Here’s how to make the most of it.īy my lights (and some others) the finest entry in TV’s recent Golden Age, “Mad Men” - lusciously appointed, historically resonant, darkly funny and just generally exceptional - is, unlike certain other “prestige” dramas, a series that lends itself to watching and re-watching.
If you haven’t already, now would be a good time to discover it.Ī guide to the internet under quarantine: 100+ things to do The show has never really gotten its due as a well-done genre series. But at its best, AMC’s long-running “zombie” drama is an well-written, slickly produced and superbly acted thrill ride that grapples with the themes of survival and human nature we will all soon be confronting. And the series has had more than its share of ups and downs creatively, particularly in recent seasons. Yes, the gore is an acquired taste - it’s often stomach-churning.
And at the moment, that’s something to celebrate. And while not every episode ends happily - sometimes quite the opposite - it is ultimately a show about kind, competent people doing their best to provide healthcare to those in need. Over nine seasons - eight of which are currently available to stream - it has never shied from social realism, featuring storylines about illegal abortions, thalidomide babies and domestic abuse. Gritty but not graphic, tear-jerking but not sentimental, “Call the Midwife” is particularly sensitive to the plight of working-class women in midcentury Britain. The midwives, who live together in a convent called Nonnatus House, travel by bicycle, capes flapping behind them as they check in with expectant mothers around the neighborhood, often encountering families in dire or tragic circumstances. Not that it clobbers you over the head with politics: This period drama, based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, follows a group of hard-working nurse-midwives, some of them nuns, in the poverty-stricken East End of London in the 1950s and ‘60s. There’s no better way to feel superior and well-adjusted while sharing your living room with a Cal King-size stash of Charmin two-ply.Īt a time when a global pandemic is exposing the vulnerabilities of the American healthcare system as well as the dedication of medical professionals across the country, “Call the Midwife” is a series about - among other things - how socialized medicine can change people’s lives for the better.
Nothing like reality TV extremes to make our pandemic panic feel sane. They stockpile essentials and everything else - hand puppets, floppy disks, Snapple bottle caps - amassing so much it becomes a barrier between them and the rest of society in a self-imposed isolation. The subjects across multiple seasons of TLC’s “Hoarders: Buried Alive” often have too much toilet paper. (They also wear banana tree fronds in lieu of underpants.) On Hulu alone there are 34 seasons of them scrapping it out for supplies, practically drowning one another in a mad dash for goods as they’re dropped off the boat. The contestants on “Survivor” never had toilet paper either. They’re competitions and docuseries that drop the bar so low it makes recent stories of Costco shoppers fighting one another for hand sanitizer sound downright civilized. Feel-good shows fill a purpose - please see Yvonne Villarreal’s “I Love Lucy” suggestion below - but so do multiple seasons of feel-bad reality series that focus on the worst aspects of human behavior.