← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
What is Your Comfort Television Show?
00:23:00
We hear about your favorite comfort shows.
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Show Host (Allison)
This is all of it on WNYC I' and we are diving into a topic that resonates with many of us. Comfort Television Slate reported to the glossy legal drama Suits became a runaway hit on Netflix following surges in viewership for shows like the Office, Friends and Girls. A morning consult report suggests that one of the reasons for this could be that 34% of Gen Z adults prefer to watch shows that already have finished airing. You have your class sitcoms, you have your feel good series, or those shows you return to time and time again for a sense of familiarity and solace. Vulture TV critic and friend of the show Katherine Van Arendonk joins us now to discuss these trends and to offer her suggestion for some new comfort shows. Hi Katherine.
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Co-Host or Producer
Hello listeners.
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Show Host (Allison)
We wanna hear your suggestions. What's your favorite show to curl up on the couch and watch after work? Are you more of a lawn or SVU marathon viewer or do you like to binge countless hours of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills? Call us and tell us what shows you're into. 2124-3396-9221-2433-W sorry, what WNYC do you find comfort in? True crime shows? Sitcoms? Critically acclaimed dramas? What is it about these shows that keeps you coming back? Our number 2124-339692-22433 wnyc. Or you can hit us up on social media. All of it. Wnyc. So what elements do a comforting show need? What do you think?
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Katherine Van Arendonk
So for me, a comfort show has one central quality, but that quality can look like a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For me, a comfort show has some element of familiar to it. And that familiarity does not necessarily mean that it's a show that you've already seen. And it doesn't even necessarily mean that it's a show that you've seen seen like a lot of other shows like, or that the show is itself repetitive, although sometimes that's what it is, but that it has something about it that feels like the shape of a thing that you already know, maybe slightly modified into a different form so that you get that really excellent. That like super satisfying TV mix of a thing that you know and feels new at the same time. This is like the peak of what a comfort television show is for me. And I think it's why for so many people procedurals are comfort television, even though they are shows about murder. Which is a question that I feel like comes up all the time. It's like, why. Why are so many people's comfort shows also shows about. About crime? And I think one of the main reasons is that they have this really beautiful internal structure that means that it is new every time. It's a different case every time. You get different guest stars every time. And you know exactly the shape of it. You know, the detective's gonna say a little snarky thing when they find the body, you know, they're gonna have the red herring and then they're gonna have the cork. And there it's that part of it, that structural repetition that is the comforting familiarity there.
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Co-Host or Producer
With streaming. It's understandable why people would wanna watch new shows, but why do you think they're going back to look at old shows when you have so many. There's infinite number on our streaming services.
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Katherine Van Arendonk
Yeah, there's a couple reasons. And one of them is that new shows, very, very few new television shows are built like old shows.
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Co-Host or Producer
Oh, interesting. Tell me more.
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Katherine Van Arendonk
Well, an old television show, I mean, obviously it depends on how old we're talking. But let's say a show that like suits that became so incredibly popular in the last couple years, that show had 20 episodes a season and ran for many seasons. And so you, in order to have that sense of comfort, which I'm suggesting often requires at least a kernel of familiarity in some form. You need the same characters to show up over and over and over and over and over again for a long period of time. Like the comfort is that long term relationship that you are having with these people. And current streaming shows, it is very uncommon for a show to have more than eight episodes in a season, maybe 10. And it is very, very uncommon for that show to run more than three seasons, maybe four. And so they're just. There are very few shows out there that have that same kind of. I promise you, you will show up and you will have hours and hours and hours of access to whatever this world is. Once you're bought in, once you've committed to the activation energy of like understanding who all these people are, then you can coast for quite a long time. It's really com. I mean, the other thing that I would say about new television is that you were mentioning that there's this large group of Gen Z adults who prefer to watch shows that have already finished. And it is the same anxiety now that people have had about television for. For quite a long time, decades. That sense of like, I don't want to get invested in something and not know that it will have an ending. And so if you already go into it understanding exactly how much there's going to be, you can e either that's because you know that it's going to have a satisfying ending. You can kind of pre Google a little bit and be like, all right, this was not canceled ahead of its time. People did not get really mad about it. I don't really know exactly what happens, but it seems like it's going to be okay. So that's one. Or you say, all right, I know exactly how much of this show there is. I'm going to watch it every night. That's going to get me through the next six weeks and then I'll find something else. You just. You have this more stable relationship with the text.
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Show Host (Allison)
Let's go back to 1990. On your list is Northern Exposure. What's the log line for Northern Exposure?
