Family series 20 series

Family, on television, usually means nobody in the room is asking for something else, which is a low bar and most programmes clear it by accident. What we are scoring is whether it talks down. The good ones assume a child can be frightened, bored or trusted to get the joke, and that the adults on the sofa are not chaperones. Our shelf leans towards animation and towards the odd: two brothers lost in an autumn wood sit beside a propane salesman in a small Texas town.

Start with Frasier (88), for writing that knows how long to wait; Over the Garden Wall (86), a two-hour fairy tale that frightens and amuses in the same minute; and Gravity Falls (84), funnier and better built than a children's cartoon needs to be, once the first run settles. After those, try King of the Hill if patience is what you liked, or The Storyteller if it was the dark.