Television series

Getting On

Name: Getting On
Genre: Comedy, Medical
Released: 2013
Cast: Alex Borstein, Laurie Metcalf, Niecy Nash, Mel Rodriguez

HBO's Getting On is a mockumentary-adjacent workplace comedy set on a geriatric extended-care ward, where three overworked women navigate bedpans, paperwork, and dying patients with weary, deadpan humour. It's small, unglamorous, and quietly devastating — comedy mined from bureaucracy and bodily indignity rather than punchlines. For fans of slow-burn ensemble comedy that finds tenderness in exhaustion, not sentiment.

TVMaze rating

7.1

If you liked this

Nurse Jackie2009

Edie Falco's ER nurse juggles addiction, ethics, and hospital politics with the same unglamorous exhaustion Getting On mines for laughs — messier, sharper, and just as unsentimental about what caregiving actually costs.

But More plot-driven and soapy than Getting On's stillness; the addiction storyline pulls it toward melodrama the original never touches.

Six Feet Under2001

Alan Ball's funeral-home drama shares Getting On's fascination with death as daily paperwork, treating mortality with gallows humour and real tenderness instead of horror.

But Runs six seasons and leans hard into family melodrama and grief — a much bigger emotional commitment than Getting On's tight half-hours.

Veep2012

Same HBO era, same appetite for skewering petty bureaucracy, just swapped from a hospital ward to the White House — institutional cringe has never been funnier.

But Faster, meaner, and jokier than Getting On; the satire has none of the ward's quiet compassion for the people trapped inside it.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Wit2001

Same HBO lineage and the same target — a healthcare system that treats bodies as data — but told as unflinching tragedy instead of deadpan sitcom.

Emma Thompson plays a literature professor dying of ovarian cancer, treated by researchers more interested in her tumour than her. It's the same medical-bureaucracy indictment as Getting On, stripped of comedy and devastating.

But There's no comic relief here — this is grief and clinical cruelty played entirely straight, a very different kind of watch.

Enlightened2011

Mike White's corporate satire follows a woman trying to fix a broken institution from the bottom rung, with the same patient, awkward comedy of dignity under bureaucracy.

But More earnest and interior than Getting On — less ensemble comedy, more one woman's slow-motion reckoning with herself.

Somebody Somewhere2022

A small, plain-spoken HBO comedy about ordinary Midwestern lives that finds the same warmth in unglamorous routine and unresolved grief that Getting On finds in a hospital corridor.

But Gentler and more sentimental — little of the institutional satire or bodily comedy that gives Getting On its edge.

Parks and Recreation2009

If you loved watching people fight a broken bureaucracy with paperwork and patience, this is the sunnier cousin — same absurd committee meetings, far kinder outcomes.

But Much warmer and more optimistic; none of the exhaustion or mortality that gives Getting On its bite.

The Thick of It2005

Armando Iannucci's foul-mouthed Whitehall satire is where the 'institution eating its own workers alive' comedy really got its teeth — bureaucratic despair played at maximum velocity.

But Political rather than medical, and much faster and more sweary — a harder, less tender kind of funny.

Bored to Death2009no page yet

A shaggier, more whimsical HBO half-hour about people muddling through work and disappointment with deadpan charm, if you want the tone without the hospital setting.

But Much lighter stakes — no illness, no death, just comic drift. Charming but far less substantial.

Rescue Me2004no page yet

Denis Leary's firefighter drama-comedy sits in similarly unglamorous emergency-service territory — dark jokes as coping mechanism for people who see too much death.

But Broader, blokier, and angrier in tone; the register is almost opposite to Getting On's female-led quietness.

The Hospital1971

Decades before Getting On, this proved hospital chaos and institutional failure could be genuinely funny — same DNA, turned up to a shout.

George C. Scott anchors Paddy Chayefsky's furious black comedy about a hospital collapsing under its own incompetence — the bureaucratic absurdity Getting On mines for tired sighs, here played as full-blown farce.

But Louder, angrier, and more theatrical than Getting On's hushed realism — a stagey seventies satire, not a slow character study.

The Waiting Room2012

Strip away Getting On's deadpan writing and this is the unvarnished reality it's satirising — the same overwhelmed system, filmed instead of written.

A documentary shot inside a real public hospital's ER over twenty-four hours, watching overworked staff and desperate patients navigate a system stretched past its limits — no script, same exhaustion.

But There's no joke structure at all, and the stakes are real — a heavier, slower watch with none of the sitcom rhythm.