Anime Like This Life
If you loved This Life's Drama storytelling, these anime deliver a similar experience — selected for art style, narrative depth, and emotional impact. Each includes where to stream it now.
★ Top Picks
Ally McBeal
Ally McBeal is a young lawyer working at the Boston law firm Cage and Fish. Ally's lives and loves are eccentric, humorous, dramatic with an incredibly overactive imagination that's working overtime!
Franklin & Bash
When they're not hanging out at their favorite hot dog stand pontificating on what they'd go through to enjoy a night with their favorite female celebrities, Jared Franklin and Peter Bash are chasing down their latest clients...sometimes literally. With business cards in hand, they're ready to nab a client within seconds after a car accident, arrest for solicitation or any other incident where their legal services may be needed. Once in the courtroom, they show their flair for the dramatic and the shocking.
Looking
Three friends in San Francisco who explore the fun and sometimes overwhelming options available to a new generation of gay men.
Trigonometry
In crowded and expensive London, cash-strapped couple Gemma and Kieran open their small apartment to a third person. Somehow, their new addition, Ray, makes the flat seem bigger, not smaller. Gradually, many things become easier, nicer and better with an extra pair of hands.
Harry's Law
Harriet, Matthew and Malcolm couldn't be any more different, but when they cross paths, they realize they're all looking for a fresh start. The most unlikely of people are starting a law practice in the most unlikely of places -- a rundown shoe store.
Being Human
Three paranormal roommates, a ghost, a vampire, and a werewolf, struggle to keep their dark secrets from the world, while helping each other navigate the complexities of living double lives.
Carmilla
Laura Hollis, a newly enrolled college student at Silas University, shares a room with Betty, who mysteriously disappears all of a sudden. Little does Laura know that after this fateful night, nothing will be the same in her life, starting with meeting her new roommate from hell, Carmilla Karnstein. "Carmilla" is a single-camera, scripted transmedia series that puts a modern spin on the cult classic Gothic vampire novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. It's a story of a young woman’s susceptibility to the attentions of a female vampire.
You Me Her
An unusual, real-world romance involving relatable people, with one catch - there are three of them! You Me Her infuses the sensibilities of a smart, grounded indie rom-com with a distinctive twist: one of the two parties just happens to be a suburban married couple.
More Anime Like This Life
Boston Legal
Alan Shore and Denny Crane lead a brigade of high-priced civil litigators in an upscale Boston law firm in a series focusing on the professional and personal lives of brilliant but often emotionally challenged attorneys. A spin-off of long-running series The Practice.
Please Like Me
After breaking up with his girlfriend, Josh comes to the realization that he is homosexual. With the support of his now ex girlfriend Claire, and his best friend and house mate Tom, Josh must help his mother with her battle with depression and the rest of his family embrace his new found lifestyle.
Fairly Legal
Kate Reed is a firm believer that justice can always be found – even if it's not always in the courtroom. Once a lawyer at her family's esteemed San Francisco firm, Kate's frustration with the legal system led her to a new career as a mediator. Thanks to her innate understanding of human nature, thorough legal knowledge, and wry sense of humor, Kate is a natural when it comes to dispute resolution. Except, it seems, when it comes to conflicts in her own life.
Grace and Frankie
Elegant, proper Grace and freewheeling, eccentric Frankie are a pair of frenemies whose lives are turned upside down - and permanently intertwined - when their husbands leave them for each other. Together, they must face starting over in their 70s in a 21st century world.
It's a Sin
A chronicle of five friends during a decade in which everything changed, including the rise of AIDS.
Togetherness
Four adults nearing 40, living under the same roof, struggle to keep their relationships and their individual dreams alive.
Girls
The assorted humiliations, disasters and rare triumphs of four very different twenty-something girls: Hannah, an aspiring writer; Marnie, an art gallery assistant and cousins Jessa and Shoshanna.
Bonding
A New York City grad student moonlighting as a dominatrix enlists her gay BFF from high school to be her assistant.
Fellow Travelers
A chronicle of a decades-long volatile romance between two men — from their first meeting during the height of the 1950s Lavender Scare to the AIDS crises of the 1980s.
Pretty Smart
A self-proclaimed intellectual, forced to move in with her carefree sister and her sister's lovably eccentric friends.
Sex Education
Inexperienced Otis channels his sex therapist mom when he teams up with rebellious Maeve to set up an underground sex therapy clinic at school.
The L Word: Generation Q
In this sequel to The L Word, we continue to follow the intermingled lives of Bette Porter, Alice Pieszecki and Shane McCutcheon, along with a new generation of diverse, self-possessed LGBTQIA+ characters experiencing love, heartbreak, sex, setbacks and success in L.A.
Why These Anime Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with This Life (1996): Drama themes, comparable animation style, and similar narrative pacing. NoBadPicks uses TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface anime most likely to resonate with fans of This Life.
See full details for This Life (1996)