20 best shows like Ray (2004)

Rayna Jaymes and Juliette Barnes face personal and professional challenges as they navigate their paths as artists and individuals. Surrounding them, and often complicating their lives, are their family, friends and, in some cases, lovers, as well as the up-and-coming performers and songwriters trying to get ahead in the business. In Nashville, musicians and songwriters are at the heart of the storm driven by their own ambitions. Some are fueled by their creativity and passion for fame. Others struggle to cope with the pressures of success and are doing everything in their power to stay on top.

In the early 1990s in New York, during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, a visionary musician named Bobby Diggs aka The RZA begins to form a super group of a dozen young, black men, who will eventually rise to become one of the unlikeliest success stories in American music history.

Glee is an American teen musical comedy-drama television series that airs on the Fox network in the United States. It focuses on the reconstituted William McKinley High School glee club, New Directions, which competes on the show choir competition circuit while its disparate members deal with relationships, sexuality, social issues, and learning to become an effective team.

As Mexican-American Tejano singer Selena comes of age and realizes her dreams, she and her family make tough choices to hold on to love and music.

Follow the story of R&B pioneers Michael Bivins, Ricky Bell, Ronnie Devoe, Bobby Brown, Ralph Tresvant and Johnny Gill as they navigate fame from their native Boston to Hollywood and beyond.

The story of the romantic and creative partnership between Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon. He was a filmmaker and one of theater's most influential choreographers and directors; she was the greatest Broadway dancer of all time. Together, they changed the face of American entertainment — at a perilous cost.

Tremé takes its name from a neighborhood of New Orleans and portrays life in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane. Beginning three months after Hurricane Katrina, the residents of New Orleans, including musicians, chefs, Mardi Gras Indians, and other New Orleanians struggle to rebuild their lives, their homes and their unique culture.

Trying to make a name for themselves in New York's competitive fashion scene, Ben Epstein and his friend and business partner Cam Calderon use their street knowledge and connections to bring their ambitions to fruition. With the help of Cam's cousin Rene, who is trying to market his own high-energy drink, and their well-connected friend Domingo, the burgeoning entrepreneurs set out to make it big, encountering obstacles along the way that will require all their ingenuity to overcome.

Chronicles the life of Judy Garland, from her first public performance in 1924 until her death.

Charming, fast talking Marty Kaan and his crack team of management consultants know how to play the corporate game better than anyone, by using every dirty trick in the book to woo powerful CEOs and close huge deals. In the board rooms, barrooms, and bedrooms of the power elite, corruption is business as usual and everyone's out for themselves first. Nothing is sacred in this scathing, irreverent satire of corporate America today.

The true story of the movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, and the unexpected backlash led by a conservative woman named Phyllis Schlafly, aka “the sweetheart of the silent majority.”

Three-part biopic of the Liverpudlian songbird who would later find fame and fortune. It tells of her rocky road to fame and captures the essence of 1960s Liverpool.

This limited series chronicles the incredible true story of Madam C.J. Walker, who was the first African American self-made millionaire.

The series dramatizes the life story of Mexican superstar singer Luis Miguel, who has captivated audiences in Latin America and beyond for decades.

A fresh look at the life and legacy of the iconic artist Leonardo da Vinci, positing that he was a gay outsider who used his work as a way of hiding his true self. Each episode will examine one of da Vinci’s artworks for hidden clues about a tortured artist struggling for perfection.

The trials and triumphs of one of America’s wealthiest and unhappiest families, the Gettys. Told over multiple seasons and spanning the twentieth century, the series begins in 1973 with the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, an heir to the Getty oil fortune, by the Italian mafia in Rome.

The owner of a Paris jazz club gets tangled up with dangerous criminals as he fights to protect his business, his band and his teenage daughter.

John Adams is a 2008 American television miniseries chronicling most of U.S. President John Adams' political life and his role in the founding of the United States. Paul Giamatti portrays John Adams. The miniseries was directed by Tom Hooper. Kirk Ellis wrote the screenplay based on the book John Adams by David McCullough. The biopic of John Adams and the story of the first fifty years of the United States was broadcast in seven parts by HBO between March 16 and April 20, 2008. John Adams received widespread critical acclaim, and many prestigious awards. The show won four Golden Globe awards and thirteen Emmy awards, which is more than any other miniseries in history.

The two-night scripted miniseries “Houdini” follows the epic tales of Harry Houdini as he emerges as America’s first bonafide world-renowned superstar.

