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Peep Show (2003)
8.7/10on IMDb
First aired
Start here, because everything else on this list grows out of it. David Mitchell's uptight Mark and Robert Webb's feckless Jez share an apartment, and the camera shows you what each of them sees while a voice-over gives you every petty, panicked thought they are too cowardly to say out loud. That gap between the inner monologue and the mumbled reality is the engine of the cringe.
Armstrong and Bain created it with Andrew O'Connor, and it ran on Channel 4 from 2003 to 2015 across nine series and 54 episodes, winning the BAFTA for Best Situation Comedy in 2008. It is a sitcom that rarely loses its nerve, and the later series hold up better than most long-running comedies do.
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The Old Guys (2009)
7.2/10on IMDb
First aired
The odd one out, and worth knowing as such. This is the partnership in a gentler, more traditional BBC One mode: two aging housemates, Roger Lloyd-Pack's Tom and Clive Swift's Roy, both quietly sweet on Jane Asher's Sally across the street, with Roy convinced he is one of the country's leading intellectuals.
The self-delusion is pure Armstrong and Bain, but the cruelty is dialed down and the laughs come in a conventional sitcom rhythm. It ran for two short series in 2009 and 2010, 12 episodes in all, so it is a quick watch for completists rather than an essential one. Come for Lloyd-Pack and Swift sparring, and for Katherine Parkinson as Tom's daughter.
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Fresh Meat (2011)
7.8/10on IMDb
First aired
If Peep Show is about men in their thirties failing at adulthood, Fresh Meat is the prequel nobody asked for and everyone needed: six students thrown together in a shared house off campus at a fictional Manchester university, all trying to reinvent themselves and mostly making it worse.
It is a comedy-drama rather than a pure sitcom, with longer episodes of around 40 minutes that let relationships breathe and sour. Jack Whitehall's posh, oblivious JP and Zawe Ashton's chaotic Vod are the standouts, and Peep Show fans get Robert Webb as a geology lecturer. It ran on Channel 4 from 2011 to 2016 across four series, and the first one won Best New Comedy at the British Comedy Awards.
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Babylon (2014)
7.1/10on IMDb
First aired
The missing link between the sitcoms and Succession, and the one most fans have never seen. Brit Marling plays Liz Garvey, an American brought in as communications director to modernize London's Metropolitan Police, with James Nesbitt as the commissioner she has to manage.
The comedy comes from spin, institutional cowardice and people saying the right thing for the wrong reasons, which is exactly the muscle Armstrong would flex at Waystar RoyCo. Danny Boyle co-created it with Armstrong, Bain and Robert Jones and directed the pilot. Be warned that it amounts to that pilot and one six-episode series, all aired in 2014, and its writers have said a return is unlikely, so treat it as a self-contained curiosity.
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Ill Behaviour (2017)
6.7/10on IMDb
First aired
Sam Bain's first series written on his own, and proof that the bone-deep awkwardness of Peep Show was not all Armstrong. Charlie, played by Tom Riley, is diagnosed with a readily treatable cancer and decides coffee enemas and homeopathy will do the job, so his friends Joel and Tess lock him in a cellar and inject him with chemotherapy drugs against his will, helped by Lizzy Caplan as a deregistered American doctor.
It is a black comedy that keeps pushing a terrible idea further than seems possible, which makes it the closest thing on this list to the Roys' sense of loyalty as a weapon. It is a short 2017 miniseries that aired on BBC Two in Britain and Showtime in the US, so it fits into a single weekend.
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Succession (2018)
8.8/10on IMDb
First aired
Jesse Armstrong's solo creation, and the same joke as Peep Show played for billions. Brian Cox's Logan Roy runs the media and entertainment conglomerate Waystar RoyCo, and his children circle the throne while undermining themselves at every turn, with insults as finely tooled as anything Mark ever muttered in that apartment.
If you came here from the sitcoms, know that the first season takes a few episodes to find its footing before the family's dysfunction turns gripping. It ran on HBO for four seasons and 39 episodes from 2018 to 2023 and won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series three times. Watch it to the end: the final season is the rare one that lands.
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