These animated shows about adult life each include promotional artwork for the series discussed below.
The best animated shows about adult life reveal what happens after that imagined freedom: work, bills, relationships, and the discovery that staying up late is usually a decision you regret at nine the next morning.
Animation has a peculiar gift for capturing that disappointment. It can send someone through a portal, turn a colleague into a bird, or make a horse a television star, and somehow arrive at a feeling you recognise from your own living room.
The best animated shows about adult life understand the contradiction: you can be old enough to know better and still have absolutely no idea what you are doing.
These ten series find their comedy, tenderness, and occasional despair in that gap. Some offer outrageous distractions. Others might leave you staring at the ceiling after the credits. Here is our countdown of the animated shows that understand growing older without assuming it means you have everything figured out.
How we chose: For these animated shows about adult life, we weighed audience ratings, critical reception, cultural influence, and how well each series explores adult life. The order reflects SFAM’s editorial judgment.
Animated Shows About Adult Life: The List at a Glance
- F Is for Family
- Tuca & Bertie
- Family Guy
- King of the Hill
- Bob’s Burgers
- Archer
- Futurama
- Rick and Morty
- BoJack Horseman
- The Simpsons
These animated shows about adult life range from sharp family satire to surreal science fiction, but each makes room for work, love, friendship, or the pressure of growing older.
10. F Is for Family — Adult Life Pressure Comes Home From Work
The Murphy household in F Is for Family is loud, strained, and shaped by the expectations of its 1970s setting. Frank Murphy carries his frustrations into family life, where the people closest to him often experience the consequences.
The series has a sharp interest in the distance between what adults hoped to become and the lives they actually built. Providing for a family can become entangled with resentment, pride, and a need to feel respected.
Its period setting also invites a question that travels well beyond that decade: what happens when people inherit a model of adulthood that leaves them poorly prepared to express disappointment or ask for help?
The humour is coarse, but the domestic pressure gives it weight. A bad day at work rarely stays neatly contained at work.
Best for: Viewers drawn to abrasive family comedy with an undercurrent of frustrated ambition.
9. Tuca & Bertie — Adult Friendship While Everything Changes
Adult friendship can be surprisingly difficult to maintain. Careers, partners, private struggles, and changing needs can rearrange a relationship long before either person knows how to discuss it.
Tuca & Bertie puts female friendship at the centre of a wildly expressive animated world. Tuca and Bertie have different ways of moving through life, giving the series space to explore anxiety, confidence, boundaries, and the need for support.
Its visual imagination is central to that experience. Feelings can become part of the landscape, making an internal struggle visible without requiring everything to be explained aloud.
There is something generous in its attention to friendship as an evolving relationship. Caring for someone takes more than familiarity. It also takes listening when the person you thought you knew begins to change.
Best for: Viewers interested in friendship, emotional growth, and inventive animation with a deeply personal centre.
8. Family Guy — When Suburban Respectability Falls Apart
Peter Griffin is hardly a model of responsible adulthood. That is a large part of the joke. Around him, marriage, parenting, work, and neighbourhood life become opportunities for spectacular lapses in judgment.
Family Guy treats the respectable family sitcom as something it can pull apart whenever a more outrageous joke presents itself. Its cutaways and gleeful absurdity let it abandon ordinary domestic logic, sometimes within the same breath.
That also makes it a different proposition from the more emotionally sustained shows higher on this list. If you want careful examinations of consequence, there are stronger choices. If you want the rituals of adult life subjected to relentless ridicule, the Griffins are well equipped.
Best for: Viewers who enjoy provocative humour, pop-culture jokes, and domestic chaos with very few restraints.
7. King of the Hill — Adult Life in the Small Details
King of the Hill finds rich material in ordinary commitments. Hank Hill cares about work, family, competence, and doing things properly. The complications begin when the people around him understand those priorities differently.
Its restrained approach suits a subject that louder comedy can overlook: the difficulty of adjusting your expectations without feeling that you have abandoned your principles.
Parenthood makes that especially complicated. You can love your child and still struggle to understand what matters to them. You can value tradition and still need to reconsider an assumption.
The show’s appeal rests in those modest negotiations. For many adults, growth happens during an awkward conversation or an everyday disagreement, with no dramatic announcement that anything has changed.
Best for: Viewers who appreciate understated humour, community life, and affection between people who do not always understand each other.
6. Bob’s Burgers — Building an Adult Life You Can Afford
Keeping a small restaurant running gives the Belchers plenty to worry about. Money, work, family demands, and unpredictable customers share the same limited space.
What makes Bob’s Burgers so appealing is the warmth inside that pressure. Bob and Linda’s relationship allows for exasperation without making affection seem foolish. Their family can create problems and still be a source of comfort.
There is a particularly adult pleasure in that perspective. Ambition does not always mean becoming famous or escaping somewhere else. Sometimes it means keeping your business open, making something well, and getting through the week with the people you love.
The series makes room for a life that is financially precarious, frequently embarrassing, and still worth showing up for.
