5 Quirky Comedy Series You NEED to Watch (and No, None of Them Are Fleabag)

There is a safe way to make comedy. You hire six white friends, put them in an improbably expensive apartment in New York, program canned laughter in post-production, and wait for applause from an audience fresh off the Universal studio tour. It works. It worked for decades. It keeps working, in fact, because streaming platforms keep renewing shows that look like they were written by an algorithm that heard about humor once. On a podcast.

And then there is the other way. The comedy that decided, at some point between 2021 and now, that it no longer wants to hug you. It prefers to make you uncomfortable, confuse you, and make you laugh at a joke that ends three minutes past the point where any normal human would have cut it. It trades the sitcom structure for a mockumentary, the mockumentary for a visual essay, the visual essay for a melancholy animation, and the melancholy animation for an entire airport built inside a Los Angeles warehouse. Yes, that actually happened. We will get there.

The following list is not about Emmy winners, global memes, or shows recommended by your aunt in the family group chat. It is about the five series from the last five years that have most lovingly abused the very concept of comedy. None of them are Fleabag, before you ask. Fleabag has become a thesis reference. We are a step above that.

The Rehearsal (2022 - ): building massive sets just for a joke

Nathan Fielder convinced HBO to let him rehearse real life. That is not a marketing tagline, it is the actual premise. Real people approach Fielder to rehearse difficult milestones, a conversation with a spouse, a confession, an apology, and he builds full-scale replicas of the bar, the house, or the park where the conversation will take place. He hires actors. He trains them. He rehearses the difficult version of the dialogue until it becomes easy. The result is never what anyone expects, and that is the joke, if you can even call it a joke.

Richard Brody called it a cruel and arrogant perspective. Variety called it a bonkers cringefest. Both are right. What makes The Rehearsal the show that opens this list is that it is not, technically, a comedy, a drama, a documentay, or fiction, and pretending it needs to be any of those things means missing the point entirely. Fielder built a brand new genre and lives in it completely alone.

The Chair Company (2025 - ): Tim Robinson uncovers a conspiracy through a broken chair

If Nathan Fielder represents the sadistic side of what American critics have dubbed the Fielderverse, Tim Robinson represents the explosive side.

The premise is simple and perfect, and we have even talked about it here on the site before. Ron Trosper, an average family man, suffers a workplace humiliation involving a faulty chair. HBO asked critics not to reveal what the humiliation is, and the collective obsession with this secret became part of the show's charm. From there, Ron falls down a rabbit hole investigating the chair manufacturer, Tecca, and the series becomes something nobody expected: a retail Mulholland Drive, a David Lynch-esque paranoia set within the office furniture industry.

It debuted with a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes across 53 reviews, marking the biggest HBO comedy premiere in over five years. Slate called it Robinson's magnum opus. Variety, always cautious, warned that it polarizes audiences. It polarizes because Robinson built an entire career around men completely incapable of handling humiliation, and here he finally moves beyond the sketch format to discover what happens when the discomfort lasts for eight hours. The answer: you end up convinced that the chair actually wanted to destroy you. And maybe it did.

How To with John Wilson (2020-2023): the anti-Fielder who films New York and crushes your self-esteem

Nathan Fielder produces How To with John Wilson, and that piece of information alone explains half the series. If Fielder is the cruel side of this school of thought, John Wilson is the gentle one. He walks around New York with a camera in hand, narrating in a hesitant second-person voice about seemingly trivial topics, like finding a public restroom or tracking a package, and ends every episode in an emotional place most award-winning dramas never even come close to reaching.

It holds a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes across all three seasons. Rolling Stone, in its review of the series finale, wrote that the fact that HBO produced three seasons of this feels like a miracle. We agree. How To with John Wilson is what happens when you cross Frederick Wiseman, Werner Herzog, and Errol Morris, put everyone in flip-flops, and tell them to film a man carefully choosing the right watermelon rind at a Korean grocery store. The result is the most tender piece of television produced this decade. And the network canceled it. Naturally.

Los Espookys (2018-2022): the Spanish-language comedy HBO did not know what to do with

A small disclaimer: technically, Los Espookys premiered in 2018, but the second season dropped in 2022 right before it was unjustly canceled, so it definitely counts.

The premise is brilliant. Renaldo, a young Mexican horror enthusiast, starts a horror-on-demand business with his friends in a fictional Latin American country. They stage hauntings for a nun who needs to fake a miracle, a politician who wants to look brave by facing a ghost, and an heiress who needs to convince her deceased father of something. The entire series is in Spanish, except for an American aunt who calls from a parking lot, and no character finds it strange that ghosts, aliens, or sea monsters are just wandering around. Magical realism, but with jokes.

Julio Torres, the creator, writes as if he were sketching the script with colored pencils chosen for their shade rather than their function. Ana Fabrega, his co-writer, plays a incredibly polite sociopath. Bernardo Velasco portrays the protagonist with a vulnerability that breaks your heart. The second season earned a hundred percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and HBO canceled it anyway. Watch Los Espookys now, before they remove it from the catalog to save on taxes.

I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (2019-2023): half an hour of this equals two full seasons of anything else

Three seasons, eighteen total episodes, roughly fifteen minutes each. Do the math: Tim Robinson's entire series fits into just over two episodes of Ted Lasso. Rolling Stone calculated that number with a certain cruel pleasure, and we are repeating it here without hesitation.

The premise is sketch comedy, but calling it sketch comedy is like calling what happens at a funeral a drama. Every sketch begins in a plausible setting, a business meeting, a birthday party, a car test drive, and ends in a psychological space where no human should ever be.

The typical SNL structure is deliberately sabotaged. The sketches do not end where they are supposed to, they escalate when they should de-escalate, and they rely on the most fundamental yet underutilized tool in comedy: a grown man who refuses to admit he is wrong and would rather destroy the surrounding society than back down. Robinson built a career on this, and in 2023 he delivered a third season featuring Driving Crooner and Dan Flashes, two sketches that deserve a lifetime achievement award.

The list ends and the discussion begins. Are you team Fielder, suffering for the concept, or team Robinson, suffering through explosion? Can you get past the third episode of The Rehearsal without needing to pause and process everything? Did you watch Los Espookys when there was still time, or did you just find out about it now through a nostalgic post and feel furious with HBO?

Is there any show we missed? Let us know in the comments which one should have taken the place of another.

Until next time!