Losing out on The Office and Friends was certainly a blow for Netflix, but the streaming service has done a good job of restocking with other top sitcoms over the years. Just this week, Netflix added How I Met Your Mother, so we thought this was as good a time as any to scroll through the library and find the best sitcoms that Netflix has to offer at the moment.
How I Met Your Mother
A new addition to the Netflix library, How I Met Your Mother is about a group of friends living in New York. It’s a traditional setup, but the framing of the story is that Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) is telling the story of how he met his wife to his children, Luke and Penny, 25 years after the series begins. The show’s ending is less than perfect, but Jason Segal, Alyson Hannigan, Neil Patrick Harris, and Cobie Smulders keep this show on the rails for 9 seasons.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Seven detectives in the 99th Precinct of the New York City Police Department (Andy Samberg, Stephanie Beatriz, Terry Crews, Melissa Fumero, Dirk Blocker, Joel McKinnon Miller, and Joe Lo Truglio) have to adjust to life under their new and near-emotionless commanding officer, Captain Raymond Holt (Andre Braugher). Along the way, they form unbreakable bonds with one another while arresting criminals, solving mysteries, and causing plenty of mischief.
Seinfeld
If you are looking for a palate cleanser after Jerry Seinfeld’s bizarre directorial debut Unfrosted, why not go back and watch all 180 episodes of Seinfeld? Larry David and Seinfeld collaborated to create a timeless sitcom throughout the ’90s, and it holds up surprisingly well. Seinfeld himself might not be the best actor, but he’s surrounded by incredible talent, including Jason Alexander’s George Costanza, who is among the best sitcom characters of all time (and a near facsimile of Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm).
Trailer Park Boys
The residents of the fictional Sunnyvale Trailer Park are, to this day, among the most ridiculous and entertaining sitcom characters I’ve ever seen on TV. The series centers on three residents — Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles — who try to make money by committing crimes.
The park’s alcoholic supervisor, Jim Lahey, is looking for any excuse to call the police and have them arrested, and that dynamic alone makes Trailer Park Boys a gem.
The Good Place
If there’s one sitcom on this list that will make you cry, it’s The Good Place. Kristin Bell stars as Eleanor Shellstrop, a less-than-righteous woman who ends up in the Good Place when she dies, seemingly by mistake. The twists and turns the series takes from there are too good to spoil, but if you need any more convincing, the ensemble cast includes William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, Manny Jacinto, and Ted Danson as an afterlife architect.
10 more sitcoms you should binge on Netflix
Those are some of our personal favorite sitcoms streaming on Netflix, but if you are looking for even more funny shows to binge, here are ten more highlights:
- Archer: An animated sitcom about a narcissistic, chauvinistic secret agent named Sterling Archer, who works for his abusive mother at an intelligence service. The show is filled with colorful and deeply flawed supporting characters, including Archer’s occasional lover Lana Kane, bomb specialist Ray Gillette, and HR supervisor Pam Poovey.
- Arrested Development: The story of a wealthy family who lost everything and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together. You can stop watching after the first three seasons, but Arrested Development remains one of the funniest shows of all time.
- Big Mouth: Nick Kroll and John Mulaney star as middle school teenagers in this raunchy animated sitcom about puberty, the human body, and sex.
- Derry Girls: Before breaking out as Penelope Featherington on Netflix’s Bridgerton, Nicola Coughlan was making us laugh in Derry Girls, a sitcom set in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. It follows five teenage girls attending the fictional Our Lady Immaculate College in Derry during the political unrest of the Troubles.
- Girls5eva: Dawn, Summer, Gloria, and Wickie were members of the girl group Girls5eva in the 1990s, but 20 years later, they get a second shot to live out their dreams when a rapper samples their only hit song.
- Grace and Frankie: Grace and Frankie tells the story of two polar opposite women (Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin) who form an unlikely friendship when their husbands announce that they are in love with each other and leave their wives.
- Great News: Up-and-coming segment producer Katie Wendelson (Briga Heelan) wants to be a hard-hitting journalist, but she’s impeded by the presence of her difficult boss, the news station’s old-school anchor, and her mother, who is working there as an intern.
- Kim’s Convenience: In Kim’s Convenience, a Korean Canadian couple runs a convenience store in Toronto with their daughter and estranged son.
- Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: After being kidnapped in eighth grade and spending 15 years in an underground bunker, Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper) is rescued and moves to New York to get a late start on life.
- The Upshaws: This Netflix sitcom created by and starring Wanda Sykes follows a working-class family in Indiana doing their best to keep it all together.
Netflix continues to add more sitcoms, both licensed and original, all the time. If you want to see what else the streamer has to offer, check out the TV Sitcoms genre.