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Katherine Van Arendonk
Northern Exposure is about a. It begins in about a doctor who comes to work in Alaska. He's from New York. It's a classic kind of fish out of water story. It is an hour long. We would call it a dramedy, although there are very many shows on television that really fit this kind of thing. It's an hour long, but it is not doing a crime kind of story. It is about the relationships of all of these people who live in this little tiny Alaskan town. And there's a strange radio DJ and there's a strange guy who runs the bar and there's a strange lady who work like. It just is one of those quirky small town kinds of shows. Actually one of its showrunners is David Chase who went on to run the Sopranos, which is like one of those fascinating bits of TV history. But Northern Exposure to me is just this ultimate sense of the rhythm of this place. The rhythm of this show is different. It's slower than like typical life for certainly for me in my life where I'm running around after my kids and I'm constantly. It's just everyone's kind of there in the town and they'll walk across the street. The opening credits are of the town sort of early in the morning before anyone has woken up and there's a moose walking down the main street. And it is about all of the things that happen, you know, to these people. They get these weird, there's like surreal dream sequence episodes, all the kinds of crazy things that you could do in the 90s when you had to fill over 20 hours of television in a season. And I just, I just love that show. And it's the kind of model of thing that I feel like TV is not good at making now, and I really miss.
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Show Host (Allison)
Let's take some calls.
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Katherine Van Arendonk
Let's talk to Ken.
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Show Host (Allison)
Hi, Ken, thanks for calling all of it.
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Caller Ken
Hey, Allison, how are you doing?
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Show Host (Allison)
Great.
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US Cellular Prepaid Announcer
Yeah, great.
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Caller Ken
My, I wouldn't exactly call them comfort shows, but I, I, I've been, I binged Space Force, which ran for two seasons and, and was, I think it was, it was, it was canceled or they, they stopped producing it due to the pandemic. But Space Force was absolutely brilliant, as was Lady Dynamite with Maria Bamford. And the one that I'm watching now, which has several seasons, I never saw it when it was first on is Arrested Development. Brilliant, brilliant comedy ride.
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Co-Host or Producer
Thank you so much for calling in. Let's talk to Linda from Huntington on line two.
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Show Host (Allison)
Hi, Linda.
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Caller Linda / Minnie / Joan
Hi, Alison. It's so nice to be with you again.
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Show Host (Allison)
Thank you.
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Co-Host or Producer
What have you been watching?
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Caller Linda / Minnie / Joan
Well, we have, we love to watch Everybody Loves Raymond and Schitt's Creek. Also just about any funny movie or nature show to mitigate some of the seriousness that's going on these days.
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Co-Host or Producer
Linda, thank you for calling as well.
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Show Host (Allison)
We're talking to Vulture TV critic Catherine.
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Co-Host or Producer
Van Arendonk about what makes a great comfort TV show. We love your suggestions. 212-433-9621-2433, WNYC. Do you find crime, true crime shows comforting?
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Katherine Van Arendonk
Yeah.
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Show Host (Allison)
Or sitcoms, of course.
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Co-Host or Producer
Maybe a critically acclaimed drama. You're into it. 212-433-9692. All right, we're gonna go over to the horror category.
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Show Host (Allison)
Evil.
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Co-Host or Producer
It started in 2019. What does the show deal with?
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Katherine Van Arendonk
So Evil is a show that it starts out sounding like a pretty, pretty straightforward network drama in the same way that a lot of Robert and Michelle King shows do. They also made the Good Wife and the Good Fight and often though, and they're currently making Elspeth on cbs, which is another great comfort watch recommendation. They tend to make these shows at the beginning that sound like a very straightforward. It's like a priest, a psychiatrist, psychologist, I think, and a sort of all around sciencey, handyman kind of skeptical guy. They are a team of three and they work Together to investigate paranormal things for the Catholic Church. And so you're like, oh, okay, that sounds like a kind of episodic. You know, it's going to. And it does. It has, like, they go in and it seems like this one particular Broadway producer who may or may not be based on some bad Broadway producers people have read about in the news, is cursed. And they're like, is he cursed by a demon and that's why he's behaving this way? And then you'll sort of move over and you'll have, you know, a kind of Rosemary's Babies episode. And. But the thing about that show is it retains all of that fantastic kind of episodic, like, what's the problem that's happening right now? And then as the show goes on, as their shows often do, it just gets weirder and weirder and more complicated. But also funny. For me, it also has this incredibly important quality that a comfort TV show has to have, which is that I turn that TV show on and I know that it is going to be competently and carefully made in every single episode. And there are so few shows like that right now. It just ended. There are four seasons. I'm deeply sad that it's gonna be off the TV right now. And I just. Everyone who's looking for a new show and has any horror adjacent desires, please check that one out.
