Some TV shows don’t just tell one kind of story. They bounce between genres, topics, and even ways of thinking, so you end up learning a little about everything: history, science, politics, psychology, crime, design, food, philosophy, business, culture, and the strange corners of human behavior.
If you’re looking for shows that cover the most diverse subject matter, you want one of three types:
- The true “variety engine”
These shows are built to roam. Every episode can be a different world. - The “deep generalist”
These have a consistent tone or format, but the topics stretch across society, ideas, and human experience. - The “genre blender”
Fiction that uses plot as a vehicle to explore a wide range of real topics, from ethics to technology to trauma.
Below are some of the best examples, and what makes each one unusually broad.
Anthology and variety engines
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown
This is travel television that refuses to stay on the surface. Food is the entry point, but each episode can turn into a lesson on politics, class, history, identity, labor, addiction, immigration, or conflict. It’s one of the few shows that can move from a street meal to a serious conversation about a country’s scars without feeling forced. You watch it for culture, but you come away thinking about people.
How It’s Made
It sounds narrow until you watch a bunch of episodes. Manufacturing becomes a guided tour through materials science, engineering, logistics, quality control, and industrial history. One segment is candy. Next is aerospace parts. Then musical instruments. It’s pure curiosity fuel, and it quietly teaches you how the modern world actually gets built.
MythBusters
At its best, it’s a crash course in scientific thinking that spans physics, chemistry, ballistics, fluid dynamics, safety engineering, and everyday problem-solving. The subject matter is wildly varied because the myths come from everywhere: movies, folklore, history, urban legends, and common “everybody knows” beliefs. More than the facts, it trains your brain to test things instead of arguing about them.
Dirty Jobs
This show covers the hidden infrastructure of civilization: sanitation, agriculture, trades, animal work, industrial cleaning, manufacturing, and maintenance. It also ends up covering economics and dignity, because you see what people do to keep society running and what that work demands physically and mentally. It’s a tour of jobs you don’t think about until something breaks.
Deep generalists that span society
60 Minutes (or similar long-running news magazines)
The format is built for breadth. In a single episode you might get investigative journalism, geopolitics, health, crime, business, tech, and a profile piece. Over time, these shows become a map of the world’s concerns, and they’re one of the clearest examples of “diverse subject matter” as a design choice rather than a side effect.
Frontline
If you want depth across many domains, this is the gold standard. One documentary might focus on war, another on addiction, another on surveillance, another on corporate power, another on healthcare systems. It’s not a “light” watch, but it covers an enormous range of subjects while keeping a consistent investigative seriousness.
Explained and Vox-style mini-documentaries
Short-form documentary series are built to jump topics rapidly: money, psychology, climate, tech, design, food systems, media incentives, and social trends. The strength here is range plus compression. You can sample a lot of subjects quickly, then go deeper elsewhere.
Planet Earth and the best nature-doc lineage
These aren’t just animal shows. The good ones cover ecosystems, geology, climate patterns, evolution, predator-prey dynamics, migration, and even the relationship between human activity and natural systems. They’re “biology,” but biology turns out to be a doorway into time, physics, and planetary processes.
Fiction that covers an unusually wide range of ideas
Black Mirror
It’s fiction, but it’s basically a rotating debate about modern life: social media incentives, privacy, punishment, identity, AI, grief, entertainment, labor, war, intimacy, reputation, and the trade-offs we accept without noticing. Not every episode hits, but the range of subject matter is huge because technology touches everything humans do.
The Twilight Zone
A classic template for idea-driven storytelling. It’s not just sci-fi. It’s moral psychology, social critique, paranoia, conformity, prejudice, ambition, fear, and irony. The topics can be deeply personal one week and cultural the next, which is why the show still feels modern.
Star Trek (especially the most “idea of the week” eras)
When it’s firing on all cylinders, it becomes a rotating thought experiment machine: ethics, diplomacy, war, scarcity, personhood, prejudice, leadership, law, science, exploration, and how societies organize themselves. Even when the science is fictional, the questions are real.
The Simpsons (at its best, especially early years)
Comedy is a powerful delivery system for breadth. This show has touched nearly every aspect of modern life: politics, religion, education, work, consumerism, family dynamics, media, health, crime, sports, and cultural change. The subject matter is massive because the town is a mirror of society.
What to watch depending on the kind of “diversity” you mean
If you mean widest range of real-world topics
Go with Parts Unknown, Frontline, and a news magazine format.
If you mean learning how the world works
Try How It’s Made, MythBusters, and Dirty Jobs.
If you mean big ideas across modern life
Pick Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone.
If you mean a long-running series that eventually touches everything
A strong sitcom with a broad cast and a broad world can surprisingly win.
A quick way to judge whether a show is truly broad
Ask these three questions:
Does each episode require a different kind of knowledge to understand it?
Does the show regularly move between personal stories and system-level forces?
Does it cover both how things work and why people behave the way they do?
If the answer is yes to all three, you’re looking at one of the rare shows that can take you across the map of human experience instead of keeping you in one neighborhood.
If you tell me what you like to watch most, I’ll give you a tight list of 10 shows that match your style but maximize subject range.
