Cucumber

Series Similar to Cucumber

If you enjoyed Cucumber, these series share similar themes, tone, and quality. Each recommendation is scored on genre overlap, tonal match, and critical acclaim.

1. It's a Sin

   2021 · Drama, Comedy · ended

   Recommended for similar Drama profile, hidden gem, also on Channel 4.

   Ritchie, Roscoe and Colin are young lads, strangers at first, leaving home at 18 and heading off to London in 1981 with hope and ambition and joy… and walking straight into a plague that most of the world ignores. Year by year, episode by episode, their lives change, as the mystery of a new virus starts as a rumour, then a threat, then a terror, and then something that binds them together in the fight.It's the story of their friends, lovers and families too, especially Jill, the girl who loves them and helps them, and galvanises them in the battles to come. Together they will endure the horror of the epidemic, the pain of rejection and the prejudices that gay men faced throughout the decade.

2. The Promise

   2011 · Drama · ended

   Recommended for similar Drama profile, highly rated (8), hidden gem, also on Channel 4.

   Claire Foy and Christian Cooke star in Peter Kosminsky's four-part drama serial. Eighteen-year-old Erin sets out on an emotional journey when she retraces her grandfather's footsteps.

3. Dirty Business

   2026 · Drama · ended

   Recommended for similar Drama profile, highly rated (8.4), also on Channel 4.

   Based on a decade-long investigation into England's water companies, and telling the real stories of whistleblowers and victims who believe their lives have been destroyed after encountering sewage polluted water, Dirty Business is a major new factual drama investigating one of the biggest potential corporate scandals in British history.Dirty Business follows the story of two unlikely detectives, who notice that the fish in the river running through their idyllic Oxfordshire hamlet are dying. They contact their water company to find out why, and the company's strange and evasive reply sparks an investigation that remains ongoing to this day.

4. Olive Kitteridge

   2014 · Drama · ended

   Recommended for similar Drama profile, highly rated (8).

   Based on Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, Olive Kitteridge tells the poignantly sweet, acerbically funny and devastatingly tragic story of a seemingly placid New England town wrought with illicit affairs, crime and tragedy, told through the lens of a woman whose wicked wit and harsh demeanor mask a warm but troubled heart and a staunch moral center.

5. Reckless

   2014 · Drama · ended

   Recommended for similar Drama profile, highly rated (8).

   Reckless is set in Charleston, S.C., where a gorgeous Yankee litigator and a charming southern attorney must hide their intense mutual attraction as a police sex scandal threatens to tear the city apart.

6. The Queen's Gambit

   2020 · Drama · ended

   Recommended for similar Drama profile, highly rated (8.5).

   Chronicling the life of an orphan chess prodigy, the story - set during the Cold War era - follows Beth Harmon from the age of eight to twenty-two, as she struggles with addiction in a quest to become the greatest chess player in the world.

7. The Newsroom

   2012 · Drama · ended

   Recommended for similar Drama profile, highly rated (8.4).

   The Newsroom follows the members of a cable news team on their quixotic mission to do the news well in the face of a fickle audience, corporate mandates and tangled personal relationships.

8. Capital

   2015 · Drama · ended

   Recommended for similar Drama profile, hidden gem.

   On one day, the people of one South London street all receive an anonymous postcard with the simple message 'we want what you have'. Its unsettling ripples affect every corner of the community.

9. Good Girls Revolt

   2015 · Drama · ended

   Recommended for similar Drama profile, hidden gem.

   It was the 1960's - a time of economic boom and social strife. Young women poured into the workplace, but the "Help Wanted" ads were segregated by gender and the "Mad Men" office culture was rife with sexual stereotyping and discrimination. Lynn Povich was one of the lucky ones, landing a job at Newsweek, renowned for its cutting-edge coverage of civil rights and the "Swinging Sixties." Nora Ephron, Jane Bryant Quinn, Ellen Goodman, and Susan Brownmiller all started there as well. It was a top-notch job - for a girl - at an exciting place. But it was a dead end.Women researchers sometimes became reporters, rarely writers, and never editors. Any aspiring female journalist was told, "If you want to be a writer, go somewhere else." On March 16, 1970, the day Newsweek published a cover story on the fledgling feminist movement entitled "Women in Revolt," forty-six Newsweek women charged the magazine with discrimination in hiring and promotion. It was the first female class action lawsuit--the first by women journalists--and it inspired other women in the media to quickly follow suit. Lynn Povich was one of the ringleaders.

10. Manhattan

    2014 · Drama · ended

    Recommended for similar Drama profile, highly rated (8).

    Set in Los Alamos, N.M., at the Manhattan Project during the race to build the world's first atomic bomb, Manhattan explores the cost of secrets and the corrosive effect they have on individuals, families and their relationships.