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Plebs (2013)
7.8/10on IMDb
First aired
Ancient Rome as a roommate comedy. Marcus, Stylax and their slave Grumio are new arrivals from the provinces trying to get ahead in the big city, and the show's whole trick is having them talk like modern guys about dates, bosses and rent while surrounded by togas and amphorae.
It ran for five series on ITV2 from 2013 to 2019, then signed off with a feature-length special, Plebs: Soldiers of Rome, in 2022, in which the boys join the army in peacetime. The tone stays cheerfully low-brow throughout: think a Roman Inbetweeners rather than a lecture on the Republic.
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Up Pompeii! (1969)
7.6/10on IMDb
First aired
The grandfather of the Roman sitcom. Frankie Howerd plays Lurcio, a slave in pre-eruption Pompeii, and every episode opens with him trying to deliver a prologue to the audience, only for it to be interrupted, usually by the doom-laden warnings of the prophetess Senna.
Talbot Rothwell, who wrote for the Carry On films, scripted the first series, and it shows: the innuendo comes thick and fast, and Howerd keeps breaking the fourth wall with asides. Only two short series aired, in 1969 and 1970, so it is an easy evening's binge. Go in expecting music-hall smut, not satire, and the double entendres are period pieces in their own right.
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Norsemen (2016)
7.7/10on IMDb
First aired
Vikings with HR problems. Set in the village of Norheim around the year 790, this Norwegian comedy treats raiding, slavery, political rivalry and blood feuds with the deadpan of an office sitcom, as new ideas keep upending village life.
The makers filmed every scene twice, once in Norwegian and once in English, so the Netflix English version is not a dub. Three short seasons ran from 2016 to 2020; the third, named Season 0, tells the story that led up to the first, so it plays best after the other two despite the name.
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Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (1989)
7.8/10on IMDb
First aired
Robin Hood, flipped. Tony Robinson, Baldrick himself, created and wrote this BBC series and plays the tax-obsessed Sheriff of Nottingham, while Marian leads the outlaw gang and Robin is a vain, incompetent ex-tailor who fell into the leader's job by accident.
It was made for children and won the 1990 BAFTA for Best Children's Programme, but the jokes about medieval peasant misery and a pompous, scheming Sheriff land just as well with adults. Four series ran from 1989 to 1994, and setting the whole thing in the very real Nottinghamshire town of Worksop is part of the fun.
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The Decameron (2024)
6.5/10on IMDb
First aired
A plague comedy, and a surprisingly sharp one. In 1348, as the Black Death sweeps Florence, a group of nobles and their servants hole up at a countryside villa, and the class lines start to buckle the moment the food and the pecking order are in doubt.
Kathleen Jordan loosely drew on Boccaccio's 14th-century story collection, keeping the escape-the-pestilence setup and throwing out the reverence. It is one eight-episode season on Netflix from 2024, so it suits anyone wanting a self-contained watch with a dark streak.
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Blackadder (1983)
8.0/10on IMDb
First aired
The essential one. Each series drops a new Edmund Blackadder into a different century: 1485 at the end of the Middle Ages, Elizabeth I's court, the Regency, and finally the trenches of 1917.
Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis wrote the first series, and it is the weakest; Ben Elton replaced Atkinson as Curtis's co-writer from Blackadder II, and that is where most people should start. The jokes about ruffs, Baldrick's turnips and royal idiocy are sublime, and Blackadder Goes Forth turns the comedy into something genuinely moving by its final scene. A 2004 BBC poll voted it Britain's second-best sitcom, behind only Only Fools and Horses.
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Upstart Crow (2016)
7.7/10on IMDb
First aired
Shakespeare as a put-upon writer with a commute. Ben Elton's BBC Two sitcom casts David Mitchell as the Bard from 1592 onwards, shuttling between London theaters and his family in Stratford, and moaning about coach journeys exactly the way people moan about motorways and railways today.
Every episode borrows from one or more of the plays, so fans of the canon get a double layer of jokes, and Will keeps claiming credit for phrases that were already old. Three series and two Christmas specials ran from 2016, with a final special in December 2020. Elton's love of a groan-worthy pun is on full display, which is a feature or a warning depending on your taste.
