My grandmother and I have been living together since we started self-quarantining, and we're just about out of shows to watch to keep us from going stir-crazy. So I figured I'd ask DLP what they'd recommend for us to watch together.

Bear in mind, my grandmother is very liberal (politically and socially), but she is 82 years old. She has no problem watching stuff with harsh language, not-overly-graphic violence (for example, "The Walking Dead" is too much, but more typical, less gory violence is okay), and drug use.

Strong sexual content can get pretty awkward for obvious reasons, so no softcore recs, please (Game of Thrones is probably the only exception to this rule, but only because we both really like the books). Genre is not important, except that neither of us can stand "reality" tv.

For reference, we currently have Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+, CBS All Access, and some IFC bundle that gives us access to AMC as well.

What we've already watched together (as far as I can remember):

Spoiler

-Pretty much all the Marvel and Star Wars movies
-The Mandalorian
- Avatar: the Last Airbender and Legend of Korra
-The Orville
-Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Picard
-Bob's Burgers
-The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
-Into the Badlands
-Drunk History
-The Cosmos
-Key and Peele
-What We Do in the Shadows
-Man in the High Castle
-Good Omens
-The Expanse
-Mystery Science Theater 3000

- There are probably more, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.

Anyway, any help you guys can give me would be highly appreciated. Seriously, recently we've even had to resort to watching 24 hour news networks for entertainment, so we're pretty desperate for something else to pass the time.

 

I enjoyed Fringe although the later seasons went downhill.

You want some nostalgia, try watching Xena or Hercules again.

 

Pushing Daisies
Firefly
Gilmore Girls
Penny Dreadful
Deadwood (heavy-ish on the language)
I enjoyed Eureka
Heard good things about The Good Place
Friends still rules supreme

 

Oh man, how could I forget those two? I grew up watching those with my dad. Well more Hercules than Xena, because my dad is super conservative and Xena was too much feminism for him to deal with. I remember liking it though...

Ah, I forgot we've watched Firefly already, too. Hmm, I've also heard good things about The Good Place, and Deadwood too for that matter. Thanks you guys, I'll check a few of these out.

If anyone else has any other suggestions, I'd love to hear 'em.

 

Picket Fences https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103512/ that's good grandma stuff!

 

You’re grandma seems pretty awesome. Mine is 93 and even the slightest hint of foul language or a tit popping out and you gotta have the remote in your hand. It’s very difficult to find things for her to watch because she has so many redlines.

She loves things that are easy to follow like Blue Bloods.

 

The Santa Clarita Diet. It features zombies so there's some gore, but it's closer to a slice of life drama about a suburban family with the mom suddenly turning into a zombie than a gorefest, so it's relatively silly and surreal even if you occasionally see her biting into a foot or something.

Has some wholesome family drama as they support each other through this time, always a plus for grandma.

 

Introduce her to anime, you're never too old to become a weeb. 8)

 

Lol, I've actually tried in the past, but a lot of the more culturally specific anime tropes just confused her (and me too, if I'm being totally honest). She really enjoyed The Last Airbender/Legend of Korra, but that's about as anime as it gets for her.

Apparently one of the things she enjoyed the most about Firefly (aside from the characters) was how much it reminded her of growing up on her family's ranch, and of watching old westerns back in the day, so I think we'll start watching Deadwood tomorrow.

Some pretty good ideas so far, so please keep the suggestions coming, everyone!

 

A few extra recs, although I'm not sure if/where they're available for streaming in the US. I've not watched much of them recently, so maybe double check some of them first:

Brooklyn nine-nine (NYC cops)
Peaky Blinders (post WW1 Birmingham gang warfare. *Might* be a bit too violent?)
Dragon Prince (not watched it, but heard good things. Apparently it's the ATLA team?)
The League (fantasy football - I think it's handegg/gridiron, not actual football. But I follow neither and enjoyed the show)
Modern Family (decent run, and I don't hate it. Stopped watching a while back)
Letterkenny (Canadian farmer, lots of clips on youtube. Might be a bit crass, it's been a while).
Fringe/Eureka were good, although I dropped them both for some reason, and then never bothered picking them back up
Great British Bake Off (surprisingly good, even as a non-baker)
Derry Girls (set in Irish Troubles, but almost certainly suitable)

 

9-1-1 is a nice show as long as you don't think too hard about why all those accidents, natural disasters and injuries happen in a row.

 

Farscape might be worth a try, and should be on Amazon. It's about an astronaut catapulted to a different galaxy by a wormhole and the crazy adventures he has thereafter.

 

Hah, yeah I watched Farscape growing up. That might be right up our alley too, so thanks for reminding me of it!

Yeah, we both independently watched this while I was locked up.

As weird as it may sound, that one has a pretty serious following among American convicts. A baffling number of them, even hard core prison-gang types, would drop everything and run back to their cells to catch each new episode. I mean, it's a good show and all, but I could never quite figure out what made it so universally appealing to those guys. Especially since most of them usually treated watching food-related shows as a mild form of self-torture, what with how bad prison food was.

 

I think I remember an episode of the Serial podcast that mentioned all the TVs in a courthouse playing the Food channel because it was the only thing that didn't cause arguments to break out. The most inoffensive thing on cable TV, apparently.

So, there's this show on Amazon Prime called Worst Cooks in America. I can't stand reality tv either, but this is apparently the exception. Celeb food channel chefs have to teach exceptionally bad amateurs how to cook. It scratches both the schadenfreude itch and the learning things about cooking itch. I can't really defend it as objectively good, but I do find it compulsively watchable.

 

We do both enjoy British humor, so those might work out pretty well. I remember watching the American knock-off of Life on Mars, and I wasn't too impressed, but I've heard elsewhere that the original was better.

For an update, we were going to start Deadwood today, but I hadn't realized it was on HBO, and we don't have a subscription with them.

So instead, she picked out a show she'd seen advertised on Prime that she thought looked interesting. So we watched the first episode of Carnival Row (neither of us paid enough attention to all the content warnings). After awkwardly sitting through two sex scenes with bare tits and male asses, we managed a laugh and talked about it.

Turns out, she's not actually scandalized at all by nudity or sexuality in entertainment. She just can't get over the awkwardness of watching that kind of thing with her grandson. She actually said "Well it just feels really wrong to enjoy that (*pointing at Orlando Bloom's bare ass on screen*) when you're sitting right there next to me!"

We had a good laugh about it, and decided that if we wanted to watch something like that, we'd have to do it separately, then discuss the episodes later. So yeah, it turns out that my grandma is even cooler than I thought, and we were just too mutually awkward for me to realize it...

 

You just need to get desensitised to it. Do deep immersion, watch a Sasha Grey gangbang with her. Then everything else will be ok.