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Show Host (Allison)
We are talking about Comfort Television with Katherine Von Arendog. After a quick break, we'll hear more of your calls and some of your texts, as well as some new comfort tv. Stay with us. We're talking comfort TV shows with Katherine Van Arendonk as well as you, dear listener. Let's talk to Minnie. Hi, Minnie.
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Caller Linda / Minnie / Joan
Hey there. So, yeah, my comfort TV show is definitely the Office. But I recently heard Mindy Kaelin say that. But it's actually more of a guilty pleasure because, you know, we wouldn't have characters like Michael Scott on the air these days. So, I don't know. I was wondering if it was a comfort show or is it a guilty pleasure? And that's why we like to curl up with it. Cause we like to be bad.
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Show Host (Allison)
Such a good question. You know, Katherine, that's very interesting. Cause during my time away, I watched Will and Grace from the beginning. And it was amazing what they got away with on network television. Some of the things they said.
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Katherine Van Arendonk
Absolutely.
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Show Host (Allison)
What do you think about that sort of diving back into the yesteryear of tv?
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Katherine Van Arendonk
Well, I mean, I think it's really great. And I think everyone should do it all the Time. Like, I think it should be a regular part of our diets, not just in tv, but in any kind of media, in part, for exactly the thing that Minnie was talking about. The sense that, like, you know, we tend to think of ourselves at any particular contemporary moment as being, like, the most aware, the most sort of pot daring, the comedy is the most avant garde. And then you will go back and realize that people were doing all kinds of stuff that actually was. I mean, in this sort of, like, ooh, I definitely wouldn't tell that joke right now. But also, like, oh, wow, I. I can't believe people were joking about that then. I thought we weren't even there yet. And I think it's really important not to sort of put earlier works of media in this box that says, like, it was. It was exactly perfect or it was completely terrible. And to really think about, like, what that. What any of those comedies say about that moment. It's, I think, notable that they're both comedies because that tends to be the genre that. Where we sort of feel out where those boundaries of. Of comfort are the most. I do think there's also a really interesting relationship between the idea of comfort television and guilty pleasure. Right. What. What exactly is the friction there? Because I think often people think of those things in the same way. I think sometimes the guilty pleasure is comforting partly because it has that little edge of naughtiness, which is what some people are looking for in their comfort television. But, I mean, these are. Things are so personal, and I think it's so good to kind of look within yourself and be like, all right, what is it exactly that I find comforting? Like, I wonder why that is.
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Show Host (Allison)
Got a text that says, I love the sitcoms MASH and the Exes. I'm a younger person. And while MASH is an older show, it is a perfect blend of hilarity and deep meaning, which I found very.
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Katherine Van Arendonk
100%.
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Show Host (Allison)
Yeah.
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Katherine Van Arendonk
100%, yeah.
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Show Host (Allison)
One of your shows that you have on your list isn't necessarily a new show. Well, it is a new show, but it's an old premise. The Columbo presence, Poker Face, it's described as a mystery of the week, where the lead character knows who the criminal is. Natasha Leone is our hero. What's her story?
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Katherine Van Arendonk
So the idea of Poker Face, it's on Peacock, and it is a very old feeling kind of television show, as you say. The premise is that she can tell when people are lying, and in the very first episode, she's working in a casino. She's just a regular Kind of person who happens to get tangled up in a crime. And because she can tell when people lie, she. Her friend gets in trouble, she wants to get her friend out and then discovers that she is now, you know, events have taken her up and sort of spit her out. And this is her life now. And so she. She's on the run for the rest of the series and travels from town to town and as a person like this does on a show like this, perpetually finds herself involved in these situations where she wants to help people and can. Because she can suss out when people are trying to conceal something. And it's comforting in a bunch of ways. One is that it has that very sort of episodic mystery thing, which tends to really comfort people. But Columbo structure in particular means that you see the crime at the beginning of the episode, and then what you're watching, watching is not how you like who did it. You already know who did it. What you're watching is just her solving it. So it has this real competence element to it that is just enough suspenseful, but also undermines a lot of that is about the process of the thing as much as it is about the question, which I always. Man, I love it when someone's competent on television.
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Show Host (Allison)
Here's an episode. Here's a clip from the episode three of the show. Charlie, that's her character, is talking to a character played by Lil Rel Howery. He's the owner of a popular barbecue place whose brother has just died. She knows they're in his office. And Charlie speaks first.
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Actor (Charlie)
I think maybe the dog saw something related to your brother's death.
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Actor (Lil Rel Howery)
Like what?
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Actor (Charlie)
Like, I don't know, malfeasance.
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Actor (Lil Rel Howery)
Malfeasance.
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Actor (Charlie)
Something that someone didn't want it to see and they felt that the dog had to be signed.
