25 best comedy series to watch right now (2024)

In a TV age where The Bear – a show with the stressy power to induce heart palpitations – is scooping up best comedy Emmys left, right and centre, attempting a definition of what comedy is and identifying which are the good ones is a tricky business.

We now have countless good comedy-dramas to pick from, as well as animated funnies centred around the likes of an alcoholic cartoon scientist and his nitwit grandson. But for the sake of ease, we've chosen to leave listing all the very good and very funny cartoon stuff for another day.

So which are the out-and-out comedies where a good time is guaranteed on a streaming service a few keyboard clicks away? We've boiled things down to live-action comedies which are quite clearly mainly trying to make you laugh.

We're guessing you've already seen the comedy greats out there – Friends, The Office, Vicar of Dibley, etc – so we've tried to pick a selection of more recent comedies which you can stream right now. Feast upon the joy below.

Ghosts

Like the best of British shows, Ghosts knew exactly when to bring things to a close without ever outstaying its welcome. Instead, its latest, fifth season left us wanting more, particularly for a show that seemed it could go on forever – if only hampered by the actors ageing out of the frozen-in-time faces of the needy ghosts they were playing.

The premise is a bit like a Homes Under the Hammer episode where the couple are mid-renovation and suddenly discover an infestation of ghosts.

With the brains of Horrible Histories on board – a children's show that even adults can enjoy – it's no wonder Ghosts proved so popular and was given a remake across the pond. What initially looked like a broadening of the CBBC show's Stupid Deaths segment quickly took on a life of its own.

Watch Ghosts now on BBC iPlayer

Fleabag

Fleabag first hit screens with a bang in 2016. Then it returned over a year later with an even better second season, warping the word "kneel" in the minds of many women thanks to Andrew Scott's Hot Priest.

If you're worried about the law of diminishing returns when taking on a new TV show with more than one season, you're safe in the capable hands of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, because this two-and-done show sews everything up perfectly.

There's not much about Fleabag that hasn't been said, but all the praise is worthy. Head over to iPlayer and find out for yourself.

Watch Fleabag on BBC iPlayer

This Country

The BBC Three mockumentary launched the careers of siblings Daisy May and Charlie Cooper, who co-wrote the scripts while living at home together and went through several rounds of false starts before finally getting it on the air.

This Country was the show for and about those from the arse end of nowhere. Specifically, a small village a few miles north of Swindon.

While the early seasons relied on – very funny – gags aplenty, the latter entries found gaps in the storytelling to spotlight the sadness of social issues in these left-behind bits of the UK country.

Watch This Country on BBC iPlayer

Black Ops

This chaotic BBC comedy sees two under-qualified community support officers unwillingly promoted to undercover detectives in the South London criminal underworld. High stakes and hijinks ensue.

With a second six-part season already on the way, you can binge Black Ops to get in on the comic timing of what's to come.

Watch Black Ops on BBC iPlayer

Girls

Lena Dunham has made no secret of how closely her own life and friendships inspired her coming-of-age HBO hit Girls, telling the New York Times: "I was doing things like going out, having a bad date, coming into work at 5am with red wine still sloshing in my stomach, writing that as a scene and shooting it five days later. That is how immediate the feedback was."

The comedy satirised four Sex and the City-style twentysomething women fresh out of college and taking on New York, one botched job and bad relationship after another.

There are several laugh-out-loud moments in Girls we could mention, many of them involving delusional icon Marnie Michaels (Alison Williams). Just look up her skin-crawling acapella rendition of 'Stronger', to a silent, disbelieving room of partygoers.

Watch Girls on Sky

Veep

Armando Iannucci took The Thick of It and exported the template to Washington to make Veep. The darker political satire is filled with irredeemable characters who revolve around the central performance of Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the morally bankrupt VP Selina Meyer.

Iannucci once again found himself with a show intended to satirise politics but increasingly reflecting the real, dire and chaotic state of affairs within our systems of power.

