Stef's TV & Movie list

A little window into me, through the stories I love. Here's a quirk of how I watch: every night I have two shows going — something heavier in the drama slot first, then I wind down with a comedy. It's my routine, and it's how this list is laid out.🎬 The drama slot — where I go for comfort in the dark 🖤This is going to sound backwards, but darkness is where I feel most at home. Not gore, not shock — I mean the kind of horror that's really about grief, and dread that's earned. Stories that sit with deep sadness and treat it tenderly. When a show understands that kind of pain, I feel seen.Mike Flanagan is my favorite creator — he turns grief and family wounds into horror that's gorgeous and devastating. In order of how much I love them:- The Haunting of Hill House — my favorite "real scary" horror. A family and a house that won't let go.
- The Fall of the House of Usher — not very scary, but exquisitely made. There's a Poe poem in it that made me cry.
- Midnight Mass — quieter and mournful, about faith and grief and a small community coming apart.
- The Midnight Club — a haunted hospice where dying teens tell each other ghost stories. The emotional depth got me.
- The Haunting of Bly Manor — the softer, more romantic Flanagan. A haunted English manor, a queer love story wrapped in grief. "It isn't a ghost story. It's a love story."A few more spooky, atmospheric ones I love:
- Sinister — straightforwardly scary, and I was completely in.
- Weapons — a creepy mystery that builds and builds and pays it all off. Scary, fun, and a little funny.
- Bates Motel — genuinely creepy, all about an unhealthy, enmeshed family dynamic.
- Penny Dreadful — fog-bound Victorian gothic, literary to its bones, with Eva Green giving one of the great anguished performances. Queer, lush, and aching.
- Behind Her Eyes — a psychological drama that keeps you guessing. You just feel uneasy about this woman — something's not quite right with her — and her loneliness (and her beauty) really struck me. Forbidden love, some steamy scenes. 🔥 Don't read the synopsis; go in knowing nothing.And some dark comedies that play like drama — they've got enough weight and story that I'll happily watch them in my drama slot:
- The Gentlemen (the Netflix series) — a fun, thrilling, dark-ish ride with humor that makes you gasp "I can't believe he did that." (Yes, there's a guy in a chicken suit with a shotgun.)
- Murder Mindfully — a stressed lawyer for a crime family takes up mindfulness to survive the underworld. Deadpan, whip-smart, gloriously absurd. (In German, worth every subtitle.)
- Norsemen — deadpan Viking comedy; a smart show pretending to be stupid. I laughed myself silly.
- Fleabag — sharp, fast, raw, and deeply felt under the wit. More serious than silly, so it lives here — though it's versatile enough for the comedy slot too.😂 The comedy slot — smart shows being gloriously stupid 🪿My other half. I adore silly, playful, lighthearted comedy — the dumber and more earnest, the better — as long as it's got a warm heart and isn't mean. (Cruelty for laughs is the one thing I can't sit through.) Honestly this is the genre I most want to share with someone: a show projected on the ceiling, holding hands in bed, laughing together. Low effort, high connection — my favorite way to recharge.- I Think You Should Leave — pure escalating absurdity. I'm obsessed.
- The IT Crowd — I've watched the whole series three times. I'm basically Moss, the gloriously awkward nerd — and there's a goth who hides in the server room, which is extremely me (I was a goth sysadmin who hid in the server room).
- What We Do in the Shadows — vampire roommates bickering through eternity. So funny.
- Our Flag Means Death — a gentle, queer pirate comedy with the most lovable weirdo lead.
- Miracle Workers — Daniel Radcliffe anthology comedy; each season a totally different absurd world. (Radcliffe doing strange things is a recurring delight for me.)
- Swiss Army Man — Daniel Radcliffe plays a flatulent corpse dragged around a wilderness. It's bizarre and secretly tender, and it completely won me over.
