hell.
  • Charmed Season 5: Three women encounter nymphs, mermaids, fairy tale creatures, and the Sword in the Stone before battling Greek Gods with the help of a deceptive time traveler. The ghostly handyman becomes an angel king, but is imprisoned by the time traveler. The attorney comes back to life on his own, turns good again, is turned evil again against his will by magic, snaps out of it, is driven mad by magic against his will, tries and fails to commit suicide, turns evil again, and accidentally commits suicide successfully by traveling to an alternate reality.
  • Charmed Season 6: Ghostly handyman turned angel king attempts to expose the deceptive time traveler as the Big Bad, but then realizes that his beloved mentor is the real Big Bad, and kills him. Romantic drama, a Wizarding School, attempted baby-murder, demonic reality TV, and a Kid from the Future are all involved.
  • Charmed Season 7: Tired of the rules of their bosses, three women and their ghostly handyman attempt to aid a revolution aiming to create Utopia, but betray their allies at the last second for being too draconian. The ghostly handyman becomes human following a career crisis and Memory Gambit, and everyone is assisted by a terminally ill demon who dresses as Robin Hood, which was all planned by the ghost of the attorney.
  • Charmed Season 8: Three women attempt a massive identity scam on the entire world while training a Reality Warper to do their job for them. The Reality Warper's sister becomes a problem because of the ghosts of three sore losers from back in the third season.
• The Chase: A gigantic maths teacher, a studious barrister, an icy ex-journalist and a sarcastic doctor in a tasteless suit hunt people down by knowing more trivia than the contestants. It's teatime entertainment, with lots of jokes about knickers.
• Cheers: A group of people meet at a bar every night. Some of them consider leaving but they usually realise that they have no life and come crawling back.
• Chernobyl: Ever wanted a dramatic crash course on the functioning of nuclear reactors?
• Chouseishin Series: Knockoff Power Rangers fight knockoff Godzilla monsters.
  • Chouseishin Gransazer: 12 people discover their Zodiac signs, get giant animals as a bonus, and wind up fighting aliens.
  • Genseishin Justirisers: Teenagers with attitude are chosen to battle a hermit sealed inside a mountain.
  • Chousei Kantai Sazer X: Young adult grapples with conflicting feelings towards his grandfather... while at the same time getting caught up in a war between two groups of time-traveling aliens.
• Chuck: A nerd gets kidnapped and forced to fight crime by a hot blonde CIA agent who wants him and a hot but grumpy male NSA agent who hates him.
• Clarissa Explains It All: A teenage girl talks to a camera for 20 minutes.
• The Closer: Southern Belle who is also a CIA-trained interrogator and her quirky side-kicks fight crime.
• Cobra Kai: Washed-up asshole resurrects a Thug Dojo from the 80s. We're supposed to root for him.
• The Colbert Report: Exaggerated right-wing pundit reinterprets the English language, itemises things that are dead to him and attempts to alert America to the increasing threat posed by bears.
• Cold Case: Detectives solve crimes through lots of Flashbacks.
  • Alternately, A Police Procedural takes place in an urban city that isn't New York or Chicago that is complete with era-appropriate music, cops that occasionally have shaky grasps of the law, hallucinations and lots of LGBT friendliness...often at the expense of blatant bigotry (especially towards Blacks) and/or misogyny.
• The Collector: About a catholic priest who becomes the devil's repo man. A new Aesop WILL be hammered home every episode.
• Columbo: Bloke who dresses like a hobo and drives a banger follows rich celebrities, generally annoying them so much that they confess to crimes just to get rid of him.
• Comedy Central Roast: A group of people hurl insults and tear down a mutual friend. Hilarity Ensues.
• Community: Sitcom about a group of dysfunctional college students (most of whom are in their 30s) with nothing in common but their Spanish study group, in which they never study Spanish.
  • Alternatively, the lives of seven friends who attend the weirdest college ever.
• Continuum: A group of democratic-republican revolutionaries attempt to overthrow a corporate-fascist dictatorship by travelling back in time from their dystopian future to the present to prevent the dictatorship from ever forming in the first place. They are pursued by a cyborg agent of the dictatorship equipped with futuristic weapons and tools who is attempting to stop them from changing the future. The cyborg, who regularly uses torture in interrogations, supports the dictatorship despite being fully aware that the dictatorship deliberately starves segments of the population as a tool of control and teams up with the younger version of one of the future leaders of the dictatorship. The cyborg fascist is the good guy, and the freedom fighters are the villains.
• Corner Gas: Quirky yet lovable people in rural Saskatchewan. One of them runs a gas station!
• Coronation Street: Working-class people live in a working-class place. Drama and various hijinks ensue.
  • EastEnders: Working-class people live in a working-class place. And it is bloody depressing. All. of. the. time. Drama and various hijinks ensue.
• The Cosby Show: A doctor and a lawyer raise their children. Then they raise other people's children.
• Counterpart (2018): A lowly bureaucrat discovers that his Alternate Universe doppelganger is a spy.
• Cracker: Hagrid plays a Scottish Patrick Jane.
• Crash & Bernstein: A young boy gets purple felt for his birthday and calls it his best friend.
• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: A high-flying lawyer leaves her job to stalk a guy she dated in high school across the country after realising she needs him to make her happy, while singing songs to herself about loneliness and feminine hygiene. It's a feminist show. Oh, and it's on The CW.
• Criminal Minds: A group of FBI agents, including a socially awkward young genius with a schizophrenic mother, a really serious guy with family issues, and a former cop who likes to kick down doors, fly to different parts of the country in order to pretend that they are crazy people.
• Crossing Jordan: A Boston medical examiner with a big mouth and a big heart solves crimes with the help of her neurotic boss, a bubbly grief counselor, an Indian entomologist, an ambiguously bisexual British man, her ex-cop father, and an attractive policeman with whom she shares a lot of UST.
• The Crystal Maze: Game show where contestants make fools out of themselves to earn cubic zirconia in order to collect pieces of colored foil for adventuring days out.
• CSI Verse:
  • CSI: An entomologist, a former stripper, a gambling addict, and a group of nerds and geeks perform obscure activities in a lab to musical accompaniment. They fight crime... somehow.
  • CSI: Miami: Suave supercop visits crime scenes, makes wisecracks about innocent victims and plays with his sunglasses in a series of 5-minute shorts.
  • CSI NY: A former Marine and 9/11 widower, a wisecracking cop, a Greek-American with a stalker problem and some other geeks and nerds solve crimes in The Big Apple...somehow.
• The Cube: A daytime TV host who used to be in a double act with a gopher presides over the public's failure to outwit a talking geometric solid.
• Cupid: A matchmaker has to set up a certain number of couples before he can go home.
• Curb Your Enthusiasm: Wealthy but socially inept and neurotic perpetual victim of circumstance offends and antagonizes everyone he comes into contact with.
• Cutie Honey: THE LIVE: An Innocent Fanservice Girl and a bunch of homeless dudes fight crime.
• Cutthroat Kitchen: Four competing chefs get their prize money upfront, but spend it to buy crazy props, steal ingredients, and create unwanted diversions against each other.
• Cybergirl: Before being the host of a certain Saturday morning block on a Canadian network, she was the star of one of its little-known Tween Dramas as a rogue cyborg from outer space on the run from its creators, taking refuge on Earth, where she befriends a family on the road and ends up a public hero.
• Dad's Army: A group of bungling old men and a mummy's boy prepare to fight the Nazis that will probably never arrive.
  • World War II has never been so funny.
• The Daily Show: New York comedian makes commentary on current events by playing clips, making a funny face, and occasionally launching a Precision F-Strike.
• Dallas: Three millionaire businessmen live in one house because they apparently can't afford more than one dwelling between them. One of them gets shot.
• Dante's Cove: Set around a resort town populated by a number of users of a magic enhanced by Fantastic Drugs, and an unusually high percentage of homosexual residents who enjoy little more than having as much sex as possible. No one can act, the writing is stilted, and everyone is gorgeous and naked.
• Da Vinci's Inquest: A coroner from Vancouver walks around a lot, talks with people on the street, and acts sarcastic towards the local law enforcement. He also wants to legalize drugs and prostitution. Which he does...after he becomes the Mayor of Vancouver. Based on a true story.
• Daredevil (2015): A blind Catholic lawyer and a possibly-autistic urban planning enthusiast battle over gentrification.
  • Daredevil (2015) Season 2: A man with a serious addiction to shooting people draws the ire of a corrupt DA, meanwhile the blind Catholic lawyer's ex-girlfriend moves back into town.
  • The Defenders (2017): The lawyer's ex returns again, forcing him to ask the help of a drunk, a convict and a hippie millionaire.
• Dark (2017): Back to the Future as rewritten by Stephen King and then made into a TV show by German philosophy students who really loved the timey-wimey aspects of modern Doctor Who.
• Dark Oracle: Two teenagers find a comic-book that lets them predict the future. Weirdness and Angst ensue.
• Dateline's To Catch a Predator: A handsome, snobbish and quasi-nerdy journalist embarrasses perverts via entrapment and scolding them like a disappointed father.
• Dave Allen at Large: Chain-smoking Irishman sits on a chair and talks about life, death, drinking, religion, and the English.
• Dawson's Creek: Teenagers in Massachusetts use big words.
  • Alternatively, "Pretty White Kids With Problems".
• Dead Like Me: An apathetic virgin gets press-ganged into a dead-end job and hanging out in a diner with her dysfunctional co-workers.
• Deadliest Catch: Guys go out, year after year, to subject themselves to constant torture at the hands of Nature, all for the sake of money.
• Deadliest Warrior: Two groups of guys hit jelly babies with stuff, all the while arguing about which is better at hitting stuff until a fight breaks out.
• Dead to Me: A woman with serious anger issues befriends another woman at a grief retreat. Unbeknonwnst to her, her new friend murdered her husband in a car crash. We're supposed to like these two people.
  • Alternatively, a woman and her friend are pursued by the friend's ex-fiance and the woman murders said ex-fiance. We're still supposed to like her.
• Deadwood: Complex compound sentences, none shorter than twenty words or containing fewer than three clauses or two profanities, delivered while standing in either dust or mud.
  • Alternatively: A dramatized series of ongoing philosophical debates about the relative merits and drawbacks of centralized democratic government and anarchocapitalist libertarianism.
• Deal or No Deal: Watch with anticipation as people discover what is inside a suitcase.
• Degrassi Junior High: Teenagers act and behave like adults while going through the normal growing pains in a setting one step above your average public access television program.
  • Degrassi: The Next Generation: A continuation of the above series starring the self-righteous Granola Girl progeny of one of the show's peripheral characters and both of their groups of friends, enemies and others. It ends up appealing more to a whole different nation than its own and like its predecessor did years earlier inspires a Sequel Series to that show with a similar plotline.
• Dempsey and Makepeace: Guy takes his job too seriously, gets transferred overseas, and is stuck working alongside an aristocratic blonde.
• Denkō Chōjin Gridman: A group of kids use Transformers technologies to get rid of computer viruses.
  • Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad: Same as above but the bad guy is Tim Curry.
• Department S: A foppish spy novelist, a quick-tempered American, and a computer whiz are brought together to solve weird cases that Scotland Yard and Interpol won't touch.
• DesChiffresEtDesLettres: Long-running game show from France that asks the questions, "can you combine these 6 numbers to achieve a target sum?", followed by "how long a word can you make from 9 random letters?"
  • Series/Countdown UK remake of the above show.
• Dexter: The main character is charming, personable, and homicidal. He's a cop by day and a killer by night...
• Dharma & Greg: A lawyer and a hippie get married on a whim. Their parents don't approve.
• Dinosaurs: A family of pre-historic animals grows accustomed to modern-style civilization.
• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: The adventures of a detective who is too inept to look for clues, and instead just meanders around until things happen.
• Dirty Jobs: Reality Show involving a former opera singer who can't keep a job for more than a day at a time.
• Dirty Sexy Money: A lawyer investigates the suspicious circumstances of his father's death while taking over his duty as personal lawyer to the richest family in New York City.
  • When Telemundo meets Dallas.
• Doctor Who: A senior citizen spends several lifetimes convincing hot young things to join them inside a box. They are routinely harassed by tin men, Nazi saltshakers and their old college buddies.
  • Alternatively, a time traveller fights aliens, makes new friends and changes their face periodically.
  • Still alternatively: A time-traveling scientist with no fashion sense attempts to have a jog around every rock quarry in the universe, only to find that they are frequently infested with monsters.
  • Alternatively-alternatively and even more alternatively: Producers find canonical excuse to keep a popular character and just replace all the actors.
  • Alternatively to all of the above: A homeless vagrant travels around in a box and claims to have a degree in medicine.
    • The First Doctor (1963-66): A grumpy old man goes on educational adventures through space and time, with the first lesson being to not be an asshole. He is accompanied by his granddaughter, two of her teachers, Cressida, a downed pilot, a temple acolyte, a security agent from an interstellar empire (revealed 27 seasons later to have been built on slave labor), a teenager, a sailor, and a Mad Scientist's secretary.
    • The Second Doctor (1966-69): The old man becomes a younger hobo who travels with the sailor, the secretary, a piper who forgot his pipes, a Victorian orphan, and a genius. Sadly, the records of their adventures are gutted.
    • The Third Doctor (1970-74): A Technical Pacifist scientist works for a military force and fights an old college buddy. He gets help from a couple of civilians, one of whom marries an activist who may or may not be extreme. Then he gets help from a reporter.
    • The Fourth Doctor (1974-81): The scientist turns cloudcuckoolander and flies away, much to his CO's annoyance, travelling with the reporter, a physician in the military force, a Jungle Princess, a robot dog, a young lady who appears to throw centuries of her life away on a whim, a troubled genius who just lost his brother, a recently-orphaned princess who loses her civilization, and an opinionated flight attendant.
    • The Fifth Doctor (1982-84): A cricketer fails to save the day a lot, while in the company of the genius, the ex-princess, the flight attendant, a youth who tried to kill him, a robot who doesn't appear much, and a botany student.
    • The Sixth Doctor (1984-86): Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat does time and space, only with less dancing and more fanservice. The botany student (now a vegetarian) either dies or marries a barbarian king and Mr. Dreamcoat escapes execution only because the powers that be owe him a favor. Then he travels with a Non-Action Girl who desperately needs to Take A Level In Badass.
    • The Seventh Doctor (1987-89): The Chessmaster throws the bridge dropped on the above person off and raises a troubled teenager when the Non-Action Girl goes off with a scoundrel.
    • The Eighth Doctor (1996 TV movie): A cloudcuckoolander dabbles in xenophilia, meets with his old college buddy, then disappears into a realm where he can only be heard, but not seen for 17 years.
