10 Feel-Good Bingeable TV Show Box Sets To Watch Right Now

“The Good Place” is indeed a very “feel good” show, but I’d like to warn people not to expect a “laugh out loud” comedy. The writing is more going to make you smile and give you warm and fuzzy feelings – without ever getting saccharine or glurgy. It’s also quite educational about basic theories of philosophy and ethics. And if you get the feeling during the first season that the writers’ idea of what constitutes “good” behavior is just a bit… off (e.g. you can’t quite agree that the other main characters belong in Heaven either, due to their somewhat arrogant / holier-than-thou attitude) – PLEASE stay around till the finale of the first season! I promise it will all make sense then!

For those who like the fantasy genre and who REALLY have a lot of time to kill these next few weeks / months, I would also like to recommend the free-to-watch streaming show “Critical Role”, in which you watch a bunch of professional voice and TV actors play a lengthy, epic Dungeons & Dragons campaign (homebrew setting). It’s much better than you’re probably expecting, because the DM (basically the head writer, narrator, referree and bit player all rolled into one) Matt Mercer is an absolute master of his craft, and all the other players are also trained actors and thus perfectly competent at improv theatre as well. Also, several of them have great comedic timing. (I’ve laughed more at this show than I ever did at any scripted comedy TV show.) And it really is a “feel good” experience to watch, because all the regular players are close real-life friends and spouses (this show started out as their hobby group, not as a project intended to make money) who think being kind and supportive with each other is very important, and the group has several female players, and the players are all in the age group 30-45, so mature where it counts. (This means some occasional toilet humor, but no sexist jokes, for example.) The show is also safe to watch if you’re queer, and over the years it’s only gotten more queer-friendly. (I.e. several player characters are queer in the second campaign, whereas only one was really consistently played as queer in the first campaign – though, due to a number of narratively lucky coincidences and improv decisions, at least that character turned out to be arguably the central protagonist of the main storyline, the one who would be the player character if this was a solo RPG video game. Plus there are a few recurring NPCs in the first campaign who start out either only slightly hinted as queer or out-and-proud but in a comedic stereotype sort of way, but who later become close and important allies to the player group and very much badasses in their own right, largely because they were so loved by the players and fans. This show is a lot like the scifi series “Killjoys” in this regard, and also in terms of the ratio between humor and anyone-can-die drama, the cheerful violence, and the importance of non-romantic friendship between men and women.)

A lot of people choose to start with the second campaign, which is still ongoing (though on hiatus right now because of the virus quarantine in California) and which has better audio / video quality since this was started after years of gathering experience and better equipment. But I haven’t watched much of that yet and I’m told the player characters are not as likable as in the first campaign. (More rough around the edges and not really heroic, and they’re not fire-forged friends yet, due to the fact that they start on the first level and most have a neutral character alignment.)

The first campaign started in the middle of the storyline (after the group had already played at home for 2 years – those pre-stream adventures are slowly being published as the “Vox Machina: Origins” comics), so the characters are already quite experienced and have come together as a group of close friends. So you get to more epic, high-stakes adventures more quickly in this campaign (starting at ep. 24 things get personal and stop being random quests, and in ep. 39 they start a long story arc facing world-destroying enemies). Also, almost all of the characters in the first campaign have a good character alignment (except Grog the barbarian, but he’s too dumb to make much trouble and he’s happy to follow the directions of the cleric – kind of like Amos in “The Expanse” choosing an outside moral compass whom he can trust to make the right decisions), so there is little in-party strife (aside from some harmless pranks) and the characters are just more likable all around. Except maybe Keyleth, who gets hated on by the fandom a lot, but her being bad with people and a bit of a klutz is intentional (she has a very low charisma stat).
But it must be said that the audio and video quality of the first campaign stream is quite low, at least for the first year or so, and they were still trying out stuff out that didn’t work (especially a chat window and twitter messages in the video from when the episode first aired live on Twitch, both of which pass too quickly to read and so are just unnecessarily distracting to the viewer). So it might be better to just listen to the first couple dozen episodes as a podcast ( http://criticalrolepodcast.geekandsundry.com/ ). This conveniently cuts out the break in the middle, the ads for other Geek & Sundry shows, and the announcements at the start, which aren’t really interesting anymore several years later. Though you also miss out on the body language and all the out-of-character commentary. (Q&As sessions after a few of the early episodes where they explain stuff that happened to the group before the game started getting broadcast, Sam’s creative and funny impromptu advertising for whichever roleplay/fandom-related company is sponsoring the episode, and just spontaneus comments from the players, once they drop out of character at the end, about what happened or decisions made in the episode – which you will become curious about after a while, especially with the more emotional episodes later on. Also, at some point they started showing the very high quality fanart they get during the break or at the end, which helps building a mental picture of the characters.)

