The Waverley Bath Stream List

An agnostic podcaster and a rabbi start seeing each other, and neither of their lives is built for it. Kristen Bell and Adam Brody play it dry rather than sweet, which is what keeps it from tipping into sitcom.

The writing is more interested in the practical problem (two people who like each other and have incompatible obligations) than in manufacturing obstacles. Conversations run longer than they would in a network comedy and land better for it.

It is a comfortable watch rather than a demanding one. Good company for a bath, in the sense that you can miss thirty seconds while you top up the hot water and lose nothing.

Kate Wyler is made ambassador to the United Kingdom at a week’s notice, in the middle of an international crisis, while her marriage to a better-known diplomat quietly comes apart. Debora Cahn came from The West Wing and Homeland, and it shows in the best way.

The pleasure here is competence under pressure: people who are extremely good at a difficult job, talking fast, in rooms where the wrong sentence costs something. Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell are both excellent, and the show is smart enough to let their marriage be genuinely unresolved rather than a subplot with an answer.

It is dialogue-driven and rewards attention, so it suits a bath you are not planning to cut short. If you want something you can half-watch, pick something else on this list.

Adapted from Margaret Atwood’s novel, the series follows June through a theocratic regime that has reduced women to their fertility. Elisabeth Moss carries an enormous amount of it in close-up, and the show trusts her to.

It is beautifully made and deliberately hard to watch. The pacing is slow, the violence is mostly implied and lands harder for it, and it does not offer easy relief. Six seasons, concluding in 2025.

A note for Canadian viewers, because most listings get this wrong: in Canada it streams on Crave and Prime Video, not Hulu. Hulu does not operate here.

Regency London as a costume fantasy, with a different Bridgerton sibling’s courtship each season and Lady Whistledown’s scandal sheet stitching it together. The production design is the real draw: it is enormously pretty and knows it.

It is not trying to be a serious historical drama, and it goes down easier once you stop expecting one. The string-quartet covers of pop songs tell you everything about the register it is going for.

Because each season is largely self-contained, you can start with whichever couple appeals rather than working through in order, which is useful if you are dipping in over several baths.

A network morning show loses its male anchor to a misconduct scandal, and the programme spends several seasons dealing with what that exposes about everyone still in the building. Billy Crudup is the best thing in it by a distance.

It is uneven. The show swings between sharp media satire and melodrama, sometimes within an episode, but the sharp parts are very sharp, particularly on how institutions protect themselves.

Better suited to a bath than its subject matter suggests, because the plotting is broad enough to follow without concentrating hard.