It's 9:40 on a Tuesday night. You've got a dozen new series sitting in your queue, and you scroll past every one of them to put on an episode you could recite from memory. You already know Luke will pour the coffee, Ross will yell "pivot," Jim will put Dwight's stapler in Jell-O, and Alexis will say "Ew, David." You press play anyway, and your shoulders drop about an inch.
A comfort show is a series you rewatch again and again because it feels familiar and safe. If you've ever wondered why you keep going back, or what your pick says about you, this post is for you. We'll cover why rewatching feels so good and what Gilmore Girls, Friends, The Office, and Schitt's Creek each tend to give you. We'll also look at how to tell when a rewatch has stopped helping.
Anchor Therapy is a counseling center in Hoboken, NJ with mental health therapists specialized in helping children, teens, adults, couples, and families with anxiety, depression, relationship issues, trauma, life transitions, and more. Anchor Therapy is accepting new clients and is now providing in-person sessions and teletherapy sessions to residents of New Jersey, New York, and Florida.
What Is a Comfort Show?
A comfort show is a TV series you return to on purpose because you know how it'll make you feel. You've seen every episode, so nothing can surprise or upset you. Most comfort shows are easy to watch, with likable characters and episodes short enough to finish before bed.
Yours might be a cozy small-town drama. Your best friend's might be a workplace sitcom she's watched start to finish every year since college. Either way, the show is doing the same job, which is helping you settle.
You probably have a comfort show if:
You can quote whole scenes before they happen
It's the first thing you put on when you're sick or worn out
You've restarted the series within days of finishing it
New shows sit in your queue for months while this one keeps playing
You know which episodes to skip and which ones you'll never skip
If most of those sound like you, you're in good company. There's a real reason it works!
Why Do You Keep Watching the Same Show Over and Over?
You keep watching the same show over and over because you already know what happens, so your mind can finally rest. A familiar story takes little effort to follow and carries no risk of a bad surprise. The characters also start to feel like company, which can ease loneliness at the end of a long day.
In one experiment and one daily diary study, psychologist Jaye Derrick found that participants sought out familiar fictional worlds, like a favorite TV program, after tasks that took effortful self-control. Spending time in that familiar world then restored their self-control.
Think about what a regular workday asks of you. You stay polite in meetings you didn't need to be in, and you make a hundred small decisions before dinner. By evening, a brand-new show with a twist ending can feel like one more thing to manage.
The other reason is company. In the first of four earlier studies on favorite TV programs, participants reported turning to their favored shows when they felt lonely, and feeling less lonely while they watched. In another, thinking about a favored program buffered the drops in mood and self-esteem that usually follow a threat to a close relationship. The authors called their own evidence preliminary, so we hold it loosely.
Psychologists call these one-sided bonds parasocial relationships. You know the characters well, and they'll never know you. It's the same kind of bond that explains why grieving a celebrity you never met can hurt so much.
Then there's nostalgia. A rewatch can take you back to who you were the first time around. You might remember the dorm room where you watched it, or the person who used to watch beside you.
At Anchor Therapy, comfort shows tend to come up as a throwaway line. A client mentions they've seen every season more times than they can count, then laughs it off. We usually ask when the rewatch started, because the answer tends to be interesting.
What Your Comfort Show Says About You
As therapists, we think your comfort show is useful information. You pick it when you're tired and nobody's watching, which makes it one of the most honest choices of your week. The world you return to often points at something you've been running low on.
The recommendations below are based on what we hear from clients in sessions, along with research on why familiar stories can feel comforting. Think of them as a starting point rather than a rule. As far as we know, there isn’t research linking specific shows to specific personality types.
Each of these four shows tends to offer its own kind of comfort:
Gilmore Girls: closeness and a town that knows your name
Friends: easy, everyday company
The Office: laughter with nothing at stake
Schitt's Creek: hope that things can get better
If Your Comfort Show Is Gilmore Girls
Gilmore Girls premiered in October 2000 and ran for seven seasons. It follows Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter Rory in the small Connecticut town of Stars Hollow. Not much happens, which is the appeal. Mostly, everyone talks fast and drinks an alarming amount of coffee at Luke's.