    • The War Doctor (2013): The cloudcuckoolander drinks a magic potion and turns into Winston Smith to fight a war. After many years in combat, he ends up in a rickety hut arguing with a box.
    • The Ninth Doctor (2005): An angry, bitter man destroys a girl's place of employment and then befriends her. They pick up another companion and then send him away for making trouble, and later pick up a man whose addiction is Played for Laughs.
    • The Tenth Doctor (2005-10): The personification of Beware the Nice Ones travels with a girl from a council estate, her ex-boyfriend, a medical student, and a temp, until he has to neuralyze the temp. He travels alone from then on. Also, his old college buddy returns as part of his Myth Arc.
    • The Eleventh Doctor (2010-2013): An angry absent-minded professor who may be Crazy Is Cool incarnate tries to stay out of trouble badly and fails to keep a hat. He spends a lot of time with his family until they die. After this, he pouts for a while until he meets a new friend who keeps reincarnating in his life and tries to figure out how that works.
    • The Twelfth Doctor (2013-2017): Grumpy Scotsman rebels against all authority and saves the day while being incredibly rude to everybody. He debates his morals frequently, and eventually mellows out with the help of a guitar and sunglasses. His best friend repeatedly lies to her boyfriend, and then eventually just becomes the Scotsman. After she dies/leaves, he's assisted by a bald alien in a duffle coat and a university cafeteria worker. His old college buddy who has had a facelift returns again as part of his Myth Arc.
    • The Thirteenth Doctor (2017-2022): Energetic blonde woman travels with an old man, his step-grandson, and a young cop who has a crush on her, becoming much less bubbly and more secretive as time goes on. Her college buddy returns with another facelift just to tell her that her past was a lie, which she struggles to deal with, not helped by her lost past deciding to stage a comeback. After the old man and his step-grandson leave, she and the cop (who's now left her job) adopt a himbo, who teaches the cop how to admit her feelings to the blonde.
    • The Fugitive Doctor (2020-2022): Black ops agent tries to find a way to leave her employers.
    • The Fourteenth Doctor (2023): Emotional Guy gets an old face back, reunites with his best friend, meets some other old friends, fights a being of unimaginable power, and retires. All within three hours.
    • River Song arc: Boy meets girl. Girl knows boy. Girl dies. Boy meets girl’s mum. Mum meets girl. Mum and Dad get married and create girl. Girl gets kidnapped. Girl is actually parents' friend. Girl meets boy for the first time. Girl kills boy. Girl revives boy. Girl gets kidnapped again. Girl pretends to kill boy. Girl gets married to boy. Girl comes back as a ghost. Boy takes girl to dinner. Boy leaves girl. Boy meets girl.
    • Saxon arc: Politician lies about his credentials, makes it to Number Ten, gets found out, falls from grace, gets shot by his wife, and ends up homeless. It's a sci-fi.
    • Day Of The Doctor: A bunch of doctors get together to fix one doctor's greatest failure. Some guy from the future shows up to tease people. A guy from the past's face also shows up to fans' delight.
    • The Timeless Child arc: Scientist adopts an abandoned child and subsequently becomes an Abusive Parent while making themselves and their home look better.
  • K-9 and Company: An ex-time-traveller turned journalist and an anachronistic robot dog face down religious fanatics.
  • The Sarah Jane Adventures: An investigative journalist turned time-traveller turned investigative journalist uses tricks learned from a former road trip buddy in her efforts to save the world. She enlists local teens to help her, without the consent or knowledge of their parents. Oh, and it is revealed in one episode that Cambridge has a genuine knight from the Crusades in its science department.
  • Torchwood: A pack of inept sex-crazed maniacs attempt to fight aliens in Cardiff, fail repeatedly, and die often.
    • Torchwood: Children of Earth: An alien took children as drugs in the 1960s, and now it demands more. The team dissolves.
    • Torchwood: Miracle Day: Death is no longer there to cause pain and grief, and whatever sex-crazed maniacs are still around treat this like a bad thing.
  • K9: A crazy scientist, a teenage rebel, a petty thief, and an upper class girl team up with a robot dog to fight other robots.
• Dollhouse: A semi-deranged FBI agent investigates a detective agency/bodyguard service/high-class brothel run by a manipulative British businesswoman, a nerdy scientist, and an ex-cop. Moral ambiguity ensues.
• Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23: Woman experiences life in the big city through a very unpleasant roommate and weird neighbors that include a washed up TV star.
• Double Dare: Two teams are Covered in Gunge for fun and profit. Hosted by an obsessive-compulsive neat freak.
• Dragnet: A By-the-Book Cop chronicles some of his more memorable cases. Based on Hundreds of True Stories.
  • Adam-12: The same as above, in a patrol car.
• Drake & Josh: Two stepbrothers costantly get pranked by their little sister.
• The Drew Carey Show: The adventures of an alcoholic fat guy with glasses.
• Due South: A Mountie and his pet wolf are kicked out of Canada for being too polite. They decide to clean up the streets of America...politely.
• The Dukes of Hazzard: A family fights the government in a town that won't let the Confederate States die.
• Early Edition: A newly-divorced man in Chicago gets tomorrow's newspaper delivered a day early by an orange tabby cat.
• EastEnders: The miserable lives of a collection of dysfunctional families in London.
• The Ed Sullivan Show: A newspaper columnist hosts an hour of virtually every field of entertainment on Sunday nights for twenty-three years. One musical act draws so big an audience that they set a new record for TV viewing percentage.
• El Chavo del ocho: A starving orphan lives inside a barrel in a slum and is regularly ostracized. It's a comedy.
• The Electric Company (1971): A cast that includes Morgan Freeman, Rita Moreno, Bill Cosby, and a man who voiced an X-rated cartoon character teaches reading through psychedelic sketch comedy.
• Elementary: A woman becomes a companion for a recovering junkie Cloud Cuckoo Lander from England who works with the NYPD. They fight crime.
  • Alternatively: Lucy Liu babysits a twitchy recovering addict Bunny-Ears Lawyer. They fight crime and have mostly-platonic femdom subtext.
  • Alternatively: CSI starring Sherlock Holmes and Lucy Liu.
• Eli Stone: A lawyer's tumor makes him see original show tunes.
• Entourage: A hot actor, his Heterosexual Life Partner, his washed out brother, and their chubby friend, along with the actor's snarky agent and the agent's flamboyantly gay secretary have misadventures in Hollywood.
• The Equalizer: A retired member of a vaguely defined government organization decides to protect the defenseless people of New York from organized crime. He does it pretty well.
• The Ernie Kovacs Show: An eccentric uses the new medium of television as his own personal plaything.
• The Expanse: A grizzled cop, a freighter crew, and a politician get involved in sprawling interplanetary conspiracy.
  • Described by one review as Battlestar Galactica meets Game of Thrones.
• Eureka: A law enforcement official moves to a small town in the Pacific Northwest. Hollywood Science ensues.
• Eurovision Song Contest: Campy weirdos compete for national glory.
• Extraordinary Attorney Woo: Monk, but IN KOREA!
• The Facts of Life: Wise and bubbly redheaded woman babysits and solves the problems of four teenage girls in Westchester County, New York.
• The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: Two war buddies deal with their friend's legacy, including arguing with the government-sanctioned new guy, while a teenager rages against The Man. A villain of a previous movie wins people over by dancing.
• Family Feud: Two families compete to predict the outcomes of surveys.
• Family Matters: A cop has issues with his neighbor.
• Farscape: A scientist and a Nazi commando help criminals escape on a living spaceship with a giant spacecrab pilot, then run and hide from the authorities- who are represented by a madman with No Indoor Voice, a weirdly assertive gimp with an interest in theoretical physics, and a date rapist who sweats love potion from her cleavage.
  • Alternatively: An unfortunate astronaut gets sucked into a wormhole where he is tortured by aliens and slowly loses his mind.
  • Quoth Warren Ellis: "Farscape is one American's descent into Australia's S&M scene."
• Father Ted: An embezzler, a simpleton and an alcoholic all live under one roof with their insane housekeeper, and they all live in fear of their boss's psychopathic rages.
• Fawlty Towers: An angry British hotelier hates his guests, lies to his wife, and physically assaults the hotel waiter. The underpaid maid is the only competent person. It's a comedy.
• Finders Keepers: Game show where trashing a house is profitable.
• Firefly: A pair of bitter war veterans, a sexual ambassador for hire, a mercenary with a cunning hat, a hot mechanic, a childish pilot, a preacher with a Mysterious Past, a medical genius and the cutest little psychotic killing machine ever all get together on a ship. They do crime!
  • Dramedic Chinese Western Heist War Movie IN SPACE!
• First Wave: A former criminal on the run from the law for murdering his wife (which he didn't) teams up with a paranoid hacker/online newspaper editor who lives in a trailer, and later also some chick with a private army. They fight aliens! Using ancient prophecies!
• The Flash (2014): A comatose police forensic investigator becomes a vigilante, with the help of a group of scientist enablers.
• Fleabag: A hapless, camera-mugging Londoner sleeps with a lot of people and owns a guinea pig café.
• The Following: A college professor ends up in jail following a midlife crisis, and starts a blog which then gets fans. His fans proceed to murder dozens of people across the United States as part of the professor's plan to get revenge on the unemployed alcoholic his wife had an affair with.
• Forever Knight: Vampire with a conscience works as a night cop, dates a mortician, and goes through a series of partners and captains. Also, he kills his vampire sire, who goes on to host a late-night radio show of some sort. This all takes place in Toronto.
• Forged in Fire: Yep, blacksmithing is now a reality competition.
• The Fosters: She's a cop keeping the peace on the streets of San Diego. She's a school principal keeping the peace in the halls. They adopt and foster emotionally-scarred teenagers.
• Foyle's War: A detective is very good at solving murders, but keeps having to let the killers go free so that they can help kill lots of Germans. His assistant only has one leg.
• Fraggle Rock: Furry, colorful vermin infest a mad inventor’s walls and floorboards, steal fresh produce from delusional ogres, and learn about the human world via a self-appointed ambassador.
• Frasier: A psychiatrist gets a new job. His brother, who drops by often, gets a crush on a nurse despite already being married. Craziness ensues.
• Freaks and Geeks: Teenage girl spends time learning that an old army jacket and playing hookey is more important to her than academia and general adoration. Her younger brother spends the same time contemplating how it's possible to be adored at all.
• The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: A street-smart teen moves in with his rich relatives.
  • Alternatively: A boy's life playing outdoor sports is inverted by a group of miscreants, prompting his mother to send him away. His transport is quite unusual, but he disregards it.
• Friends: Three incredibly hot guys and three incredibly hot girls live together in varying combinations at varying times while doing crazy stuff and drinking lots of coffee.
  • Or, a Control Freak, Deadpan Snarker, Endearing Dork, Lovable Alpha Bitch, Cloud Cuckoo Lander and The Casanova try to figure life out by never going to work, never interacting with anyone else and drinking lots of coffee.
• Fringe: A DHS agent, a terminally unemployed man and his mentally ill father solve mysteries with mad science and recreational drugs.
• Full House: Widower asks a punk and a manchild to help raise his three terminally cute little girls.
• Game of Thrones: Like Dungeons & Dragons, only there are few monsters, all the players are jerks, and the GM is a colossal dillhole.
  • Alternatively: Way too many people for me to remember fight over who gets to sit on the world's most uncomfortable chair while nobody seems to consider the encroaching horde of unstoppable ice zombies important.
  • Season One: A drunk guy asks his friend to do his job for him. Then he gets killed by a pig, a jerk ends up in charge, the drunk guy's friend gets beheaded, and everyone starts grabbing expensive headgear and trying to tell everyone else to kneel. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ocean, a girl sets things on fire.
  • Season Two: Five guys with expensive headgear wave swords at each other. Very young girls make inappropriate friendships with older men. A bunch of guys in black take a road trip to someplace cold. Across the ocean, countless people die over a young girl's pets.
  • Season Three: Like the above, plus a wedding that many find too aggressive.
  • Season Four: Jerk is murdered, leading him to be replaced by a teenager, and the leading suspect to flee the law while killing his loved ones. Three siblings discover how seemingly the world is out to get them. Across the ocean, the young girl makes plenty of people change their jobs.
  • Season Five: A mum gets tangled up with a persistent cult, an orphan girl gets tangled up with another persistent cult, and a father lands himself, his family and his career in hot water for putting too much trust in a different, but equally persistent cult. Somewhere else, two families try to reenact Romeo and Juliet and get all the characters wrong.
  • Season Six: A soldier undergoes major surgery and tries to evict a renowned dog breeder from his home. An alcoholic makes a terrible trade agreement while his boss is out of town to make fiery speeches. A mum finally gets the promotion she's waiting years for after devising an unusual method of cleaning up the streets. Two siblings get their promotions screwed over by their Black Sheep uncle.
  • Season Seven: The soldier tries to convince the girl and the mum that some aggressive squatters want to move into their homes. This ends up giving the invaders a powerful weapon.
  • Season Eight: The soldier and the girl team up against the squatters and the mum. Then the girl goes crazy, to much fan outcry.
• House of the Dragon:
  • Season 1: Building a stepfamily isn't always a good idea.
• The Games: Four people with a love/hate relationship are single-handedly responsible for putting on the Sydney Olympic Games and get into every problem imaginable.
• Game Shakers: A bunch of kids make cheap mobile games because Kel Mitchell is a fan.
• Garth Marenghis Darkplace: A talentless horror writer with a huge ego presents (with added cast interviews) an awful television show from The '80s that he wrote, directed, and starred in, claiming that it is a masterpiece.
• Get a Life: A perpetually doomed 30-year-old Manchild tries to grow up. Due to his views on life and the people around him, he routinely fails to do so.
• Get Smart: An inept spy fights crime with his girlfriend to save the world from an age-progressed Hitler and his henchman.
• Ghosts (UK): A woman and her Manchild husband inherit a house from a very, very distant relative. The woman is almost killed by a nasal politician, which allows her to see him. She spends the rest of the first season being tormented by the politician, a failed poet who’s infatuated with her, a homophobic old lady, an army guy who’s mad that his crush got to go to war and he didn’t, a man whose wife didn’t like him because he was too much of a Control Freak, an idiot caveman, an illiterate woman, a Literal-Minded Georgian and a head. They stop annoying her and decide to be her friend. All but the first two are dead.
• Ghostwriter: Kids solve mysteries with the aid of someone who never shows his face.
  • Alternatively: The ghost of a runaway slave solves mysteries with a group of New York City area preteens with vaguely Canadian accents.
• Gilligan's Island: Seven people spend years on a deserted island driving each other up the wall and concocting Zany Schemes to get off, almost all of which are foiled by their stupidest member.
