Top 5 Best TV Shows Like It (Ranked & Where to Stream)

Unpacking the rotten foundation of Maine's most cursed municipal zip code, Andy Muschietti and Jason Fuchs construct a prequel operating with grim period texture. Set against the simmering anxieties of 1962, a ragtag circle of adolescent outcasts slowly unearths how municipal corruption conceals an ancient, underground evil feeding on local children. The serialized pace grants the creeping dread room to breathe, treating municipal complacency with as much suspicion as the subterranean tunnels. For audiences hunting for tv shows like It, this expansion delivers the exact balance of adolescent solidarity, small-town rot, and cosmic malice that made Pennywise a generational nightmare.

Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk's long-running carnival of excess thrives on pure, unapologetic grotesque spectacle. Each standalone season reshuffles its veteran repertory cast—anchored across key eras by Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters—into fresh urban nightmares, from the psychological decay of Briarcliff Manor to the bloodied grounds of a 1950s sideshow. The pacing moves at a breakneck sprint, colliding pulpy urban legends with genuine visceral disgust. While its narrative discipline often unravels in later episodes, its parade of malevolent archetypes—none more chilling than John Carroll Lynch's grinning killer Twisty—strikes the precise nerve craved by fans of It seeking nightmarish carnivalesque terror.

Little Marvin’s anthology approaches domestic terror with surgical precision and unrelenting acoustic dread. The debut season drops an African American family into 1953 suburban Compton, where the virulent hostility of their white neighbors runs parallel to malevolent, smile-distorting entities lurking inside the crawlspaces. Deborah Ayorinde gives an astonishing, nerve-shredding performance as a mother pushed past her psychological breaking point by forces both systemic and otherworldly. The sound design alone—sharp, scraping, and percussive—refuses to let the viewer relax. It echoes the core thematic engine of It, using grotesque, grinning fiends as visceral externalizations of community rot and deep-seated social malice.

Mike Flanagan trades solemn grief for blood-soaked, satirical fury in this modern remix of Edgar Allan Poe's macabre canon. The narrative tracks the Usher pharmaceutical dynasty as each arrogant heir meets an imaginative, hyper-violent demise, all orchestrated by Carla Gugino’s enigmatic, shape-shifting harbinger of fate, Verna. Bruce Greenwood anchors the ensemble with gravelly, cynical menace as an untouchable patriarch forced to watch his bloodline dissolve in buckets of gore. It operates with wicked gallows humor and Shakespearean doom, offering audiences seeking tv shows like It an equally satisfying reckoning where monstrous human hubris faces an ancient, unstoppable supernatural executioner.

Beneath the fog-drenched gardens and shadowy stairwells of an English countryside estate lies an intricate puzzle box of grief and memory. Victoria Pedretti shines as an anxious American au pair who arrives to oversee two deeply eccentric, orphaned children whose games hint at spectral interference. Flanagan favors quiet, creeping tension over cheap jump scares, embedding hidden phantoms directly into the backgrounds of wide shots while slowly peeling back the manor's tragic history. It resonates with audiences fond of It by anchoring its spine-chilling ghost mechanics in the fragile psychology of lonely children confronting evils that adults refuse to acknowledge.