Television series

The End of the F***ing World

Two damaged teenagers — one convinced he's a psychopath, the other furious at everyone — go on the run together and discover they might actually need each other. It's deadpan, violent, tender, and very funny in a way that keeps ambushing you. Eight tight episodes, told with the flat affect of people who've given up performing normal feelings for anyone.

TVMaze rating7.7

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Killing Eve2018

Same electric, dangerous intimacy between two people who shouldn't want each other's company but can't stay away — just swapped from teenage runaways to an assassin and the agent obsessed with catching her.

But It's glossier and more stylised, and loses some of its nerve and cohesion in the later seasons.

Killing Eve poster

Fleabag2016

The same trick of using deadpan comedy to smuggle in real grief and self-loathing, delivered straight to camera by someone who's clearly not okay and daring you to laugh anyway.

But More talky and internal, less plot-driven — if you wanted the road trip momentum, this sits still more.

Fleabag poster

Sex Education2019

British teen misfits, awkward sex and real tenderness under the jokes — warmer and safer than James and Alyssa's world, but built from the same honesty about being young and lost.

But Sweeter and more optimistic overall; if you came for the bleakness, this softens it considerably.

Sex Education poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Let the Right One In2008

Both pair an isolated, possibly dangerous outsider with a damaged companion and ask whether the bond that saves them is also the thing that will destroy someone.

A lonely, bullied boy and a strange, violent girl form a bond nobody else could understand — swap the psychopath fantasy for an actual vampire and you get the same tender, morally unsettling two-hander.

But It's a Swedish horror film with real bloodshed and a much colder, snowier atmosphere — no jokes to soften it.

Let the Right One In poster
More like this (7)

My Mad Fat Diary2013

A British teen dramedy that treats a messed-up mind with real seriousness while still being funny and specific and full of feeling — Alyssa's fury has a cousin here.

But Less stylised and stranger than TEOTFW, and more conventional in structure and tone.

My Mad Fat Diary poster

True Romance1993

A young couple on the run, violence following them like weather, black comedy bleeding into real tenderness — this is the adult, pulpier ancestor of James and Alyssa's story.

But Louder, more Tarantino-brash and body-count-heavy than the show's quieter, sadder register.

True Romance poster

Thelma & Louise1991

The road trip that becomes an escape from everything, two people discovering who they are outside the roles they'd been handed — same freedom-and-doom momentum, different decade and gender.

But More overtly a feminist statement piece than a character study; the politics are foregrounded, not implied.

Thelma & Louise poster

Lady Bird2017

Teenage anger and love tangled together, delivered with a similarly sharp, funny, unsentimental eye — no crime spree, just the ordinary violence of growing up and leaving.

But Far gentler and more grounded; if you want darkness and danger, this stays firmly in the realistic and warm.

Lady Bird poster

Atypical2017

An outsider narrator trying to make sense of connection and other people, with humour used as a coping mechanism rather than a cover-up — a much softer echo of James's flat affect.

But Considerably more comforting and family-friendly; the stakes and the edges have been sanded right down.

Atypical poster

Breathless1960

Same emotional engine six decades earlier: a self-mythologising outsider, a woman testing whether she actually loves him or the idea of him, comedy and dread running side by side.

French New Wave's cool, doomed drifter and the woman half-charmed by him wrote the blueprint for every deadpan young couple running from consequences ever since — jagged, jump-cut, and strangely funny.

But Black and white, subtitled, and made with 1960s pacing — patience with silence and style is required.

Breathless poster

Natural Born Killers1994

Where the show underplays violence for dry laughs, this overplays it for satire — same runaway-killers frame, register cranked from deadpan to full scream.

Takes the same murderous-young-couple-on-the-run premise and blows it up into a screaming, media-satirising fever dream — the trashy, maximalist cousin who never learned to whisper.

But Aggressively loud, stylistically overwhelming, and considerably more graphic — this has none of the show's restraint.

Natural Born Killers poster

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