• Gilmore Girls: A mother and daughter with an extremely codependant relationship live in a small town full of weirdoes, drink coffee, and speak very very quickly.
• Girls: A group of young sociopaths live in New York. Most of them are female.
• Glee: A soap opera wrapped in High School Musical.
  • Alternately, High School Musical with Issues.
  • Alternately, teenagers work though their angst with group karaoke.
• The Goodies: Three Englishmen set up a "We Do Anything" agency. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Alternatively, Monty Python meets The Three Stooges, with the same results.
• Good Luck Charlie: Every episode is life advice for the baby protagonist.
• The Good Place: A rude woman moves to a new neighborhood where everyone is nicer than her, and she has to pretend to be nice in order to avoid being sent to a considerably worse neighborhood.
  • Alternatively, Everyone who has died in the past few centuries has gone to Hell, where they are horribly tortured. Except for four people who are put in an experiment where they are tricked in to psychologically torturing each other for all eternity. It's a comedy.
  • Alternatively, Ethical Philosophy Class: The Sitcom.
  • Alternatively, a rude woman dies, ends up in 'Heaven', and quickly learns that it's not all what it's cracked up to be.
• The Golden Girls: A snarky know-it-all, a Scandinavian Dumb Blonde, a well-to-do slut and a cranky old woman live in America's Wang.
• Good Eats: A nerdy kitchen whiz enlists the help of everyone from dead politicians to obscure relatives to teach the viewing audience how to cook. He has a crush on a fairy in his refrigerator.
  • Alternately, MacGyver has a cooking show.
• Goosebumps (1995): The Outer Limits (1995) for kids.
• Gotham A frustrated honest cop in a crimeridden city fights a losing battle to clean it up even while its gets more bizarre by the day. Meanwhile that detective will somehow rise in the ranks until he gets help from a mentally traumatized child who will grow up terrorize the city's criminal underworld with his way.
• The Great British Bake Off: A reality show where everybody's nice, starring two female comedians, a sweet grandmotherly lady and a George Clooney lookalike who is obsessed with bottoms. And lots of sugar. And sheep.
• The Greatest American Hero: A lovable doofus with ridiculous '80s Hair fights crime with alien technology he barely knows how to use.
• Green Acres: A strange city slicker couple runs a dilapidated farm in a bizarre farm community where the most admired resident is a super capable pig.
• Green Wing: A hospital show in which no patients are ever seen. There's no time - the doctors and management are too busy with funny and surreal hijinks.
• Grey's Anatomy: A hospital show where everyone is part of a giant Love Dodecahedron, which patients are occasionally dragged into. No one ever seems happy, even when they specifically state that they are happy, because of the Masochism Tango of always wanting their relationship status to be the opposite of whatever it currently is.
  • Private Practice: Spinoff featuring the Ensemble Dark Horse of the previous show. The writers initially attempted to make it even less about the surgeries than its predecessor, but this plan was scrapped in order to save the show.
• Grimm: Homicide detective beats up fairy tales during his off-duty hours, frequently assisted by not-quite-werewolf clockmaker.
  • "Fairy tales, but for adults" meets conspiracy theories "fairy-tales-for-adults"]].
• Hannah Montana: A girl who is only famous when she wears a blonde wig overacts, a lot.
• Hannibal: Morality is a gray zone. We know this because the characters live in a world where bad guys mutilate corpses and the good guys adopt fluffy stray dogs.
• Happy Days: A family deals with their three kids, one of whom disappears and is never heard of again, and a biker who moves in with them.
• Hard Quiz: A variant of Mastermind with a snarky host.
• Have I Got News for You: A show which can't hold down a host for more than one episode, is outdated within a week of broadcast, and whose only regular cast members are an eccentric comedian and a magazine editor. Allegedly.
• Hawkeye (2021): Family man is forced to extend his holiday trip because a girl (who absolutely adores him) discovered some old clothes of his.
  • Alternatively: Arrow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a female archer.
• Hawking: A nerdy university student attempts to get his degree before he dies of an incurable neurological illness. (Spoiler: he succeeds.) Based on a True Story.
• Hawaii Five-0: Standard cop show, just with prettier scenery than most. Remade so you can recognize more of the actors.
• Hell's Kitchen: A British chef swears and yells a lot at people.
  • Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares: Said British chef goes out of his way to save near bankrupt restaurants while insulting the people working there, and their cooking.
• Herman's Head: New York-based magazine editor leads a boring life, but his psyche is always working overtime.
• Heroes: A whole bunch of people with superpowers try to pretend that they've never heard of superheroes or supervillains while they play recreational sports with the Idiot Ball.
• Henry Danger: A Manchild hires a teenage boy to be his sidekick.
• Hey Dude!: Teenagers get paid to wreak havoc on an Arizona ranch in the early '90s.
• Highlander: The enduring battles between people who emanate lightning after getting their heads cut off. In the end, there can be only one, except that more appear every year.
• Highway to Heaven: A hobo and an ex-cop with anger issues tell people how to live their lives in Southern California. Miracles happen.
• Hit & Miss: A woman tries to balance her unorthodox job, her new family, and her love life.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981): The Earth blows up. Hilarity Ensues.
• Hogan's Heroes: A comedy set in Nazi Germany, wherein a cocky allied commander and his multicultural comrades subvert the Third Reich from within a prison camp with a no-escape record.
  • Oh, and most of the Nazis are played by Jews who survived Nazi oppression. And German viewers love it.
• Hollywood Squares: Tic-tac-toe featuring risqué remarks to simple trivia questions.
• Holmes on Homes: Burly man invades homes, rails against stupidity.
• Home Improvement: A home improvement show host tries to add more power to everything. When that fails, he consults his odd neighbor.
  • A man is extremely passionate and knowledgeable about his profession, but ironically, when he tries to apply it to his life, it always blows up in his face. He hosts an informational show with a far more sensible assistant/friend whose personal life he is always making jabs at, and lives with a sarcastic and sharp-tongued companion with a set of personal tastes as different from those of the main character as possible. When faced with problems, the main character consults a highly knowledgeable but eccentric adviser whose most notable peculiarity is the fact that an essential aspect of the character is always kept off-screen. Wait, hang on...are we talking about Home Improvement or Frasier??
• Homeland: A beloved war hero's efforts to get justice for a group of murdered children are repeatedly thwarted by a psychotic stalker who is carrying on an affair with a married man. The stalker is the hero.
• Homicide: Life on the Street: A Bond villain guides a stand-up comic, a very tall man, a Fiery Redhead and a few Shakespearean actors and trade snarks with each other while solving murders in the South. It may or may not have served as a predecessor to The Wire.
• House: Crippled Doctor can't decide if he's Batman, Sherlock Holmes, or Nietzsche; solves medical mysteries to keep the crushing ennui at bay only to find that Victory Is Boring, so he takes drugs instead.
• House Hunters: Couples go comparison-shopping.
• How I Met Your Mother: A man tells his bored teenaged children stories about his sex life when he was younger.
  • Or: A man tells his children the story of how he met a bunch of women who AREN'T their mother with the help of Doogie Howser, M.D.
  • Or: A woman, her two ex-boyfriends, and their married friends stay up late drinking at their favourite bar every night for several years, until someone gets pregnant.
  • The Wonder Years: A man tells his bored child(ren) stories about himself when he was younger. Evidently there's nothing good on TV in the present.
• Human Target: A killer steals the identity of the Six Million Dollar Man and is helped by a former high school principal and Rorschach (or possibly Freddy Krueger). Their enemy is Judge Dredd's clone.
• Human Trafficking: The graphic downside of international tourism. Features an Oscar winner, a Golden Globe winner and a man who once got naked with his friends.
• Human Wrecking Balls: A pair of brothers break stuff.
• Hustle: Rich, dishonest people are robbed in highly creative ways. We are supposed to believe that the thieves are the good guys.
  • The Real Hustle: Ordinary people are robbed, and then the money is given back.
• H₂O: Just Add Water: After getting stranded on Neri's home island, three teenage girls are transformed into descendants of Ariel after coming into a contact with a strange pool — and during a full moon to boot. First found recognition in the U.S. via an infamous Same Language Dub on public television, then its original form airing on a certain channel that was trying to be more inclusive to live-action.
  • Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure: Turns out magical creatures lived around and worshipped that pool the whole time, and somehow they never crossed paths with the above show's protagonists. Those magical creatures try to remove the powers of another magical creature like themselves because they think he's a human. Then they try to kill another magical creature like themselves because they think she's a dragon.
• I, Claudius: A man who was born into the world's most powerful family spends the entire series whining about his relatives.
• I Dream of Jeannie: A blonde Magical Girl who is a Genie in a Bottle annoys an astronaut for five years by calling him "Master" in order to have Happiness in Slavery and sparks controversy for exposing her navel. She also loves folding her hands and nodding her head, usually when she knows or thinks that something is about to go wrong. Alternatively, a man finds his life centering more and more around the contents of a bottle, and it's a dream of Howard Borden .
• I Love Lucy: A spaced-out, red-haired housewife tries to get on her husband's variety show and whines about it when she can't.
• I'd Do Anything: Women compete for the right to wear a corset in front of thousands of people and die horribly at the hands of Owen Harper, while children compete to play a miserable orphan.
• iCarly: A spoiled teen girl, her psychotic best friend, and the nerd next door host a webshow.
• Ice Road Truckers: "Guys drive on ice."
• In Living Color!: Predominantly Black series that constantly upset the censors and executives. Memorable characters include an "Angry Black Man" Stereotype, a guy who played with fire, and two Camp Gay guys.
• I'm in the Band: Washed-up '80s celebrities move into a teenage boy's house.
• Inazuman: Mothman fights blue Shrek and his army of SS soldiers.
• In the Night Garden...: A bunch of people live in a forest with a pair of semi-sentient vehicles.
• The Incredible Hulk (1977): A scientist with really serious anger management issues is a presumed dead fugitive.
• Insomniac: Bald drunk tours the U.S. to prove that the freaks really do come out at night.
• The Inspector Lynley Mysteries: A Lord with a dysfunctional personal life and a cranky, foul-mouthed junk food addict fight crime while clashing over class issues, elitism, and everything else. Somehow, they wind up best friends and possibly fall in love.
• Inspector Morse: He's an aging alcoholic frustrated academic singleton. He's a much younger family man from the North. Together, they fight crime.
• Inspector Rex: A cop show where the lead character isn't human.
• Interceptor: Hide-and-seek against a helicopter containing a mad Scotsman. Don't worry, though, you have a former tennis player to help.
  • Alternatively: On one team — a sci-fi bounty hunter with a laser cannon, a quick-witted aerial ace, and their fleet of really cool black vehicles. On the other — two hitch-hikers who are usually yuppies. You're supposed to root for the latter.
• Iron Chef: Two people play a game to see who can cook the best food in one hour. They are judged by a panel of D-list celebrities. Home team wins.
• Iron Fist (2017): After returning home, hippie who likes punching people falls for teacher and discovers his new job has unethical business practices.
• Ironside (1967): Man fights crime without ever leaving his chair.
• The IT Crowd: A nerd with no social skills, an Irish drunkard, a goth who lives in a closet and a woman with no knowledge of computers work with computers in a basement.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Fraternal twins, their dad and two friends run a bar and scheme to get money and/or sex. Everybody turns against everybody else. Antagonists are a nameless waitress and a homeless former priest.
  • Alternatively, a show with absolutely unlikeable sociopaths for the main characters who all undergo flanderization and an entire episode dedicated to a mystery involving faecal matter. And the occasional blackface.
  • Or, five alcoholics make an already crappy world an even worse place.
• iZombie: A zombie eats the brains of innocent people. Her former fiance from before she became a zombie gets out of a mental hospital and goes on a killing spree. They are the good guys.
• JAG: A tall dark and handsome former Naval Aviator turned lawyer together with an equally beautiful female jarhead partner; supported by an ensemble cast led by a bald former Navy SEAL; investigates, prosecutes, and defends service members in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.
  • NCIS: A retired Marine with a redhead fetish, a lecherous playboy, a malapropping Israeli assassin, a murder mystery writer / computer nerd and online gamer, an old British doctor and a Perky Goth with a caffeine habit work for the US Navy. They fight crime!
    • NCIS: Los Angeles: Robin (of Batman and...), LL Cool J, and a short white woman famous for playing a Chinese man work out of a resort that's supposed to be a secret base in the middle of Los Angeles. They also fight crime!
• Jane the Virgin: Virgin girl gets pregnant, and enters a love triangle with the father of her baby (who is also her boss) and her fiance. Everything gets much, much more complicated from there, so don't even bother trying to explain the basic plot beyond this.
• Jeeves and Wooster: Gay Victorian couple pose as upper class idiot and his more intelligent butler.
• Jekyll: A Victorian horror novel re-imagined as a modern sci-fi conspiracy with the star Acting for Two but providing enough ham for eight.
• Jeopardy!: A game show which is hard to win even though they give you all the answers.
  • Get a stupid answer, ask a stupid question.
• Jessica Jones (2015): A not terribly good PI gets stalked by a man with a strange way of making friends.
  • Jessica Jones (2015) Season 2: The PI discovers both her biological and adoptive families are screwed up.
• Joan of Arcadia: A girl talks to God.
• The Joe Schmo Show: A Reality Show where the only "real" thing about it is one unwitting contestant.
• The Joker's Wild: A game show where players spin a slot machine to determine their categories. Satan and Heath Ledger guest star.
• Jonathan Creek: A nerdy magician and a hot but dysfunctional journalist with a crush on him solve mysteries. Then the journalist suddenly turns blonde and skinny, but no one mentions it.
• The Joy of Painting: an ex-Master Sergeant paints nothing but nature scenes.
• Judge Judy: Every day, horrible rotten people come up to an old lady and tell her about all the horrible rotten things they've done. It's a miracle she hasn't lost all faith in humanity.
• Justified: Cowboy lawman spouts wisecracks and shoots hillbillies in crapsack rural community. Wisecracks some more with his ex-neo-Nazi, ex-preacher crimelord best friend who blows things up.
  • Season Two: Cowboy lawman goes up against large woman who punishes those she loves with contaminated moonshine and ballpeen hammers.
  • Season Three: Cowboy lawman goes up again a guy who dismembers dead animals, a drug-addicted albino deer, a skinny cripple with an 80s mohawk, and a redneck with four kidneys. Features barbecue pork and bondage.
• Kamen Rider: Long-running franchise about bugmen riding bikes.
  • Kamen Rider V3: College student becomes bugman to fight animals mashed with objects.
  • Kamen Rider Amazon: Guy from South America befriends children while encountering animal men.
  • Kamen Rider Super-1: Astronaut learns Shaolin style.
  • Kamen Rider BLACK RX: Gold-masked Destro throws man into sun, but it backfires.