It might not be as quotable as its predecessor, but it is just as enjoyable and there's even more of it. If you want a quick flavour of what this show holds, look no further than Louis-Dreyfus accepting her Emmy in character in 2013, alongside her long-suffering dogsbody Gary (Tony Hale – who gets left off the list of thanks).

Watch Veep on Sky

Hacks

While most of the shows on this list have wrapped up their runs, Hacks is going strong, having just aired its third season and with a fourth greenlit.

If you're not yet on the Deborah Vance wagon, the comedy legend is played by the acting legend Jean Smart. She (reluctantly) enlists lightly cancelled Gen Z comedian Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) to punch up her Vegas residency material. Soon enough, both their stars are rising.

The highlight might be the various shenanigans that unfold between Deborah's manager Jimmy (Paul W Downs – who also co-writes on the show) and his erstwhile assistant Kayla (Megan Stalter).

Given that the third season has been heralded by some as the best yet, you definitely don't want to miss out on this. It's arguably the best comedy on the air.

Buy Hacks boxset on Sky Store

Atlanta

Atlanta firmly stamped itself on TV screens as a show unlike any other. Every week you tuned in, you never knew what you were going to get, because with the creative power of Donald Glover and his writing team, it could and almost always was beyond what you would have imagined.

There was the entire episode Brian Tyree Henry's Paper Boi spent trying to get his hair cut. Or perhaps the one where Earn's on-and-off girlfriend Vanessa (Zazie Beats) went native in France and fell in with a cult of hand-eaters, who included Alexander Skarsgård among their ranks.

With a raft of standalone episodes, Atlanta tackled race and its implications from various angles, all while refusing to pander to the mainstream.

While the show did tail off in quality towards the end as it fell into more of an anthology format, Atlanta still had moments of brilliance with a distinctive aesthetic to the end.

Watch Atlanta on Disney+

Extraordinary

This offbeat Disney+ comedy has been a quiet but very quirky addition to the superhero content machine.

We're dropped into a world where everyone has a superpower (although some are less super than others – looking at the guy with the power to make anything into a PDF…). Except for our protagonist Jen (Máiréad Tyers), whose 18th birthday arrived and unlike all those around her, the milestone didn't come with some newfangled power.

The show operates as a thinly-veiled metaphor for how confusing and stressful your twenties can be and it's the debut screenwriting effort of Emma Moran, who was a shudder-worthy 28 years old when it first hit Disney+.

Watch Extraordinary on Disney+

Black-ish

Black-ish follows monied business exec Andre Johnson (Anthony Anderson) and his family's trials and tribulations, in classic sitcom style.

The sharply funny show takes on everything from race and sexism to the importance of family and community.

Gaining a coveted stamp of approval from Barack Obama, the sitcom treads the careful balance of issue-based storylines – featuring episodes on police brutality and ugly racial stereotypes – with good gags and a stand-out performance from Tracee Ellis-Ross as Andre's wife Rainbow.

Watch Black-ish on Disney+

Derry Girls

This C4 original (since acquired by Netflix) was short but sweet, with three brief seasons and a cracking final episode. Derry Girls is proof any show that kicks off to the tune of The Cranberries' 'Dreams' is well worth your time.

Set in Derry ("or Londonderry, depending on your persuasion") in the '90s, the show sees a group of teens muddle their way through life at a Catholic girls' school, as the Troubles rage around them. It might not sound like suitable comedy fodder, but it is. And it's on Netflix!

Watch Derry Girls on Netflix

Arrested Development

Arrested Development was one of those shows that got better the more you watched it, partially by design.

"Chance favours the well-prepared," creator Mitchell Hurwitz told the New York Times. "Somebody said that. So there was a lot of planning. I’d done a lot of callbacks in shows, and by the time I got to Arrested Development, I was thinking, "I’m going to call forward. I’m going to put in jokes that won’t be funny until you rewatch them."

