10 Dark Comedy Shows Like Zendaya & Robert Pattinson's The Drama

Along with Obsession and Backrooms, The Drama is one of the most surprising box office hits of the year. It’s getting rarer and rarer that comedy movies even turn a profit in theaters, and this is a comedy that deals heavily in school shootings — one of the hottest hot-button issues in America right now — and yet it sailed past $100 million worldwide like it was easy. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s star power had something to do with it, but that only gets you so far.

Clearly, this movie resonated with audiences. There’s something about Kristoffer Borgli’s uniquely twisted sense of humor that struck a chord with moviegoers. You don’t see The Drama’s brand of pitch-black comedy on the big screen very often — it’s awfully risky — but you see it all the time on television.

Euphoria

Zendaya has been famous since her Disney days, but what really made her an icon, and launched her to global superstardom, was her incredible, Emmy-winning portrayal of drug addict Rue Bennett in Euphoria. Euphoria showed the world that Zendaya doesn’t just have star power; she has the dramatic chops to back it up.

It paved the way for more complicated roles in projects like Challengers and Dune and, indeed, The Drama. Tonally, The Drama and Euphoria feel of a piece; they both have a pitch-black sense of humor, laughing in the face of tragedy.

Beef

Although it was originally conceived as a limited series, Beef has been turned into an anthology format with an extremely loose premise. Both seasons of Beef are connected by what happens when the human mind obsesses over one tiny thing and refuses to let it go.

That’s the conflict at the heart of The Drama: Charlie can’t let go of this new information he’s just learned about Emma. All the ensuing chaos comes from his inability to have a mature conversation, and the same could be said of the beefs in Beef.

Fleabag

The genius of The Drama is that it takes really uncomfortable subject matter and makes it hilarious. Phoebe Waller-Bridge did the exact same thing with all the painfully relatable foibles of being an aimless twentysomething in her seminal sitcom Fleabag.

Waller-Bridge developed the title character in a stage show, so that character was fully cooked before she’d even shot the pilot episode. Just like Emma and Charlie in The Drama, Fleabag is far from a perfect person, but we love her in spite of her many flaws.

It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia

One of the most refreshing things about The Drama is its frankness. So few Hollywood productions are willing to have a provocative discussion about gun violence, for fear of alienating audiences, but both The Drama and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia have addressed the gun issue head-on.

It’s Always Sunny has a couple of episodes about gun violence — after covering it in season 1, the writers decided they had more to say in a sequel episode, “Still Hot” — but that’s just one of the satirical targets that Sunny has taken aim at. It’s also tackled abortion, disability, terrorism, and even the Nightman.

The White Lotus

Mike White is the screenwriter behind one of the sweetest, most wholesome movies ever made — the musical comedy masterpiece School of Rock — but his new crowning achievement is the exact opposite. The White Lotus is a pitch-black satire about the absurd excesses of the ultra-rich. It follows the debauched, depraved antics of one-percenters on a vacation that they don’t expect to have any consequences.

Broadly, The White Lotus is an upstairs-downstairs comedy contrasting the trivial problems of the resort’s wealthy guests with the very real problems of the underpaid staff waiting on them hand and foot. But it deals with all kinds of complicated themes within that: money, sex, spirituality. Like The Drama, each season touches on relationships torn asunder by secrets and lies and bombshell revelations. The White Lotus is full of couples who are a much worse match for each other than Emma and Charlie.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

The Drama almost plays like a Gen Z version of Curb Your Enthusiasm, replacing Larry David’s jaded cynicism with the overwhelming anxiety and self-doubt of kids who were raised on social media and porn. Pattinson certainly recaptures the antsy, neurotic social ineptness that defines Curb.

Curb reinvented the TV comedy. With its improvised dialogue, vérité filming style, and actors playing fictionalized versions of themselves, Curb blurred the line between fiction and reality. It brought an excruciating realism to its cringe comedy, and established a new visual language that movies like The Drama would emulate later down the line.

Barry

Part of what makes The Drama so intense and uncomfortable is that it doesn’t let us out of Charlie’s headspace. Once he finds out what kind of person Emma is, he starts to spiral. In that sense, it’s as much a harrowing psychological drama as it is a dark comedy — and that perfectly describes Bill Hader’s HBO series Barry.

Barry might sound more gimmicky than The Drama on paper: it’s about a hitman who dreams of becoming an actor. But it’s much darker and grimmer than it sounds. Barry drags us down the rabbit hole with an unstable protagonist’s descent into madness, just like The Drama.

PEN15

You may have seen a lot of coming-of-age shows, but I guarantee you’ve never seen one like PEN15. It’s a dramedy set in a middle school, full of middle-school-aged kids, but the two lead characters are played by women in their early 30s.

Co-creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle play their own 13-year-old selves as 31-year-old women. It has the same surreal feel as the dream sequences in The Drama, where the Emma that Charlie knows gradually leaves his memories and the young would-be school shooter he now knows her to be takes her place. But, more broadly, the show’s cringe-inducing comic situations feel just as painfully real as The Drama.

The Bear

It’s tough to categorize The Drama, because it has a lot of laughs like a comedy, but above all, it’s a deeply anxiety-inducing experience. The same could be said for a recent TV comedy whose own genre has been called into question for that very reason. The Bear regularly sweeps the comedy categories at the Emmys, but it’s not exactly a straightforward sitcom.

Much like The Drama, The Bear uses social discomfort to keep its audience on the edge of their seats; it’s as hair-raising as it is hilarious. Anyone who grew up in a household where the primary form of communication was yelling will relate to the Berzatto family to an uncomfortable degree.

Girls

No other TV show has quite captured The Drama’s mix of heart, hilarity, and deep discomfort quite like Girls. Lena Dunham’s magnum opus, much like The Drama, explores complicated modern relationship dynamics in all their toxicity. It’s all about the messiness of being young and naive, and making humiliating mistakes at life-changing junctures.

There are a couple of standalone episodes of Girls that capture the exact same high-wire tension as The Drama — the #MeToo episode with Matthew Rhys and the heroin episode with a returning Christopher Abbott being prime examples — but the series, as a whole, is cut from the same cloth. It’s all about the insecurities and anxieties of young people desperately trying to cosplay adulthood.