  • Kamen Rider Agito: Amnesiac experiences the joys of housework, cooking, and defeating agents of god.
  • Kamen Rider Ryuki: Guys fight over cards.
    • Kamen Rider Dragon Knight: Guys fight over cards IN AMERICA.
  • Kamen Rider 555: Three friends who run a dry cleaning business deal with their annoying neighbors and a MegaCorp led by transhumanists bent on annihilating the human race.
  • Kamen Rider Blade: 4 dudes collect cards.
  • Kamen Rider Hibiki: Demons play music to other demons.
  • Kamen Rider Kabuto: Man fights worms.
  • Kamen Rider Den-O: A luckless klutz saves history by getting possessed by one of four demons.
  • Kamen Rider Kiva: A vampire boy has to break a lot of glass.
  • Kamen Rider Decade: Struggling photographer also uses cards.
  • Kamen Rider Double: Lovable poseur and amnesiac know-it-all use USB Drives to share a body.
  • Kamen Rider OOO: Homeless man is made to fight for spare change.
  • Kamen Rider Fourze: Ordinary High-School Student makes loads of friends through their shared love of outer space.
  • Kamen Rider Wizard: Magician battles monsters by helping people with their personal problems.
  • Kamen Rider Gaim: First arc: Dance teams are serious business. Second arc onwards: Fruit is serious business.
  • Kamen Rider Drive: Police detective gets a new belt and Cool Car.
  • Kamen Rider Ghost: Guy gains superpowers by dying.
  • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: Medical intern discovers that video games are serious business.
  • Kamen Rider Amazons: Green tries to save his species, while Red eats raw eggs.
  • Kamen Rider Build: Gay rabbit boy and dumb athlete get drafted into the military, made to fight Loony Fan of idol singers.
  • Kamen Rider Zi-O: Kid collects watches in the hopes it will make him a better person.
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One: Failed comedian inherits tech enterprise and beats up robot cultists.
  • Kamen Rider Saber: A novelist joins a crew of badass swordsmen who fight monsters with the power of BOOKS.
  • Kamen Rider Revice: Three siblings take grappling with inner demons to new and much more literal levels while fighting a mariachi trio who deal demonic stamps.
  • Kamen Rider Outsiders: A gathering of returning bad guys in the franchise to form a resistance against an artificial intelligence with a messiah complex that seeks to establish new world order.
  • Kamen Rider Geats: People play a game where they dress up as animals and fight plant men. And one of them is on a massive winning streak.
• K.C. Undercover: It's Kim Possible...only she's black.
• Kickin' It: Kids try to keep an overweight former action movie star's karate dojo from going out of business.
• Kings: A Farm Boy saves the prince's life and everything goes to hell. Also known as: Ian McShane gets dicked over by NBC.
• Kirby Buckets: A teenage boy becomes a local celebrity by drawing cartoons to bully his older sister.
  • Kirby Buckets: Warped: The boy manages to break the space-time continuum by playing with a metal sphere.
• Knight Rider A man and his talking computer-controlled car wander the country, fighting crime.
• Knightmare: A Dungeon Master sends children into his dungeon to deal with problems he doesn't want to take care of himself. They almost always fail.
  • Alternatively: Kids play a video game which has no controls, no continues, and a habit of freezing mid-level.
• Kojak: Bald Greek guy sucks on lollipops while doing his job.
• Krypton: A show about Superman but without Superman, and the only superhero around wants to help the Big Bad to kill a lot of people.
• Kyle XY: A loving family raises a teenage savant who was literally born yesterday.
• K-tai Investigator 7: one's an Ordinary High-School Student. One's a transforming cell-phone robot. They fight cyber crime!
• Lab Rats: A teenager convinces his scientist dad to let him bring three top-secret bio-weapons to school.
  • Lab Rats: Bionic Island: The scientist opens a school to assist in the development of more bio-weapons.
  • Lab Rats: Elite Force: Two of the bio-weapons join forces with amateur doctors and their alien friend.
• Land of the Lost: A family gets lost in an acid trip. Maybe.
  • Land of the Lost (1991): Remake where a family gets lost during vacation.
• Last of the Summer Wine: Inexplicably long-running series about three old northerners. One is gynophobic, one is a short, scruffy liberal, and the other is one of various tall, pompous conservatives. They wander around Yorkshire, argue about politics and crash things. All the female characters are prudes. It's a comedy.
• The Last Man on Earth: Survivors of a pandemic bicker a lot as they scramble to rebuild society, only to end up predicting an actual pandemic.
• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: A British guy sits at a desk and goes on long monologues about topics such as mislabeling of vitamin supplements, pharmaceutical marketing and infrastructure funding. He tries to alleviate the heaviness of some topics with photoshopped pictures and mascots in ridiculous costumes.
• The Late Show: Host interviews people and makes a top 10 list.
• The Late Late Show: Host reads mail and interviews guests with help from a robot, a horse, and puppets.
• Law & Order: Police officers investigate crimes. Lawyers argue about them in court.

  • Or, crime-solving duo helps grandfatherly mentor teach cynicism to a series of supermodels.

  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: A recovering alcoholic tries to keep a Cowboy Cop, a closet lesbian, a gangsta rapper, and John Munch from taking their frustrations out on rapists and child molesters.
  • later part of season 15: The same closeted lesbian sans likeability, an unlikeable gambling addict, and the same Cowboy Cop BUT LATINO! try not to take their frustrations out on rapists and child molesters. A snarky caffeine-addicted ADA tries to keep them in line.
  • Law & Order: Criminal Intent: A strange detective with an unconventional approach and a diminutive snarker (both of whom were once psychotic killers) head to the other side of the law to team up with two other classically trained actors and investigate really nasty people and manipulate them into confessing. They are later assisted by Mr. Big and Brundlefly.
  • Law & Order: UK: Police officers investigate crimes. Lawyers argue about them in court. With wigs. And no guns.
• LazyTown: Ugly man is repeatedly woken up by a pink-haired girl and an ambiguously elvish sports maniac forcing a hopeless mayor, a boring secretory, an idiot with a Sweet Tooth, a Black and Nerdy guy, The Prankster, and a kleptomaniac hoarder to be active.
• The League of Gentlemen: A Sitcom / Sketch Comedy set in a Town with a Dark Secret, whose best-loved characters are a pair of incestuous Small-Town Tyrant Serial Killers and a polygamist Monster Clown who runs a Circus of Fear and calls everybody "Dave".
  • Psychoville: A mysterious figure attempts to blackmail a group of disabled people and medical personnel.
• Leave It to Beaver: Classic Kid Com starring goofy little brother and, to a degree, his level-headed, athletic older brother. Older brother's friend ends up stealing the show whenever he appears.
• The Leftovers: Several different religious leaders, lay people, and bureaucrats have an argument over the significance of an interrupted download.
  • Season 1: Handsome small town cop is reluctantly drawn into the argument and enters intimate relationships with two different women: a bureaucrat and a religious leader. It’s not clear if the interrupted download ever had any religious significance.
  • Season 2: Handsome small town cop tries to escape the aforementioned conflict by moving to Texas. He dies a couple of times. It’s not clear if the interrupted download ever had any religious significance.
  • Season 3: Handsome small town cop tries to escape the conflict by traveling to Australia. He dies several times. It’s still not clear if the interrupted download ever had any religious significance.
• Legend of the Seeker: A young woodsman embarks on a mystical quest with an elderly wizard, a beautiful woman who mind-rapes people with her eyes, and a reformed dominatrix. Along the way they collect magical objects, rescue villagers, and try not to doom the world by having sex.
• Legends of the Hidden Temple: Game show where All Myths Are True and kids compete for the right to rob tombs, meet a talking stone head, and fail to put together a monkey statue.
• Legends of Tomorrow: A Ragtag Bunch of Misfits are brought together by a time-traveling Englishman to protect history. They usually screw it up worse than it was before they manage to fix it.
• Let's Make a Deal: Costumed audience members exchange cash and merchandise for exotic vacations and luxurious cars, as well as smelly farm animals, massive quantities of produce, and oversized TV show props.
• Leverage: A Five-Man Band of criminals. They fight crime.
  • Basically an updated version of those four ex-military fellows in the van above.
• The Librarians 2014: Former NATO counter-terrorism agent becomes a bodyguard for three geniuses who work for a secret organisation that safe guards magic after a librarian's Library goes missing.
• Lie to Me: An obnoxious Brit and a quirky team accuse people of lying and are usually right.
• Life On Mars: A policeman gets run over and wakes up in 1973. His boss is a misogynistic, racist homophobe, he himself is and is not hallucinating everything, and he's being stalked.
  • Ashes to Ashes (2008): Alex Drake gets seriously injured and wakes up in 1981. Somehow, she's ended up in Sam Tyler's world, working for his boss, and it's anyone's guess whether or not Alex is hallucinating the whole thing.
    • Or: A police detective gets stalked by a freaky clown who probably doesn't exist in 1981.
  • Brimstone: Police detective gets seriously injured, travels forward in time to 1998, and meets the devil.
• Living Single: A well-known rapper-turned-magazine editor living in New York has the world and her eccentric/arrogant friends bend to her every whim, regardless of how insensitive she may come off across at times.
• Lizzie McGuire: A cartoon character snarks about the daily mundane life of her live-action counterpart.
• Loki (2021): The most untrustworthy person in the universe tries to save his life by getting a job in a Vast Bureaucracy, and falls in love with himself.
• The Lone Ranger: A cowboy and an Indian fight crime. Together.
• Long Ago and Far Away: Darth Vader hosts children's stories from around the world.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Local Elf Karen insults everyone and forces the workers to follow her orders just to prove that she is right to the the managers. Underage girl hides her relationship with an old man from her parents.
  • In a story about great battles between the armies of good and evil, everything goes wrong because they lose track of one elderly cultist at the worst moment.
• Lost: People stuck in a place where weird things happen and no one has any idea what's happening. Also features a soap opera set in East Asia.
  • Alternately: People learn about boar hunting and killing each other brutally.
  • Or: An angry Momma's Boy wants to pull the plug out of a drain. His brother recruits a diverse group of people to try and stop him. They all end up dying.
• Lostin Space: Hopelessly lost preteen boy hangs out with a robot and a Miles Gloriosus villain.
• The Lost Room: A plucky single dad finds the magic key to a Negative Space Wedgie and meets a cast of colorful characters on a quest to find his daughter.
  • Or: Shady people fight over a key to a non-existent room in a long-abandoned hotel.
• Luke Cage (2016): The owner of the local club and his cousin discover it is a bad idea to make the local bartender angry.
  • Luke Cage (2016) Season 2: Local bartender-turned-barber gets dragged into an argument between the club owner's cousin and a very angry Jamaican while dealing with his own anger issues.
• MacGyver: A spy who can't fire a gun helps people by using everyday items in unconventional ways.
• Mad Men: The man in the grey flannel suit commits identity theft, votes for Nixon, and provides an object lesson in why the women's movement was a Good Thing.
  • Alternately: A bunch of sexist, racist, homophobic dicks get drunk, smoke and screw hot chicks a lot en route to huge paychecks.
• Maddigan's Quest: Two boys and a baby run away and join a circus in order to fight a cockroach that doesn't exist yet.
  • Alternately: Renewable energy good, radiation bad.
• The Magicians: A college student finds out his favorite book series is real, and now he and his friends have to stop the characters from destroying the world. But after he sings Taylor Swift in a mental hospital.
• Malcolm in the Middle: Teen Genius narrates the life of his severely screwed-up family through his own eyes.
• Mama's Family: A crotchety old Midwestern woman raises her eccentric, slow-witted, feuding and ungrateful children, grandchildren and in-laws. It's notable for the old woman of a Vague Age being portrayed by an actress who ranges from being years to even decades younger than her on-screen children.
• The Mandalorian: Struggling single man unexpectedly becomes a struggling single parent after he fails to do his job properly.
  • Or, as the funny page put it, Stoic bounty hunter turned disgruntled babysitter ends up on one of his most annoying escort missions yet.
  • John Wick plus a baby, and IN SPACE!.
• Man vs. Bee: Possibly the most Rowan Atkinson thing to ever exist.
• Man vs. Wild: A man goes hiking around the world.
  • Also he drinks his own piss.
• Married... with Children: Loser Protagonist lives through hell on earth with his lazy red-headed wife, two bumbling kids, and a pair of annoying neighbors.
  • Unhappily Ever After: Loser Protagonist lives through hell on earth with his lazy blonde wife, one bumbling kid, one hottie genius kid and masochistic plush toy.
• Martin: A black radio DJ pisses people off.
• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Woman decides to attempt a new career after a drunk tirade against getting dumped.
• M*A*S*H: A bunch of Americans living abroad in the 1950s talk and act like it's the 1970s, and crack a lot of jokes about death.
• The Masked Singer: Celebrities wear fursuits and adopt fursonas.
• The Mclaughlin Group: People discussing politics loudly under the watch of an ex-Jesuit with a penchant for Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness.
• The Mentalist: a Jerkass ex-conman pisses people off while his short Brainy Brunette reprimands him. Plus, a stoic Asian, bumbling big guy, and Fiery Redhead.
• Merlin: A bumbling manservant uses non-specified superpowers to protect his unwitting and unappreciative master while taking advice on their relationship from a dragon who basically speaks in subtext (and ships them). Corny CGI ensues.
• Merv Griffin's Crosswords: Classic pencil puzzler turned into a game show. Poor formatting turns this into the game show version of the Macguffin Delivery Service.
• Metal Heroes: Semi-long running Japanese franchise about lawmen who wear shiny outfits.
  • Jikuu Senshi Spielban: Man and his female partner (who can defeat people by sitting on them) fight villains trying to steal water.
  • Sekai Ninja Sen Jiraiya: Crooks try to steal a clay board from a family struggling to make ends meet.
  • Kidou Keiji Jiban: Cop undergoes major reassignment, finds out his new boss is a little girl.
  • Tokkei Winspector: Rescue but with a Sentai team.
  • Juukou B-Fighter: Three people befriend beetles and gain superpowers, team up with a private academy to fight guy trying to destroy Earth by making a big hole.
• Miami Vice: An hour long music video compilation about a set of cowboy cops who out-cool all the bad guys.
• Midsomer Murders: Local detective lives in a county where everyone is a murderer. His wife complains he's a workaholic.
• The Mighty Boosh: A glamrocking pretty boy and a middle-aged virgin with a jazz fetish go on ridiculous, surreal adventures with an alien stoner and a talking gorilla who's supposed to be dead.
• Mighty Med: The health and safety of Philadelphia's most valuable residents is in the hands of high schoolers.
• The Middleman: A young painter living with her ditzy blonde roommate is hired by a quirky superhero with a grumpy robot secretary. Memorable opponents include a super-smart gorilla, a mud monster, and a boy band.
