10 Most Perfect Comedy-Drama Shows of the Last 5 Years, Ranked

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For TV fans who love emotional linear storylines but still like to have a good laugh, dramedy series make for the perfect watch. From Gilmore Girls, to Ugly Betty, to Jane the Virgin, great dramedy series keep viewers engaged with compelling long-running storylines, while also taking the time to develop their characters and dynamics in the lighter in-between moments.

There are so many iconic dramedy series that span across genres, whether they be family-focused shows with lower physical stakes but high emotional ones, or soapy series with just as much suspense as silliness. These are the most perfect dramedy series of the last 5 years, ranked.

10 'The Four Seasons' (2025–Present)

Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Will Forte, Erika Henningsen, and Colman Domingo walk to the hotel in The Four Seasons

Based on the 1981 film of the same name, The Four Seasons follows a tight-knit friend group made up of three married couples, who meet up once every season of the year to go on a vacation together. Even as they're all feeling a little lost and uncertain about their lives in different ways, their system works for them. Everything is upended at the 25th wedding anniversary party for their friends Nick (Steve Carell) and Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver), though, when Nick reveals that he's planning to ask Anne for a divorce.

Over the course of the next year, the entire friend group struggles to figure out how to stick together after Nick and Anne's divorce. At the same time, the other two couples deal with their own issues. Kate (Tina Fey) and Jack (Will Forte) start to question the strength of their own marriage after watching what happened with Nick and Anne. Danny (Colman Domingo) and Claude (Marco Calvani), meanwhile, disagree with one another about how to deal with Danny's health problems.

9 'The White Lotus' (2021–Present)

Aubrey Plaza, Will Sharpe, Theo James, and Meghann Fahy in The White Lotus Season 2

The White Lotus is an anthology series that takes place at a different luxury White Lotus hotel each season. At the start of the season, there's a flash-forward to at least one body being found on the hotel premises. Then, the season goes back to tell the story of the days that led up to the deaths. Now three seasons in with a fourth on the way, The White Lotus has taken viewers to White Lotus locations in Hawaii, Sicily, and Thailand.

The White Lotus perfectly balances its twisty suspense storylines with its laugh-out-loud funny satire, making for a strong dramedy series. Each season uses its new characters to tackle a different theme, and to tell the story of how reckless behavior by wealthy people on vacation can end in utter disaster and chaos. Its central whodunnit-style death mysteries are always clever and shocking, but even more interesting are the complex dynamics between the characters each season.

8 'High Potential' (2024–Present)

Morgan and Karadec working a case together in High Potential Season 2 Episode 11

High Potential is one of the best procedural dramedies of recent years. The series follows Morgan Gillory (Kaitlin Olson), a brilliant but underestimated woman and mother of three who works as a night cleaner for the LAPD. Morgan is a High Potential Intellectual individual, so her brain can't rest when she knows that something isn't right. One day, while cleaning the Major Crimes division of the LAPD, Morgan catches and fixes a mistake. From there, she is brought on to be a police consultant.

High Potential is a very entertaining and fun procedural that sees Morgan solving a different murder or other major crime each episode, with the help of her rule-following partner, Detective Adam Karadec (Daniel Sunjata). High Potential is very funny, with consistently sharp quips from Morgan, and some seriously over-the-top and bizarre cases from time to time. It's also suspenseful and intense, with major overarching storylines that see Morgan trying to uncover twisty mysteries, like what happened to her long-missing ex, Roman Sinquerra.

7 'Rivals' (2024–Present)

Maude, Declan, and Taggie O'Hara standing together holding drinks in a crowd in Rivals.

Based on Jilly Cooper's 1988 novel of the same name, Rivals follows the messy personal and professional rivalry of two very powerful men in England in 1986: television mogul Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), and MP and Minister for Sport, Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell). Things come to a head when Tony brings in two newcomers to revamp his TV station in the hopes of greater success: opinionated broadcast journalist Declan O'Hara (Aidan Turner), and ambitious American TV producer Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams).

Just one season in with a second about to premiere, Rivals has already perfected its formula. Its suspense is a slow build, quietly creeping along until it delivers an explosive payoff. Amongst the more serious tensions and power plays at the center of the series, though, is a sharp sense of humor that comes out through clever dialogue and well-delivered moments of irony.

Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey's Anatomy · House · Scrubs

Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.

🚨The Pitt

🏥ER

💉Grey's

🔬House

🩺Scrubs

FIND YOUR HOSPITAL →

A critical patient comes through the door. What's your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.