There are also a number of one-shot adventures (or short series of 2-3 episodes), where the group tries out a different RPG system or someone other than Matt serves as DM. Usually this happens because more than one player is missing that week and/or they have several guest players at once, or because Matt is out of the country for his day job. These one-shots are usually very different in style and mood from the normal campaigns, but they might be a more manageable entry-points for new viewers, especially for people who are unsure if they’ll like watching tabletop RPG sessions at all.

One-Shots and other specials: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_bHT0l5Ma_BzBcthy27W6aNSXzzdueYE
(I recommend “Liam’s Quest” and “Liam’s Quest: Full Circle”, which are losely connected. They have a VERY different mood compared to the regular campaign – it’s a homebrew surreal survival horror / post-apocalyptic setting with a storyline that gets very personal in the end, and the players play basically as themselves. Because of this, it’s very interesting as it allows the viewer glimpses of their regular jobs as voice over actors and also of their childhoods and very affectionate real-life relationships. Liam does a great job setting the scene, even if the second episode is unusual in that the fights are not meant to be survivable. I can also recommend “Thursday by Night” part 1 and 2, an introduction to the Vampire: the Masquerade RPG system, courtesy of Taliesin – but again it’s somewhat unusual for that setting, as the horror is more surreal than “gothic” and they don’t even get into the vampire clan politics until the very end. Until then, it’s just “you are all playing yourselves, in this studio, but you’ve just woken up and find you’ve been turned into vampires – now try to survive the night”. The Red Nose Day special with the surprisingly enthusiastic Stephen Colbert is very short and contains a lot of information about the history or tabletop RPGs and D&D in particular, but Matt is just DMing for one player in that special, so of course it doesn’t reflect the social aspect of the game or the humor and party interactions that make the regular campaign so great.)
The list linked above is more comprehensive for the early specials, but it hasn’t been updated in a while. Some more recent one-shots are in this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVu_Ib1fpVI&list=PL1tiwbzkOjQyUR1nbxZGETYMZRCcfV6yL

Campaign 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-p9lWIhcLQ&list=PL1tiwbzkOjQz7D0l_eLJGAISVtcL7oRu_
(If you don’t mind getting thrown in in the middle of a storyline (there is a brief recap at the beginning), I recommend watching episode 60 “Heredity and Hats” to get an impression of what makes this show so entertaining. That particular episode was filmed infront of an audience at Comic Con, so the players are playing more to the audience than usual, but that just makes for a somewhat higher density of jokes than in the streamed episodes. This episode is also shorter than the usual 3-5 hour sessions, and it features almost no battles, which is a good thing because those can be somewhat tedious in my opinion, since they have 8 people all having to make dice rolls and figure out which of their many powers to use every round, and then figure out the complex D&D rules for those powers. I find the show more entertaining when it’s just social interactions (i.e. free-form improv theatre), which is where this particular episode shines.)

Campaign 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byva0hOj8CU&list=PL1tiwbzkOjQxD0jjAE7PsWoaCrs0EkBH2

If you need help understanding what the players are saying, please note that all the episodes have proper subtitles in English (it’s not computer-generated captioning – there is a group of dedicated fans taking care of this), but only a few episodes have been translated into other languages.