Television series

Everything's Gonna Be Okay

Josh Thomas's follow-up to Please Like Me is a half-hour dramedy about a self-involved 25-year-old suddenly parenting his two teenage sisters after their father's terminal diagnosis — one of them autistic, played by an actually autistic actress with unusual specificity. It's funny in an unguarded, slightly chaotic way, then abruptly gutting. For anyone who wants comedy that doesn't flinch from real grief or real difference.

TVMaze rating5.0

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Please Like Me2013

Josh Thomas's earlier show, and you can feel the DNA — same wandering camera, same trick of cracking a joke right before your heart breaks, this time about his mother's mental illness rather than his father's cancer.

But The humour is drier and slower to warm up, and the earlier seasons are rougher around the edges than his later, more assured work.

Please Like Me poster

Six Feet Under2001

The grand ancestor of grief-comedy: a family funeral business, a dead father who won't stop appearing, and siblings forced into adulthood by loss, shot through with pitch-black humour and real tenderness.

But Five seasons is a big ask, and its early-2000s pacing is slower and more novelistic than the tight half-hour you're used to.

Six Feet Under poster

Atypical2017

A warmer, glossier take on autism and family life, following a teenage boy's push for independence while his parents and sister quietly rearrange their own lives around him.

But Broader, softer, more conventional — it wants to comfort you rather than unsettle you, and sometimes flattens the spikier truths of the condition.

Atypical poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Rain Man1988

Both hinge on a self-absorbed young man abruptly made responsible for an autistic family member, and both ask what love without romanticising the condition actually looks like.

The film that first put a sibling-caretaker plot like this into the mainstream — a hustler brother forced onto the road with an autistic brother he barely knows, decades before nuance became the norm.

But Its portrayal of autism is dated and now criticised as reductive by many actually autistic viewers and critics.

Rain Man poster
More like this (8)

Sex Education2019

Same appetite for frank, funny, occasionally excruciating conversations about sex and bodies, wrapped around a found-family ensemble of teenagers and the adults failing to keep up with them.

But Glossier, more heightened British-teen-drama world; less interested in the quieter, sadder textures of a real household falling apart.

Sex Education poster

Speechless2016

A network sitcom that treats a disabled character and his family with real specificity and bite, using JJ's nonverbal cerebral palsy as the engine for jokes rather than the target of them.

But Sitcom rhythms mean neater endings and gentler stakes — it rarely sits in discomfort the way this show does.

Speechless poster

This Is Us2016

If it's the terminal illness and the siblings scrambling to hold a family together that hooked you, here's a bigger, weepier, more mainstream machine built to do exactly that, season after season.

But Far more sentimental and manipulative with its reveals — it wants you crying on a schedule, not laughing your way there.

This Is Us poster

The End of the F***ing World2017

Deadpan, off-kilter teenage voices narrating their own disaster, blackly funny and unexpectedly moving, with the same appetite for finding warmth in genuinely damaged people.

But Colder and more clipped in tone, with a streak of real menace this show never touches.

The End of the F***ing World poster

Shameless2011

Siblings raising siblings, a parent who can't be relied on, chaos and love tangled together — just dialled up louder, longer, and considerably filthier.

But Eleven seasons of escalating chaos will wear you down eventually, and the tone swings further into farce than this show ever does.

Shameless poster

Ramy2019

A messy, self-absorbed young adult figuring out how to be good to the people around him, filtered through faith and family instead of grief and autism, with the same jagged, personal comic voice.

But Its concerns are religious and cultural rather than domestic, so the overlap is more in spirit than in specifics.

Ramy poster

Life, Animated2016

It swaps the fictional lens for a real one — a real young autistic man's life narrated partly through his own obsessions — sitting alongside this show's Matilda as two very different, equally serious attempts to depict an actual interior life.

A documentary that gets inside an autistic mind through animation and Disney references, told with real tenderness and specificity rather than any tidy inspirational arc.

But Nonfiction pacing and its animated interludes are a big tonal jump from a scripted half-hour comedy, and it's a quieter, sadder watch.

Life, Animated poster

Raising Hope2010no page yet

It takes the same premise — an unprepared young adult suddenly responsible for people who need looking after — and blows it up into loud, trashy network sitcom, proving the engine works even without any of the delicacy.

A useless twenty-something forced to raise a baby with his chaotic extended family, played entirely for big dumb laughs — the tonal opposite of this show's aching restraint, built on the identical premise.

But Broad multi-camera sitcom silliness with none of the emotional nuance or specificity you came to this show for.

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