When Netflix resurrected the show in 2013, it never quite resuscitated that comedy magic, but we'll always have the show's heyday on Fox, where it lampooned the rich Bluth family.

Watch Arrested Development on Netflix

Peep Show

Channel 4's longest-running sitcom might already be a cult classic now it's no longer on the air, but when it was, the show was in constant jeopardy of being axed.

Originally pitched as a live-action Beavis and Butt-Head, Peep Show minted the careers of writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (of Succession infamy), as well as stars David Mitchell and Robert Webb. They play the miserable "El Dude brothers" Mark and Jeremy, two disillusioned young-ish men coexisting in Croydon.

Executive producer Andrew O’Connor told the Guardian 20 years on from its debut: "The big hook of the show is the gap between what Mark and Jeremy present to the world and what they're really thinking. That's the genius of it."

The result of a lightning script, odd close-up camera techniques and never-ending voiceover monologues is weird but brilliant.

Watch Peep Show on Netflix

The Good Place

The Good Place sees a case of mistaken identity send Kristen Bell's Eleanor to heaven despite a life of wanton wrongdoing.

The show spun its wacky, out-of-the-box premise out into four seasons, but the high point of it all may have come at the end of the first, with a twist nobody saw coming.

The quality may have dipped in later seasons (that's becoming a common theme) but come for the belly laughs and stay for the meditations on existentialism and morality politics – as well as Manny Jacinto's cheekbones, of course.

Watch The Good Place on Netflix

The Big Bang Theory

Another sitcom with another group of friends just living their lives. But the twist was that The Big Bang Theory was one for the nerds, with a brainy bunch of socially awkward pals: Leonard, Sheldon, Howard and Raj.

For those of us who struggled to relate to the experience of being a dab hand at particle astrophysics, there was always neighbour Penny (Kaley Cuoco) to make us feel seen.

Watch The Big Bang Theory on Netflix

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

The cop sitcom came and went over eight seasons of police department funnies. While the show starred Saturday Night Live and The Lonely Island's Andy Samberg, it came to life with an ensemble cast constantly bouncing off each other, all while solving murders and busting cartels.

While the show's insistence on the intrinsic goodness of the police started to wear thin given the real-world context of feelings towards the police, Brooklyn Nine-Nine managed to wrap things up on a two-part high.

Watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Netflix

Schitt's Creek

Another sitcom! Netflix is drowning in them. Schitt's Creek sees the spoiled rich Rose family's assets seized – with the exception of a small town they once bought as a joke, where they are forced to decamp and take refuge. Hilarity ensues in this fish-out-of-water farce.

The show is a heartwarming hoot that has great queer representation and a forever TV icon in Catherine O'Hara's lush Moira Rose, with her ever-revolving set of kooky wigs.

Watch Schitt's Creek on Netflix

Motherland

If you ever thought there was a limit to how many times we could watch a character melt down in real time on screen, Motherland – specifically Anna Maxwell Martin's character Julia – shows the limit does not exist.

The BBC show's no-holds-barred picture of parenthood is so hilarious you can forget how the school runs with mothers on the brink of a nervous breakdown, facing off passive-aggressive tiger mums and leaning into midday drinking, are chilling scenes. The laughs come with occasional doses of horror.

Watch Motherland on Netflix

This coming-of-age comedy from the mind of Jack Rooke follows two new besties in their first year of university as they go through all the ups and downs that come with that first taste of independence.

The second season debuted in 2022 and our review promised it was even better than the first, with Rooke's writing "even more confident this time around, expertly navigating the fine line between tear-inducing laughs and tear-inducing sorrow in ways that are painfully true to life".

Watch Big Boys on Channel 4

Big Mood

Shortly before Nicola Coughlan returned to Bridgerton as Lady Whistledown, she played Maggie in Big Mood, whose friendship with bestie Eddie (Lydia West) is tested by her bipolar disorder diagnosis.

