We nearly bumped Somebody Somewhere (HBO) from this list because recommending a cozy heartland comedy feels almost too easy right now—everyone's looking for something warm as we slide into summer. But here's the thing: Season 3 just dropped its final episodes, and if you've been saving it, this weekend is your moment to catch up before the discourse gets too loud. Bridget Everett remains one of TV's most underused weapons, playing grief and joy like they're two sides of the same Kansas coin. The show never apologizes for being small, and in a landscape of shows trying to be prestige monuments, that modesty is what makes it stick.
Now for something that'll wreck your Saturday night plans in the best way: Midnight at the Pera Palace just released its second season on Netflix, and this Turkish time-travel thriller has quietly become the smartest genre show nobody's talking about. Set in 1920s Istanbul with a modern journalist pinballing through history, it's got the propulsive plotting of Dark without the punishing bleakness. The production design alone—all art deco hotel corridors and smoky jazz clubs—makes it worth the subtitles, but the show's real trick is how it folds actual Turkish history into its twisty mystery without turning into a lecture. Fair warning: six episodes will become eight will become "oh god it's 3am."
Our defend-it-at-dinner pick is Telemarketers (HBO), the documentary about, yes, telemarketing fraud that somehow became one of last year's most compulsively watchable things. If you missed it during awards season, the whole trilogy is streaming and it's the perfect rainy-afternoon rabbit hole. Directors Sam Lipman-Stern and Adam Bhala Lough started filming as young telemarketer burnouts in the early 2000s and kept their cameras rolling for two decades, accidentally documenting a massive charity scam. "We were just bored kids with a camera," one of them says in episode one, and that DIY energy—shaky cam, zero narrator polish—makes it feel like you're watching someone stumble into a real conspiracy instead of a slick true-crime package. It's messy and obsessive and way more fun than a doc about phone scams has any right to be.
Can't decide, or looking for something else entirely? Let our recommendation engine pick for you →