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Actor (Lil Rel Howery)
I mean, you do know dogs can't talk, right?
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Actor (Charlie)
Well, nobody's saying dogs can talk.
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Actor (Lil Rel Howery)
So what are you saying, Charlie? Well.
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Actor (Charlie)
He said he'd tell me later. The last time George and I talked, he said he'd tell me something later, and he believed it. And that means, you know, he thought he'd be alive at the end of the night. Night.
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Actor (Lil Rel Howery)
Look, we're all taking this really hard. Charlie, do you know I will give all of this up to have my brother back?
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Katherine Van Arendonk
Sorry.
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Show Host (Allison)
She knows. She knows. Star Trek, the ultimate comfort. Television. Thank you for that text, Monk, the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the Bureau, the West Wing gives me hope that politics can improve. Let's move on to, let's say, historical fiction. You have All Creatures Great and Small. This is available on pbs. What are the books? This was based off a book. What are the books about?
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Katherine Van Arendonk
So the books are about. They are kind of semi autobiographical, slightly fictionalized books by James Herriot. And they are about a veterinarian who is working in the Yorkshire Dales in sort of before and during and after World War II in England. And he is working, particularly in these areas where you're not really a vet, for household pets. You are a little bit. But you are working with livestock. These are these animals that are people's livelihoods. And it's your ability to keep them alive and healthy is an important part of the economy of this, of this whole area. The All Creatures Great and Small adaptation is one of the best, most poignant, most deeply comforting adaptations I have seen on TV in a while. It showed up the first season, came out during the pandemic. I think I may have watched it like three times, which I. You. I mean that for me, that's saying something. I think my mom has watched it, like, more than that times. And it is just the performances are beautiful. The balance of kind of humor and humanity for all those PBS moms and dads out there. I know you know who you are. If for some reason you have not seen this one, it is gonna be a treat for you. And there have been four seasons since then. There's a fifth series that's gonna be coming out. A beloved character who was not in the past season will be back in the future. So that's gonna be very exciting. And that show is just such a reliable standby for me.
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Co-Host or Producer
Someone else who likes PBS is Bobby in Queens.
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Show Host (Allison)
Hi, Bobby.
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Caller Ken
Hi. How are you doing?
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Katherine Van Arendonk
Great.
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Caller Linda / Minnie / Joan
Yes.
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Caller Ken
Speaking of pbs, my comfort watch is and has always been Antiques Roadshow.
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Katherine Van Arendonk
Yes, I love that.
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Co-Host or Producer
Thank you so much for calling in. To add to that, you do have a reality television show on your list, the Traitors. Real quick, Give us the Traitors.
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Katherine Van Arendonk
Oh, the Traitors is a really great show. And there's a British version, there's an Australian version. The idea, basically, is that a bunch of people show up in this castle. Some of them are what are called the faithful, some of them are what are called traitors. And the faithful are trying to figure out who the traitors are. And one every night, somebody gets, quote, unquote, murdered. There's a lot that is comforting about this show. Mostly that it's sort of low stakes, high drama, which is, I think, what reality TV does the best, because everyone's playing this game. Everyone's intensely into it. The American version, the host is Alan Cumming. He is absolutely crushing that job, wearing incredible kilts. And you just, you fall into the traitors and then your weekend is set.
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Co-Host or Producer
Let's talk to Joan. Hi, Joan. Real quick, if you can.
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Caller Joan
Okay. Well, I wanted to say first of all that it's very much like when you have a young child and the child wants to hear the same book over and over and over again without any skipping of pages. And I think that's what comfort TV is. And for me, it's Grace and Frankie because it's really about female friendship, which I really love. And now that I watch it over and over again, I can actually knit while I'm watching because I don't have to keep my eyes glued to the screen every minute.
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Show Host (Allison)
Thank you so much for your recommendation. One last recommendation. One thing you want people to think about.
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Katherine Van Arendonk
Oh, boy. You know, I just want to say, if you haven't seen the Australian sitcom Colin from accounts, you can watch it on, I believe it's on Paramount. Plus, I love that show. There's a second season that's coming out shortly. For me, it's an ideal kind of sitcom where it's about real people. It's funny. I could not believe how much I loved and absorbed that first season. I'm so excited for season two. And it has that distinctly bright Britishy feeling of a sitcom where the barbs are sharp and then underneath everyone is just all gooey sweet for each other, which is one of my favorite combinations from any kind of sitcom.
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Show Host (Allison)
Thanks to everybody who called and texted in. And thanks to Vulture TV critic Katherine Van Arendonk for talking comfort TV shows. Hey, it's really nice to talk to you again, Katherine.
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Katherine Van Arendonk
Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks for asking me.
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