With much humor derived from some cast members of Saturday Night Live and with approval from Lorne Michaels himself, Portlandia was born. The name Portlandia refers to a sculpture with that title found over the entrance doors of the Portland Building which is situated in downtown Portland on Fifth Avenue. The show has the fast paced comedy touch that SNL is well noted for and cast members Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein help keep it moving along. With Lorne Michaels as executive producer and creative writing from Fred Armisen, Jonathan Krisel, and Carrie Brownstein the show appears to have a bright future. We see how popular restaurants along the famous Hawthorne District in Portland handle irate dinner guests when they leave rather nasty reviews on a website titled Yelp! Another episode finds how badly a one man performance can actually be at the Hollywood Theatre, a local historic building in northeast Portland. If it happens in or around Portland it might end up on the show in some fashion, most likely comedic in tone. Portlandia currently runs on the IFC (Independent Film Channel).

Sketches are a comics best format for television and Nick Swardson has a show that's loaded with them. Each episode displays some sort of rank and raunchy humorous ingredients that will make 7th graders giggle and adults cover their heads. But along the way some of it is actually funny even if rather dark. Skits about cats in wheelchairs, snipers who masturbate, and incestual dreams involving the Nightmare on Elm Street movies are unusual fare for family television nights and when the show's main character sits and tells us about what we are about to see we begin to wonder what world this is. Nick's dead cat, Fitzgerald, is fair game for another episode as are a fatherly bucket list for a dying son, urine powered cars, and even a Gay Robot. Never one to be short on "off the wall" ideas, Nick Swardson's Pretend Time will give viewers a peek into a rather weird place, the mind of Swardson. Imagine, if you will, recovering a time capsule full of sex objects, or following Gay Robot as he buys airplane tickets to visit the alien probe site (area 51 come to mind?), or maybe learn how a forest ranger steps in to break up intimate moments between homosexuals. All this and more can be found on the Nick Swardson's Pretend Time show.

Family Tree is a comedy television series that aired on HBO and BBC Two in 2013. The show was created by Christopher Guest and Jim Piddock and starred Chris O'Dowd as Tom Chadwick, a young man who sets out to trace his family's genealogy after inheriting a mysterious box of belongings from his great-aunt.

"Barry" is an American dark comedy television series that premiered on HBO in March 2018. The show follows the life of Barry Berkman, a former Marine turned hitman who travels to Los Angeles for a job and ends up becoming involved in the local theater scene. While in LA, Barry discovers a passion for acting and wants to leave his violent past behind, but struggles to do so as he is continually drawn back into the world of crime.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is a popular American sitcom that aired on NBC from 1990 to 1996. The show revolves around a young man named Will Smith who, after getting into trouble in his hometown of Philadelphia, is sent to live with his wealthy relatives, the Banks family, in their Bel-Air mansion.

Called an American television sitcom and launched as a midseason replacement for another sitcom titled Man Up that was quickly cancelled we find that Work It simply didn't work! And it was even panned for being insulting for the transgender people out there because it was about two men dressing up as women to keep jobs during this shaky economy. This was in no way comparable to Bosom Buddies which starred Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari and ran on ABC from 1980 to 1982. Lee Standish (Ben Koldyke) and Angel Ortiz (Amaury Nolasco) are unemployed and believe that women are having more luck getting jobs in this recession and decide to dress up and apply as women. Standish find a job with a pharmaceutical company but also find it to be far more difficult to be women than they previously thought. It does show that women and men are treated differently in the working world but ratings were a disaster.