The best TV comedies on Amazon Prime Video

A Different World was immune to the adverse effects of introducing serious topics into a sitcom because with Hillman [College] as its backdrop, it lived up to its title. The show’s unique environment was unfamiliar to many viewers and was ideally conducive to topical episodes. College is about students feeling out their identities, challenging their most closely held beliefs, and exploring new ways of looking at the world. It’s also the time when kids get their first intoxicating taste of freedom, and enough latitude to make consequential mistakes. Those universal dynamics have contours all their own for students at historically Black colleges. When students choose a college like Hillman, that’s a political statement in itself, a commitment to shaping and refining a Black identity and immersing themselves in Black culture. With those students as television characters, solemn topics can be gracefully folded into stories and dialogue without a speed bump. A Different World isn’t one of history’s funniest sitcoms, but it’s certainly one of the most revolutionary, and a rare example of a sitcom that works as a vessel for even the thorniest of ideas. []

We’ll be the first to admit it: We just like it when Phoebe Waller-Bridge looks at us. As Fleabag, her sly, knowing glances to the camera make you feel like you’re in on something; they’re also integral to understanding the series’ debaucherous, sardonic, and ultimately anguished title character. In the first season, Fleabag’s wry asides emphasize her loneliness and guilt—she turns to the audience because her best friend is dead. In the second, her glimpses act as release valves when Andrew Scott’s Hot Priest digs too deep into her feelings. It’s all about looking and being recognized and how it can be scarier for another person to really see you than no one at all. []

Premiering in 2017 on Amazon Prime, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel mixes fantastical ideas and historical accuracy in its portrayal of New York City in the late ’50s. Rachel Brosnahan nails it as Midge Maisel, a self-possessed Jewish-American woman entering the male-dominated world of comedy with raunchy humor and astute self-jabs. The quick-witted, big-hearted show was the first streaming series to win Outstanding Comedy at the Emmys, proving it couldn’t have been written by anyone but Amy Sherman-Palladino. []

Mozart In The Jungle spent its entire four-season run blithely moving to its own beat, shifting TV landscape be damned. The Amazon dramedy explored the world of classical music, and the ongoing clash between tradition and innovation therein. That struggle afforded the exceptional cast, including Malcolm McDowell, Bernadette Peters, and Saffron Burrows, much to work with. But Mozart was often at its most captivating when it focused on the harmonizing going on between the roguish Rodrigo (Gael García Bernal) and grasping Hailey (Lola Kirke). []

The Office is the most influential TV comedy of the last 10 years and probably the most influential TV comedy since . You could make an argument for Friends or or the of the show or even Everybody Loves Raymond, but most of those shows were reacting to Seinfeld or trying to ape what made this show so great. In just 14 episodes, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant took the standard workplace sitcom—full of will-they/won’t-they romances and wacky hijinks—and brought it slightly more down to Earth. They brought cringe humor into the TV mainstream in a big way. They invented a set of characters that resonated from the very first episode, and they create a full story that leaves at just the right point in time—twice. []

The burgeoning subgenre that critic Matt Zoller Seitz recently dubbed “”—half-hour TV programs that aim for the heart and gut as often as the funny bone—has so far tackled  , , , , and . Telling the story of a dysfunctional family dealing with the passing of its matriarch (among other traumas), Amazon’s One Mississippi adds “grief and grieving” to that list of not-just-for-dramas-anymore topics. Based in part on the life of comedian Tig Notaro (who co-created the series with Diablo Cody), that gauntlet should be familiar to anyone who’s followed Notaro’s career since the celebrated performance that became her 2012 album, . []

Red Oaks works best as someone’s reconstructed memories of a time that didn’t really happen. The 1980s weren’t a John Hughes movie, but they weren’t David Meyers’ (Craig Roberts) summer at Red Oaks Country Club, either, and neither of those things is a 100 percent accurate depiction of what it’s like to be young at any point in history. The truth lies somewhere in between, in the ineffable elements that Red Oaks absolutely nails. The show takes place in a world where lives are as planned out as a country club’s summer itinerary, but it’s smart enough to see through that illusion. Growing up isn’t a progression from childhood to adolescence to college to marriage and beyond—and Red Oaks acknowledges this, by placing its wedding episode before the bar mitzvah one. And even after that, David has some maturing to do. []

Nineteen years since it debuted, it seems clear that is a pivotal show in recent television history, even if it lacks the lasting popularity of  or the acclaim of , two shows it bridged to a certain extent. The show was set at the Sacred Heart teaching hospital, and mostly followed a group of medical interns—referred to as “scrubs” because of their uniforms—as they struggled to put their newly completed education to use. Zach Braff, in his breakout role, starred as John “J.D.” Dorian, a competent doctor, goofball, and extremely emotional guy. J.D. forms relationships of desperate intensity with everyone around him: best friend and surgeon Turk (Donald Faison), professional rival and on again/off again love interest Elliot Reid (Sarah Chalke), and most intensely, chief resident Perry Cox (), who J.D. makes a mentor and father figure over Cox’s overwhelming opposition. (J.D. can’t do this all on his own—.) Surrounding them are nurse Carla Espinosa (Judy Reyes), who’s the hospital’s most efficient employee; Bob Kelso (Ken Jenkins), Sacred Heart’s penny-pinching and gleefully dickish chief of medicine; and an unnamed janitor () with an unwavering and mostly undeserved grudge toward J.D. []