20 best shows like Sideshow (2021)

Coming-of-age drama about lovable rogues Conor and Jock as they navigate their awkward teenage years, hatching plans and adventures to help distract from their tough home lives and their inability to stay out of trouble at school.

When tough-acting loner paramedic Maleek is paired with over-friendly divorcee Wendy, their partnership looks dead on arrival. But pretty soon they're giving each other life support.

Frank is a 33-year-old catastrophe; a misanthropic fantasist in arrested development who’s convinced that the world owes him. He's also our hero. He has a tenuous hold on reality, a single room in his mother’s home, an ex he can’t get over and a loyal best friend, Doofus. This is the hilarious story of a man’s hapless search for respect. We don’t want him to succeed, but it’s fun to watch him try.

Sitcom about three desperate young men from the suburbs who try to get laid, hold down jobs and climb the social ladder in the big city - which just happens to be ancient Rome.

A chronicle of four friends during a decade in which everything changed, including the rise of AIDS.

Tom and Louise meet in a pub immediately before their weekly marital therapy session. With each successive episode we piece together how their lives were, what drew them together and what has started to pull them apart.

BOY MEETS GIRL is a funny, tender, sex positive romantic comedy that explores what it means to be a real man or woman, and how important it is to live a courageous life not letting fear stand in the way of going after your dreams.

Set in 1980s London, this comedy series follows the Easmon family, which has settled in England after having arrived from Sierra Leone a decade earlier. The Easmons’ son, Akuna, hangs out in the housing project where the family lives, playing soccer and dodging the local thugs. The family’s life is turned upside down when Walter’s brother Valentine arrives in the U.K., bringing chaos in his wake and igniting a passion for music in Akuna.

Set in Valco, a fictional budget supermarket in the north west of England, Trollied finds the funny in one of our most familiar surroundings and focuses on the types of characters we all recognise: bored checkout staff, ineffectual managers and a range of customers, from the irate to the downright bizarre.

When the news is announced that a comet is on an unavoidable collision course with Earth, the most hilarious and unexpected chain of events imaginable is set in motion.

When his antiques dealer dad winds up in hospital following a rather mysterious accident, book-smart Barnaby teams up with NYC tough girl Nina to save the family's cash-strapped business.

Comedy drama revolving around a small seaside hamlet in the north of England, as a former resident returns with big plans for the community's re-development.

Inexperienced Otis channels his sex therapist mom when he teams up with rebellious Maeve to set up an underground sex therapy clinic at school.

The Wright Way was a British television sitcom written by Ben Elton which began airing on BBC One on 23 April 2013. It concerns a health and safety manager, his staff, and his family. Widely panned by critics, it was cancelled after only one series had aired.

Comedy set in the social services department of a local authority. Social workers Rose and Al swim against the tide of bureaucracy, deal with the absurdities of life and try to navigate their equally trying professional and personal lives.

Family-based sitcom set in the capital of British Pakistan - Sparkhill, Birmingham. Citizen Khan follows the trials and tribulations of loud-mouthed, tight-fisted, self-appointed community leader Mr Khan and his long suffering family, wife Mrs Khan and daughters Shazia and Alia.

A British husband-and-wife comedy writing team travel to Hollywood to remake their successful British TV series, with disastrous results.

Andy is a dissolute out-of work musician who forges an unlikely alliance with his 12-year-old nephew Errol after being morally blackmailed into looking after him by his chaotic sister Sam - all on the day Andy was planning to kill himself. Not a natural with either kids or responsibility, he tries to keep his new charge out of trouble while being knee-deep in it himself.

Hosted by Josh Widdicombe and James Acaster, top comedians are posed absurd hypothetical situations and scored on how well they would deal with them. Over three rounds, two teams of comedians must think fast as they are faced with a series of completely made-up scenarios and interrogated on their approach to each one. Host Josh Widdicombe poses the questions and interrogates the guests' methods, whilst James Acaster, as arbiter of the Hypotheticals, deals with the guests quibbles and queries and doles out the points.

A genre-bending, anti-historical ride through 18th century Russia following the rise of Catherine the Nothing to Catherine the Great and her explosive relationship with husband Peter, the emperor of Russia.

When an arrogant, maverick National Security Agent comes over from the US to join a newly-formed team tackling cybercrime at Britain's security headquarters, he enlists an inept and tactless computer analyst Joseph in a power grab that threatens to disrupt the team’s ability to combat cyber terrorism.

Shaun, Harvey, Gadget, Trev and Kelly hit up the nightlife of raves and ecstasy. Woody and Lol are happy, living together with their kids and Combo is still in prison. But things slowly change. This is the year 1990 and This is England.

Funny Valentines is a comedy collection of nine original short films exclusive to BBC iPlayer, written and starring many of Britain's finest comedians. Each comedian was invited to create a short Funny Valentine to bring their unique take on the international day of love.

Set in the dark heart of Victorian London, Detective Inspector Rabbit is a hardened booze-hound who's seen it all. Rabbit's been chasing bad guys for as long as he can remember, but these days his heart keeps stopping at inopportune moments.

Breeders exposes the parental-paradox that it is possible, in the very same moment, to love your child to the horizon of the universe, while being apoplectically angry enough to want to send them there.

Celia and Alan are both widowed and in their seventies. When their respective grandsons put their details on Facebook, they rediscover a passionate relationship that started over sixty years ago.

Radio phone-in host Gary Bellamy is given his own TV series in which he travels the length and breadth of the land to meet the British people.

Comedy drama following a mismatched pair of police officers who disagree on everything with their partner, from policing to their personal life.

James is 17 and is pretty sure he is a psychopath. Alyssa, also 17, is the cool and moody new girl at school. The pair make a connection and she persuades him to embark on a darkly comedic road trip in search of her real father.

Award-winning British comic geniuses Mischief, creators of the Broadway and London smash 'The Play That Goes Wrong’, present the hit BBC comedy The Goes Wrong Show, where a fictional amateur group attempt to put on a series of terrible TV plays, all of which end in disaster. Expect huge laughs from the funniest slapstick performers around. ‘I don’t think family entertainment gets better than The Goes Wrong Show. On a par with Pixar in our household’ - Charlie Brooker (creator of Black Mirror).

Tom and Suze, two nineteen-year-olds both dreaming of the future, have sex when nuclear war strikes. Unfortunately, they then survive. Awkward. Cockroaches is a post-apocalyptic comedy about one family trying to survive in a wasteland of cannibals, perverts and one insufferable-ex. Our heroes struggle with boredom, fear and the ethics of cooking with their own body fluids.