If one of your resolutions for 2025 is to nurture ways of being a better person, you need not look further for inspiration than TV. All over American television this year you could land on any number of characters whose main plot was presumably a simple one: self-improvement. It may be reductive to talk about the Ted Lasso-ification of contemporary TV. After all, shows such as Friday Night Lights, The Good Place, Schitt's Creek, and Parks And Recreation are obvious touchpoints for a kind of softcore sensibility that has modeled how hard and yet rewarding it can be to strive to be a better person. But lately, there has been an expanding canon of series (mostly comedies) that have taken up the didactic possibilities of television to encourage us all to make better choices and become better people in turn.
In 2024 alone, you could see such themes in the halls of Abbot Elementary, where Jeannine’s (Quinta Brunson) sunny ambition rests on her belief in the good she can do for her students and the community around her. You can feel it in the tender heart to hearts in Somebody Somewhere, where the conviction that community breeds a happier existence is foundational to Sam’s (Bridget Everett) experience. You can sense it driving the very friction at the heart of Hacks, which constantly asks itself whether being a “shark” is really the only way to succeed in show business. You can even hear it echo in the kitchen in The Bear, where Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) is set on healing his old wounds and starting anew away from past habits and industry-wide condoned abuse. It’s not just that these shows focus on flawed people wanting redemption (though there is a bit of that, at times). Instead, they feel like a collective attempt at reminding viewers that there are tangible actions you can take if you're committed to bettering yourself.
The most obvious example of this may well be Shrinking and its central focus on the healing powers of therapy. Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel, and Brett Goldstein’s comedy follows the hijinks of Jimmy (Segel), a shrink who, after hitting rock bottom following the death of his wife, decides he can skirt ethical concerns with his patients in order to give them better care. Even if the show’s warped and boiled-down vision of therapy may irk many (myself included), there is something to be said about how openly it reminds characters and audiences that there are always choices, small and big alike, one can make if one is committed to improving one’s mental health and thus one’s good standing in the world.
That’s something even its most self-avowed selfish character understands: “I think I want to be a better person, sometimes,” Liz (Christa Miller) tells her therapist friend Gabby (Jessica Williams) when she realizes she’s not enjoying being the shrill asshole anymore. The line hits precisely because Liz finds that the only way to maintain the relationship she’s been building with Sean (Luke Tennie), a veteran who’s found in his food truck venture with her an outlet for his own brand of self-improvement, is to learn new ways of socializing with those around her. But her sentiment is the very driving force of Shrinking as a series. Jimmy, Gabby, Liz, Luke and the many other characters around them are variations on such a theme. Whether you’re a narcissist (like Michael Urie’s Brian) or an antisocial curmudgeon (like Harrison Ford’s Paul), there is hope for you yet. You just have to be able to want to reach for that better version of yourself, as even Liz’s husband Derek (Ted McGinley) found out this season when he was driven to some soul-searching following her indiscretion.
Liz’s particular journey was echoed in two late-in-the-year rom-coms that centered on selfish female protagonists who must rise up to the occasion if they are to find the happy ending they’ve long coveted. Both Nobody Wants This’ Joanne (Kristen Bell) and Laid’s Ruby (Stephanie Hsu) know they’re not great people—or, know, at least, that they have things they could work on. “I’m not a bad person,” Joanne insists to her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) when she gleefully shares how smitten she is with the hot rabbi she’s just met and kissed. “We’re just saying that you’re, like, sort of a bad person relative to a man of god,” Morgan clarifies.
The question of whether Joanne is a good person (which she outright asks a former hookup, who answers “No” all too quickly) drives the podcaster’s actions for much of the first season. Performatively, at first, like when she rescues a dog in hopes that such an action will prove to herself (and perhaps to Morgan and Adam Brody as rabbi Noah) that she can be good enough to be with someone who’s really good. But soon, Joanne’s quest becomes a spiritual one—not unlike that embarked on by Bell’s own Eleanor Shellstrop in Mike Schur’s sitcom meditation on morality, The Good Place—a detail that adds a level of metatextual winking to her entire character arc.
Meanwhile, Laid used its more outré premise to offer up its central character, lovestruck Ruby, a chance to reassess not only who she was but how she treated those she dated. It’s only once Ruby realizes her exes are dying one by one (in the order she slept with them and some in ways more violent than others) that she’s forced to look at who she’s become. Needing to revisit old flames and random hookups dredges up an entire sexual history where Ruby rarely comes off looking all that good. Aghast at her past, she eventually realizes that she better start anew and let go of old habits. “This could be the beginning of me making a change,” she tells her BFF AJ (Zosia Mamet), who rightfully ribs her for deciding to do so at someone else’s funeral. “I’m burying the old judgmental me,” Ruby retorts.
But what at first plays like a punchline soon becomes a concerted attempt to right her wrongs. A possible new love interest she wishes to keep alive (and the real possibility of losing AJ over bad decisions made in the throes of a drunken night) fuel Ruby to finally take therapy seriously (much too late, as Ruby’s own therapist cannot bring herself to keep seeing her) and, at last, take accountability for her chaotic and hurtful actions. Like Joanne, Ruby finds that it is romance—an attempt to connect with another on a deep, personal level—may well be the kick she needs to finally make good on her decision to be good.
TV shows, of course, have long toyed with bending and reshaping ideas of good and evil, coloring in such rigidity with all sorts of grey areas in between. And while the beauty in the series listed above was in their insistence on the mundanity of such attempts—you don’t need to be a superhero to want to do let alone be good—it was also refreshing to have it be the anchoring point of the MCU’s best TV offering this past year. What was Agatha All Along if not a rather touching exploration of what it means to truly break apart from the generational patterns its central witch had been stuck perpetuating?
By the time Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) had reached the end of the Witches’ Road alongside Billy, a.k.a. Wiccan (Joe Locke), with two facing off death incarnate (Aubrey Plaza), the pair’s close bond hinged on Agatha’s goodness, if not her niceness. “You’re not bad,” Agatha tells Billy when she finally reveals she wishes to fend off Rio/death by herself. “Neither are you,” Billy kindly replies. Agatha, of course, cannot see that, saying “You’re the only one who thinks so.” But her eventual sacrifice truly proves her wrong. The once feared and fearsome witch finally changes for good.
This is not to say that television will always be good for you. But looking around at these shows and these fallible characters whose main concern is to right themselves into being better people, it’s hard not to see a concerted effort to use episodic storytelling to advance a not-quite-novel but always welcome idea: You can always be and do better. At a time when it may feel like the world encourages and rewards everyone’s basest instincts—not to mention craven, cruel, and otherwise reprehensible actions—there is something comforting and encouraging about watching folks on the small screen struggle to be better people—and do so in ways that feel, Agatha’s magic aside, manageable, relatable, and (the real kicker) replicable.