If this is your show, our guess is that you like being known. Stars Hollow is a place where the diner owner knows your order and the whole town throws you a going-away party. Lorelai and Rory's closeness is the other pull, and it can stir up different feelings depending on your own family.
That mother-daughter bond might feel like home to you. Or, it might remind you of the relationship you wish you had, bringing a little grief alongside the comfort. We often hear clients describe both feelings at once.
And then there's Emily. If the tense Friday night dinners are the scenes you replay, you might be working through your own family's expectations from the safety of your couch.
Gilmore Girls is a fall show at heart. If your rewatch starts every October, the ritual is probably part of the comfort.
A question to sit with: Where in your life do you feel known the way Rory is known in Stars Hollow?
If Your Comfort Show Is Friends
Friends aired on NBC from 1994 to 2004 and follows six friends in Manhattan across ten seasons. Friendship on this show is a walk across the hall, and somebody is always on the couch at Central Perk.
If Friends is your pick, you probably miss friendship that takes no planning. Your friendships now run on group chats and rain checks, and you're likely three reschedules deep with someone you love. Six friends who are always around can fill that gap for half an hour at a time.
This rewatch tends to pick up after a move, or during a stretch when your close friends have paired off and left the city. It can be a way of visiting your own twenties, when your friends lived ten minutes away and nobody had to check a calendar. If that sounds familiar, our post on how to cope with loneliness is a good companion to the rewatch.
Notice which friend you find yourself rooting for. Maybe you love Monica because she takes care of everyone, or Phoebe because she’s unapologetically herself. The character you connect with might reflect a part of yourself you’d like to make more space for. Then ask yourself: who could you reach out to this week, without overthinking it?
If Your Comfort Show Is The Office
The Office ran on NBC from 2005 to 2013, with nine seasons set at the Scranton branch of a paper company called Dunder Mifflin. It's filmed like a documentary, so the characters look straight into the camera. When Jim glances at you after Michael says something ridiculous, you're in on the joke.
The Office is often a go-to when your brain is tired. It doesn’t ask much of you. Episodes are short, the stakes are low, and you can fold laundry or answer texts without missing much. If that sounds like you, it might be worth asking yourself how much of your day is spent taking care of everyone else and keeping things together.
There's something soothing about a workplace where the worst outcome is an awkward meeting. If your own job has been heavy, Dunder Mifflin lets you laugh at work from a safe distance. Our post on Severance and work-life balance looks at that same wish to leave work at the door.
The Office is also a show about belonging. A group of mismatched coworkers gradually turns into something close to a family, with Jim and Pam's slow love story running through it. If those are the episodes you save for bad days, steadiness might be what you're after.
If Your Comfort Show Is Schitt's Creek
Schitt's Creek ran for six seasons, from 2015 to 2020. The wealthy Rose family loses everything and moves into a motel in a small town the father once bought as a joke. Across 80 episodes, four self-absorbed family members learn to like each other.
A Schitt's Creek rewatch often lines up with starting over. A breakup or a move back home, or any stretch where life looks different than you'd planned, can make this story land hard. It's about a family that loses its old identity and builds a better one.
It's also a kind show, which is rarer than it should be. David and Patrick's relationship is met with warmth by everyone in town, and the humor rarely comes at anyone's expense. If you've been bracing for judgment lately, a few episodes in a world without it can be a relief.
There's hope in how slowly the Roses change, too. Alexis and David grow up a little each season, which is close to how change works in real life. If this is your show, ask yourself what you're rebuilding right now, and who's helping.
What If Your Comfort Show Isn't on This List?
The same idea applies to any show. Look at what its world offers that your week has been missing. A cozy mystery may offer order, and a baking competition may offer encouragement. A cartoon from childhood may take you back to a time when the hard decisions were somebody else's job.
