Shows Like The A Word
If you loved The A Word's Drama storytelling, these series deliver a similar experience — chosen for tone, narrative quality, and viewer satisfaction. Each includes where to stream it now.
★ Top Picks
Atypical
Sam, an 18-year-old on the autism spectrum, takes a funny, yet painful, journey of self-discovery for love and independence and upends his family.
Touch
Martin Bohm, a widower and single father, is haunted by an inability to connect to his autistic, mute 11-year-old son, Jake. Their relationship and their lives take an extraordinary turn when he discovers his gifted son has the ability to see things that no one else can and the patterns that connect seemingly unrelated events.
Parenthood
The trials and tribulations of the very large, colorful and imperfect Braverman family.
United States of Tara
Tara's multiple personalities include "T" the wild-child teenager, "Buck" the rough and tumble biker dude, and "Alice" the type-A homemaker. But with a family that loves her just the way she is, Tara never gives up hope that someday she can just be herself.
Switched at Birth
The story of two teenage girls who discover they were accidentally switched as newborns in the hospital. Bay Kennish grew up in a wealthy family with two parents and a brother, while Daphne Vasquez, who lost her hearing at an early age due to a case of meningitis, grew up with a single mother in a working-class neighborhood. Things come to a dramatic head when both families meet and struggle to learn how to live together for the sake of the girls.
7th Heaven
Reverend Eric Camden and his wife Annie have always had their hands full caring for seven children, not to mention the friends, sweethearts and spouses that continually come and go in the Camden household.
Everwood
After the death of his wife, world-class neurosurgeon Dr. Andrew Brown leaves Manhattan and moves his family to the small town of Everwood, Colorado. There he becomes a small-town doctor and learns parenting on the fly as he raises his talented but resentful 15-year-old son Ephram and his 9-year-old daughter Delia.
More Shows Like The A Word
As We See It
Finding love, making friends, getting a job, adulting. Watch as three roommates on the autism spectrum navigate their early 20s with all its joy, tears and laughter. With the help of their families, aide, and sometimes even each other, these roommates experience setbacks and celebrate triumphs on their own unique journeys towards independence and acceptance.
Life Unexpected
16-year-old Lux was given up for adoption at birth but never adopted. When she is put back into the custody of her estranged-since-high-school birth parents, Cate and Baze, the three form an unlikely family.
Smother
On the rugged coast of County Clare, Val Ahern's husband is found dead at the foot of a cliff the morning after a family party. The matriarch starts to dig into the family's secrets to find out who might be responsible.
The Good Doctor
Shaun Murphy, a young surgeon with autism and savant syndrome, relocates from a quiet country life to join a prestigious hospital's surgical unit. Unable to personally connect with those around him, Shaun uses his extraordinary medical gifts to save lives and challenge the skepticism of his colleagues.
Upstairs, Downstairs
Upstairs: the wealthy, aristocratic Bellamys. Downstairs: their loyal and lively servants. For nearly 30 years, they share a fashionable townhouse at 165 Eaton Place in London’s posh Belgravia neighborhood, surviving social change, political upheaval, scandals, and the horrors of the First World War.
Tyler Perry's The Oval
A seemingly perfect interracial first family becomes the White House's newest residents. But behind closed doors they unleash a torrent of lies, cheating and corruption.
The Fosters
Stef Foster, a dedicated police officer, and her partner Lena Adams, a school vice principal, have built a close-knit, loving family with Stef's biological son from a previous marriage, Brandon, and their adopted twins, Mariana and Jesus. Their lives are disrupted in unexpected ways when Lena meets Callie, a hardened teen with an abusive past who has spent her life in and out of foster homes. Lena and Stef welcome Callie and her brother, Jude, into their home thinking it's just for a few weeks, until a more permanent placement can be found. But life has something else in store for the Fosters.
Bloodline
A dramatic thriller that explores the demons lurking beneath the surface of a contemporary American family. The Rayburns are hard-working pillars of their Florida Keys community. But when the black sheep son comes home for the 45th anniversary of his parents' hotel, he threatens to expose the Rayburns' dark secrets and shameful past, pushing his siblings to the limits of family loyalty.
Sister Wives
Husband Kody Brown, along with his four wives (only one of which is legally married to Kody) and their combined 18 children, attempts to navigate life as a "normal" family in a society that shuns their lifestyle.
Finding Carter
A teenager finds out she was abducted as a toddler and returns to her biological family.
Downton Abbey
A chronicle of the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants in the post-Edwardian era—with great events in history having an effect on their lives and on the British social hierarchy.
Greenleaf
The unscrupulous world of the Greenleaf family and their sprawling Memphis megachurch, where scandalous secrets and lies are as numerous as the faithful. Born of the church, the Greenleaf family love and care for each other, but beneath the surface lies a den of iniquity—greed, adultery, sibling rivalry and conflicting values—that threatens to tear apart the very core of their faith that holds them together.
Why These Shows Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with The A Word (2016): Drama themes, similar pacing, and comparable production quality. NoBadPicks uses TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface series most likely to resonate with fans of The A Word.
See full details for The A Word (2016)