惯性聚合 高效追踪和阅读你感兴趣的博客、新闻、科技资讯
阅读原文 在惯性聚合中打开

推荐订阅源

大猫的无限游戏
大猫的无限游戏
H
Hackread – Cybersecurity News, Data Breaches, AI and More
博客园_首页
OSCHINA 社区最新新闻
OSCHINA 社区最新新闻
D
Docker
酷 壳 – CoolShell
酷 壳 – CoolShell
宝玉的分享
宝玉的分享
Martin Fowler
Martin Fowler
美团技术团队
量子位
M
MIT News - Artificial intelligence
Apple Machine Learning Research
Apple Machine Learning Research
阮一峰的网络日志
阮一峰的网络日志
博客园 - 叶小钗
博客园 - 三生石上(FineUI控件)
腾讯CDC
Hugging Face - Blog
Hugging Face - Blog
博客园 - 【当耐特】
小众软件
小众软件
博客园 - 司徒正美
罗磊的独立博客
云风的 BLOG
云风的 BLOG
B
Blog RSS Feed
博客园 - 聂微东

Lifehacker

Lifehacker Deals Live Blog: The Best Tech Sales, All in One Place You Can Choose New 'Thinking Levels' for Gemini Lifehacker Is Hosting a 'Big Guessing Game' for Apple's 2026 Announcements How to Watch WWDC 2026 Live I’m a Deals Writer, and These Are My Top 10 Tech Deals This Week 10 Hacks Every Claude User Should Know This 65-Inch Premium Sony OLED TV Is $700 Off Right Now Hyrox Race Live Blog: Watch Our Runner and Our Weightlifter Take on the Latest Viral Fitness Competition Carnival Cruise Just Had a Massive Data Breach Google Chrome Just Rolled Out a Major New Security Feature The Best Books, Movies, Video Games, and Podcasts You Should Check Out After Watching 'The Mandalorian' The Garmin Epix Pro Smartwatch Is Half Off Right Now We Finally Know More About Apple's New Siri This Massive LG Curved Gaming Monitor Is $300 Off Right Now This Craftsman Battery Kit Comes With a Free Tool Worth up to $139 I Used Garmin's Heart Rate Monitor to Measure My 'Running Economy,' and Here's What I Learned What You Get With Each Paid AI Subscription You Can Get a Free Ryobi Tool From Home Depot Right Now The Best Books, Movies, Video Games, and Podcasts to Check Out After Watching ‘Call the Midwife’ There's a New Way to Make Your Gmail More Private 10 Shows Like 'The Mandalorian' You Should Watch Next The Hisense CanvasTV Is a Great Alternative to Samsung's 'The Frame,' and Now It's up to $1,000 Off You Have Another Chance to Get the M5 MacBook Pro for $200 Off Meta Is Rolling Out New Subscriptions for Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook This Eufy Solar Security Camera Is 33% Off Right Now This Massive Samsung Ultrawide Gaming Monitor Is $600 Off Right Now The Oura Ring 5 Is Official, and Starts Shipping Next Week Apple Will Now Give You More Trade-In Value for These iPhones, iPads, and Macs This EcoFlow Portable Generator Is Over $400 Off Right Now You Can Already Save $100 on the New M4 iPad Air
10 Shows Like
Ross Johnson · 2026-06-26 · via Lifehacker

Ross Johnson

Ross Johnson Freelance Writer

Experience

Ross Johnson writes about television, film, and literature for Lifehacker. He has a degree in political science from the University of Rochester and has previously been a legal writer and editor for Thomson Reuters, for which he later traveled around India and the Middle East as an educator specializing in American English style and grammar for adults.

Ross has been an actor on stage, in commercials, and in independent films since childhood, and has written hundreds of articles and essays on genre literature and cinema for Barnes & Noble, Gizmodo, Kotaku, and Yahoo! Entertainment.

Ross produces the Swan Songs film podcast and hosts The Sound of Tomorrow, a pop culture and current affairs radio show based in Rochester, New York, where he lives with his husband and dogs and supports the local arts and cinema scene. You can find him on Bluesky.

