Things To Watch In Your Downtime

Chances are that sometime in the last year, you've watched something on a streaming service, such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime TV, or maybe even Crackle.  When you choose to pay for multiple streaming subscriptions, and finally get a device that supports all of them (thanks Roku!), you don't really want to spend time looking everything over five times to determine what you should watch.  Instead, you want to make your TV time as worth it as the money you're spending on it.

So, before you spend time paging through TONS of suggested series, let me ramble off a couple of my favorites.  Some of these are origninals to the streaming service, and others are from different networks that have streaming deals with the services.  Read away

Adam Ruins Everything (TruTV/TruTV App)

Adam Conover has made a name for himself on TruTV series Adam Ruins Everything by comically debunking major facts/assumptions about everything from the government to the TSA to even the simple thing that is school.  Each episode features a loosely-connected plotline woven in between Adams' explanations.  You may not laugh all the time, and not all of Adam's refutals are 100% correct, but the value of this show to me is high for being willing to try something different and run with it. 

The Joel McHale Show with JoelMcHale (Netflix/Netflix)

Although it's been cancelled for about a month now, The Joel McHale Show with Joel McHale was a show that kept me conistently laughing from week to week throughout it's 19 episodes.  With guest stars popping in and out such as Jack Black, Joe Manigello, Kristen Bell, and even Nicole Beyer, you're going to want to watch this one a few times over, as McHale makes fun of everything and everyone from the Kardashians to the Vanderpumps to the Home Shopping Network. McHale's commentary makes the whole show worth it for me. 

The Good Place (NBC and Hulu for new episodes, Netflix for Seasons 1 and 2)

The Good Place is a very strange comedy.  What makes it strange is it's continual plot and the fact that it's all about life after death and that it chooses to focus on ethics.  Season 3 has just started on NBC, and thanks to the power of Hulu, I'm able to watch each episode on Fridays to start my weekends off right, and I really enjoy that the show teaches me something new about moral philosophy every single week.  It's just this mix of styles all the time, and it really helps me pick up my mood a little bit when I need to have it picked up.  Perhaps you'll enjoy this raucous ride through the afterlife as much as I have, and will find yourself laughing at every last detail. 

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO/HBO Go)

John Oliver seems to be (to me at least), the only comedy talk show host who hasn't completely resorted to bashing Donald Trump for a ratings boost.  Don't get me wrong, he still does at least a little bit of it every week, and sometimes he does more, but the real reason I appreciate this show so much is that each week after the show is about five to ten minutes in, Oliver proceeds to take a look at something that not many people are talking about in common places.  For example, when I was last watching the show steady back in Fall of 2015, he was talking about religious organizations abusing the tax code, and more recently he touched on the fact that Myanmar uses Facebook as their source of internet and how Florida really needs to get their s**t together.  It's such a different veering into the deep left field every single week that you never really know what to expect when you start the program, and that's why I appreciate tuning in each and every week. 

Family Guy (FOX/Hulu)

I started watching Family Guy from Season 1 Episode 1 about two years ago right after I re-subscribed to Netflix, and it was my plan to watch every episode from start to finish.  Well, the problem with the show is that after about it's third season (the last one before it's first cancellation), the quality began to dive, so I took a bit of a break before starting Season 4.  I enjoyed most of the next four seasons, and Season 7 (2008-09) is probably where most of my favorite episodes originate from.  Season 8 (2009-10 and the first without Cleveland) took a bit of a nose dive and didn't offer much of anything new for the first time in a while, except for a good laugh with that year's Christmas episode "Road to the North Pole".  Since then, I've slowed up my watching of the show quite a bit.  I got onto Season 9 last year (first season I watched on Hulu instead of Netflix), after watching the first eight seasons in just under a year.  Now, a year later, I find myself just starting Season 13 (2014-15), which means that I got through half the content I did two years ago this year.  I think for the most part this show stopped appealing to me after Season 8, and now I'd rather find something else to watch, but I still come back to it every so often. 

What do you like to watch in your spare time? Got any good show ideas?  Drop them in the comments please!