TV Shows Where the Characters Aren't Tools

Cafe Society
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We just wrapped up the 2nd Season of Ramy after finishing all five seasons of Six Feet Under, and you know, I am just growing tired of protagonists who are assholes, tools, jerks or otherwise unpleasant people. I’m not denying such characters can make for good television, but I’m in need of a palette cleanser. I want to watch a show about… you know, good people. Not perfect people, but not people who run around following their darker impulses and hurting people left and right.

What do you recommend?

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Ted Lasso
The Good Place
Schitts Creek
Marvel Agents of SHIELD
Parks and Rec
Parenthood
This Is Us

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We recently started the Hawaii Five-0 re-boot and are really enjoying it (I was sure I’d hate it). Lots of gunfire, keep the volume low during shoot-outs.

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I’m with the OP. I’m just kind of sick of shows where the main characters are unlikable assholes or constantly having to consciously decide not to become a crazed asshole. Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, Westworld. Walking Dead, Lost, The Office, Shameless, Barry, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Veep, Sons of Anarchy, Archer, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Even Battlestar Galactic seemed to have saved 50,000 of humanities biggest fuckups (no surprise since the Colonial Fleet presumably sent all their rejects to quietly serve out the remainder of their service on a museum ship).

At some point it becomes hard to sympathize with characters unable to realize their dreams when the reason is they are psychopaths, jerkoffs, or lazy fuckups.

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I would second Schitt’s Creek. I’m on the third season. The main characters may be self absorbed but they care about one another and generally try to do the right thing as they understand it.

Also The Good Place, even though some of the characters are literally demons.

Also The Kominsky Method, with Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin. Again, the main characters have their foibles but are generally decent people.

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Nothing new, so you may have already seen these, but we’re re-watching both Psych and Chuck. Both good-hearted light dramas.

We’re also about halfway through Corner Gas and really enjoying it. It’s sort of a throwback to the old-fashioned small-town sitcom. The characters do bicker and trade insults, but they also care for each other.

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Person of Interest. Plenty of drama, since it’s a crime show (well, among other things … it starts off is just a crime-of-the-week procedural and develops into something a whole lot more interesting) but the main characters are all decent folk trying to do their best, and the love-interest between the geeky central character and his artist girlfriend is just gorgeous.

Everything’s gonna Be Okay. Josh Thomas’s second vehicle after Please Like Me (which I haven’t seen, so can’t comment on). Kinda weird 20-something guy has to take on the dad role for his also-kinda-weird younger stepsisters after their father’s death. Everyone’s bizarre and sweet in roughly equal measure … sometimes things get majorly screwed up because they have a slightly unique relationship to the world they live in, but it always gets back on track eventually because they really do care about each other.

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Avatar, the Last Airbender

Kim’s Convenience - gentle and very funny comedy about a Korean family in Toronto

Derry Girls – Teenagers growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Also very funny.

Sex Education - teen boy who becomes a sex and relationship therapist for people in his school, basing it on listening to his mother (Gillian Anderson), who is a sex therapist.

Glow -women wrestlers

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power - not the God-awful cartoon from the 80s. The character named are the same, but the show is a decent ripoff of Avatar. Not quite as good, but worthwhile watching.

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The cartoon, Home Movies, featuring characters who are non-literal children (the target audience is adults, but there’s nothing objectionable about it). It’s almost 20 years old at this point, but I watched it recently, and it really holds up.

You’ve probably seen it, but if it happens that you haven’t, the police drama from about 8 years ago, Rizzoli & Isles. Full of unselfish people.

Adorable romance from the 70s UK called No Honestly, starring real-life couple Pauline Collins and John Alderton. Two nice people who deserve finding each other. They come from different backgrounds, which in the UK can produce a lot of dramatic tension. Watched it originally around 2007, and found it engaging, and saw a couple of episodes on my laptop when I was flying last summer (2019). It was still good. Part of what is engaging is how much chemistry the two main characters have.

My Life is Murder: detective show Lucy Lawless did 10 episodes of in Australia in 2019, and was set to do 4 more seasons of, but COVID-19 shut it down. Still on the books, so there may be more, but it’s up in the air. She plays a fascinating character who is a little bit of a misanthrope in her personal dealings with people, but is very unselfish. Definitely not an asshole-- just a little unfiltered sometimes, but extremely likable. Lawless is very, very good in this.

Hey Arnold: a cartoon that is actually aimed at children, but the target audience is a little older than the target audience for a lot of cartoons (more like 10-11 than 6-7); has lots of sly references in it that are there for any adults who may be watching. It’s also about 20 years old, but I saw a few episodes recently, and it’s holding up. I loved Hey Arnold when it was new, and never missed it, even though I was about 30, because while the city where he lives is never named, it’s clearly NYC-- but it’s an idealized NYC, and a nostalgic one, that reminds me of the one from my childhood, rather than the one I used to visit (and lived in briefly) as an adult. I have recommended this to adults before, and gotten lots of “Thanks-- I never would have thought to watch that.”

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Gavin & Stacey - a British comedy about a young couple. No one really unpleasant comes within their orbit. If you liked Parks & Recreation, then this is somewhat similar in tone, but lacks even the cartoonish baddies of Parks & Rec.

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While animated programs are in the mix, I’m going to give a shout-out to Bob’s Burgers, a show that has a lot of heart. Most episodes begin with characters pursuing a short-term selfish interest but when the wheels inevitably come off, there’s an epiphany, and an opportunity to do the right thing.

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The original Addams Family.
Take away the spooky aspects, & the Addams Family are really nice folks, who would certainly be fine neighbors for anybody.

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That’s GOT to be.a whoosh. I wouldn’t drink or eat anything they offered me! No back yard BBQs with the Addamssess.

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The Addamses don’t realize how dangerous their lifestyle is. When they offer you one of Granmama’s Tarantula Pasties, they really are being neighborly with no harm intended.

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Slight disagreement: I was bingewatching Psych and dear God is the protagonist horribly smug and sexist, at least for the first couple seasons. I had made it to the beginning of season 4 when he was just starting to grow up a little when Amazon took it off “included with Prime”, dammit. But honestly, I found myself rooting for Lassiter much of the time.*

Chuck, however, is just goofy fun. And it taught me that you can stop someone from killing you just by putting your hand out and saying “waitwaitwaitwait!”

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Thanks for all the great suggestions! There are a lot of these I haven’t seen yet.

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Though there aren’t a lot of episodes (it only ran for two seasons, and both of those seasons were cut short), Pushing Daisies is a lot of fun, and while the characters are all quirky and odd, they’re good people, and it is, at its heart, a love story.

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I absolutely agree about The Good Place, Parks and Rec and Schitt’s Creek. (And since the first two are from Michael Schur, perhaps add Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which he also produced.)

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Okay, point taken. I sort of thought the OP was talking about anti-heroes who do evil and illegal stuff, ala Breaking Bad or The Sopranos. But upon re-reading I suppose Shawn might fit the OP’s description of an “unpleasant person,” to a degree. I do think he’s generally a decent person, though, and the show is lighthearted enough that his flaws are not that hard to take.

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And he does get better.