• Mimpi Metropolitan: A Country Mouse befriends a pirated-DVD seller on his first day in the city. Meanwhile, a struggling actor is mouthed off by his boss.
• Misfits: Five juvenile delinquents—consisting of a nerdy arsonist, a shamed athlete, a snarky jerkass, a violent chav, and a sex-mad drunk-driver—get caught in a freak storm while on community service, and get magically lumbered with some of the most debilitating and ridiculous superpowers EVER.
• Mission: Impossible: A Five Smart Guy Band takes on Magnificent Bastard after Magnificent Bastard and wins.
• Mister Ed: A horse talks to an architect and says nothing to anyone else.
• Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: A Presbyterian minister shows children how various things are made, sings to them, and then tells serial stories set in a kingdom in his wall.
• Modern Family: An extended family allows an unseen mockumentary crew to record every detail in their lives.
• Mock the Week: Seven people talk about how terrible Britain and the world is using Black Comedy.
• Monk: A man with OCD annoys everyone around him in the process of solving murders.
• The Monkees: Four teenagers sing songs, break the fourth wall and go on zany adventures.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: Five educated British men make complete fools of themselves on national television until they run out of ideas, at which point their American colleague cuts bits of famous paintings out and moves them in front of the camera.
  • Alternatively: A history of Irish agriculture.
• Moon Knight:
  • In a series that partly aired during Passover, a Jewish man serves an Egyptian god.
  • Alternatively: a man argues with himself about whether he should be a British museum tour guide or an American hitmen.
• Mork & Mindy: Cloudcuckoolander from space and sweet innocent young woman live together in Boulder, Colorado and seem to swing back and forth between Just Friends and a real romantic relationship for three years until they get married and give birth to Jonathan Winters.
• The Morton Downey Jr. Show: A man brings various guests onto his show to argue with them. In some cases the arguing will escalate into outright violence. Known for launching the "trash talk" genre of shows.
• Mr. Bean: A manchild is overwhelmed by the most basic tasks. Most of the time something goes wrong, and for some reason, instead of asking someone for help, he tries to fix everything himself, but just ends up making it worse.
• Mr. Belvedere: An English butler lives in the Pittsburgh suburbs and writes in his diary about the mundane goings-on of his host family.
• Mr. Brain: A Ginza host with impossibly good hair is crushed under a building, has his brain rebuilt, and gathers a ragtag band of misfits to solve crimes by eating bananas and playing children's games.
• Mr. Robot: A misanthrope does hard drugs while ranting about how much he hates corporate America.
• Mr. Young: A kid is hired as a high school teacher.
• The Munsters: A caring, considerate family do their best to improve their community but are shunned and discriminated against by the rest of civilization.
• The Muppet Show: A variety show—starring assorted singing and dancing animals, not to mention talking food—where nearly all of the acts end in total disaster. Comes complete with its own MST3K riffers. Oh, and Mark Hamill is the son of Padmé's sister.
• Murder, She Wrote An elderly female author moonlights as a homicide investigator in her idyllic hometown and on the road. The author is a lovely woman, but an astonishing number of her friends, relatives, and neighbors die every year, such that her hometown has a murder rate 3 times that of Detroit in 1974. Murders are solved through keen observation skills, clever verbal traps, and convenient confessions.
  • Alternatively, an elderly woman is friends with a shocking number of people in her small town, which has a reputation of being idyllic despite its sky-high murder rate. She often assists in the apprehension of the murderers, and is miraculously never harmed despite her age and the fact that many of them have weapons.
• Murphy Brown: Recovering alcoholic can't keep a secretary, but can keep a painter. Hilarity Ensues.
• Mutant X: Geneticist composes team of human guinea pigs to fight against a Corrupt Corporate Executive with plastic skin. Not related to the X-Men.
• My Name Is Earl: A white-trash crook is hit by a car after winning the lottery, then his trashier (but hot) wife leaves him for the black man who fathered his Chocolate Baby. He learns about the concept of Karma from a talk show and it scares him into writing a list of everything bad he's ever done and setting out to make up for every item so that this "Karma" thing won't kill him.
• My So-Called Life: A show about the problems of white, middle-class teenagers in the '90s. Is retroactively praised by people who weren't white, middle-class teenagers in the '90s.
• Mystery Diagnosis: People are sick. Their doctors don't know why, until they do.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: A man is stuck in a satellite orbiting earth with some robots he made out of spare parts, and they are forced to watch bad old movies while mocking them. Join the fun!
  • Alternatively: A man, hated by the people he serves, is jettisoned into a spaceship. Each day, he is forced to watch torturous films that make the ones shown in A Clockwork Orange look mild. In a losing battle against loneliness, he builds several machines from various parts of the ship, who treat him worse than his employers. A truly sad story.
  • Alternatively: A scientist gives poor movie recommendations to three men with nothing better to do, but they still take constant breaks to play pretend.
  • Alternatively: Some people won't shut up about awful movies.
• The Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nóg: Power Rangers in ancient Ireland.
• MythBusters: Two overgrown geeks and their three younger sidekicks try to prove whether urban legends are true or not by playing with an overly abused crash test dummy and blowing stuff up.
  • Or: Four guys and a girl blow stuff up — all in the name of science.
• My Two Dads: A preteen girl deals with grief and an identity crisis while living in your average episode of Maury due to a dead woman who forced two incompetent ex-boyfriends to raise her and live together but aren't gay.
• Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide: Slice of Life anime, only it's live-action. Set in American Junior High with No Fourth Wall.
• New Tricks: A widower, a compulsive gambler, and a neurotic with OCD join forces with a dog-murderer to solve mysteries.
• Nick Arcade: A game show where kids play video games and answer trivia questions in order to win a chance at jumping around in front of a green-screen.
• Night Court: A barely qualified judge rules on a series of petty crimes, while the prosecutor makes inappropriate remarks about the duty counsel, and one of the bailiffs is really tall.
• Ninja Warrior: 100 people fail to pass several obstacles and a rope ladder twice a year.
• No Ordinary Family: The Incredibles In Live Action!!!
• Northern Exposure: A New York doctor goes to Springfield, Alaska. He tries to leave. Hilarity ensues. Don't call it fantasy.
• Nowhere Man: A photographer gets very convincingly erased. Over his course of Walking the Earth trying to unravel the conspiracy and get his family back, he becomes less and less convinced he was ever real.
• NUMB3RS : A nice Jewish math genius writes on a chalkboard and finds criminals. The first criminal they find is always dead. The second is arrested.
• Obi-Wan Kenobi: Amber Alert forces old man out of retirement.
• The Odd Couple: A priggish intellectually pretentious Neat Freak and a down to earth, if short tempered, slob try to live together as roommates and friends.
• Odd Girl Out: A quasi-Hispanic girl is continuously bullied by her two best friends, a Manipulative Bitch and a Sociopath.
• The Office (UK): The boring lives of a group of people who work in a paper merchant's in Slough.
  • The Office (US): the surprisingly interesting lives of a dysfunctional group of people who work at a paper company in Scranton, PA.
• Occupied: 20 Minutes into the Future, the Russians plot to steal all of Norway's oil and book all the good tables in their restaurants. To add insult to injury, they then try and steal away the bodyguard of the Norwegian prime minister as well. Meanwhile, an Intrepid Reporter gets in trouble for writing headlines that are too juicy. Meanwhile, a couple of guys in very silly hats decide to re-enact Red Dawn (1984). Europe and America watch the whole thing from afar and Pass the Popcorn. It's a serious Conspiracy Thriller.
• Ocean Girl: A lonely islander with only a whale for a friend comes into contact with two boys, their mother, and their underwater society.
• Once Upon a Time: After getting into a fight with her son's custodial parent, a successful woman moves back in with her single mother, who is trying to get back together with her father.
  • Meanwhile, the son tries to prove that everyone in town is really from Disney's fantasy menagerie.
  • Once Upon a Time in Wonderland: Two lovers navigate an acid trip while fleeing Disney villains.
• One Tree Hill: Two poor outcasts bond with rich popular kids over a basketball. Also, they all have several run-ins with and obsess over the opinion of a Jaded Washout with an emo haircut who is basically a cross between Scar and Mitch Hiller.
• Only Murders in the Building: Two old men and a woman discover a body, and decide that the most logical thing to do would be to start a podcast.
• The Order: Modern American teenagers join secret societies. They are scarily good at it.
• The Orville: The mind behind Family Guy and similar shows stars in his own sendup of Star Trek.
• The Outer Limits (1963) ("Demon with a Glass Hand") (Single episode of anthology series): An emotionless man with amnesia does everything his hand tells him, including walking into a hail of bullets. (He gets better.)
• Oz: An in-depth look into U.S. federal prisons which entails that it's really gruesome, really into nudity and really unfair.
• Parker Lewis Can't Lose: A popular and handsome High-School Hustler schemes and manipulates others while still remaining a Lovable Rogue. No, it's not that one. Or that other one. And it also always ends with someone getting stuffed into a locker.
  • Ferris Bueller: A similar series about another High-School Hustler tries to be its own thing while disrespecting the source material in the first episode. It fails miserably.
• Parks and Recreation: A city government employee attempts to turn a hole in the ground into a community park, accompanied by her Obstructive Bureaucrat boss and similarly apathetic staff of subordinates.
  • Alternatively, started off as a clone of The Office (US). Had one character completely dedicated to his ex-girlfriend, only to completely scrap his previous characterization, instead making him into a total idiot. Expecting us to completely forget his previous characterization in favor of this new one.
  • Or, a woman doesn't understand why her friends don't love their unremarkable Flyover Country hometown as much as she does.
• The Patty Duke Show: A socially awkward, cultured Scottish teenager moves in with her uncle, a newspaper editor in New York City, and bonds with her extroverted, boy-crazy identical cousin. Hilarity Ensues.
• Pawn Stars: Antiques Roadshow as hosted by the guys from Orange County Choppers.
  • Or: A weird and wonderful mixture of Antiques Roadshow and Sanford and Son.
• Peacemaker (2022): After barely surviving his previous mission, a disgraced superhero has to deal with his former demons including his racist, homophobic father and deal with an alien invasion.
• Penn & Teller: Bullshit!: Everything you know about life is wrong, and these two guys are going to tell you why. Bombastically.
• Penn & Teller: Fool Us: Two magicians give you a chance to perform stage magic for them and an audience, then tell you using coded phrases if they know how you pulled it off.
• Penny Dreadful: A Victorian adventurer, his possessed lady friend, and a Wild West performer search for the adventurer's kidnapped daughter. Meanwhile, their Ambiguously Gay Mad Scientist associate is confronted by his abandoned first born.
• Pennyworth: Future butler must deal with several annoyances, including a Civil War, a Psycho Lesbian and Hollywood Satanism.
• Peep Show: The humiliations and inner thoughts of an Odd Couple with no social skills whatsoever.
• Pee-wee's Playhouse: A man plays pretend with living furniture. A cowboy, a hot girl, a king, a mail lady, and a man wearing nothing but swimming trunks occasionally wander in.
  • Or: A chronic masturbator hangs out with talking furniture, a hot girl, and a black cowboy.
• Perfect Strangers: An innocent foreign shepherd and his neurotic distant cousin try to make it through life in Chicago without injuring themselves.
• Perry Mason: Someone gets murdered, man is really good at his job, man goes to lunch with his two friends/coworkers. Repeat for nine seasons.
  • Perry Mason (2020): Man, who is now far more angsty and slightly less good at his job, investigates a child murder while dealing with the corruption of 1930s Los Angeles. Everything and (mostly) everyone is fucked-up and/or broken in one way or another.
• Person of Interest: A computer programmer and an ex-Special Forces operative violate everybody's civil liberties in order to save them.
  • Or: a gang of friends and their dog hang out in a library, solving mysteries.
• Peter Gunn: Guy hangs out at jazz club, gets into trouble, and annoys his Friend on the Force.
• Phoenix Nights: A Deadpan Snarker cripple from Oop North decides to re-open a club, only to get it burned down again next series. He then repeats the process again next series, only without the burning. Despite this, people still want a Series 3.
• Picket Fences: A small-town family and their acquaintances deal with increasingly offbeat visitors and criminals, all while maintaining a strong sense of values.
• Pizza: Italian-Australian pizza delivery guys regularly find themselves dealing with the sorts of subjects and people Haruhi Suzumiya would be happy to meet.
• Please Like Me: After being rejected by women, a guy comes out as gay, and then gets rejected by men while getting caught up in his divorced parents' drama.
• Pointless: One half of a comedy duo encourages people to think of unpopular things, assisted by a guy whose computer doesn't work.
• Poirot: Series about a pudgy, vain immigrant who refers to himself in the third person and has an imperfect command of English. He is a clotheshorse, and is so fastidious that he once puts a handkerchief on a park bench before sitting on it. He frequently boasts about a certain part of his anatomy. His frequent sidekicks includes a bland retired officer, who says "I say!" and "Good Lord!" at every opportunity, and a secretary obsessed with filing. They Fight Crime. The series occasionally adds sexuality and angst that weren't in the original stories.
• Police Squad!: a super silly Cop Show spoof that was cancelled because the TV Network head said that the people had to watch it to appreciate it, and the producers were glad he felt that way.
• Popular: Unattractive and wealthy blondes bully and belittle good-looking and socially awkward brunettes in the most unrealistic high school ever. The increasing amount of drama gave way for more development and interest in all of their lives, but it all ends abruptly due to a unresolved --and out of nowhere-- hit-and-run.
• Power Rangers: An American TV show with fight scenes made up of recycled footage from a Japanese show that somehow managed to be popular enough that most people have heard of it.
  • Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Teenagers become dinosaur-themed superheroes, then mythical-beast-based superheroes, then ninja superheroes, all while keeping the same costumes, even though all but one of the original members are replaced along the way.
    • Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (2010 airing): A Mook gets overwhelmed by Written Sound Effects
  • Mighty Morphin' Alien Rangers: Above mentioned teenagers become kids, superheroes from an aquatic planet fight like ninjas.
  • Power Rangers Zeo: Teenagers fight evil robot overlords with the power of geometric shapes.
    • Alternatively: Previously-mentioned teenagers trade in ancient dinosaur powers for Lucky Charms shapes to fight evil conquering robots.
  • Power Rangers Turbo: Four teenagers and a kid fight evil pirates with cool cars.
  • Power Rangers in Space: Above mentioned teenagers go into space.
    • Alternatively: Exactly What It Says on the Tin
  • Power Rangers Lost Galaxy: A Ragtag Bunch of Misfits protect a mobile space station from bugs and space pirates.
  • Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue: Highly trained professionals fight demons that are weak against water in a coastal city.