Best for: Anyone who wants a funny, affectionate portrait of family life and everyday perseverance.
5. Archer — Office Politics With Much Better Weapons
Give an office a collection of highly trained spies and you might expect discipline. Archer suggests you would still get jealousy, wounded pride, inappropriate relationships, and people who cannot stop making everything about themselves.
Sterling Archer’s confidence is enormous. His emotional maturity struggles to keep up. The appeal lies in watching people who can handle extraordinary danger remain hopelessly unequipped for ordinary conversations.
Its espionage setting supplies the action, but the workplace friction gives the comedy its staying power. Being good at your job does not automatically make you easy to work with. In this world, that distinction can become everybody else’s emergency.
Best for: Anyone who likes rapid dialogue, dysfunctional colleagues, and characters whose professional skills greatly exceed their self-awareness.
4. Futurama — Tomorrow Still Has Lonely People
The future in Futurama is full of extraordinary inventions. It also has jobs to turn up for, feelings to misunderstand, and people trying to find somewhere they belong.
Fry arrives in the distant future after being accidentally frozen, creating a premise with room for both ridiculous adventure and emotional displacement. Starting again can be exciting. It can also mean confronting everything you have lost.
The show’s imaginative freedom lets it approach familiar feelings from unexpected directions. Loneliness looks different against an interplanetary backdrop, but it remains loneliness. Love still involves uncertainty, even when the technology around it is astonishing.
That balance makes Futurama especially rewarding: the absurdity opens the door, and the tenderness catches you while you are laughing.
Best for: Science-fiction fans who want comic invention with room for longing, affection, and grief.
3. Rick and Morty — Intelligence Cannot Solve Everything
The scale of Rick and Morty is enormous: alternate realities, bizarre civilisations, and scientific possibilities that make ordinary human concerns look almost comically small.
Yet its family keeps bringing those concerns along.
Rick’s intelligence gives him extraordinary power over his surroundings. It offers much less help with intimacy, responsibility, and the damage a person can leave behind. The show repeatedly finds friction between knowing how the universe works and knowing how to live with other people.
Its nihilism can be funny, abrasive, and uncomfortable. Beneath the spectacle is an adult temptation worth examining: treating everything as meaningless because caring would require vulnerability.
Best for: Viewers who enjoy science fiction, dark comedy, and arguments about meaning wrapped in spectacular disorder.
2. BoJack Horseman — The Adult Life Beneath the Performance
A former sitcom star who happens to be a horse sounds like the beginning of an uncomplicated joke. BoJack Horseman turns that premise into a sustained examination of shame, loneliness, addiction, and responsibility.
BoJack wants to feel better about himself. The uncomfortable question is what he is willing to change in order to get there.
The series is particularly incisive about the stories adults tell themselves. A painful past can explain behaviour. Success can distract from unhappiness. Being articulate about your flaws can even begin to resemble progress. None of these things necessarily repairs the harm you cause.
Around its central character, the show gives other people their own desires and limits. Their lives cannot exist solely to provide his redemption.
That is why it earns a place so close to the top here. Its emotional force comes from taking consequences seriously while leaving difficult questions open: How do you live with what you have done? What does improvement look like after the apology? And can you keep trying when a cleaner, more satisfying version of yourself remains out of reach?
Best for: Viewers ready for dark humour and emotionally demanding storytelling about accountability and the possibility of change.
1. The Simpsons — The Endless Business of Being a Family
There is something revealing about Homer Simpson’s place in popular culture. Beneath the foolish decisions is a recognisable collection of wants: a tolerable workday, something good to eat, a little comfort, and a family that still loves him.
The Simpsons turns Springfield into a miniature society where employment, marriage, parenting, institutions, and community can all become the subject of a joke.
Its family has room for irritation and loyalty at the same time. Love does not eliminate impatience. A familiar home can be reassuring one moment and exhausting the next.
Its combination of enduring family satire, audience support, and historical importance earns it our top spot. For an article about adulthood, that emotional coexistence matters. Much of family life happens between the grand declarations, in the routines people repeat and the small accommodations they make for each other.
Best for: Viewers looking for social satire rooted in everyday family frustrations.
Which Animated Shows About Adult Life Should You Start With?
Your mood matters as much as the ranking.
For warmth after a tiring day, start with Bob’s Burgers. For a quieter look at family and community, try King of the Hill. If friendship and emotional uncertainty are what interest you, turn to Tuca & Bertie. And if you want a series willing to sit with the most uncomfortable parts of adulthood, choose BoJack Horseman.
These animated shows about adult life have very different temperaments, but each recognises something familiar about growing older. People can be capable and confused, affectionate and impatient, hopeful and exhausted, sometimes before breakfast.
Animation gives those contradictions an extraordinary amount of room. A ridiculous character can say something painfully recognisable. A visual joke can lead into a feeling you had been avoiding.
You came for a cartoon. Then somebody on screen had exactly the kind of day you were having.
For more animated stories and screen adventures, explore SFAM’s Animation archive.
Which animated series understands your version of adulthood? Tell us in the comments.
