Stuck At Home? These Are The Best Background Shows To Watch While You Work

For everyone else but me and my boss reading this, working from home is the perfect opportunity to kick back and throw professionalism out the apartment door. Instead of dress pants and hidden browser tabs, you can wear PJs and turn up the TV. But despite how good it feels to eat peanut butter out of the jar in between renditions of Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" into your hairbrush, it is still a workday. You can't fully check out.

That's why the TV show you put on while you're answering e-mails and conducting secretly-pantless video-chat meetings can't necessarily be the one you've been meaning to catch up on. If you don't want to wind up with a stern email in your inbox, you have to be able to still give your all to your work without distractions. You need a show that can easily fade into the background.

"Background shows" aren't bad shows. Some of my favorite shows are the ones that are so soothing I somehow find myself waking up hours later to an "are you still watching?" screen. There's no one thing that makes a show good to put on in the background, it just needs a nice soundtrack, a warm vibe, and nothing too jarring or complicated that you'll find yourself confused about when you tune back into it after a meeting and brief trip to to the coffee shop — and so many of the best ones are just a Netflix-search away.