Read Full Bio

Add as a preferred source on Google
Add as a preferred source on Google

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

Jon Hamm smoking as Don Draper in 'Mad Men'

Credit: Mad Men, AMC

Streamalikes Logo

This is Streamalikes, where you can find a curated list of recommendations to stream based on what you already like.

Table of Contents


Following the conclusion of The Sopranos, Mad Men picked up the torch for prestige television in 2007 with layered storytelling, fascinatingly damaged characters, and impeccable period style. Set at an advertising agency in the 1960s, the show explored an America on the cusp of massive social change from the perspective of the people committed to preserving the status quo. Given our current cultural fascination with an imagined past in which women knew their place and white heterosexuals always knew best, the charming, complicated, boozy, and deeply damaged Don Draper looks a lot less like an artifact now than he did nearly 20 years ago—a reminder, I suppose, that good shows never really lose their ability to speak to us. In that spirit, here are 10 other rich, novelistic shows full of complex characters living though moments of change.

Mrs. America (2020)

From Mad Men writer/producer/Emmy winner Dahvi Waller, Mrs. America dramatizes (with tremendous period style) the ‘70s-era fight over the Equal Rights Amendment, the moment being, simultaneously, a high and low point in the hope for equity and autonomy. Cate Blanchett plays activist Phyllis Schlafly, who led the fight against the (once) broadly popular proposed amendment, weaponizing the ERA by tying it to radical and pro-choice feminists, homosexuals, desegregationists, and other maligned groups. She was at the forefront of the broad conservative cultural shift into a world that we're very much still living in, and it’s not a bad time to take a close look at the people who made basic equality sound radical. The incredible supporting cast includes Rose Byrne, Uzo Aduba, and Elizabeth Banks. Stream Mrs. America on Hulu.


Halt and Catch Fire (2014 – 2017)

A show that largely flew under the radar during its four seasons (and gets better as it goes along), this one offers up a heavily fictionalized portrait of the rise of personal computers in the 1980s, into the early days of broad adoption of the internet in the '90s. Lee Pace plays Joe MacMillan, the antihero lead who leaves IBM in 1983 to join the fictional Cardiff Electric. He's charismatic, manipulative, and not terribly tech-proficient, but nonetheless has dreams of building the next big tech innovation—starting by reverse-engineering the IBM PC. It's a show that comes up on any number of critical best-of lists and has a sick opening sequence. And did I mention Lee Pace? The timeframe here is different, but the world of men and women going a bit too far in business resonates. Stream Halt and Catch Fire on Prime Video.


The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017 – 2023)

Mrs. Maisel was one of Prime’s first and buzziest original series, a comedy/drama from Amy Sherman-Palladino (Gilmore Girls) about the title’s Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan), a New York housewife of the late 1950s who discovers a talent for stand-up comedy. Inspired by the real-life careers of comedians like Totie Fields and Joan Rivers, the show is warm and funny, with great performances and dialogue; it also achieves something rare in being a show about comedy that’s actually funny. The tone here is a bit different from Mad Men, but the time frame and period stylings are a match, as are the trajectories of the shows' female leads: Like Midge, Mad Men's Peggy aspires to more than she's given to believe she should expect. Stream The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Prime Video.


The Hour (2011 – 2012)

With a rather brilliant cast and impeccable period style, The Hour charts the rise of a (fictional) BBC current affairs program, led by women and premiering in the middle of the 1956 Suez Crisis—a challenge in itself, as the government isn't particularly keen to have its missteps reported on (luckily, such censorship could never happen today). Producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) chooses war correspondent Lix Storm (the great Anna Chancellor) as foreign correspondent alongside less-accomplished anchor, Hector Madden (Dominic West), while scrappy reporter Freddie Lyon (Ben Whislaw) is desperate to get onboard. There are spies, murder, and plenty of then-current affairs spread across the show's two seasons, but the juiciest stuff takes place in the office, as internal politics and rivalries meet real-world drama. Stream The Hour on Tubi.