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Our Flag Means Death (2022)
7.7/10on IMDb
First aired
A gentleman's midlife crisis in the Golden Age of Piracy. In 1717, Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) swaps his comfortable life for a pirate ship he has no idea how to run, struggles to earn his crew's respect, and soon crosses paths with Blackbeard (Taika Waititi).
What starts as a silly fish-out-of-water comedy turns into one of TV's warmest love stories, and that shift is the reason to watch. David Jenkins created it for HBO Max; Max canceled it after two seasons, 18 episodes in all, so the story ends with threads still loose.
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The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin (2024)
7.0/10on IMDb
First aired
The title is a promise, and the show keeps it. Noel Fielding plays the real highwayman Dick Turpin, recast as the reluctant leader of a band of outlaws who must keep outwitting a thoroughly corrupt lawman, Jonathan Wilde.
History here is a dressing-up box: tricorn hats, coaching inns and gallows, worn with Fielding's usual surreal glee rather than any interest in the facts. It premiered on Apple TV+ in March 2024. A second season was scrapped partway through production, and one extra episode, the seventh, came out in October 2025, so treat it as a single short run.
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The Great (2020)
8.1/10on IMDb
First aired
It says so on screen: The Great: An Occasionally True Story. Tony McNamara takes 18th-century Russia and Catherine's rise from nobody to empress, then cheerfully ignores whatever gets in the way of a good line, which is why Hulu billed it as anti-historical.
Elle Fanning's Catherine is an idealist with very modern ideas about books and progress, stuck at a court of drunks, and Nicholas Hoult's Emperor Peter III is a magnificent monster of a husband. The swearing is constant and the violence sudden. Three seasons ran on Hulu from 2020 to 2023, and the third was the last.
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Dickinson (2019)
7.6/10on IMDb
First aired
Emily Dickinson as a 19th-century teenage rebel. Hailee Steinfeld plays the poet, and Alena Smith's series deliberately mixes period bonnets and parlor manners with modern language, modern music and very modern feelings about parents, fame and love.
It is a comedy with real ambition: the anachronisms are a way into the poems, not a gimmick, and it won a Peabody Award, the first for an Apple TV+ show. Three seasons and 30 episodes ran from 2019 to 2021, enough to watch a whole arc without a cliffhanger left hanging.
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Year of the Rabbit (2019)
7.4/10on IMDb
First aired
A filthy Victorian cop show spoof. Matt Berry is Detective Inspector Rabbit, a hardened booze-hound policing London in 1887 whose heart keeps stopping at the worst possible moments, with Susan Wokoma alongside him as co-lead.
Kevin Cecil and Andy Riley created it for Channel 4 in 2019, and Berry's booming delivery makes every grubby gaslit alley funnier. There is only one six-episode series, ideal for a weekend, and it leans hard on crude jokes, so it is not one for the in-laws.
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Another Period (2015)
7.4/10on IMDb
First aired
What if the Kardashians lived in a Gilded Age mansion? Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome created and star in this Comedy Central spoof as Lillian and Beatrice Bellacourt, daughters of Newport, Rhode Island's first family at the turn of the 20th century, filmed as if for a reality show.
The joke cuts both ways, mocking reality TV vanity and the upstairs-downstairs reverence of shows like Downton Abbey at once, and the servants get some of the best lines. It ran for three seasons and 32 episodes from 2015 to 2018, and the humor is crude, so treat it as a late-night watch.
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Jeeves and Wooster (1990)
8.4/10on IMDb
First aired
Pure P. G. Wodehouse, served with a cocktail. Hugh Laurie is Bertie Wooster, an affable young gentleman of the idle rich, and Stephen Fry is Jeeves, the highly competent valet who quietly gets him out of every engagement, theft and aunt-related disaster.
Clive Exton adapted the stories for ITV, setting them somewhere between the late 1920s and the 1930s, in Britain and America. The comedy is gentle and verbal rather than belly laughs, and the four series from 1990 to 1993 are a perfect antidote to anything gritty. The third series won a BAFTA for its design.
