5 Reasons Not to Leave Your Couch This Weekend
Sometimes friends are the best kind of family.
Everyone gets by with a little help from their friends, including the stars of some of the best TV shows and movies out there. February is, decidedly, one of the worst months of the year despite it being the shortest. That’s just a fact. You probably need some uplifting content at this point, so here are some weird movies and TV shows about weird friendship.
After all, “fish are friends, not food,” corpses fart and come back to life, sometimes your husband has been cheating on you with his law partner for decades, and both high school and college are weird, horrible places filled with flashes of fun. You need a nice reminder that “normal” isn’t always the best way to be and that sometimes friends are the best kind of family.
Here are the five weirdest, most uplifting movies and TV shows about friendship currently available to stream online.
5. Fresh Meat, Netflix
A group of rag-tag British kids start their first year of college as “freshers” (the British slang for Freshmen) and live together in a house off campus. At first, they hate each other. Like, they really hate each other. They have awkward sex, try various drugs, and fail monstrously at school and life as they attempt to learn how to be real people.
Starring Jack Whitehall, Zawe Ashton, Greg McHugh, Kimberley Nixon, Charlotte Ritchie, Joe Thomas, and Tony Gardner, Fresh Meat ran for four seasons from 2011 to 2016. Basically, the show proves that you can still be friends with people totally different from yourself, even if you low-key hated them from the second you met them.
4. Finding Dory, Netflix
The long-awaited follow-up to Disney-Pixar’s Finding Nemo came in 2016 in the form of Finding Dory. With the same killer cast behind it — Ellen DeGeneres, Albert Brooks, Bob Peterson — and a ridiculously amped supporting cast — Ed O’Neill, Kaitlin Olson, Ty Burrell, Diane Keaton, Eugene Levy, Idris Elba, Dominic West, Kate McKinnon, Bill Hader, and Sigourney Weaver — Finding Dory was an even bigger hit than its predecessor.
When Dory (who suffers from short-term memory loss) gets a flash of memory about her parents, she becomes determined to find them and her home. What ensues is yet another trek across the ocean for the little found family and a host of new friends and allies along the way.
3. Swiss Army Man, Amazon Prime
This dark comedy drama starring Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe is as irreverent as it is weird and, admittedly, gross. Dano plays Hank, a man stranded on an island in the middle of the ocean. He’s trying to commit suicide and end his loneliness when he notices a corpse wash up on the shore. What follows is Radcliffe’s corpse character, Manny, slowly reanimating himself and Hank trying to teach him how to interact with humanity again.
2. Freaks and Geeks, Netflix
Freaks and Geeks follows the story of the “freaks” led by Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini) — Daniel Desario (James Franco), Ken Miller (Seth Rogen), Nick Andopolis (Jason Segel), Kim Kelly (Busy Philipps) — and her younger brother Sam’s (John Francis Daley) “geeks” — Neal Schweiber (Samm Levine) and Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr). Lindsay tries to transform herself from a “mathlete” into one of the cool slacker kids, and things, naturally, go awry.
Created by Paul Feig and executive produced by Judd Apatow, this NBC cult favorite was cut off the air after 12 episodes. Fans petitioned NBC for the release of the final six episodes and got what they wished for, but not a subsequent season.
1. Grace and Frankie, Netflix
What do you do when you find out your husband’s been cheating with his law partner for decades, is in love with him, and has been hiding the fact that he’s gay the whole time? Oh, and he’s leaving you to marry him. If you’re Grace and Frankie — the wives of said law partners — you drink some peyote on a beach, move in together, and become unlikely best friends.
Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin play Grace and Frankie, respectively, in this charming original Netflix series. After hating each other for decades due to their polar opposite personalities, Grace and Frankie eventually prove that a drastic change late in life doesn’t mean the end of it.