AStay completely present — block everything else out and work through it step by step, right now. BTriage fast and delegate — get the right people on the right problems immediately. CTrust my gut and move — I work best when I stop overthinking and just act. DAsk the question everyone else is ignoring — what's the thing that doesn't fit? ETake a breath, make a joke to cut the tension, and then get to work — panic helps no one.

NEXT QUESTION →

Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you'd give in an interview.

ABecause I wanted to be where it matters most — right at the edge, when someone's life is actually on the line. BBecause I wanted to help people — genuinely, one patient at a time, in a system that makes it hard. CBecause I was drawn to the intensity of it — the stakes, the drama, the feeling of being fully alive. DBecause medicine is the most interesting puzzle there is — and I needed a problem worth solving. EBecause I wanted to make a difference — and also, honestly, I didn't know what else to do with my life.

NEXT QUESTION →

What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.

ACompetence and calm — I need people who don't fall apart when things get bad. BTrust and reliability — I want to know that when I pass something off, it's handled. CConnection — I want colleagues who become family, even if that gets complicated. DIntelligence and the willingness to be challenged — I have no interest in people who just agree with me. EFriendship — people I actually like spending twelve hours a day with, because those hours are going to happen either way.

NEXT QUESTION →

You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who's worked a long shift has had to answer this question.

AI carry it. All of it. I don't look for ways to put it down — that weight is part of doing this work honestly. BI process it and move — you have to, or the next patient suffers for the one you just lost. CI feel it deeply and lean on the people around me — I don't think you're supposed to handle that alone. DI go back over every decision — not to punish myself, but because I need to understand what I missed. EI grieve it genuinely, find some way to laugh about something unrelated, and try to be kind to myself — imperfectly.

NEXT QUESTION →

How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.

AIntense and completely present — no small talk during a shift, but exactly who you want there. BSteady and dependable — not the flashiest in the room but never the one who drops something. CPassionate and occasionally chaotic — brilliant on the hard cases, prone to drama everywhere else. DBrilliant and difficult — right more often than anyone else, and everyone knows it, including me. EWarm and self-deprecating — not the most intimidating presence, but genuinely good at this and easy to like.

NEXT QUESTION →

How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.

AProtocol is the floor, not the ceiling — I follow it until the patient needs something it can't provide. BI respect it — the system is broken in places, but the structure is there for a reason and I work within it. CI follow it until my instincts tell me not to — and my instincts are usually right, even when they cause problems. DRules are for people who haven't thought hard enough about when to break them. EI try to follow it and mostly do — with a few memorable exceptions that still come up in meetings.

NEXT QUESTION →

What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What's yours?

AEverything outside these walls — I've given this job my full attention and the rest of my life has gone around it. BMy idealism, mostly — I came in believing the system could be fixed and I've made a complicated peace with that. CStability — my personal life has been as chaotic as the OR, and that's not entirely a coincidence. DMy relationships — I am not easy to know, and the people who've tried to would probably agree. EMy sense of gravity — I use humour as a coping mechanism, which not everyone appreciates in a hospital.

NEXT QUESTION →

At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.

AThe fact that it's real — that nothing else I could be doing would matter this much, right now, today. BThe patients — individual human beings who needed something and got it because I was there. CThe people I work with — I have walked through impossible things with these people and I'd do it again. DThe next unsolved case — there's always another puzzle, and I'm not done yet. EBecause despite everything — the exhaustion, the loss, the absurdity — I actually love this job.

REVEAL MY HOSPITAL →

Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…

Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.

The Pitt

You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn't let you look away.

You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You've made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.

You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.

You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.

Grey's Anatomy

You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.

You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It's messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.

House

You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn't fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.

You're not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you'd deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they're smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.

Scrubs

You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.

You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that's not a flaw, it's a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

6 'Hacks' (2021–Present)

Hannah EInbinder & Jean Smart smiling in Hacks Season 5.

Now in its fifth and final season, Hacks is one of the best comedy series of recent years, but it also expertly balances its comedy with more complex and emotional dramatic storylines. Each season of the series has had a different main overarching storyline, but at its center, Hacks has always been about the unlikely working partnership between once-successful comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and ostracized up-and-coming comedy writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder).

Against all odds, and with everything riding on it, Deborah and Ava's partnership somehow struck gold along the way. From there, each season of Hacks has shown the ups and downs of their relationship, both when they're working together and when they're not. At their best, nobody understands either Deborah or Ava more than each other, and they can make true magic together. At their worst, though, nobody knows how to hurt the two of them better than each other, and their relationship can often reach messy and vicious lows.

