Best
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Getting to watch any TV at all when you have a baby feels like an absurd luxury – because, really, this is time better spent sleeping – but a sitcom such as Always Sunny … is the perfect place to start. It’s funny, it’s short, it doesn’t require close concentration and, best of all, everyone screams their lines so loudly that you won’t have any trouble staying awake.
Breaking Bad
Another tip: revisit shows you’ve already seen. Because if you fall asleep fully dressed the second you’ve put your kid to bed and you miss an episode – which you absolutely will at some point – it doesn’t really matter. We revisited Breaking Bad when our son was about three months old, and it was a brilliant idea.
Fargo
A lot of prestige drama mainly consists of dour white men mumbling a lot, which can get samey when you only have an hour or two of TV time every day. Fargo, though, is lively and formally daring enough to hold your interest. I cannot recommend it enough.
Anything on Walter Presents
Channel 4’s foreign import imprint almost feels like it was tailor-made for new parents. Babies are noisy, which makes following dialogue a nightmare, a scientific impossibility. But everything on Walter Presents is subtitled, so you can just read the episodes instead.
Game of Thrones (with Wikipedia)
Watching Game of Thrones knackered or distracted is a monumental pain in the arse. Confronted with the prospect of billions of identical characters grimly discussing things their uncles did 50 years ago, you’d be forgiven for giving up and checking out. But it isn’t entirely hopeless; assign your partner to the internet to work out what’s going on and things will become much easier to follow.
Worst
True Detective
One of my main ambitions during paternity leave was to catch up on True Detective. This was a huge mistake. When you’re cranky and sleep-deprived and your attention span has been reduced to a tiny dot, the last thing you want is to try to sit through a mumbly, convoluted faux-profound drama about basically nothing.
Wallander
I loved Wallander before I was a parent, for all the reasons I can’t stand it now. It’s so languid. It’s slow and moody. In this British remake of the Danish drama, nobody ever seems in a rush to do anything. It’s infuriating. Oi, Wallander, don’t you know it’s 8pm and I’ve got a maximum of 45 minutes before I pass out in a dribbly mess on the sofa? Hurry it along.
Anything by Aaron Sorkin
There’s a rapid-fire exchange of dialogue. You didn’t catch any of it because your toddler is banging a wooden hammer on a radiator. You ask your partner what just happened. She tries to explain, but she’s too tired to fully articulate anything. By the time you’ve figured it out, you’ve missed three dozen more rapid-fire exchanges of dialogue, and all is lost.
Game of Thrones (after they turn one)
Even though it took extensive Wikipedia consultation, we could still watch Game of Thrones in the same room as our son when he was a newborn. Not any more. Ask me when I knew that my son had become a conscious person and not just an unthinking infant, and I’ll tell you it was when he saw a swordfight on TV and burst into fits of terrified tears. Now, sadly, it’s one for after bedtime.
Teletubbies
I don’t mind Teletubbies. But it does constitute about 85% of my total viewing habits these days. I am 35. This is no way to live.
