When tripping, the TV can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. The wrong clip, the wrong word, the wrong sound can send an otherwise blissful psychonaut on a one-way ticket to Bad Trip Land.
We’ve got your back. Below, you’ll find a list of some of our favorite trippy TV shows, which you can enjoy equally as much whether you’re flying higher than a spacebound billionaire or watching over a friend while stone-cold sober.
The psychedelic experience isn’t just a visual experience, either. It’s also an aural experience, so the trippiness can’t stop at just the visuals. All shows selected here won’t only tantalize the eyes, they’ll stimulate the ears, as well, with meticulously crafted sound effects and carefully curated soundtracks to amplify the good vibes.
For the Easily Distracted: Liquid Television
A truly immersive trip can make even a menial task, such as watching TV, nearly impossible. Thankfully, back in MTV’s heyday in the ‘90s, late-night viewers got a special treat each week called Liquid Television.
Liquid Television is a frenetic showcase which jumps from segment to segment without any connection between them. One moment, it’s Aeon Flux doing freakishly long-legged somersaults through a cyberpunk dystopia, the next moment it’s Beavis and Butt-Head’s PETA-triggering debut in “Frog Baseball.” The segments span across drama, comedy, action, sci-fi, fantasy, cheese, horror, and camp with thrills galore.
Some segments are animated. Some are mixed with live action. And none run longer than a few minutes. So, there’s a little something for everyone, and if one isn’t your cup of tea, another will kick in shortly.
READ: The (Very) Best Movies to Watch on Shrooms
For Good Vibes Only: SpongeBob Squarepants
Sometimes you just need to let the TV run, and you need to trust that every second of runtime respects your psychedelic sensitivities. One wrong word, sound or image, and it could be a one-way ticket to Bad Time Land.
Thankfully, Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob Squarepants can nearly guarantee you a pleasant time. The show is packed with goofiness, wholesomeness and over-the-top slapstick without ever getting dark or heavy. And while it’s marketed as a kids’ show, the humor intersects every age and generation, even to this day.
The original series includes 14 seasons. There are also three feature-length movies and a spin-off show, so you’ll have plenty of SpongeBob content to trip out to.
For Those Who Adore Disgusting Nonsense: Tim & Eric’s Awesome Show
The first fully live action show on the list, Tim & Eric’s Awesome Show (Great Job!) isn’t for everyone. Heck, it’s probably not for anyone, really.
If you’re unfamiliar with Tim Heidecker and Eric Warheim’s brand of video comedy: Imagine every low-budget local TV ad you’ve ever seen, very poorly produced educational video you watched in school, and very dorky public access programming you caught at 3 a.m., with all the graininess, corny special effects and bad acting we expect from low quality entertainment. Fuse all of those together into a gross-out sketch comedy, and you’ve got one awesome show.
READ: The Trippiest Cartoons Over the Ages
For a Lighthearted Romp Across the Multiverse: Bee and PuppyCat
If you’ve seen one of these “Trippiest TV Shows” lists before, then you probably saw Adventure Time mentioned. In every. Single. One. And for good reason: Adventure Time is one helluva trippy cartoon.
Netflix’s Bee and PuppyCat is sort of like Adventure Time, except instead of taking place in the post-apocalyptic Land of Oo, it takes place in the modern gig economy. Created by Adventure Time alum Natasha Allegri, the series follows Bee, a chronically unemployed twenty-something in perpetual need of rent money. Along the way, she befriends PuppyCat, a disgruntled cat-dog hybrid. Together, they venture into weird dimensions, aimlessly odd-jobbing for next month’s paycheck. The supporting cast includes wizards, warlocks, wrestlers, robots, a bubbly interdimensional portal and a boy-landlord with a Stewie Griffin complex.
There are only 11 episodes in the entire series, so it’s possible to watch all of Bee and PuppyCat across one long, strange trip.
For Random Doses of Magical Realism: Atlanta
Donald Glover is a living testament to the modern Renaissance Man. Starting as a comedy writer, he broke his way into acting, then went on to become the hip-hop icon Childish Gambino. His first foray into television brought a slew of dreamy surprises, as we wouldn’t expect anything less from our friendly neighborhood Troy.
Atlanta centers on aspiring music manager Earnest “Earn” Marks (Glover) and his rapper-buddy, Alfred “Paper Boi” Miles (Brian Tyree Henry). While navigating the whacked-out world of the recording industry, the main characters’ experiences sometimes translate on-screen to dream-like sequences, such as an invisible car driving away from a nightclub shooting, to an entire episode shot as a behind-the-scenes documentary for Disney’s A Goofy Movie.
The storytelling in Atlanta often bends or outright breaks genres. If you’re into random, uncanny TV moments that have you hitting “Go Back” to ensure you actually just saw that thing, then give Atlanta a shot.
For the Conspiracy Lorehounds: The X-Files
Though psychedelics usually go hand-in-hand with dazzling visuals, they can bring on dizzying waves of paranoia, as well. But, sometimes, paranoia can be fun.
In The X-Files, FBI agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) crack open cold cases which defy scientific explanation. Across 11 seasons, the agents encounter everything from alien ghosts to a cult that uses magic to change genders.
There are some truly trip-tastic gems in The X-Files. For instance, the episode “X-Cops” follows Scully and Mulder in the style of the reality show Cops. In “War of the Coprophages,” the show parodies itself through a cockroach-y mystery. And in “Improbable,” the late Burt Reynolds plays God.
For the Superhero Fans: WandaVision (2021)
Most Marvel fans may say MCU’s trippiest show is FX’s Legion, which follows a psychic mutant with schizophrenia. However, we’d like to suggest another Marvel property which is just as, if not more, trippy than Legion’s fever dream: WandaVision.
Disney’s WandaVision picks up after The Avengers: Endgame, though we’re not sure where… or even when, exactly. In fact, we don’t even know what the heck is going on at all. After the Avengers saved the universe in Endgame, witchy Wanda Maximoff (played by Elizabeth Olsen) now lives as a domestic housewife with her husband, the hyper-intelligent android The Vision (Paul Bettany). But everyone behaves as if Endgame intergalactic showdown never happened, including the fact that Vision died two movies prior.
Though it may lack the pizzazz and supercool of the movies, WandaVision screws with the senses as much as it does with the mind. The episodes leap through eras of American television, starting with the black-and-white ‘50s and dragging us — happily — to the punch-tastic sitcoms of the ‘90s. As the story unfolds, reality cracks, too, with both Wanda and the audience falling into its fatalistic conclusion.