A biography series based on the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, the brilliant, beautiful and talented Southern Belle who becomes the original flapper and icon of the wild, flamboyant Jazz Age in the 20s. Z starts before Zelda Fitzgerald meets the unpublished writer F. Scott Fitzgerald and moves through their passionate, turbulent love affair and their marriage-made in heaven, lived out in hell as the celebrity couple of their time.

A prisoner becomes a lawyer, litigating cases for other inmates while fighting to overturn his own life sentence for a crime he didn’t commit.

When an up-and-coming young country singer accepts a job as a nanny with a musical family, she finds the bond she's always missed.

Anthology series about famous geniuses with the first season charting how Albert Einstein unlocked the mysteries of the atom and the universe, and the second exploring the passionate nature and relentless creative drive of Pablo Picasso.

The rise and fall of Fox News founder Roger Ailes, focusing primarily on the past decade in which Ailes arguably became the Republican Party’s de facto leader, while flashing back to defining events in his life.

Biopic about Niccolo Paganini. He receives training from his father in early childhood. The best teachers of Parma are unable to give him more, so Paganini turns to a daily 15 hours of rigorous self-training. He makes sensational concert tours in Vienna, Paris, London and many other cities of Europe. He is always playing from memory, wearing black, and his stage appearance supports the rumors of his supernatural abilities. He is a wealthy man, but gambling and reckless spending forces him to pawn his violin. He is given a Guarneri violin by a wealthy listener to keep. He later gives this violin to the city if Genoa. The Paganini's violin is played by Leonid Kogan in this film.

Cleopatra, the famed Egyptian Queen born in 69 B.C., is shown to have been brought by Roman ruler Julius Caesar at age 18. Caesar becomes sexually obsessed by the 18 year old queen, beds her, and eventually has a son by her. However, his Roman followers and his wife are not pleased by the union. In fact, as Caesar has only a daughter by his wife, he had picked Octavian as his successor.

Twins Tal and Janelle relocate from Ohio to Atlanta, where at their new school High Water is always a beat.

Based on a true story, "Harley and the Davidsons" charts the birth of this iconic bike during a time of great social and technological change beginning at the turn of the 20th century.

Louis C.K. stars as a fictionalized version of himself; a comedian and newly divorced father raising his two daughters in New York City.

A comedy about the unique relationship between a young songwriter, Ally Dawson, and Austin Moon, the overnight internet sensation who gains sudden notoriety after performing one of Ally's songs. Austin and Ally struggle with how to maintain and capitalize on Austin's newfound fame. Austin is more of a rebel type who doesn't follow the rules and is somewhat immature for his age, while Ally is conservative yet self-conscious.

In a Kentucky orphanage in the 1950s, a young girl discovers an astonishing talent for chess while struggling with addiction.

Spartacus is an American television series inspired by the historical figure of Spartacus, a Thracian gladiator who from 73 to 71 BCE led a major slave uprising against the Roman Republic departing from Capua.

The series follows the "untold" story of Leonardo Da Vinci: the genius during his early years in Renaissance Florence. As a 25-year old artist, inventor, swordsman, lover, dreamer and idealist, he struggles to live within the confines of his own reality and time as he begins to not only see the future, but invent it.

The stranger-than-fiction account of a prison break in upstate New York in the summer of 2015, which spawned a massive manhunt for two convicted murderers who were aided in their escape by a married female prison employee with whom they both became sexually entangled.

Based on a true story, the drama tells the tragic love story of Kim Woo Jin, a married stage drama writer, and Yun Shim Duk, Korea's first professional soprano, who meet while studying at Tokyo University in the 1920s. Yun Shim Duk's recording of "Death Song" became the first Korean pop song in 1926.

Set in 1970s New York, Vinyl is a ride through the sex- and drug-addled music business at the dawn of punk, disco, and hip-hop. The show is seen through the eyes of a record label president, Richie Finestra, who is trying to save his company and his soul without destroying everyone in his path.

An intense and fictionalized account of actual events and people surrounding Lizzie’s life after her controversial acquittal of the horrific double murder of her father and stepmother in 1892.

Boss is an American political drama television serial created by Farhad Safinia. The series stars Kelsey Grammer as Tom Kane, the mayor of Chicago, who has recently been diagnosed with dementia with Lewy bodies, a degenerative neurological disorder.

Elizabeth Thatcher, a young school teacher from a wealthy Eastern family, migrates from the big city to teach school in a small coal mining town in the west.

Follow the first human mission to Mars, exploring the challenges of taking the first steps toward interplanetary colonization. The story focuses not only on the astronauts, but also on their families and loved ones, as well as the ground team on Earth.