5 'Shrinking' (2023–Present)

Jason Segel as Jimmy standing outside while being schooled by Harrison Ford as Paul in Shrinking Season 3

Shrinking is a delightfully cozy dramedy series that leans away from high physical stakes, and into high emotional ones. The series follows Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel), a therapist who is still grieving after the death of his wife, Tia (Lilan Bowden), about a year earlier. Now out of the most destructive stage of his grief, Jimmy is ready to finally do right by his teenage daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell), and to try to enact real change in his patients' lives.

Jimmy's debilitating grief has fractured his life and made him question everything he once knew to be true, including how a therapist should treat their patients. He decides to throw all of his old methods out the window, even as Paul (Harrison Ford) and Gaby (Jessica Williams), the other two therapists at the practice where he works, question this. Jimmy starts giving his patients his honest input and advice, breaking these boundaries leads to both chaos and real progress.

4 'Bad Sisters' (2022–2024)

Ursula, Eva, Becka, and Bibi singing karaoke in costumes in Bad Sisters Season 2.

Based on the Belgian series Clan, Bad Sisters tells the story of the five Garvey sisters: Eva (Sharon Horgan), Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Bibi (Sarah Greene), and Becka (Eve Hewson). The show takes place over the course of two timelines. In the present day, Grace is grieving after the recent death of her evil husband, Jean Paul (Claes Bang). In the past, all the sisters suffer due to Jean Paul's cruelty, and everyone but Grace gets together to plot his murder.

Bad Sisters is a darkly funny and gut-wrenching series that is, at its core, about the deep closeness of five sisters who lost their parents when they were very young. There is nothing that they won't do to protect each other, so when each of them is threatened by the evil and abusive Jean Paul, it's an easy decision to kill him. The problem is, the sisters know nothing about murder, so what follows is a series of hilarious and mortifying failed attempts to kill him. In the present, Jean Paul is dead, but nobody seems to know what happened to him.

3 'Long Story Short' (2025–Present)

A character from behind hugs two other characters together in Netflix's Long Story Short.

Long Story Short is an animated family dramedy that is told out of order over the course of several decades. The series jumps through time to tell the story of the Schwooper family: married couple Naomi Schwartz (Lisa Edelstein) and Elliot Cooper (Paul Reiser), and their three children, Avi (Ben Feldman), Shira (Abbi Jacobson), and Yoshi (Max Greenfield). The series covers important moments in the Schwooper childrens' childhood, as well as when they're older and have children of their own.

Long Story Short is silly and over-the-top in its comedy, but quiet and poignant in its drama. The emotional stakes are very high, even in the small in-between moments. The series sticks to consequences, so that a character's small choice about what they prioritize in the earlier timeline ends up fracturing their future relationships beyond repair. Long Story Short is a wildly funny and deeply emotional series that covers themes of family, grief, and religion, and it's one of those shows where you need to pay attention at every moment so as not to miss any hidden details.

2 'My Lady Jane' (2024–Present)

Guildford Dudley (Edward Bluemel) and Jane (Emily Bader) hold hands and smile at a party in My Lady Jane.

Based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Joni Meadows, My Lady Jane is a fictionalized reimagining of the story of Lady Jane Grey (Emily Bader). Jane is an ambitious and bright young woman who yearns to study medicine, but instead, she's being forced into an arranged marriage to a man from a wealthy family. Jane tries to get out of the marriage, but she is unsuccessful. As it turns out, though, Jane's new husband is Lord Guildford Dudley (Edward Bluemel), a guy that Jane initially had a crush on but now detests.

My Lady Jane takes place in a fantasy version of 16th century England, where society is split up into two groups: Ethians, who can turn into animals, and Verity, who cannot. Jane's new marriage is enough to deal with, but she soon has to step up as a temporary ruler in place of her dying cousin, King Edward (Jordan Peters). Jane soon realizes that she can't just sit by and watch Ethians be persecuted, so she tries to use her power to enact real change, no matter the cost.

1 'The Bear' (2022–Present)

The Bear now has four seasons under its belt, with its fifth and final one set to release this coming June, and it has cemented itself as the best dramedy series of the last five years. The Bear starts off with former fine dining chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) taking on the responsibility of the family restaurant that his brother, Mikey (Jon Bernthal), left to him after his death. Since then, Carmy has opened a new restaurant called The Bear, alongside his partner, Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebri), and the rest of their dedicated team.

The Bear has some of the best TV episodes of the last five years, from the unrelenting and brutal "Fishes," to the quietly beautiful "Forks," to the delightfully funny and sweet "Worms." The show is deeply emotional, particularly in its portrayal of grief and how to rebuild a life after it. The Bear also has a sharp sense of humor, both in its witty dialogue, and in its more outlandish moments — with the best example being the iconic scene in Season 1's "Dogs" where Carmy and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) accidentally drug a whole birthday party full of children.