Are you too tired for tough TV? Does your brain feel overtaxed, overtaken by a buzzing static-screen of anxiety? Are you searching for a sweet-spot watch somewhere between all-absorbing (Shogun, Industry) and ultralightweight (Virgin River, Christmas movies)? One that acknowledges your intelligence, but feels … friendly? Relax, rub some lavender into your temples, and snuggle into Fuzzy TV.
Fuzzy TV is the televisual equivalent of flannel PJs: not sexy, but it does the job. Its Holy Grail is the luminous, shimmering Somebody Somewhere (HBO), the best television series ever about the miracles of small epiphanies and simple kindness. But that’s a high bar, so it’s really more Elsbeth (Global/CBS/Paramount+), The Good Wife spinoff starring Carrie Preston. Her adorable, covertly astute title character ostensibly helps the New York Police Department catch criminals, but her show is really a bubble bath of fun guest stars from other shows you loved: Linda Lavin, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Pamela Adlon, Jane Krakowski, Vanessa Williams, Laurie Metcalf – how delightfully soothing to hang out with all of you again! And how wonderfully retro that each episode is self-contained – no complex arcs to follow.
Fuzzy TV is Matlock (also Global/CBS/Paramount+), where Kathy Bates as the title character is having quite the hoot, gliding effortlessly over the river of her talent to play an underestimated seventysomething attorney. It’s Ted Danson as a widower-turned-undercover agent in A Man on the Inside (Netflix), and here’s how Fuzzy this one is: Maite Alberdi’s 2020 source documentary, The Mole Agent, was about a Chilean who moves into a retirement home to root out elder abuse; Danson goes there to find a stolen necklace. This season of Shrinking (AppleTV+) is Fuzzy, too, because the drunk driver who killed Jason Segal’s wife turns out to be a decent man racked with guilt (played by series co-creator and Ted Lasso alum Brett Goldstein) and everybody forgives everyone and everything.
It’s English Teacher (FX), created by and starring the comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez – who shot to fame via a TikTok dance – where every episode pokes humane fun at both wokeness and the cranks who misunderstand it, and then ends with a splendiferous 1980s power ballad. It’s the adorable Nobody Wants This (Netflix), where Kristen Bell and Adam Brody give us all the clever romcom feels we’ve been missing, and where Justine Lupe and Timothy Simons get to pull on their proverbial sweatpants and play the leads’s supportive siblings, after their much spikier HBO roles (she on Succession, he on Veep).
The newest Fuzzfest is No Good Deed (Netflix, arriving Dec. 12), starring one of my favourite women, Lisa Kudrow. I don’t know why 10,000 scribes aren’t spending 10,000 hours writing series for her – she’s singularly funny; original and familiar at the same time; warm but healthily skeptical. She deserves her Somebody Somewhere, but until she gets it I’ll watch her be the best thing about this, and delight in the tiny moments of subversiveness she injects – a quarter-roll of an eye here, a puff of exasperation there.
Kudrow plays Lydia, a former concert pianist afflicted with the shakes. She’s married to Paul, a contractor who’s run out of ways (and maybe reasons) to help her. They own a crown jewel of Los Angeles real estate, a period-perfect 1920s Spanish-style house in Los Feliz, the hilly, hipster haven just east of Hollywood. Paul thinks selling it will solve their problems. Lydia isn’t so sure.
Circling the house are a sextet of avid Angelinos: passé actor JD (Luke Wilson) and his high-maintenance wife Margo (Linda Cardellini); lawyer Leslie (Abbi Jacobson) and her doctor wife Sarah (Poppy Liu); pregnant architect Carla (Teyonah Parris) and her struggling-novelist husband (O-T Fagbenle). Again, all of these actors are familiar friends from other series, lovely to look at; all their characters have secrets they’re barely concealing, but the type that cause amusing complications, which you can be confidently, comfortingly certain will all work out in the end. Oh, and Denis Leary pops up as Mikey, Paul’s shady brother, but even he is fuzzily defanged.
Showrunner Liz Feldman’s last series, Dead to Me (also Netflix), starring Cardellini and Christina Applegate, had more bite – abuse, murder, blackmail, cancer – and also more depth: For all its capital-P Plot, it was a rich portrait of female friendship, an authentic exploration of how two women can meet, recognize something in each other, and fall in love, platonically but profoundly. Here Feldman is trying something equally noble – to plumb the ups and downs of spousal relationships, especially in couples who are struggling to move forward after huge sadness and disappointment.
But No Good Deed is designed for tired couples to watch together, so Feldman doesn’t offer dark home truths. Instead, there are pretty rooms and gentle chuckles, and when the secrets finally come out, they’re actually not that bad, because – here’s the Fuzzy TV Manifesto – the only thing hurt people need to do to heal is just open up to one another. Because really, isn’t everyone flawed? And wouldn’t life be so much nicer if we stopped trying to cover up our foibles, and explained the one or two understandable reasons that we’ve been acting badly, and just forgave each other?
Okay, most of these series linger in the mind about as long as that box of Merci chocolates that you meant to give to your mother-in-law lasts in your TV room. But we turn to them for the same reasons we shop at Old Navy or eat at Olive Garden: Some pleasures are meant to be mild. Fuzzy can be fun. Or, you know, fine.
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