I can’t think of anything in specific, but in general, the movies are a mother to me.
When I was in a very bad place, there was this extremely long thread on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I ignored it for a long time and finally started to read it as I had nothing else to do except commit suicide. So then I started watching the show and it was like 22 minutes of happiness applied directly to the eyeball. It picked me up enough to decide to see a doctor about my condition and that put me back on track.
After the semi-long lingering death of a very close friend, there is nothing like a Harold and Maude to release the floodgates and let the healing start.
Ditto to TOS.
My dog died of a brain tumor last year and for a long time I had to stay with her in the living room at night until she fell asleep. For a couple months at the end there she couldn’t do much of anything so I just sat with her in the living room. I didn’t want to watch any of my favorite shows for fear of “ruining” them - thinking about how I spent time with my dying dog while I watched them. So I watched a lot of “over-the-air” television from my antenna. Weird old tv shows, un-popular cartoons, Canadian talk shows.
I can’t watch any of that stuff now either. I’m glad I thought ahead.
One show that really calms me down is the cartoon Adventure Time. I had super crazy bad anxiety for a while a couple years ago, and found it was the only thing that could make me calm down enough to sleep.
My mother passed away about a week before the premier of Golden Girls. It was exactly the sort of show she would have loved. I would watch the show and carry on a conversation with my mom about the plot and characters. Maybe a little weird, but it seemed to put me in a better place. My mom had been ill for a long time and there had been precious little laughter in our lives for a while. Something about that little sitcom brought back the laughter. By the time the second season rolled around I didn’t need it anymore, but was so grateful it was there just exactly when I needed it.
When I was a having a tough go a few years back, one day The Karate Kid (1984) came on the TV, and it was genuinely inspirational.
God Said, “Ha!”. Julia Sweeney’s monologue about what happens when cancer struck her and her brother. Sweet and sad and full of things that can help people cope.
In my darkest days–when my illness had been diagnosed but my medication had not yet kicked in–baseball bloopers were a lifeline for me. At least for a few moments, I could laugh a little.
Yet another person who got through depression by watching MST3K right here.
My husband and I started watching Parenthood on Netflix shortly after we married. Now we are on the last season, and I am going through an extremely stressful time. There’s nothing much to do while we await diagnosis other than sit around and talk about the worst case scenarios and grieve, so instead we cuddle up in bed with Parenthood on the laptop and talk about the Bravermans.
They’re a big supportive family, much like my own family, and we enjoy watching them all flock together and all their little quirks and foibles. There’s lots of catharsis too. Not sure what we’ll do when this season ends. Humor for some reason annoys me. I like the idea of Foyle’s War for sure.
Kids in the Hall and the Chappelle Show got me through my first tour in Iraq. I’ve watched KITH a lot since then, but not so much the Chappelle show, so any time I catch a rerun of the Chappelle show on TV it brings me right back to 2003 when I was 21 and bored in the desert.
The first couple weeks after my youngest was born, I would stay up all night with him while mom got some solid sleep. I watched a lot of Deadliest Warrior during that time. Funnily enough, the repetitive nature of the show (“Next up on Deadliest Warrior, we show you a sword” “Here’s a sword” “Before the break, we showed you a sword…” “Let’s review before the simulation: this was a sword…”) worked great for my addled mind since it was near impossible to miss anything by the fifth time they repeated it.
Scrubs was extremely cathartic while I was in law school, and working at my first firm as an attorney. I completely understood the desire to find a mentor and someone to guide you, and how frustrating it was to work for / with some assholes.
I’ll never forget spending the Spring Break of my 1L year in the law library, working on a brief for Legal Writing. I’d received some bad news about my grandmother earlier in the year, and I was just really feeling beat down. I was watching Brendan Frasier’s last episode, when they do the big reveal at the end. I just start bawling. Of course, that was the exact moment that my boyfriend (at the time) calls to check in on me. (He was out of state at the time.)
I was crying so hard that I couldn’t even form words, to let him know I was just upset about a tv show (and all the related stress that comes w/ your 1L year). He was about to jump in the car for a 2+ hour drive until I finally got it out that I was fine and this was more of a release than anything that required immediate attention.
My father died in early December of 1970, when I was 9. Most of December wasn’t much fun, and Christmas seemed pretty empty.
By chance, I happened to see Laurel & Hardy’s March of the Wooden Soldiers on WPIX-TV on Christmas night. It cracked me up, and made me happy for about 90 minutes. So, dated though it is, that movie has always had a place in my heart.
It was a very hot Saturday in August when we took our very old, sick cat to the vet for the last time to be euthanized. I knew when I came home I would want to be alone and quiet. I spent the rest of the day in front of a fan watching “The Mists of Avalon”, I had rented the day before. It was just the perfect thing to occupy my mind.
Police Squad. “Tonight’s special guest star…”