Masters of Sex (2013 – 2016)

Covering a historical time period of nearly 15 years, from the mid-1950s into the late '60s this is the (sometimes highly) fictionalized story of sex research pioneers William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), who's hired as a secretary but quickly proves herself capable of far more than taking notes and fetching coffee. With a style reminiscent of Mad Men, the show impresses by being far less lurid than its title suggests, instead approaching sexuality with a deep earnestness that occasionally borders on the schmaltzy. No matter: There are plenty of shows with lots of sex, and fewer that approach the topic with this degree of compassion. Buy Masters of Sex from Prime Video and Apple TV.


The Queen's Gambit (2020)

A surprising cultural phenomenon in the early pandemic era, Queen's Gambit gets a spot here largely for its impeccable 1960s period vibes—but that's not quite all. The coming-of-age period drama stars Anna Taylor-Joy as chess prodigy Elizabeth Harmon, fighting to become a champion on a global stage in an era where her talents were often dismissed, and while struggling with her own emotional problems and dependency issues. Without pushing the comparison too far, Elizabeth, like Don Draper, is fighting to reach the top of her field, making moral compromises while struggling with an intense alcohol dependency. How anyone survived the 1960s, I'll never know—though they'd probably wonder the same of us. Stream The Queen's Gambit on Netflix.


The Sopranos (1999 – 2007)

Mad Men's most obvious forerunner to the prestige TV crown, The Sopranos doesn't share much with Mad Men in the way of setting, but there are tonal similarities that might have a fair bit to do with the mutual presence of writer/producer Matthew Weiner, who earned Emmys for both shows. The Sopranos works as well as it does because the mob here works as a stand-in for just about any job in America—full of false promise and plenty of peril, requiring endless moral compromises in order to get ahead. Tony, like Don Draper, exists in a world in which his power as a boss, and as a man with very traditional ideas of what that means, is increasingly under perceived threat. Stream The Sopranos on HBO Max.

What do you think so far?


Succession (2018 – 2023)

The darkly comic story of the Roy family, owners of media conglomerate Waystar RoyCo, and the chaos and backbiting that ensue when patriarch Logan (Brian Cox) suffers a stroke, prompting the clan to begin fighting over what will remain after his inevitable demise. As one of the standard bearers of modern prestige TV, at least until its conclusion in 2023, Succession picked up the torch for layered storytelling and complicated characters both elevated and crushed by their circumstances. Both shows deal with broken people, shaped so deeply by their circumstances and settings that it only rarely occurs to them, and usually too late, that they might be capable of being better. Stream Succession on HBO Max.


Good Girls Revolt (2015 – 2016)

A fictionalized adaptation of Lynn Povich's nonfiction book of the same name, Good Girls Revolt takes place the offices of a Newsweek-esque publication in 1969, taking some clear inspiration from Mad Men in its exploration of the social, political, and cultural mores of the American middle-class in the 1960s. Genevieve Angelson, Anna Camp, and Erin Darke star as three "researchers"—a low-level position for women requiring at least as much education and talent as for the male reporters who use their work and writing without any thought of attribution. Oh, and they also get paid (at best) about a third of what the boys get. As the series progresses (as you may have gathered from the title) the women get fed up and move toward legal action to protect their rights. Author Povich was, herself, one of the parties to the historic lawsuit on which this is based. Stream Good Girls Revolt on Prime Video.


Industry (2020 – )

Bringing us right up to the minute and taking us across the pond to London, Industry plays like a spiritual successor to Mad Men, investment banking being to the modern world what advertising was to the 1960s. Placing the two shows into conversation with each other allows for a look at the business worlds of past and present: The climbers of Industry are less overwhelmingly white, straight, and male than their predecessors, though almost as much has remained the same. As Industry begins, the recent grads working at prestigious investment bank Pierpoint & Co. are given their marching orders: There are a lot of them and only a few full-time job openings, so they'll need to prove themselves if they hope to stick around. Imagine a younger, hotter, British Glengarry Glen Ross. Stream Industry on HBO Max.

The Daily Newsletter Ready to do everything better?

Jordan Calhoun portrait Jordan Calhoun

Get daily tips, tricks, and tech guides from our expert team.

The Daily NewsletterReady to do everything better? Get daily tips, tricks, and tech guides from our expert team.