  • Power Rangers Time Force: Time police go back in time to stop wanted criminals from causing mass destruction.
  • Power Rangers Wild Force: Pollution causes ancient monsters to awaken and another Ragtag Bunch of Misfits fights them with animals.
    • "Forever Red" Previous red-colored superheroes team up to fight evil robot overlords.
  • Power Rangers Ninja Storm: A ninja master gets turned into a guinea pig and teaches teenagers how to become ninjas.
  • Power Rangers: Dino Thunder: One of the original teenagers with attitude teaches paleontology to another group of teenagers that fight bad guys with dinosaurs.
  • Power Rangers S.P.D. In the distant future, three space police cadets and two Robin Hoods become superheroes
  • Power Rangers Mystic Force: Superheroes with capes fight an Eldritch Abomination using magic
  • Power Rangers Operation Overdrive: Four trained professionals, a mercury alien and some guy actually an android travel around the world to find artifacts.
  • Power Rangers Jungle Fury: Cat-themed martial artists become superheroes and run a pizza parlor
  • Power Rangers RPM: Seven people led by a teenage scientist try to turn off a computer.
  • Power Rangers Samurai: Teenage Samurai stop evil monsters from trying to overflow a river.
  • Power Rangers Megaforce: Tiki head and WALL•E Recruit Teenagers with Attitude to fight invaders. Main hero dreams of a Crisis Crossover.
    • Alternatively: Teenagers and RoboCop's environmentally-friendly cousin use trading cards to fight insects, robots, and toxic creatures.
  • Power Rangers Dino Charge: People use the power of dead animals to fight the cast of The Wizard of Oz.
    • Alternatively: Mentor causes mass-extinction of dinosaurs to protect 10 pieces of jewelry.
  • Power Rangers Beast Morphers: A power company has to ward off threats from a thief who doesn't even live in the same universe.
  • Power Rangers Dino Fury: People use the power of dead animals to fight chess pieces and blob-like batteries.
• Press Your Luck: Contestants answer low-IQ questions in order to press a button to win money. Small red imps attempt to steal said money with various implements. One guy outwitted these gremlins with a Game-Breaker, but his own character flaws gave them the last laugh in Real Life.
• The Pretender: A kidnap victim with a mean streak habitually lies about who he is to solve mysteries.
• Prehistoric Park: A man creates a park full of prehistoric life by going back in time and saving them fro extinction.
• Pretty Little Liars: Four teenaged girls who have almost nothing in common receive text messages from the same anonymous sender. This is part of a convoluted and intricate conspiracy.
• The Price Is Right: Randomly selected contestants win cash and prized based on their knowledge of common supermarket items.
• Primeval: College teacher is a dick to a bunch of amateurs who follow him unquestioningly. They cover up cryptid sightings and try to arrest the teacher's estranged spouse.
  • Or: A divorce gone wrong results in giant reptiles running around London. Snarky government official tolerates a nutcase scientist, big game hunter, techno geek and the only successful member of S Club 7 as they appear to do a better job than the special forces. Later a PR woman with multiple personality disorder, a sexy Egyptologist and Tom from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels attempt to kill giant super evolved bats.
  • Also: A whole bunch of random people chase dinosaurs that escaped from big, shiny balls of broken glass while trying to stop the main characters crazy wife who wants to commit suicide by erasing the human race.
  • Alternatively: History comes to life. Then eats you.
• Prison Break: A man deliberately gets himself thrown in prison — after having his escape plan tattooed over his entire body.
• The Prisoner (1967): Man retires from his stressful job to an exclusive and seemingly idyllic resort, but spends all his time bitching about it and refuses to join in the fun and games like everyone else.
  • The Prisoner (2009): Gandalf Mind Screws Jesus.
    • Alternatively: Magneto is mayor of Agent Peggy Carter’s hometown. He can only retire by manipulating Jesus into taking over.
• Prisoners of Gravity: A man is stuck in a satellite orbiting Earth with a superintelligent computer and spends his time interviewing famous scifi and fantasy authors, which he broadcasts to the world by constantly interrupting a nature program.
• Pro-Wres no Hoshi Azteckaiser: Wrestler becomes a Toku Henshin Hero to save the sport of wrestling from a league of renegade wrestlers.
• Prodigal Son: Mentally unstable guy really doesn't want to turn out like his dad. To prove it, he gets a job that is the opposite of what his dad does.
• Profit: Richard III goes '90s, has sex with his stepmom, and plays computer games naked.
• Psych: An immature slacker convinces the police that he has ESP. He and his reluctant best friend solve murders and sing a series of 80s references as they do it.
  • Alternately: An obnoxious Manchild lies about his abilities to be a police consultant.
• The Punisher (2017): Shell-Shocked Veteran solves his problems through violence.
• Pushing Daisies: A baker/necromancer brings his murdered girlfriend back to life; together with an undead dog, a cynical private eye, and a singing waitress, they solve gruesome yet hilarious murders. One-eyed synchronized-swimming aunts, homeopathic mood enhancers, disappeared dads, and a restaurant called the Pie Hole are involved.
• Pyramid: Word association game played with a loud clock ticking in the background.
• QI: Jeeves grills British comedians on obscure trivia. Negative scores are often allotted.
  • Four British comedians are asked apparently simple questions, then mocked if they give the obvious answer.
  • A British quiz game where all scores are arbitrary.
  • A Panel Show where giving the correct answer is frequently not as preferable as telling anecdotes or sharing tangentially-related knowledge.
• Quantum Leap: A semi-amnesiac scientist travels through time with his horny, invisible friend, who carries a computer disguised as a tetris cube (sometimes a calculator).
• The Queen's Gambit: Loner decides to let board games and pills take over her life.
• Queer as Folk: Everyone is gay. Sex is abundant.
• Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased): Two men continue their business partnership, even though one of them is dead.
• Raven: A guy who can turn into a bird guides kids on a quest to become the best warrior.
• Rawhide: A bunch of guys take cattle out west and back in the years following the Civil War.
• Reading Rainbow: Celebrities read children's books accompanied by stilted animation. Hosted by Geordie LaForge.
• Reaper: A directionless twentysomething takes on a second job to pay off a debt his parents incurred. His friends help.
  • The job being a hunter of escaped souls from hell.
• Reba: Fiery Redhead is Surrounded by Idiots and snarks about it.
• Red Dwarf: The last human in existence drifts through space in a vast abandoned ship. It's a comedy.
  • Alternatively, angry man dies and complains about it.
  • Alternatively, a young man with everything planned out is doomed to a miserable, lonely existence by his unlikeable superior. The superior is repeatedly shown that everything is his fault and that he could have been so much more, and each episode ends with a list of the other man's broken dreams and things he wanted from life, but is now half-resigned to never having. Because it's funneh.
• Reno 911!: A group of highly incompetent police officers are taped by a documentary crew.
• Resident Alien: An odd man breaks down in a small town full of weird residents, but he is weirder. In fact, he is so weird, people have been hired to follow him. Unfortunately, he has to choose between his old job and his new friends. Along the way, he solves and commits murder, while terrifying a little kid.
• Retro Game Master/GameCenter CX: A Japanese guy tries to play through old video games. The show also breaks to show him visiting arcades or interviewing video game developers.
• Revenge: A psychopathic young woman infiltrates a snobbish society of backbiting socialites to execute an absurdly complicated retribution plot for a legal scandal that occurred fifteen years earlier. Meanwhile, she is aided by a bisexual antisocial billionaire and courted by several clueless young men who have absolutely no idea what she's really up to. Drama ensues.
• Riverdale: Jake Harper has been left behind by his family due to being Mistaken for Murderer and forced to share an apartment room with Zach, while his love relationship with Lexi Mason is starting to fall apart due to the infamous "lipstick incident." As his senior year of high school begins, newcomer Tori Vega becomes attracted to him almost immediately, while fellow students Dez, Kacey, and Chris question Jake's innocence and who the real murderer is. As it turns out, the victim's sister, a doppelganger of Jessie Prescott, is still alive after all.
  • Twin Peaks meets My So-Called Life.
  • This ain't your granddad's or even your dad's iconic American situational comic.
• River Monsters: A man goes fishing.
• Robot Wars: A game show where many contestants are rendered unable to perform motor functions.
• The Rockford Files: Maverick meets Peter Gunn.
• Rome: A drama about life in Italy, as seen through the eyes of two soldiers.
• Roswell: Dawson's Creek with Aliens who are trying to stay hidden. While trying to keep the secret that they aren't human, they tell everyone they meet that they are aliens.
• Roundhouse: A Dom Com trapped inside Saturday Night Live, all with No Budget.
• Russian Doll: A narcissistic drug addict revisits her terrible childhood while in purgatory.
• Rutland Weekend Television: A near-no budget show about a near-no budget TV station.
• Salute Your Shorts: Kids go to summer camp and harass their counselor.
• The Sandman (2022): A goth spends a while in a glass ball. After getting out he plays my-thing-can-beat-up-your-thing with Satan, stops an old guy from making people honest, crashes a convention, and attempts to kill his relative.
• Santa Clarita Diet: The life of a married couple is changed forever when the wife tries out a new diet.
• Sapphire and Steel: Two socially-inept gods investigate ghosts and other paranormal phenomena, defeat eldritch horrors mostly by glaring at them, and have ridiculous amounts of UST despite allegedly existing only to do their job.
• Saved by the Bell: A blond and superficial High-School Hustler uses his good looks and powers of manipulation to get his way by having his friends do his bidding.
  • Alternatively, a live-action version of The Archies.
• Saturday Night Live: Many educated men and women of all races, usually American, imitate the five British men discussed above but usually have their own writers and no moving paintings.
• Scrubs: Two dorky white people strive to impress their black and Dominican best friends and shed their dependence on the "Well Done, Son" Guy. Oh, and they save people's lives daily, but that doesn't seem enough to raise their self-esteem.
  • Or: A dorky white guy with an overactive imagination's adventures in a hospital full of doctors who must've bribed their way through med school.
• SCTV: A local television station, run by an conniving owner who fakes being wheelchair-bound, forgoes airing cheap reruns to air incompetent original programming. The most popular material is a pure filler piece starting two beer swilling idiots.
• Search: Three guys are constantly being watched while they're working, and they're aware of it.
• Seinfeld: Four self-interested adults talk. About nothing.
• Sense8: Eight people spontaneously become a Hive Mind, have telepathic sex together, and try to solve each other's problems.
• Sesame Street: A community filled with monsters and humans teach viewers about the alphabet, numbers and other valuable lessons.
• Shameless (UK): Alcoholic Parent, the series.
  • Shameless (US): Alcoholic Parent, the series remade for American audiences.
• Sherlock: A sociopathic manchild teams up with a traumatised Army doctor. They fight crime.
  • Or, yet another Sherlock Holmes adaptation.
  • "A Study in Pink": a relatively normal guy going through a rough patch in his life meets a quirky, free-spirited stranger with no regard for social conventions, who brings adventure into his depressing existence.
• The Shield: Crime fighting show notable for asking such difficult questions as 'Is the Porn Stache the best way to get girls?'.
• Shining Time Station: Three kids play around inside a railway station, with blatant Product Placement for another show.
  • The spin-off The Noddy Shop is pretty much the same thing, but replace "railway station" with "antique toy store".
• Silk Stalkings: The original version of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, only set in Palm Beach, Florida.
• The Singing Detective: Murder investigation is frequently interrupted by song-and-dance numbers using well known forties songs and shots of some bloke with a skin problem wangsting.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World: Five adventurers and an Action Girl find themselves stuck on an inaccessible and inescapable island, yet a parade of guest stars can come and go as they please.
• Six Feet Under: The patriarch of a family of morticians dies unexpectedly, but continues to appear regularly on the show. A Family Drama.
  • Alternatively: The sex lives of a group of middle-aged, emotionally stunted funeral directors
• The Six Million Dollar Man: The adventures of a crippled former astronaut/test pilot with the world's most expensive, powerful and lifelike prosthetics.
  • The Bionic Woman: The distaff version made possible by one of the medium's most notorious Death Is Cheap examples.
• Skins: Undermotivated British teenagers do drugs and run up their cell phone bills.
• Slings & Arrows: A struggling Shakespearean theatre company is reinvigorated with the help of a director who suffered a nervous breakdown, and the bisexual ghost only he can see.
• Small Wonder: A man builds a lifelike android and tells everyone it's his daughter.
• Smallville: Young man who never changes his clothes keeps refusing to fulfill his blatantly obvious destiny.
  • Well meaning college dropout incapable of maintaining meaningful relationships stumbles through life and increasingly submits to his father's attempts to control his life as the series progresses.
  • Superman meets Dawson's Creek.
  • Protagonist indirectly causes conflict by withholding the truth from others.
  • Green Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: The Series.
• Snuff Box: The adventures of a womanizing British hangman with a voice that makes you shout "Come on, world, I'll have you for breakfast!" and his time-travelling American assistant who has an absolutely deadpan voice. Both are insane.
• The Sopranos: A suspiciously wealthy waste management executive has panic attacks, recurring dreams, extramarital affairs, and occasional bouts of violence.
• South of Nowhere: A family with a strained relationship move to LA, which causes a rift between mother and daughter.
• Spaced: Two lazy, unmotivated slackers trick their drunken landlady into letting them rent a flat by pretending to be a couple, and spend their time bumming around aimlessly with their weird friends.
• Spartacus: Blood and Sand: Gladiators get restless. Their bosses get restless. Everyone gets laid.
• Spider-Man: Popular comic book hero IN JAPAN! He also has a Giant Robot.
• Spin City: A Ragtag Bunch of Misfits do their darndest to make the incompetent mayor of New York City look good.
• Split Second (1972): Game show in which three contestants earn as high a score as possible in the first two rounds, but the first player to go back down to zero in the third round is declared the champion.
  • Or a Jeopardy! mimic with questions that all three players can answer — even if the first player gives a correct response.
• Sportscenter: People spout lame catchphrases while reporting sports scores.
• Sports Night: People talk about sports and fail at their personal lives.
• Square One: A Pac-Man ripoff, various music stars, a pair of police detectives, and assorted other people teach children mathematics.
  • NUMB3RS: A ripoff of those "math detective" segments.
• Squid Game: 456 people play Korean children's games for money.
  • Alternatively, family-unfriendly Fall Guys.
• Stargate SG-1: A wisecracking colonel, an archaeologist who just won't die, a pretty blonde astrophysicist, and an alien revolutionary step through a big gray ring to fight snakes with glowing eyes and mechanical insects. Later, the colonel is promoted, so a new proverb-quoting colonel and an eccentric, flirty thief join up, this time to fight glowing energy beings who like to play god.
