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For Elizabeth Cohen, an associate professor specializing in media psychology at West Virginia University, her favorite rewatch is Black Mirror, while her husband prefers to relax with episodes of The Great British Baking Show. “It’s fun, it’s light, he knows when he watches it he won’t be stressed,” she told me over the phone. Series like that one—low-stakes, light, uplifting fare—make up the first category of what people watch when they’re feeling depleted or anxious. The most obvious balm for troubled souls is television where nothing bad really happens and everything will almost certainly be okay, a model Amy Sherman-Palladino has mastered with Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. On an awful day, you can visit Schitt’s Creek or Pawnee, Indiana, safe in the knowledge that no crisis greater than a gay-penguin scandal or a bed-wetting incident will occur.

A different kind of comfort comes from watching reruns of shows that you’ve already seen over and over: The Office, Friends, Cheers. It’s “definitely nostalgia,” Cohen said—watching to try to return, momentarily, to a different time, or a moment when everything seemed easier. But also: “There’s a lot of comfort in knowing when something’s going to happen. You don’t have to exert a lot of cognitive energy, so it doesn’t feel taxing.” The familiarity of, say, Frasier’s ego leading to some kind of misunderstanding, or Carla hurling rapid-fire insults at Cliff, is part of the process. Watching this kind of television, Cohen said, that doesn’t require you to invest too much attention or brainpower, can be very effective for relaxing. “It can make you feel replenished,” she noted, with one important caveat: “If you feel guilty about your pleasures, this study shows that you can’t reap the benefits from them. But if you’re able to give yourself the opportunity to indulge, it can actually be really beneficial.”

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Counterintuitively, people can also derive psychological comfort from dystopian or bleak entertainment: The Handmaid’s Tale, The Twilight Zone, true-crime series, murder mysteries. One 1992 study found that some viewers who felt lonely or unhappy enjoyed watching shows about people in similar situations, because they found comfort in seeing others facing experiences akin to (or worse than) their own. For these people, series about happy, thriving characters can actually cause emotional distress, due to something called social comparison. This particular theory explains why so many viewers over the past month have streamed Contagion, Outbreak, and other grim-but-topical movies: They’re hoping to be reminded of all the ways in which their own lives could actually be worse. Not to mention that there’s cheer in the idea of efficient, selfless people solving crises in time for a happy ending.