Photograph by Alfonso Bresciani / Warner Bros. courtesy OWN

“Queen Sugar”

I’ve been watching “Queen Sugar” since it premièred, last year, and have grown fascinated with its soapy yet increasingly thoughtful and provocative story lines. Created and produced by Ava DuVernay (and co-executive-produced by Oprah), it is set amid the modern-day sugarcane fields of rural Louisiana, where three adult siblings have decided to take over the operations of their recently deceased father’s farm. Their struggles for control, and to connect with one another, fuel the show’s tension. “Queen Sugar” has taken on a deeper resonance in recent months, as its main characters, all black and gorgeously lit, explore themes that are related to black-family wealth and legacy, the predation of the criminal-justice system, and the emotional mazes of romantic relationships. The series is gloriously focussed on the everyday experience of being black in the South, and, much like the series “Insecure,” it isn’t concerned with translating that experience or broadening its scope beyond that world to appeal to a wider audience. Watching scenes of love between older black couples, of young black men and women finding their ways in life, and of the mundane vagaries of being black in America, feels almost like comfort food: warming and addictive.—Alexis Okeowo

Photograph by NBC via Everett

“Frasier”

I began rewatching all two hundred and sixty-four episodes of “Frasier” at 2 A.M. one night last month, while standing by my sleeping mother’s ventilator at Bellevue Hospital. It was our second time at the hospital in five weeks. My mother, who is fully paralyzed by advanced A.L.S., is my most beloved and exhausting charge. Leaning my weight against her cot that night, I needed to stay awake, but I also needed to escape. “Frasier” follows Dr. Frasier Crane, a therapist turned radio personality who returns to his home town of Seattle, after a divorce, to live with his father, a former policeman who can no longer care for himself. I first watched the show when I was eighteen, home from college, and sleeping on my mother’s couch. After a day of tussling with her over everything from my classes to the price of groceries, the late-night reruns I watched alone in the living room perfectly captured the friction of our hapless parent-child relationship, and illuminated the cultural and generational distance between us. Like Frasier, I was a nerd who got lost in Greek mythology and experimental art films. Like Frasier’s working-class father, my immigrant mother, who speaks little English, found my interests tedious, preferring thrillers or Hollywood action movies. In rediscovering the show that night in the hospital, I realized that “Frasier” possessed more than pedigreed wit and martini-dry humor. Without trivializing the hard truths of life and relationships, or patronizing the audience with cheap laughs, it encompassed remarkable emotional range. That, in a way, is its true brilliance. Watching it on my phone under the fluorescent light of a hospital ward, I was, even if briefly, cheered and comforted.—Jiayang Fan

Photograph by Moviestore / REX / Shutterstock

“Twin Peaks”

This year, the first season of “Twin Peaks” transformed my autumn while possibly becoming my favorite show of all time. In concrete terms, David Lynch’s show is a mystery series, in which Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, visits a small town to investigate the murder of Laura Palmer, a high-school girl who lived a secret life. But “Twin Peaks” isn’t “C.S.I.: Pacific Northwest”—it feels like an emanation from another, purer realm, where emotions are heightened and unheard vibrations sing. Most crime shows take a sociological view of evil. As the detective ventures deeper into the criminal underworld, he uncovers the depraved circumstances that turn good people bad. “Twin Peaks” explores an older, more spiritual view of life, in which evil is a disembodied, mystical force that comes from outside, affecting people the way an invisible wave lifts boats on the sea at night. (It’s not as implausible as it sounds—ask Dostoyevsky, or Jung.) Cooper is the perfect person to investigate Palmer’s death because he is sensitive to the wavelets of evil that run across our collective unconscious. But he also senses other waves—of grief, beauty, affection, and love—and is moved by them, too. The town of Twin Peaks is small and nestled in a big forest; the show implies that our lives, similarly, are floating islands on a sea. Start from the beginning—there are three seasons in total, one just released, plus a full-length film, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me”—and, for bonus points, read the disturbing tie-in novel, “The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer,” after you finish the first season. It was written by Lynch’s daughter, Jessica, when she was just twenty-two.—Joshua Rothman