A few questions can help you find the need underneath:
When did this rewatch start, and what else was going on in your life?
Which character do you most want in your corner?
Which episodes do you skip, and which do you replay?
How do you feel in the first five minutes?
How do you feel when the credits roll?
You might rotate between shows. If you keep several comfort TV shows in the same queue, each one probably fits its own kind of day. A lonely Sunday and a brutal Thursday at work tend to call for different shows.
Is Rewatching Shows a Sign of Anxiety?
Only sometimes. It's a common habit, and a story with no surprises is soothing when your mind is already busy, which is why it's so popular on stressful days. If new shows feel too tense to start, or you rewatch mainly to quiet constant worry, the anxiety underneath deserves attention.
When you're anxious, not knowing how something ends is the uncomfortable part. A new series means cliffhangers and the chance of a scene that sticks with you at 2 a.m. A rewatch takes all of that off the table, so it makes sense that you'd lean on it during anxious stretches.
The habit becomes a concern when the show is doing all the work. If it's the only thing that slows your thoughts, the worry itself is still going untreated. Anxiety counseling can help you find out what's driving the worry and give you several ways to calm it.
When Comfort Shows Stop Feeling Comforting
Most of the time, a rewatch is harmless and even helpful. There are times when it stops working, though, and a 2017 experiment with 55 undergraduates hints at one reason why.
The researchers compared three groups of students:
Students with no trauma history
Students who'd been through trauma without significant PTSD symptoms
Students with PTSD symptoms
Each student wrote about either a favorite story, such as a TV show or a book, or a neutral topic. In the trauma group without PTSD symptoms, students who wrote about a favorite felt more socially connected than students who wrote about the neutral topic. In the group with PTSD symptoms, students who wrote about a favorite felt less connected.
It's a small study of college students, and they wrote about their favorites without watching them. Still, it suggests that a favorite story can land differently depending on what you're carrying. If your rewatch has started to leave you lonelier than when you pressed play, pay attention to that.
Signs your comfort show may be covering for something bigger:
You feel worse or emptier when the episode ends
Sleep keeps losing to "one more episode"
Plans with friends get canceled so you can stay in with the show
The rewatch is the only thing that calms you down
Anything new, even a new show, feels like too much to start
If the sleep one stood out, our post on revenge bedtime procrastination explains why late-night episodes are so hard to turn off.
How to Get More From Your Comfort Show
In our clinical experience, what helps most is naming the need the show is meeting and then finding one more place to get it. You keep the show, and you add a second source.
A few ways to put that into practice:
Name the need out loud by finishing the sentence, "I put this on when I need..."
Pair the show with one real-world step, like texting a friend during the opening credits
Watch with a roommate or a sibling so the rewatch becomes time together
Pick a stopping point before you press play
Try one new thing a week next to your rewatch, even if it's only a walk or a phone call
Start small. If Friends is your show, invite one person over for takeout. If it's Gilmore Girls, become a regular somewhere, and let the barista learn your order.
Talking it through with a therapist can help too, especially if the need underneath feels big. In sessions, we look at what the show gives you and what's getting in the way of finding it in your own life. You can read about each of our therapists on the Meet Our Team page.
What to Take From Your Rewatch
So keep the rewatch. Your comfort show is a good way to rest, and the one you choose can tell you something about what you need right now. Gilmore Girls, Friends, The Office, and Schitt's Creek each comfort in their own way.
If your rewatch has started to feel like the only thing getting you through the week, you don't have to sort that out alone. Anchor Therapy offers counseling in-person in Hoboken, NJ, and virtually for residents of New Jersey, New York, and Florida. Fill out the contact form below and our intake coordinator will get back to you.
Victoria Scala, LAC
is the Psychotherapist, Community Engagement Director, Office Manager, and Social Media Manager at Anchor Therapy in Hoboken, New Jersey.
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