Sci-fi, which means almost entirely Dr Who, with occasional miniseries, Red Dwarf, Hitchhikers, and just enough of a dose of Sapphire and Steel that somebody out there other than me must be a fan
Masterpiece Theater stuff like Downton Abbey
The very mixed bag of sitcoms that run the gamut from Absolutely Fabulous to Are You Being Served to Black Adder to The Office. Maybe the common thread here is that until recent years, the well-known British comedies tended to be very very broad. Looking at you, Mr Bean.
(Why we wind up with the British shows we do, and what relationship this sampling has to the whole of British TV, is something I actually think about a lot and derive a lot of frustration from. It's insane to me that there is a fucking channel called BBC America that shows, like, one or two scripted British shows at a time, plus a couple of talk shows and a lot of cars. Think of how much old British content there is, never aired in the US, that surely could not command all that much money in North American broadcast rights. This is like if the Cartoon Network only showed cartoons on Saturday nights. For that matter, with all this goddamn real estate across the 500-channel programming grid, where are all the other English-language shows that should be relatively easy to acquire, or the foreign-language shows that have already been dubbed or subtitled for other English-speaking markets? Jesus Christ.)
I'm sure it can't be representative, but even apart from that it can be bewildering figuring out why -- beyond rights availability, I guess -- certain shows become unavoidable while others remain obscure. The fact that The Office is so much more well known than Peep Show, for instance, is just nuts. I'm not knocking The Office -- it's just that Peep Show is in some ways the perfect companion piece to it, in its early seasons.
Peep Show's one of those British sitcoms where every season is like six episodes long, so the fact that there are eight seasons shouldn't intimidate you - that's a total viewing time of, what, about the first season of Lost?
The name refers to the heavy use of point of view shots, especially but not entirely of the two main characters, and if it were an American show, it would probably commit entirely to that gimmick, the way How I Met Your Mother spent ten years getting around to meeting the mother and then stopped. But it isn't, and doesn't. The use of voiceover for the inner thoughts of the two leads serves the same purpose as the interview cutaways in The Office and other faux documentaries, but to different effect, since you don't have to cut away from the scene.
There's a long tradition of terrible people in comedy, obviously, whether as a single member in the cast (Ralph Kramden's a blowhard who abuses everyone around him, Larry David spends most of Curb trying to find the path that indulges his self-centeredness while mitigating its consequences) or, in the post-Seinfeld world, all of the main characters. Sometimes it's a source of a show's brilliance, like with Arrested Development, where Michael Bluth constantly congratulates himself for being better than the rest of his family but is a mediocre and self-serving negligent father who is only able to feel good about himself because of just how much worse the people surrounding him are; sometimes it makes a show just about unwatchable for me, like with Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens, or that spate of 2000s comedies about couples bonding over what terrible parents they were.
There's a more subtle sort of everyone is awful, too, which both versions of The Office capture. It's a mediocre kind of awfulness -- one the US version didn't dwell on very long, but gave you enough glimpses of to realize (until the final lackluster seasons) that, you know what, Jim is kind of a dick who is so sure that he's better than his mediocre job that he constantly belittles Dwight (who the show makes sure we realize is a genuinely good salesman) in large part because Dwight has the gall to care about the job.
One of the things that weakens the U.S. Office is that it doesn't really fully admit Jim's dickishness or the general mediocrity of the whole bunch -- in part because it can't, not when it has 100 or more episodes to fill and a once-great network to save, and it needs to be likable. So instead we get these increasingly rosy glasses forced on us as we watch these grey tones play out, and this has a lot to do with why the show started to grate even before Michael left.
Enter Peep Show.
Like Jim, Mark Corrigan (David Mitchell) is an office drone at some fucking business that does some fucking thing that we don't need to care about and has no inherent interest (Peep Show never lampoons the meaningless of the business the way The Office does, but that's a whole nother tangent). Like Jim, he has a thing for one of his co-workers, Sophie. Unlike Pam, Sophie isn't taken -- Mark is just timid, anxious, constantly self-questioning (with good reason, admittedly), and has a rival in the form of alpha workmate Jeff.
Everything plays out the way you think ...
... insofar as, you know, Mark and Sophie flirt, and almost get together but don't, and almost get together but don't, and then do get together ...
... and here's the thing. Sophie is fucking awful.
Mark is fucking awful.
They are not fucking awful in ways that are good for or enjoyable to each other. Neither actually likes each other at all by the time they're truly together, which makes for some of the funniest scenes in the series.
I don't mean they're awful like the Always Sunny people, like oh, they've found each other, they can be awful together, I mean they are just really unpleasant to be around, and self-serving and self-absorbed, and each is manipulative but not really all that good at being manipulative so it doesn't come off as being charming or anything, and neither really cares about very much except for Mark's obsession with history (and fascism) and with being respected, and whatever it is that drives Sophie.
And this is all fantastic!
Meanwhile Jeremy (Robert Webb) is Mark's roommate and best friend since college. He's a would-be musician who's been sponging off Mark, but it's clear how badly Mark needs him, and in how many different ways -- the friendship is handled better than in most sitcoms that revolve around A Couple Of Bros, but of course it helps that both of them are absolutely terrible people, that each knows how terrible the other is, that each is accustomed to the other's terribleness, and that they have basically come to terms with this. At one point Jeremy tells himself that he's Mark's "the one," and he's not wrong -- he's the only person Mark can be himself with without being rejected, and vice versa. It's the glue of the series, and what connects many otherwise unrelated plots (though Peep Show has a gift, as with Arrested Development or Seinfeld, for tying disparate elements together, often when one self-serving character sabotages another).
I've barely scratched the surface of a series that features rampant drug use, each lead's occasional homosexual meanderings, elaborate lies that never work out, etc. It's on both Netflix and Hulu and it's one of the all-time great comedies.
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