Our five-star review of the show described creator Camilla Whitehill's writing as "dangerously sharp and insightful".

Here's what it had to say about the show's comedy elements: "Big Mood may be a provocative watch with intentional messages but that doesn't hamper its ability to be utterly laugh-out-loud funny, only it's a dark and light and grey kind of comedy that resonates throughout the body. It's a show that's sad, frustrating, painful, awkward and plain bonkers funny.

"Shoutout to all the millennials who will understand every '90s and noughties reference, who will belt out the lyrics to Avril Lavigne's 'Nobody's Home' and will get Maggie's compulsion to stroke Love Actually star Joanna Page's face."

Watch Big Mood on Channel 4

The Inbetweeners

Many of the comedies on this list cemented their cult status by perfectly distilling a certain time in everyone's life. The Inbetweeners did that for secondary school. The show spawned two movies and the robust Cameo career of James Buckley.

The Inbetweeners wasn't hellbent on proving how exciting and aspirational the lives of these teenagers were, like Gossip Girl or Euphoria did. This was a show about the loser boys who went on loser escapades and had the dispiriting experience of actually being trapped in the mind, body and corridors of a teenager's life.

Anyone who has ever been naïve or an idiot while wearing school uniform will be able to relate to something in here. Perhaps painfully so. The quotable bits are too numerous to list here – "Oooh, fwiends!", "Bus wanker", and anytime Jay told a blatant lie. Completed it, mate.

Watch The Inbetweeners on Channel 4

Chewing Gum

Before Phoebe Waller-Bridge broke the fourth wall with Fleabag in a series that was originally a one-woman show, Michaela Coel did it with Chewing Gum.

Cole wrote and starred in the Channel 4 sitcom as Tracey, a repressed and horny 24-year-old who is desperate to be rid of her virginity, away from the prying eyes of her devout Christian family.

The technicolour TV show set on a London council estate has plenty of slapstick and laugh-out-loud moments, many of which come from Cole's zany array of facial expressions.

At just 12 episodes, this will be over before you're ready to say goodbye.

Watch Chewing Gum on Channel 4

Community

This six-season sitcom Community had a deceptively simple premise. It revolves around a community college's freewheeling study group, which consists of people who we could be kind and describe as oddballs or be realistic and describe as lunatics. From there, it became a surreal satire of genres and pop culture.

What’s more, the show was a launch pad for the careers of most of its cast and creatives. It's almost bewildering now seeing Donald Glover in Community, but online he will always pop up as Troy, holding a stack of pizza boxes, as he walks into a manic burning room.

Watch Community on ITVX

Parks and Recreation

Roll up, roll up, we've got another sitcom. But it's a) the last one, we promise and b) a good'un. Parks and Recreation – or Parks and Rec for the abbreviation-prone, lazy-fingered among us (no shade) – centres on the bureaucratically-minded Leslie Knope, played by Amy Poehler, and her ragtag public officials trying to get stuff done.

The show did turn schmaltzy towards the end, but this goofy workplace comedy is a worthy successor for those looking for something to fill The Office void.

Watch Parks and Recreation on ITVX

Ted Lasso

This was the pandemic hit that gave us a dose of the feel-good when everyone most needed it. The show came, of all places, from a Jason Sudeikis coach character invented for a faintly humorous ad, whose one-note personality trait was being MidWestern.

From there, the Apple TV+ show filled out Ted's affable-to-a-fault personality with a cast and underdog sporting story which packed a real emotional punch. Ted Lasso created a world to answer the question, "What if everyone and everything was nice all the time?"

Alas, if Arrested Development didn't know when to bow out, then Ted Lasso really didn't know when to bow out.

The legacy of the show is a touch tentative – although the diehard Lasso lot insist it stayed true to the end, the finale was a bonkers mess of CGI and questionable character decisions. Maybe Ted will return to Richmond one day to give us a finale worthy of that first season's niceness and heartwarming fun.

Watch Ted Lasso on Apple TV+