TV Shows like Trying

Trying (2020) is a British domestic comedy that frames a couple's attempt to adopt with warm, restless humor and clear dramatic stakes. It trades sitcom shorthand for close character work: Andy Wolton's creation privileges small, believable decisions over punchlines, so the show feels lived-in rather than staged. Across five seasons and forty episodes the tone stays steady enough to let personality-driven scenes register emotionally. What the series does best is couplecraft: it stages the tension between private desire and institutional scrutiny in scenes built around intimate framing and a measured pace. Performances lean into awkward honesty, and the ensemble chemistry turns screwball set pieces into studies of etiquette, boundaries, and bureaucratic anxiety. Rather than escalating into melodrama, the writing often opts for satirical restraint, using comic reversals to expose how adoption panels and social procedures test a relationship's seams. That restraint is also the source of its complication. Trying balances domestic comedy conventions with a persistent ethical question about who counts as a family, and it leaves room for quiet shifts in tone — bittersweet moments that ask viewers to sympathize with imperfect choices. If you want a sitcom that privileges relational specificity and procedural friction over gags-for-gags' sake, Trying supplies a steady, humane study of modern parenthood.