Our Favorite TV Shows We’ve Watched as a Family
I love watching family TV shows!
It’s so fun to have that shared experience and really get to know and love the characters and setting.
Plus, it’s much easier to squeeze in a 30-60 minute episode rather than a 2 hour movie.
We started watching family TV shows in 2020 (when we were spending a LOT of time at home!) and we’ve been fans ever since.
Here are some of our favorite family TV shows we’ve watched (our four kids currently range from 8-14 years old):
Favorite Family TV Shows
- Just Add Magic. This is the first family TV show we watched (our youngest was 3.5 and our oldest was 10) and it was SUCH a delightful experience to watch a show all together. Just Add Magic is a show about three tween girls who find a cookbook in the attic and when they start cooking, they realize each recipe is magic and has some magical result when someone eats the recipe. This one was just so cute and fun (and just a tiny bit scary for some of our younger kids) – we blew through all the seasons, plus the spin-off season of Just Add Magic: Mystery City. The show (and the spin-off) is included on Amazon Prime.
- All Round Champion. This show is free on BYUtv and we have LOVED every season. The show brings in 10 young athletes (usually around 12-16) who are top in their sport and each week one athlete is the sport leader and teaches all the other athletes about their sport for a few days (alongside an Olympian or other high achiever in that sport) before everyone competes on the last day. We’ve had SO many good conversations about good sportsmanship, trying new things, dealing with disappointment and more.
- All Creatures Great and Small. If we HAD to choose an all-time favorite family TV show, it would probably be this one. Based on the memoirs of a veterinarian in the 1940s, this is the sweetest show that is also so funny and heartwarming. Bart and I watched the first couple of episodes and then went back and started again with our kids because we knew they’d love it too. Now we look forward to a new season every winter! We started watching this one when our youngest was about 4 and she loved it then and still loves it now that she’s 8 (our oldest started at 10 and now is 14). Truly a terrific show for all ages. We have a PBS subscription to watch it but you can also get it through Amazon.
- The Mysterious Benedict Society. This was sadly a short-lived show, but we’d listened to the book as a family and heard great things about this show. I wish they’d done more than two seasons! This one was one Disney+ but has been removed so if you find a place to watch it, let me know!
- Cranford. This was our most recent family watch. Bart and I had watched it 15 years ago and loved it but we couldn’t remember almost anything about it. This year, for part of our Winter Weekend Old Movies night, we watched it with Bart’s parents and we all LOVED it. It is set in a small town in England in the 1840s and you get to know all the townspeople and the things going on in their lives, big and small. There are only 2 seasons (with a total of 8 episodes).
- Relative Race. I was actually surprised by how much my kids liked this show, but we’ve watched several seasons of it. In this show, there are four teams with 2 people on each team (usually siblings or a couple) and it is a 10 day race across the country to find and meet family members they didn’t know they had. It is so touching to see people find family they’d been looking for and wondering about for years or even decades. There are also challenges in each episode to make it more exciting and it’s been a delightful show (we started on Season 5 and have hopped around which seasons we’ve watched). This one is free on BYUtv.
P.S. I asked my Instagram community about what TV shows their whole family had enjoyed and all their answers are here if you’d like more suggestions!
These are great suggestions We loved Dwight in shining armor on byutv.
Dick Van Dyke show is clean and HILARIOUS. It’s been a huge hit and is free on Tubi and the Roku channel. My teens have enjoyed Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Doctor Who (the reboot that started with Christopher Eccleston as the doctor)