  • Alternatively, a retired Air Force officer, who was previously sent on a suicide mission that he volunteered for due to his son's death, but who has now coped with his grief by adopting an entirely new personality, is called back into the service to lead an undermanned survey team who suck at their actual mission. Eventually, they break every regulation known to the Air Force, desecrate every religion in the world except for Buddhism, and one of them eventually causes the biggest manmade explosion in history. They're considered the greatest heroes on Earth.
  • Stargate Atlantis: Interplanetary explorers get stranded in a flying city in another galaxy and must fight off space vampires that feed on human life force.
  • Stargate Universe: Darker and Edgier Ragtag Bunch of Misfits get stranded on a runaway ship on the other side of the universe.
• Star Trek: Three men and four hundred extras travel through space in their futuristic living room/model UN club, going where no man has gone before.
  • A space ship runs around the galaxy telling everyone to behave lest their planet be blown up. This is the ideal form of society.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series: A Grumpy Old Man, a Straw Vulcan, and a Chivalrous Pervert with a toupée save the galaxy.
    • The Straw Vulcan succumbs to a powerful mating urge and almost kills the ship's captain. (An actual TV Guide synopsis of the episode "Amok Time")
    • A sex addict plays Mary Worth to the galaxy.
    • A ship from an organization that is absolutely, positively, you better believe it, not a military organization goes about obeying a strict hierarchy of ranks, carrying spectacular amounts of firepower, involving itself in imperialistic power politics and killing or threatening to kill large numbers of intelligent life. This ship has a captain who cannot stay away from alien women, an exec with absurd mathematical prowess, a curmudgeonly doctor, and an engineer who always complains that the ship cannot stand any more. There are also numerous people dressed in red shirts to indicate that they are chosen for human sacrifice to the religion of plot necessity.
    • Alternatively: A crew of obscenely over talented people is ordered to get as far away from civilization as possible for five years. It quickly becomes clear that this was not a punishment, but someone upstairs being smart enough to realize the ship is a Doom Magnet.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: An enlightened old man, a young up-and-coming commander who refuses all promotions, an attractive female doctor (except for that year with the shrewish female doctor), and an android go where no one has gone before. They usually would rather not. Oh, and the most iconic adversary introduced in this one seems to have been lifted out of Doctor Who.
    • The enlightened old man is stuck with a foreign counterpart who won't stop making pop culture references. His friends try desperately to rescue him. ("Darmok")
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: A commander who never quite got over the death of his wife in the worst military loss his government ever had, a beautiful young woman with dark spots whom he keeps calling "old man," a hot-headed genius engineer, and an ambitious doctor straight out of medical school go where extremely ugly aliens have gone before and stay there. They meet a former freedom fighter (who has to get over some severe Fantastic Racism, albeit with a Freudian Excuse) and a security officer who sleeps in a bucket. When the young woman with spots is murdered by a possessed villain, she is replaced by a shrink.
    • Babylon 5 minus the Babylon 5.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: Two starships go where no one has gone before. The captain of one ship drafts everybody from the other into her organization (since they lost their ship), as well as a local and a mercenary, and then spends the series trying to go back without violating her peculiar moral code, whatever that may be. They all are forced to use a sophisticated computer program for medical treatment. About halfway through the series run, they pick up and draft a cyborg Emotionless Girl who is Beautiful All Along.
    • Or.... literally going where no one has gone before. Anybody have a map?
  • Star Trek: Enterprise: An Iowa farm boy who's dreamt of space travel all his life, his Southern-accented chief engineer/best friend, an uptight British munitions officer, a black helmsman, a gorgeous Japanese linguist (played by a Korean), a gregarious alien doctor who commits murder on at least two occasions, and a stoic-yet-beautiful alien commander travel space at the beginning of humanity's efforts. They meet nasty aliens and get caught up in a lot of headache-inducing time stuff.
    • Or... how Mankind got it done before the aliens started pitching in.
  • Star Trek: Discovery Season 1: Adopted daughter causes an intergalactic incident, joins a top secret spaceship in order to realize she made a huge error and make everyone realize Darker and Edgier doesn't work.
    • Star Trek: Discovery Season 2: Adopted daughter teams up with Cool Old Guy to find her brother and figure out all these red spots in space are.
    • Star Trek: Discovery Season 3: Adopted daughter and top secret spaceship travel to the future to solve a gas shortage.
  • Star Trek: Picard: The enlightened old man, now older and disgruntled, and his dog team up with a Ragtag Band of Misfits and the former Emotionless Girl to give robots civil rights.
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: We finally see what happens when the Cool Old Guy commanded the ship, before he's put in the chair.
• Still Game: People going through old age in poverty in a Glasgow estate that no one cares about are mean to each other.
• Storm Chasers: An IMAX filmmaker, a videographer, and an electrical engineer. They chase storms.
  • Alternatively: A bunch of people who are only happy when it rains.
• Stranger Things: Small Indiana city sees its routine broken by two weird visitors.
  • Takes place in a terrifying world where a given name starting with “B” guarantees you a violent death.
  • 'It's 11:00: do you know where your children are?'
• Strangers with Candy: A middle-aged junkie prostitute attends a high school where all the other students are of normal age and the principal is an insane narcissist. The teachers hate the students and angst about everything. Important lessons are introduced but nobody learns them. Homes are broken, lives are ruined, and every episode ends in a dance sequence.
• The Suite Life of Zack & Cody: Two kids live in a hotel. Hilarity Ensues.
  • The Suite Life on Deck: The same kids move to a cruise liner for their studies.
• The Sunset Limited: Two old men talk for 90 minutes about suicide.
• Supergirl (2015): A woman who idolizes her cousin decides to broaden her career path by following in his footsteps and ends up dealing with a ton of crap he failed to warn her about.
• Supernatural: Two hot, dysfunctional brothers drive around the country fighting monsters, later accompanied by a hot angel, with a revolving door of hot recurring stars/guest stars. They fight monsters.
  • A pair of smokin' brothers hate themselves and love each other so much that they ruin the apocalypse and somehow piss off both Heaven and Hell.
  • Two ridiculously attractive brothers travel around the US having the most miserable lives known to mankind.
  • Or, A show about two mentally-challenged underwear-model brothers trying to impress God.
  • Alternatively, two criminals travel around the country committing credit card fraud, impersonating police or other law enforcement officials, running various con games, and also carrying out many killings. They are the heroes.
• Super Sentai: Long-running Japanese franchise about people who wear different-colored clothes. Was adapted into an entirely different premise for American audiences.
  • Himitsu Sentai Gorenger: The United Nations creates a special task force to deal with people who wear colorful masks.
  • J.A.K.Q. Dengekitai: Four cyborgs play a game of cards against a crime lord with a really bad haircut and a crappy A.I..
  • Battle Fever J: Japan, France, the Soviet Union and Kenya all have their own versions of Captain America, and America is a woman.
  • Denzi Sentai Denziman: A Ragtag Bunch of Misfits are recruited by a dog to fight aliens.
  • Dai Sentai Goggle Five: Evil scientists try to take over the world, so a team of gymnastics experts are called in to stop them.
  • Choudenshi Bioman: Five people are recruited by a robot to fight evil cyborgs, because a bigger robot have sneezed on their ancestors 500 years ago.
  • Hikari Sentai Maskman: Man falls in love with the wrong woman, earns the enmity of her older brother and an entire subterranean empire as a result.
  • Choujuu Sentai Liveman: College students betray their friends to go live with an older man on a space station.
    • Alternatively: School rivalry goes out of control.
  • Chikyuu Sentai Fiveman: Teachers fight aliens. Their worst enemy is a handsome singer who can charm anyone in radius.
  • Choujin Sentai Jetman: A red hawk and a black condor get in a love feud over a white swan.
  • Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger: A grieving mother declares war on prehistoric animals.
  • Gosei Sentai Dairanger: Martial artists fight kitchen appliances and other household objects.
  • Mirai Sentai Timeranger: A robot and a pink haired girl break a whale out of prison, this leads to everyone going back in time.
  • Ninpuu Sentai Hurricaneger: Quirky, idiot ninjas wind up as the only ones who can fight against quirky, idiot space ninjas.
  • Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger: A Ragtag Bunch of Misfits are recruited by a dog to fight aliens. Again.
  • Juken Sentai Gekiranger: Man who lives in the wild learns martial arts from talking animals.
  • Tensou Sentai Goseiger: Angels battle bugs, monsters and robots with trading cards.
  • Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger: Pirate captain with a key collection gets pissed after his lunch is interrupted.
    • Alternatively, Human Alien space pirates learn to be better people from other former heroes who came before them.
  • Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger: Traveling vagrant befriends dinosaurs and battles an evil cult while dancing like a badass.
• Super Store: Disgruntled retail employees neglect their job to get up to some wacky antics.
• Survivor: A bunch of people that have no business living with one another are thrown into the middle of nowhere and have to live with one another.
• Tales from the Crypt: Pungeon Master corpse tells stories of Asshole Victims getting their just desserts.
• Taskmaster: Man tortures five comedians with inane and pointless challenges, seemingly all in service of getting his humiliation kink broadcast on national television.
• Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills: Teenagers battle evil with the power of the Zodiac. Has nothing to do with Saint Seiya.
  • Alternatively: a poor man's Power Rangers.
• Teen Wolf: Teenage boy becomes werewolf, gets better at lacrosse. Everything else gets worse.
  • Remake of a 25 year old teen movie, In Name Only, airs on MTV.
  • A high school outcast and his best friend wish their lives were more exciting. Then they wish their lives were less exciting.
  • A cast of 25-year-old-high-school lacrosse players take off their shirts.
  • Teenage boy struggles with the problems of puberty including body changes, mental control and mean guys trying to beat him up.
  • Two best friends struggle to balance high school and their extra-circular activities.
• Teletubbies: A group of brightly-colored humanoids live in a hi-tech dome.
• The 10th Kingdom: A waitress, a janitor, a golden retriever, and an obsessed ex-con chase a mirror, while pursued by three idiots who love the Bee Gees. Meanwhile, the Big Bad teaches a dog how to be a man and spends the rest of her time talking to mirrors (or Al Bundy).
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: The savior of mankind goes through high school. Meanwhile, his mentally unstable mother and time-travelling uncle fight robots and criminals, a disguised robot looks for them, and River Tam beats up everyone.
• Terra Nova: The cop from the American Life On Mars and the asshole colonel from Avatar travel back in time 85 million years and form history's earliest recorded bromance. They fight dinosaurs (and an Angry Black Woman).
• Tetangga Masa Gitu: Bickering couple bicker with each other and disturb their newlywed neighbors. Alternatively, Sickeningly Sweethearts couple make their neighbors argue about such romanticness.
• Thank God You're Here: Comedians walk through a door, not knowing what's on the other side.
• That '70s Show: Main character is nerd with a crush on tomboy. Setting is a dull city filled with rednecks. Main characters do lots of drugs.
  • Or: A group of teenagers live through the 1970s. When 1980 comes they can't remember the 70s.
• That's So Raven: A psychic teenager goes to a school for normal people. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Cory in the House: The psychic teen's brother moves to a presidential suite, but doesn't become president.
  • Raven's Home: The psychic and her best friend move in together to raise their kids, and they're totally not lesbians.
• The Thick of It: A minor British governmental ministry attempts to deal with public image crises while trying to avoid getting sworn at.
  • Alternately: The British pendant of The West Wing, except everyone is either a pathetic coward, a shouty dick, or both.
• 3rd Rock from the Sun: A military officer working for a foreign dictator hides in a small American town under a false identity with three subordinates posing as his relatives. He regularly has sex with a local woman who doesn't know his true identity. Hilarity Ensues.
• This is Wonderland: A woman named Alice chases a shy man with no pants, encounters drug addicts, gets a haircut from her Ambiguously Gay opponent, argues with a Stepford Smiler who wants to be royalty, and sits through various bizarre trials conducted by a wannabe clown with an explosive brain.
• The Three Stooges: A trio of "brothers" take odd jobs, but mostly spend half the time arguing and beating each other up.
• Three's Company: A guy pretends to be gay so that he can live with two women to whom he is not romantically linked.
• The Thundermans: Twin siblings get into constant feuds by freezing and burning each other.
• Thunderstone: When a teenager from After the End messes with virtual reality technology, he finds himself lost in the far past, where animals still thrive long before his time, but is also very treacherous to boot.
• Time Team: Archaeology in an episodic format.
• Time Warp: People watch things in slow motion.
• Tipping Point|Game Show:: People answer trivia questions in order to play a Medal Game for money and prizes.
• Titans: The world's greatest detective's former sidekick-turned-struggling actor must redon his old cape and team up with an ordinary Aussie girl revived and adopted by a demon lord after she and her family perished in a plane crash at sea, a young aspiring zoologist with the ability to become any animal at will, and a former hotshot Air Force rookie pilot once taken from Earth by a malevolent alien race after being infused with strange powers—to defend Los Angeles from the various threats of his troubled past.
• Top Gear (UK): Three middle-aged men arse about with cars and a whole bunch of the BBC's money.
  • Or: A large, blustery man, a secret American who whitens his teeth, a man unable to drive fast, and a man(?) in a racing suit muck about with cars in an airplane hangar.
  • Top Gear: The Great Adventures: Same middle aged men race across countries across the world, getting injured, getting drunk, freezing their arses off, having stones thrown at them by hicks and making friends with Companion Cubes along the way.
    • Three presenters are repeatedly humiliated and, occasionally, blatantly tortured by their producers in a series of challenges. They find it funny, so you find it funny too.
• Touched by an Angel A Scotirish woman, a veteran singer and a reluctant Serial Killer wander the Earth observing tragedies. It's similar to the show about the hobo and the cop previously mentioned, but instead of usually preventing bad things from happening, they inform those they encounter that it was ultimately for the greater good while also diplomatically telling them to get over it.
• Tower Prep and Unnatural History Live-action shows on Cartoon Network.
• Trailer Park Boys Wildly inaccurate "documentary" about poverty, crime and substance abuse in rural Canada.
  • Or: People with awful lives stuck in the middle of nowhere in Canada consistently fail to break out of the cycle of poverty. Most of the characters are addicted to harmful substances and evidence of brain damage is, sadly, everywhere. With no education no one seems to have any options other than a life of crime and they all end up in and out of prison. It's supposed to be a "documentary" but I'm pretty sure it's scripted just to get laughs at the expense of these poor people.
• True Blood: Several minorities suffering from segregation and discrimination in a middle American town fight over a girl.
  • Or: Bodily Fluids discovered to be a Healing Potion and Stat Booster.
• True Jackson, VP: A 15-year-old girl becomes vice president of a youth apparel line.
• The Twilight Zone: The universe is really, really weird.
  • "Time Enough At Last": A man proves that one should prepare for the end of the world by getting contact lenses.