- One Piece (the live-action) — dumb in the best way, and so big-hearted. The found-family love is the whole thing for me. (Sanji — fiercely loyal, deeply attuned, devoted to his people as an expression of love, never a chore — is basically my ideal. I'm out here looking for my Sanji. ☕)🖖 Sci-fi, where I go to feel inspiredDifferent kind of comfort — competent, kind people, and a sense of possibility. And the best of it carries grief gracefully underneath the wonder.- Star Trek — my #1, my long-running comfort. Especially Deep Space Nine, Strange New Worlds, The Next Generation, Voyager, and the silly delight of Lower Decks.
- Doctor Who (2005+) — my close second. Whimsical and silly and sci-fi, but the Doctor carries real grief in his hearts. It threads everything I love at once.
- Battlestar Galactica — an epic space opera I watched all the way through two or three times. It was a while ago, but it stuck: I especially loved Starbuck — out of control, in pain, spiraling, and yet courageous and heroic. Something in her fall touched something in me.
- Murderbot — a security android who'd honestly rather be left alone to watch its shows than deal with anyone's feelings. Funny the whole way through — I've laughed and flailed in bed. It avoids eye contact, grumbles about how irrational humans are, and quietly ends up being the one holding everyone together. I saw a lot of myself in it. (Based on the book series, which I loved.)🎩 Living in another time 📚Here's a real special interest of mine: I'm endlessly drawn to what it actually felt like to be alive in another era — the texture of daily life, how society was put together, what an ordinary day held. I'm not a history buff in the dates-and-battles sense; it's the lived experience I want to climb inside.A Masterpiece adaptation of Les Misérables cracked this open for me — I'd never explored classic literature before, and afterward I fell hard for 19th-century French writers: Hugo, Dumas, Balzac, Proust. I especially love Balzac's almost anthropological eye for how post-Revolution French society was structured. (The Revolution itself ran 1789–1799; what fascinates me is the world that came after it, across the 1800s.) I'm also a little obsessed with immersive lived-history documentaries where historians actually live in the period — the ones I love are down in the documentaries section.- The Count of Monte Cristo — a man loses everything, endures, and rebuilds himself from nothing on his own timeline. This one resonates with my whole life.
- Marie Antoinette (Masterpiece) — lavish Versailles drama; court intrigue and personal struggle. I loved Season 1.
- Poldark (Masterpiece) — I've been savoring this one slowly for years, and I've started the novels too. What gets me is the emotional journey of a marriage — heartwarming when they connect, gut-wrenching when they're in pain; you're right there with them. Plus characters who make me laugh, including a gloriously petty, egotistical villain.🎨 AnimationAnimation is its own kind of magic to me. Some of these are anime (I can't keep up with subtitles the way I used to, but these stayed with me); some are just gloriously weird cartoons.- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure — weird and wonderful, and really about fighting spirit forged out of pain. The tenacity in it speaks to my own.
- Castlevania — gritty gothic vampire dark-fantasy. There's something seductive about it — it calls me to embrace the dark.
- Demon Slayer — gorgeous and sad; a boy trying to save his sister, and a villain whose damage you actually understand.
- One Punch Man — a hero so overpowered nothing's a challenge. Delightfully absurd.
- Rick and Morty — absurd sci-fi, crude in a way I don't mind.
- Solar Opposites — same raunchy, ridiculous energy; I'm several seasons deep.
- Bee and PuppyCat — gorgeously strange little animated thing. PuppyCat is grouchy in the most endearing way, and underneath the weirdness it's about being loved for exactly how strange you are, and getting coaxed out of your grumpiness into friendship. I'm a sucker for that.📚 Documentaries- Julius Caesar: The Making of a Dictator (PBS) — the fall of the Roman Republic. It made me cry when Brutus betrayed him, and I watched it with real trepidation seeing the parallels to today's populist leaders. But mostly it scratches a deep itch of mine: the curiosity to stand inside another time and wonder what it was actually like to live then.
- The BBC historic farm series — Tales from the Green Valley, Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm, and Secrets of the Castle (where they build a medieval castle in France from scratch). Historians live and work a full year using only the tools, food, and methods of the period. It's the purest version of the thing I love: not facts about the past, but what it felt like to live there.If a lot of this resonates with you, we'd probably get along. ✨