Sometimes you just want a story for a couple of hours. Ideally, a story with enough episodes so you have something to watch before bed for a week or two before scrolling again through the endless screen-filler on cable, losing the will to live.

Lost in the mists of time, half-buried among the placards and three-and-a-half-star reviews for 24 knockoffs and inflated soap operas are truly great shows you may have missed. Shows that aren’t new, but that may be new to you. Shows that even if you caught a few episodes back in the day are even better in big gulps.

So what should you settle down with tonight? So happy you asked.

Note to the wise: It’s always wise to check where a show is currently playing since streamers drop and pick up properties willy-nilly and charge extra, or don’t, in fairly random fashion.

Homicide: Life on the Street

I never thought I’d have any reason to shell out for a Peacock (NBC Universal) subscription, but this summer they started rerunning Homicide: Life on the Street (seven seasons,1993-99), the long-unavailable David Simon/Tom Fontana Baltimore cop drama that set the table for The Wire. My husband went to school in Bal’mer, where the series was shot on location in expressive handheld style, and back in the day we never missed it.

The cast includes Yaphet Kotto, Andre Braugher, Melissa Leo, and the great Richard Belzer as TV’s most ubiquitous character, Detective John Munch. The stories are tight, specific, and humane – ripped not from the headlines but from Simon’s yearlong embed in the homicide department. Memorable guest stars turn up in their young shapes – keep an eye out for Robin Williams, Vincent D’Onofrio, Steve Buscemi, and Edie Falco.

As several reviewers have noted, the world and the issues remain instantly recognizable – three decades on, nothing but the phones have changed. (After you polish off Homicide, which should take weeks, you might as well run through The Wire again – the greatest TV show ever made.)

Outlander

Starz is another service we intermittently pop for to see just one offering – Outlander, the Scottish romance/time travel story/historical saga based on the bestselling novels by Diana Gabaldon. The final, split eighth season wraps up this November, much to the sorrow of legions of devoted fans. (The show premiered in 2014. A backstory series is rumored to be starting production now.)

This is historical fiction straight up: heartfelt, wearing corsets and kilts, and without the slightest ironic smirk. Memorable characters, lovely scenery, careful attention to historical detail (including realistic violence and suffering – this is the eighteenth century, after all), and a beautiful, madly-in-love couple having great sex all over the place make it a marvelous entertainment.

Seeing our smart, twentieth-century protagonist, Claire (Caitriona Balfe), defy time itself to get what she wants – Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan) – is a lasting satisfaction.

Also set in a green world circa the Revolutionary War and worth the time: Poldark and Turn.

Ted Lasso

It wasn’t that long ago but it’s hard to recall, thank God, the deep funk of the pandemic year of 2020 and the pervasive bleakness that made it possible for Ted Lasso to sweep us away with a cheerful, old-school fairytale in which optimism, kindness, and scrappy team-spirit win it all.

Four years later, the first season of Ted Lasso is still a heart-easing watch – funny and tender and way smarter than it looks. Jason Sudeikis created the show and plays Ted, an American college football coach improbably hired to head up a failing English soccer team owned by an angry divorcée – Hannah Waddington – who wants the team to tank.

The setup doesn’t quite make sense and of course the team wins after learning to play nicely together, and everyone learns and grows in the radiant glow of Lasso’s Tim Walz-ish Midwestern nice-ness – but all this sweetness feels hard-won and comforting. Tremendous British actors previously unknown to Americans swam into our ken on the show – Waddington, Toheeb Jimoh, and Brett Goldstein among them.

Juno Temple, here cast as a squeaky but capable boy-toy, went on to star in the fifth season of Fargo, garnering an Emmy nomination for best actress in a limited series for her astounding turn (nice, domestic, combat-ready) as a previously abused wife under siege. Honestly, she was robbed.

For more uplifting sports drama, you could do worse than Friday Night Lights. Yes, it’s about high-school football in a small Texas town. Try it anyway. I’m severely sports-impaired and have no particular use for Texas or adolescent drama, but I adore FNL.

The Americans

A show about an embedded Russian spy-couple embedded in the DC suburbs during the Reagan administration sounds like a recipe for dumb, run-and-shoot dreck, but The Americans (six seasons, 2013-18) explores both the emotional toll and dramatic potential of the high-concept premise.

The Americans is a taut, affecting drama about marriage, deception, and duty that cuts ever deeper as it goes along. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys (who married during the show’s run) are all-in as KGB agents raised from infancy to live undetected in a culture they despise and work to destroy. Their friendship with the affable FBI agent across the street (Noah Emmerich) and their love for their increasingly confused, American-born children – offspring they produced under orders to improve their cover – keep the tension thrumming. (The couple’s frequent disguises and assumed identities are special delights.) Guest stars include Frank Langella, Margo Martindale and, briefly, the incredible Julia Garner.

In the same vein but even darker: Ozark, starring Garner, Laura Linney, and Jason Bateman, about middle-class parents laundering money for a cartel in the boonies.

The Good Wife

After ER, the lovable actress Julianna Margulies bumped around for a while before landing in The Good Wife (seven seasons, 2009-2016), a show from husband-and-wife writer-producers Robert and Michelle King.

The germ of the show was several brutal humiliations of the wives of busted public figures. But our heroine Alicia Florrick’s sufferings as the innocent wife of a wicked pol (good old Chris Noth) are just the series backbone – its flesh is that of an exceptionally literate case-of-the-week legal drama rendered in high style against the backdrop of Chicago politics.

When her husband goes to prison, Alicia’s need to keep the family afloat forces her to dust off her law degree and go to work in a luxuriously appointed pool of glamorous, fast-talking Chicago sharks – Christine Baranski, Josh Charles, Archie Panjabi and, eventually, Cush Jumbo and Alan Cumming are the standouts.

The clothes are splendid, the wall-art is handsome, and the mostly Vivaldi-esque soundtrack superb. But it’s Margulies’ portrayal of Florrick ‘s private warmth, professional wariness, and gradual assimilation into a ruthless world that carries the show.

For more along the same lines, you could go back to L.A. Law, or to the more recent Suits – a sort of L.A. Law Lite with a pre-royal Megan Markle.

Happy Valley

West Yorkshire is the great TV creator/writer Sally Wainwright’s home, and her enduring subject. In Last Tango in Halifax, she gave us a glimpse of life there – from struggling sheep farm to posh boarding school – in a cheerful light; in Happy Valley (three seasons – 2014, 2016, 2023) we get the dark.

Both shows star Sarah Lancashire, an actress who can do anything. In Happy Valley she’s the heart-broken, hard-working police chief of Halifax, where she tries to keep a lid on working-class mayhem in a wet climate, raise her orphaned grandson (Ryan Connah), keep her alcoholic sister (Siobhan Finneran) sober, and, in her scarce spare time, grieve the suicide of her daughter, who was raped and impregnated by a local psychopath named Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), a dedicated young criminal who’s still up and doin’ in the neighborhood.

Few dramas so convincingly render the texture of life in a place, the feel of individual personalities, the drag and rush of life. (The show’s won a raft of BAFTAs.) And few villains are as terrifying as Norton’s Royce – I once saw a photo of Lancashire and Norton at an awards ceremony that actually made me start – “Oh my God! Royce has his arm around you! Run!”

When you run out of Happy Valley, try Mare of Easttown, set in a fictional suburb of Philadelphia, and starring Kate Winslet as a small-town detective in a career-capping performance. Jean Smart, as Mare’s mother, and Guy Pearce, as her love-interest, are bright spots in a strong if not quite Wainwright-level production.