8 TV Shows to Watch If You Miss ‘Happy’s Place’
Fans of Happy’s Place might be in a sad place now that the NBC sitcom is on hiatus. We know Season 2 is a go, at least, but the new episodes won’t hit screens for months yet.
Happy’s Place stars Reba McEntire and Belissa Escobedo as long-lost half-siblings who must learn to connect after they inherit a bar from their late father. Season 1 ended last month with the possibility of romance between McEntire’s Bobbie and cook Emmett, played by McEntire’s real-life beau, Rex Linn.
Showrunner Kevin Abbott told TV Insider some of what we can expect for Season 2, but if you need other binge-watches for the intervening months, here are the shows that might wet your whistle.
Reba
Yeah, this one’s a gimme. Before she starred in Happy’s Place, McEntire starred in this sitcom, playing a single mom raising her family solo following her husband’s extramarital affair. Better yet, Happy’s Place costar Melissa Peterman plays the other woman in the equation.
Malibu Country
Shorter-lived (and harder to find) is this other sitcom, which also counted Abbott as an executive producer. McEntire again plays a jilted woman, but this time, she’s relocating, moving her family from Nashville to Malibu… and she has TV legend Lily Tomlin as her mother.
Grace and Frankie
Speaking of Tomlin, she and Jane Fonda starred in this long-running series, which, like Happy’s Place, is a comedy about women grudgingly thrown together by unusual circumstances. Grace and Frankie are two women — one prim, one hippie — who are married to men going public with their own romance.
Cheers
If you’re looking for a TV comedy set at a bar, you could certainly go where everybody knows your name. Starring Ted Danson, Shelley Long, and other comedy stars, Cheers is a cultural touchpoint, a seasons-long story about the romances and friendships between the workers and patrons of a Boston watering hole.
Abby’s
Another bar-set comedy is this project from producers of Parks and Recreation. Natalie Morales plays the eponymous owner of an unlicensed backyard bar where friends and neighbors can throw one back. It’s a rare comedy centering on a queer Latina character, and in a novel twist, it was also filmed entirely outdoors.
SisterS
Here’s another later-in-life family reunion, à la Happy’s Place. In this show, a Canadian woman and an Irish woman discover they’re half-sisters. But Sarah Goldberg and Susan Stanley’s characters don’t run a bar together; they go on a road trip in search of their alcoholic dad.
Sister, Sister
Tia and Tamera Mowry’s Sister, Sister characters, at least, learned about one another in their teens. The fictional Tia and Tamera are twin sisters — with vastly different upbringings — who move in with one another after finding each other at a shopping mall.
The Other One
And this Britcom stars Ellie White and Lauren Socha as two women named Catherine Walcott, half-sisters who only find one another after their dad’s death. Creator Holly Walsh crafted the story after hearing of a man who gave kids from his two families the same name to avoid confusion, Den of Geek reported.
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