Dramas like
Hi Bye, Mama!

A home emptied out after a death, and the people who have to stand in it. Same subject exactly, what a death leaves behind in the rooms and the relatives, played at heavy 5 with none of the sentiment the premise invites. Ten episodes, one job, and every case is a family that did not say the thing in time. Difference: no fantasy device, romance 0, and the grief belongs to a stranger each week rather than to one household across sixteen hours.

Hooks early Episode 1 already tells you exactly what the show is.

Supernatural staff with a caseload, and the care is in the writing rather than the premise. Same machinery pointed at the same target, the living who are still standing after somebody is gone, and it treats each case seriously instead of squeezing it. Sixteen episodes at heavy 5. Difference: an anthology with a team at the centre, no marriage and no child in it, so the ache is general where this one is domestic.

Hooks early Episode 2, once the case-of-the-week structure clicks into place.

Eight episodes that look like horror and turn out to be about mourning. Same trick of using the dead to write about the living, the same attention to the ones left sitting in a ward or a kitchen, and the fifth hour reorganises everything in front of it. Difference: an ensemble of strangers rather than one family, a real horror register for the first half, and it asks for patience before it pays anything.

Slow start Episode 5, where the strangers turn out to be one story and the horror framing shows what it has actually been doing.

A fantasy rule about time, with a real bill attached. Same shape: a woman handed terms nobody asked for, and a family that has to deal with the version of her those terms produce. Twelve episodes at heavy 5, and the confusion in the first four is doing work. Difference: no young child, a much older centre, and it is stranger and sadder than this one is.

Slow start Episode 4. Sit with the confusion, it is doing work.

Mothering written as damage and love in the same gesture. Same argument about what a parent owes a child and what the child does with it, and the same willingness to sit in a house where everybody is behaving badly for reasons you understand. Fourteen episodes at heavy 5 with a warm village around the hurt. Difference: no ghost and no clock, and the child is grown, so the debt runs the other way.

Hooks early Episode 2, once he wakes up changed and the pig farm becomes the whole world.

A mother measured across decades instead of days. Same subject, what a woman spends herself on and who notices, and the same refusal to be embarrassed about tears. Sixteen episodes at comfort 4, and the script treats ordinary lives as though they were worth the runtime. Difference: sixty years of small kindnesses rather than a supernatural deadline, so the sadness accumulates instead of arriving on terms.

Hooks early Episode 2, where the childhood section pays off.

Unfinished business settled by somebody working off a debt with a number on it. Same premise of a supernatural rule with a count attached and living people on the other end of it, and the episodic cases land the same small repairs. Twelve episodes at pace 4 and comfort 4. Difference: broad comedy and a found family rather than a marriage, at heavy 3, so nothing in it is asking you to grieve.

Hooks early Episode 1. The bar, the debt and the rules are all on the table immediately.