Ask Lemmy

Australia: Lano & Woodley

It's only funny to Aussies and has a specific kind of humour, but I get very patriotic over it

US: The Wire

In Finland: ”Queen of fucking everything”

I'm German and I couldn't recommand any show from my country in good conscience.

Canada: The Kids in the Hall.

But there are a few I really like. Orphan Black, Letterkenny, Shorzy, Littlest Hobo, SCTV, Fraggle Rock, Schitt's Creek, Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High (not the newer ones with Drake), The Red Green Show, Reboot, Transformers: Beast Wars (or as it was known here just "Beasties") Street Cents, This Hour has 22 Minutes, Mr. Dressup....really hard to just pick one.

Kaamelott is a good French short format comedie series. Most of the humor is based on puns, word plays and quiproquo, it would be absolutely impossible to translate and it wouldn't be funny to anyone who isn't absolutely fluent in French. No need to thank me for this useless recommendation.

UK: I'd recommend Slow Horses on AppleTV. Gary Oldman heads a cast of misfits from an MI5 unit of rejects. Drama and comedy in a perfect blend.

US: Everything by Mike Judge is gold, so for a live action show its indisputably Silicon Valley. Personal fave sci-fi was Babylon 5. Out of animation - Pantheon.

Mr Inbetween is probably the most popular, but if you want an Australian version of The Office I would highly recommend Utopia.

Umbre . Romanian HBO production about a mob enforcer that's trying to keep his family and job separate. Pretty good and should be decently easy to find with English subtitles.

Israel: HaPijamot (literally: The Pajamas). It's a sitcom for kids (but really more for their parents IMO) about a mediocre band that's trying to make it big in Tel Aviv. The show often breaks the fourth wall in a way that's really hard for me to explain. It's kind of like a mockumentary, but it plays with it a lot. For example, there's a "white screen" sometimes where the cast pauses the show to explain something to the audience. It's clearly an abstract place that doesn't canonically exist in the world. But occasionally it plays a role in the plot, e.g. a character goes there to hide from everyone else, or someone would abuse the system and activate the white screen to get out of a sticky situation.

The original premise of the band quickly becomes secondary, it's just a great show with excellent writing and a great cast. It even has a few spin-offs, including a great one where the fast food shop owner becomes a detective.

I think you may have triggered a rewatch for me, it's been years since I last saw it!

From Greece, To Nisi (The Island) is the best I've seen. It's about an island where they used to move people with leprosy.

Eteros Ego (The Other Me) is supposed to be one of the best but haven't gotten around to watching it yet. It's a crime show that's a sequel to the movie with the same name. The movie is on YouTube with English subs.

Not from South Korea but my favorite show on all of tv is "Chef vs My Fridge"

2 guests give their order to 8 chefs and 2 of them cook for only 15 minutes to fulfill that order. However, they may only use what is in that guest's fridge/pantry. So sometimes it's a lot of good ingredients, sometimes hardly anything to cook with.

It's so funny. Each chef has their own character and I love how they converse with each other. It's hard to pick a favorite since they are all so different (but Namno is the best). It's the only show (next to taskmaster) that I wait impatiently for it's release each week.

The Netherlands has a couple good series. A recent hit (dutch/belgian production) is "undercover". It's about a Belgian cop that goes undercover in the organisation of a dutch drug dealer. Very fun with lots of peculiar cultural references.

A personal favorite though, is a 1995 childrens show called "lang leve de koningjn" (long live the queen). It tought me how to play chess in a very fun and engaging way.

From the UK, I'd probably go for The Day Today, which ran for a single six-episode series back in 1994.

It's a satirical news programme which manages to be more cutting and accurate than anything that's been produced since, and along the way includes pastiches of fly-on-the-wall documentaries (doing The Office years before The Office), multi-camera soap operas (The Bureau), the rise of multichannel TV (RokTV) and so much more. A lot of the show's staff were actually from the BBC's own news department so timbre is spot-on, and received an incredible level of French polish before broadcast meaning every second of it is crammed with gags, slights and real blink-and-you'll-miss-it jokes and, aside from the dated styling and real-world reference, the whole thing feels frustratingly prescient thirty years later.