  • "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street": Humans are both Othello and Desdemona. Aliens are Iago.
  • "A Nice Place to Visit": A small time crook goes to heaven, or does he?
  • "Nightmare as a Child": A schoolteacher gets a blast from the past.
  • "Nervous Man in a Four-Dollar Room": A frightened man who think's he's facing Morton's Fork talks to himself.
  • "Back There": A well-to-do theoretician tries in vain to stop a murder.
  • "The Whole Truth": A crooked car salesman gets rid of a magic car by saving the free world.
  • "The Obsolete Man": In a dystopian future, a doomed man gets his chief persecutor in trouble.
  • "It's a Good Life": Will Robinson is freaky.
  • "Deaths-Head Revisited": A sadistic Nazi refuses his last chance to repent.
  • "Still Valley": A pro-slavery warlock accidentally selects the cause's Token Good Teammate.
  • "Once Upon a Time": A grumpy janitor steals a Time Machine. Hilarity Ensues, and the fourth wall is painted.
  • "Showdown With Rance McGrew": Wild West outlaws put a TV producer through an Official Fanfiction University.
  • "To Serve Man": The Wolf and the Goat with an alien invasion.
  • "Living Doll": A Bland-Name Product version of Chatty Cathy drives a man to his death.
  • "The Jeopardy Room": In a sudden genre change, a defector has to think his way out of a trap.
• Twin Peaks: Quirky agent with a sweet tooth visits town to solve murder mystery. Strange people from his dreams help him.
  • Or: An FBI agent tries to solve a murder with the help of a midget, a giant, and a dead girl from his dreams. Spoiler: Satan did it.
• Ugly Betty: An iconoclastic woman works in an industry she hates so she can preach about it. Her father is a murderer, her best friend at work is an alcoholic, and her nephew is friendly with a minion of the Big Bad.
• Ultra Series: Giant men fight People In Rubber Suits for nearly 50 years and still counting.
  • Ultra Q: Japanese people meet weirdness in the form of 50-foot whatevers. Doesn't have giant men.
  • Ultraman: A highly trained paramilitary team needs the help of a giant man to defeat rejects from the Godzilla series.
  • Ultraseven: Same as above, but the rejects are from Doctor Who.
  • Return of Ultraman: The first giant man comes back to do the exact same thing again...except he isn't the first giant man.
  • Ultraman Ace: A guy and a girl become one giant man to fight rejects from Power Rangers.
  • Ultraman Taro: A giant man fights rejects from Japanese fairy tales.
  • Ultraman Leo: A gym coach gets put through Training from Hell by a handicapped man for failing to kill the Monster of the Week.
  • Ultraman 80: A teacher fights giant monsters formed from youth angst. He later teams up with his "maybe girlfriend" from space.
  • Ultraman: Towards the Future: A giant man fights a virus possessing various Australian wildlife.
  • Ultraman: The Ultimate Hero: The first "giant man" show, but it's in the US and the fight scenes are laughably bad.
  • Ultraman Zearth: A germaphobic gas station janitor gets bullied by a shady customer who needs gold to live. Later on, the shady customer's sexy biker wife exploits the janitor's phobias to promote her flying karate dojo.
  • Ultraman Tiga: A J-Pop idol merges with a really big statue to fight giant monsters and Cthulhu's son.
  • Ultraman Dyna: A Plucky Comic Relief fights giant monsters while trying to find out what happened to his father.
  • Ultraman Gaia: A genius becomes a giant red man to fight aliens trying to cause the apocalypse. He also meets a giant blue man who wants to kill everyone.
  • Ultraman Nice: An asymmetrical giant man promotes the J-Pop idol's merch and fights aliens who want to steal their merch.
  • Ultraman Cosmos: A giant man fights The Corruption by using The Power of Love.
  • Ultraman Nexus: A rescue worker fights hungry aliens and is helped out by a giant man.
  • Ultraman Max: The previous series gets Screwed by the Network, so the creators do the formula of the first "giant man" show.
  • Ultraman Mebius: An alien, a paramilitary veteran, a motorcyclist, a soccer player, a preschool teacher, and a medical student battle giant monsters and an Evil Overlord by using The Power of Friendship. Continuity Porn ensues.
  • Ultra Galaxy Mega Monster Battle: A amnesiac man and his giant dinosaur befriend a space delivery crew and fight everyone they meet.
  • Ultraman Ginga: Young man reunites with his friends at their old school. They learn to follow their dreams by using toys to transform into giant monsters and superheroes and fight people doing the same thing. Later, the young man teams up with a foreigner to fight an alien, a Robot Girl, a parrot-headed man, and their collection of monster toys.
  • Ultraman X: An orphan discovers talking data in his communicator. He uses its powers to turn kaiju into toys so he can create a world where monsters and humans can live peacefully.
  • Ultraman Orb: A trio of geeks investigate weirdness caused by giant monsters and encounter a vagabond who uses cards to fight the monsters.
  • Ultraman Geed: A fanboy uses tiny capsules to battle giant monsters and his father's biographer. His friends are an alien, a ronin, a computer, a salaryman with a split personality, and a secret agent with a crush on him.
  • Ultraman R/B: Two brothers turn into giant men to stop an entrepreneur from trying to be a superhero by fighting giant monsters.
  • Ultra Galaxy Fight: New Generation Heroes: Eight of the giant men team up to file a copyright claim on impostors using their likenesses. Notable for featuring the debut of the first Malaysian giant man.
  • Ultraman Taiga: Three giant men possess a security guard and fight one of the giant men's father's former friend with a bondage kink.
  • Ultra Galaxy Fight: The Absolute Conspiracy: The giant men face an immigration problem when a rival race of giant men attempt to immigrate by altering history.
  • Ultraman Z: An orphaned giant man merges with a karate-obsessed Humongous Mecha pilot and use poker chips and an intergalactic criminal's severed head to fight a parasite obsessed with stitching giant monsters together.
  • Ultraman Trigger: New Generation Tiga: A plant biologist merges with a familiar-looking big statue on Mars and tries to make everyone smile, including his psycho ex-girlfriend and her two lackeys.
  • Ultraman Decker: A rice grain worker fights literal Spaceballs to end lockdown, but accidentally gets involved in time travel shenanigans.
• Ultraviolet (1998): A former policeman, a doctor, a Gulf War veteran, and Catholic priest team up to fight vampires, while mulling over the ethics thereof.
• The Umbrella Academy: A NEET, a police academy dropout, an abusive mother, a drug addict, an angsty teenager, a dead guy, and a depressed music teacher yell at each other instead of preventing the end of the world.
  • A group of super-empowered children are taken to a specialist training centre and subjected to a stiff training regimen to make them grow up into crimefighters. A Surprisingly Realistic Outcome follows, hard.
• Unbeatable Banzuke: A nigh-impossible Game Show from Japan whose challenges involve the use of pogo sticks, unicycles, stilts, giant seesaws, remote-controlled helicopters, and cat-shaped wheelbarrows. The grand prize is "honor".
• Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: A woman tries to hide her dark, abuse-filled past from her friends and employer, but finds that it keeps coming back to haunt her. It's a light-hearted comedy!
• V (2009): The government opens up relations with a foreign power, and our heroes respond by blowing up buildings. Also, there's a kid who wants to bang a lizard.
• Van Helsing (2016): Woman with unique blood condition fights vampires in a post-apocalyptic world.
• Veep: Inept politician and her even more inept employees navigate DC politics.
• Veronica Mars: A blonde high-school age female solves a crime every episode with the help of her African-American male friend, trusty dog, and protective father while she struggles to fit into the high school social scene. (Hint: it's not Nancy Drew.)
• Victorious: A teenage girl attends a performing arts high school where she gets to sing and perform in plays, while getting into wacky situations.
• The Walking Dead (2010): An ex-cop, a pizza delivery boy and a redneck team up with an untrustworthy ex-cop, an old man with a shotgun and a black guy to protect themselves against shambling people who like to bite things.
• Wallander: Cop solves crimes by frowning and crying a lot.
• WandaVision: European woman reenacts famous TV shows with her robot boyfriend. The army doesn't like that, but certain fans do!
  • Alternatively: A sorceress creates an artificial sitcom reality to avoid accepting the death of her robot boyfriend while a government organization comes to give her a reality check.
• Warehouse 13: A group of hoarders travel the world looking for unique knick-knacks.
• Weeds: A soccer mom's husband dies of a sudden heart attack. She decides to pursue alternate career options to keep the family afloat with the help of her eccentric chef brother-in-law, a sassy black woman, an obnoxious blonde with cancer, and her two sons, one of whom is a psychopath and the other of which is boinking a deaf chick.
• The West Wing: The adventures of a politician and his staff.
  • Alternatively: Trivia enthusiast attempts to solve world's problems with help of young idealists. This involves a lot of lengthy conversations conducted whilst walking up and down corridors.
• Wheel of Fortune: Contestants play Hangman with a big wheel to win money. Hangman's failure condition has been removed. Lovely Assistant aids in making letters magically appear.
• Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego: Three prepubescent kids hunt down a world-renowned thief and her gang of cartoonish Mooks all over the world.
  • Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego: Pretty much the same premise as above, only this time they hunt down the world-renowned thief all across the space time continuum. Oh, and her Mooks aren't as cartoonish this time around.
• The White Queen: A family of witches use magic to take over their country and crush their political opponents. Based on a True Story (Very loosely).
• Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?: Contestants earn a gradually increasing amount of money by answering the exact same question up to fifteen times.
• Who Wants to Be a Superhero?: Cosplayers compete in a pseudo-reality show to win the prize of becoming a fictional character who briefly appears in a cheesy Made-for-TV Movie.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway?: Four comedians try to impress a judge with a buzzer by making stuff up as they go along.
  • US Version: Cast from an actor's self-titled sitcom act out Ho Yay-drenched audience suggestions through improv.
  • The only show where the scores are made up and the points don't matter.
  • 2013 version: Two bald guys, a tall guy and a rotating set of friends impress a woman and weird out celebrity guests through improv. Ho Yay, Innuendo and Hilarity Ensues.
  • Drew Careys Improvaganza: Six comedians go to Vegas and make up raunchy stuff up on the top of their heads.
• Wicked Science: Two high school rivals get into a Freak Lab Accident that transforms them into... well, geniuses. Hilarity Ensues as they fight over who's the best at chemistry.
• The Wild Wild West: Two 19th century government employees are good at dealing with bizarre occurrences that come with their jobs. A very charming dwarf periodically stops by to make their lives more difficult.
• Win Ben Stein's Money: Snooty emcee gambles his paycheck against the intellects of three everyday citizens, then competes against these citizens to prevent himself from going home penniless. Homoerotic humor ensues.
• Wipeout: A game show in which the dregs of humanity are pushed onto an assault course/obstacle course/the inflatable seven circles of hell and attempt to get to the other end in the quickest time. Most are hindered by four large bouncy balls that they must traverse and will eventually give them crippling back problems later in life. Anyone who is good is mocked. Anyone who is bad is mocked. Anyone who is fat will be fixated on as they are made to writhe cruelly in the mud. The entire event is presided over by an entirely unsympathetic plastic woman.
  • Total Wipeout: Similar concept, but the people are from a different country. A short guy who likes cars narrates.
• The Wire A show where some of the "heroes" include a drunk Irish cop, a drug addict with a penchant for putting red hats on people, a reformed felon, and a gay stickup artist. The antagonists include a man who goes to community college and works at a copy centre, a young adult who hangs out at a wheel rim shop, a boss that doesn't have a valid driver's license, and an enforcer with a love for tropical fish.
  • A cop show, but instead of solving one case per episode, they take an entire season just to resolve one. Your favorite plot may get minutes of screen development in any given hour long episode. Despite the glacial pacing, the show includes long rambling discussions in bars and devotes staggering amounts of time documenting petty office politics. Pretty much everyone is a bastard. It somehow managed five seasons despite tanking in the ratings throughout.
• Wizards of Waverly Place: An antisocial girl torments her family, who can't stand her. She and her brothers will fight to obtain the ability to do magic tricks.
• WKRP in Cincinnati: A look at the lives of Ohio disc jockeys during the late 70s.
• Wolf Like Me: Olaf finds himself dating a philosophical woman and finds out at the worst time that she's a closeted furry.
• Wonderfalls: A 20something woman hears voices and goes to the bar a lot.
  • A philosophy major talks to inanimate objects. They talk back.
• Write On: The misadventures of a newspaper staffed with one editor, one secretary and one daydreaming reporter who apparently got hired despite not knowing how to write well.
• Wynonna Earp: The modern day descendant of a famous cowboy shoots a lot of people for the government while getting drunk very often. Meanwhile, her sister has a protracted coming-out story.
• The X-Files: A paranoid nerd and an attractive doctor (who may or may not be sleeping with each other) spend a lot of time trudging through forests and other out-of-the-way places in search of the truth whilst an elderly government employee smokes a lot.
  • Alternate: A man and woman who get fired and/or demoted frequently argue about who's right (usually the man) while their boss looks uncomfortable, their nemesis smokes, their family and friends get killed off, and they try to deny - unsuccessfully - that they are sleeping together.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: Ancient Greek women beat people up and engage in lesbian subtext.
  • Alternatively, schizophrenic women from the nineties believe they're Greek women, beat people up, and engage in lesbian subtext.
• Yes, Minister: Loquacious snob works his hardest to ensure that a man never accomplishes anything of merit.
  • Alternatively: Three elderly British dudes discuss politics as they try to out-sleaze each other.
  • Alternatively: If House of Cards was a comedy.
• Yo Gabba Gabba!: A trippy show that had My Chemical Romance guest star in its Christmas special.
• Yonderland: Live action British isekai.
  • Alternatively: Some British woman is forced by a puppet and his talking stick to go into a room with twelve people, of which only seven are ever seen and one is a gag character who dies on screen. Among them are a guy who can’t pronounce her name, an alcoholic, a hippie, a transgender woman, an old guy with an impractical haircut and a blob. The family unfriendly villain and his minions regularly fail to get rid of them. Running Gags ensue.
• You (2018): Exploits of a misogynistic Serial Killer who always gets away with his crimes.
• You Can't Do That on Television: Canadian kids discuss issues that people their age face, engage in skits where everything is backwards, and get Covered in Gunge.
• You've Been Framed: A doctor presents footage of dozens of people and animals having humiliating accidents. You're supposed to laugh at it.
• The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles: A young boy from New Jersey meets practically everyone who was famous during the 20th Century. Several years later, he serves in war, attends school, and meets more famous people. The whole thing may or may not be an old man (and Han Solo, on one occasion) recounting his life.
• The Young Ones: Four students who hate each other live together.
• Zoom: Seven real kids do activities sent in by viewers.

---