Shows Like The Cleaner
For those captivated by The Cleaner, are likely to find resonance in stories that questions the purpose and weight of our choices while grounding the story in targets the intellect with complex, multi-layered ideas. Carefully balances character depth with narrative flow makes this definitely worth a watch.
Standard feature-length experiences.
Best for fans of who appreciate concise storytelling.
★ Top Picks
Rush
Dr. William Rush is not your average on-call doctor. He's not attached to any hospital, he's highly discreet no matter what the ailment as long as the client can pay his cash-only premium and the doctor can party with the best of them. He has no desire to change his life or how he lives it, until an old flame and his conscience begin to stir things up.
Californication
A self-loathing, alcoholic writer attempts to repair his damaged relationships with his daughter and her mother while combating sex addiction, a budding drug problem, and the seeming inability to avoid making bad decisions.
Ray Donovan
Set in the sprawling mecca of the rich and famous, Ray Donovan does the dirty work for LA's top power players, and makes their problems disappear. His father's unexpected release from prison sets off a chain of events that shakes the Donovan family to its core.
Recovery Road
Maddie is a teenage girl dealing with addiction who has a reputation as a party girl who doesn’t think she has a problem, until she’s confronted one day by her school guidance counselor and is forced to choose between expulsion and rehab. Maddie makes the difficult decision to live with other recovering addicts at a sober living facility while facing the daily pressures of her teenage life. Based on the popular young adult novel by Blake Nelson.
Good Trouble
After moving to The Coterie in Downtown Los Angeles, Callie and Mariana Foster realize that living on their own is not all that it’s cracked up to be.
Loudermilk
Sam Loudermilk is a recovering alcoholic and substance abuse counselor with an extremely bad attitude about, well, everything. He is unapologetically uncensored, and manages to piss off everyone in his life. Although he has his drinking under control, Loudermilk discovers that when your life is a complete mess, getting clean is the easy part.
Snowfall
Los Angeles. 1983. A storm is coming and its name is crack. Set against the infancy of the crack cocaine epidemic and its ultimate radical impact on the culture as we know it, the story follows numerous characters on a violent collision course.
Patrick Melrose
A critical and often humorous look at the upper class, tracking the protagonist's harrowing odyssey from a deeply traumatic childhood through adult substance abuse and, ultimately, toward recovery.
More Shows Like The Cleaner
The Guardian
Nick Fallin is a hotshot lawyer working at his father's ultrasuccessful Pittsburgh law firm. Unfortunately, the high life has gotten the best of Nick. Arrested for drug use, he's sentenced to do 1,500 hours of community service, somehow to be squeezed into his 24/7 cutthroat world of mergers, acquisitions and board meetings. Reluctantly, he's now The Guardian - a part-time child advocate at Legal Aid Services, where one case after another is an eye-opening instance of kids caught up in difficult circumstances.
Suits LA
Ted Black, a former federal prosecutor from New York, has reinvented himself representing the most powerful clients in Los Angeles. But his firm is at a crisis point, and in order to survive, he must embrace a role he held in contempt his entire career.
Perry Mason
The cases of master criminal defense attorney Perry Mason and his staff who handled the most difficult of cases in the aid of the innocent.
Shark
Notorious Los Angeles defense attorney Sebastian Stark becomes disillusioned with his career after his successful defense of a wife-abuser results in the wife's death. After more than a month trying to come to grips with his situation, he is invited by the Los Angeles district attorney to become a public prosecutor so he can apply his unorthodox-but-effective talents to putting guilty people away instead of putting them back on the street.
Tell Me Lies
When Lucy Albright and Stephen DeMarco meet at college, they are at that formative age when seemingly mundane choices lead the way to irrevocable consequences. They quickly fall into an addictive entanglement that will permanently alter not only their lives, but the lives of everyone around them.
Knots Landing
The domestic adventures, misdeeds and everyday interactions of five families living on a cul-de-sac in a small California community.
Tales of the City
Mary Ann Singleton, a naïve young secretary from the mid-west, tumbles head first into the colorful world of San Francisco, where carefree chaos revolves around the funky old apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane.
Wu-Tang: An American Saga
In the early 1990s in New York, during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, a visionary musician named Bobby Diggs aka The RZA begins to form a super group of a dozen young, black men, who will eventually rise to become one of the unlikeliest success stories in American music history.
The Rockford Files
Cranky but likable L.A. PI Jim Rockford pulls no punches (but takes plenty of them). An ex-con sent to the slammer for a crime he didn't commit, Rockford takes on cases others don't want, aided by his tough old man, his lawyer girlfriend and some shady associates from his past.
Mom
Aan irreverent and outrageous take on true family love‐and dysfunction. Newly sober single mom Christy struggles to raise two children in a world full of temptations and pitfalls. Testing her sobriety is her formerly estranged mother, now back in Christy's life and eager to share passive-aggressive insights into her daughter's many mistakes.
Virgin River
After seeing an ad for a midwife, a recently divorced big-city nurse moves to the redwood forests of California, where she meets an intriguing man.
Sweet Magnolias
Lifelong friends Maddie, Helen and Dana Sue lift each other up as they juggle relationships, family and careers in the small Southern town of Serenity.
Why These Shows Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with The Cleaner (2008): 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 Cleaner.
See full details for The Cleaner (2008)