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Dad's Army (1968)
8.1/10on IMDb
First aired
The Home Guard of the fictional seaside town of Walmington-on-Sea, preparing for a German invasion with more pomp than equipment. Jimmy Perry and David Croft's BBC sitcom ran for nine series and 80 episodes from 1968 to 1977, and a 2001 Channel 4 poll ranked its Captain Mainwaring 21st among the 100 Greatest TV Characters.
Its affection for the volunteers keeps it from cruelty: the jokes come from vanity, class and age rather than from mocking the war effort. It came fourth in the BBC's 2004 poll for Britain's Best Sitcom. Three of the original episodes are lost, so the run you can watch is slightly short of the full 80.
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'Allo 'Allo! (1984)
8.4/10on IMDb
First aired
Occupied France as a farce. René Artois runs a café in the town of Nouvion and gets dragged into the Resistance's schemes while juggling German officers, his wife and the waitresses, and a stolen painting of a bare-breasted Madonna keeps turning up hidden in a sausage.
David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd made it as a parody of the earnest BBC wartime drama Secret Army, and its catchphrases, Officer Crabtree's mangled "good moaning" above all, became national property. Nine series ran from 1984 to 1992 after a 1982 pilot. The national stereotypes are broad, which is the whole joke but also the main thing that dates it.
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Hogan's Heroes (1965)
7.8/10on IMDb
First aired
A prisoner-of-war camp where the prisoners are secretly in charge. Colonel Hogan runs an Allied sabotage operation from inside Stalag 13, a German camp for captured airmen, right under the noses of a vain commandant and Sergeant Schultz, the guard who famously knows nothing.
The premise sounds tasteless until you learn who made it work: the actors in the four main German roles were all Jewish or from Jewish families, Werner Klemperer, John Banner and Leon Askin had all escaped the Nazis, and Robert Clary, who played the French prisoner LeBeau, had spent three years in a concentration camp. CBS ran it for six seasons and 168 episodes from 1965 to 1971, and its sitcom rhythms are very much of their decade.
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M*A*S*H (1972)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
The 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, stuck in the Korean War of the early 1950s, where doctors and nurses fight horror with practical jokes, gin and insubordination. It ran 11 seasons on CBS from 1972 to 1983, far longer than the war itself.
M*A*S*H is the list's proof that a period comedy can carry real weight: the laughs sit beside the operating table, and later seasons lean into drama. Its finale, Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, was the most-watched broadcast in US television history from 1983 until 2010. Early seasons are the funniest; the final ones are the most moving.
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The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017)
8.6/10on IMDb
First aired
A 1958 Manhattan housewife discovers she is a natural at stand-up. Rachel Brosnahan's Midge Maisel loses the perfect Upper West Side life and finds a microphone, and Amy Sherman-Palladino's rapid-fire dialogue does the rest.
The period is lavish, from the B. Altman cosmetics counter to a Catskills resort and the Gaslight Cafe, and the comedy is about a woman breaking into a man's trade in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in 2018 and ran for five seasons on Prime Video until 2023. It is a comedy-drama rather than a sitcom, and the final season flashes forward to later decades.
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Horrible Histories (2009)
8.7/10on IMDb
First aired
The era-hopper for all ages. Based on Terry Deary's bestselling books, this CBBC sketch and song show leaps between periods from the Stone Age onwards, finding the gruesome, gross and genuinely surprising details the school syllabus skipped.
Do not let the children's label put you off: the original five series from 2009 to 2014, with Mathew Baynton, Simon Farnaby, Martha Howe-Douglas, Jim Howick, Laurence Rickard and Ben Willbond, were sharp enough to win two British Comedy Awards alongside several BAFTA Children's Awards. The jokes are silly, the facts are the fun part, and the pop parodies are earworms.
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History of the World: Part II (2023)
5.5/10on IMDb
First aired
Mel Brooks finally made his sequel, 42 years late. This Hulu sketch series follows his 1981 film History of the World, Part I, and was written and produced by Brooks with Wanda Sykes, Nick Kroll, Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen.
Expect the same scattershot spirit: sketches jump between eras and famous figures, and the hit rate varies, as sketch comedy does, but the best bits have the old Brooks shamelessness. All eight episodes arrived across four nights in March 2023, so it works as a dip-in watch rather than a binge with a story.
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