](/author/maggie-lovitt/)

Rob London

Maggie Lovitt

Published Jun 19, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

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Father’s Day is fast approaching, and instead of a tie, a belt sander, or a new set of golf balls, some individuals of a paternal bent might rather just enjoy the comforts of home and some high-grade dad-aimed TV. Luckily, Netflix is there for all your Dad TV needs, and this weekend, they’re shining a spotlight on the shows and movies that are guaranteed to elicit a bigger smile than a new bottle of aftershave. As a special treat, Collider’s Maggie Lovitt had a chance to talk to the creative minds behind some of their dadliest offerings.

Netflix has recently fired off a string of Dad TV hits: Man on Fire, a re-imagining of the Saturday-afternoon cable-TV Denzel Washington dad classic, hit the streamer last month. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stars as Special Forces operator turned bodyguard John Creasy in the series, which is still in the Global Top 10 charts. The Boroughs, a new sci-fi horror series from Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers, assembled an impressive cast of Boomer icons to play the residents of a retirement community besieged by a mysterious presence, including Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, and Alfred Molina. **Gabriel ****Basso **has just returned for a third season of The Night Agent, the globe-trotting action series that’s become a worldwide hit. And the Dad TV is still coming — just released yesterday is I Will Find You, starring Sam Worthington and Britt Lower. It’s the latest series from mystery maestro Harlan Coben.

Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.

Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.

Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.

Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.

Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.

Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.

Nemesis, a cat-and-mouse game between Detective Isaiah Stiles (Matthew Law) and master thief Coltrane Wilder (Y’lan Noel), debuted on Netflix last month and instantly became one of the streamer’s biggest sleeper hits​​​​​​. Netflix subscribers watched 1.31 billion minutes of Nemesis, propelling it to #1 on the Nielsen charts with Black viewers making up 57% of its audience. Collider spoke with *Nemesis *creators **Courtney Kemp **and **Tani Marole about the show’s surprise success. **They’ve been reaping the rewards — they were actually greeted in a Miami restaurant as “Team Nemesis.” Marole was thrilled to see the show’s viewership grow in real-time:

“To see the culture and people show up and to see that 60% pop on week 2, which is extremely rare, as you know…week one, top-heavy, and then it shrinks down, but to see people gravitate and the word of mouth conversation grows. That’s been interesting, and the most, you know, rewarding part is seeing people talking about it in real life.”

It certainly exceeded Kemp’s expectations, as she says, “This is absolutely what we wanted, and I would say, what I wanted for myself, plus.” They also discussed the show in the context of “Dad TV.” Kemp says that crime thrillers like *Nemesis *are “an escape,” while Marole chalked some of the show’s appeal to nostalgia, with “an aesthetic and an ethos that’s kind of like, straight up and down.” Marole continued, saying:

“It’s the kind of [stuff] that your dad would have watched in the ’80s and ’90s, and that’s what he would have played for you while you were a kid…and now you’re watching it and experiencing it as an adult, and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is familiar. It’s comforting.’”

As Marole says, it’s the Steely Dan of TV. He thinks being deemed “Dad TV” is a “badge of honor.” It’s TV for your grandma, and for your nephew; and he wants them all to know the show addresses “the masculine burden” — which isn’t just about men, but is about “people in positions of authority or responsibility,” and that could be your mother, your brother, or, indeed, your father.

The two also discussed their creative process. Kemp doesn’t want a show that’s nothing but crime drama. She told Lovitt: “My taste is for shows that have a bunch of different things going on. So like there’s some romance, there’s some soap, there’s…obviously crime, there’s cops and robbers, there’s a little bit of a legal aspect…I think it appeals to a wide swath of television watchers, because there’s a lot of different ways you can plug into this kind of fare.” Marole, meanwhile, sees himself as a sort of TV chef:

“I know what I love. I know the flavors I love. I know the flavors I want to see…Jamaican with Italian or something, you know what I mean? We’re gonna do Rasta pasta. Like, I know no-one’s expecting that, but I know that’s something that once it tastes good to me, then from there, then my hope is that others will respond to it.”

He attributes the show’s success to “selfishness” on the part of himself and Kemp — the “first viewers” of the show aren’t the studio executives, but the creators. As he says, “if we love it, then my hope is that our taste is good enough that others will come to it as well.” Given Nemesis’ streaming numbers, it appears he’s very correct.

Dads love driving Lincolns, and dads love legal dramas, so what’s more precision-aimed at dads than The Lincoln Lawyer? Based on the popular series of novels by ***Bosch ***creator Michael Connelly, Netflix’s *The Lincoln Lawyer *stars Manuel García-Rulfo as Mickey Haller, a defense attorney who works out of the back of his Lincoln Navigator. Its four seasons have spent 29 weeks in the streamer’s top ten, and have garnered 171 million views.

It’s headed into its fifth season, and executive producer Ted Humphrey tells Lovitt it’s a show that, while it can be consumed by a solitary dad in his den, is just as enjoyable “with the college-aged kids, and they both like it, and they both enjoy it for their own reasons.” While he doesn’t fully embrace the Dad TV label, he understands that it certainly fits the bill: “I like to think that we appeal to a pretty broad audience across age and across gender, but…there’s a strong sort of moral compass to our lead character, and there’s a strong righteousness to the causes that he attaches himself to, and I think that’s a pretty strong element of [Dad TV shows].”

Netflix has certainly been happy with the show’s ratings, and Humphrey discusses the importance of not just subscriber retention, but subscriber growth, reaching out to dads all over the globe. He told Collider:

“It’s been a huge element of this show’s success, the way we’ve been able to grow the audience, particularly internationally. The show’s been a very big international success, which was…a little bit of a maybe not a surprise to me, but it, you know, sometimes the conventional wisdom is legal shows don’t travel as well as other things, as well as cop shows or medical shows that are a little more universal. But this one has traveled very well, and I think it’s a testament to, kind of, the personal storytelling of the show that transcends the legal. It’s also a testament to, I think, people’s enduring fascination with the legal system.”

The fifth season of The Lincoln Lawyer will be its last, but don’t worry about a dangling cliffhanger: Humphrey expressed his gratitude to Netflix for “giving us the opportunity to wrap the show up correctly.” While he says they “could have kept this show going for another season or two, and we had ideas for that,” the show is fully complete. He explained:

“We were able to craft what we feel is a very satisfying ending to the show, one that can hopefully propel, potentially, some of our characters into new arenas, but that will leave the audience feeling like they’ve watched a five-part thing that has come to an organic, and satisfying, and hopefully fulfilling, conclusion.”

Netflix’s fatherly offerings aren’t just TV: they’ve also got a wide variety of dad movies to relax with. Notable recent titles with major dad appeal include The Rip, a dirty-cop thriller helmed by Joe Carnahan that reunites Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and was recently given the seal of approval by dad movie legend Quentin Tarantino; War Machine, a science fiction thriller pitting intergenerational dad favorites Alan Ritchson and Dennis Quaid against a killer robot; and Apex, a high-octane thriller that sees Charlize Theron fighting for her life against both the elements and a deranged Taron Egerton.

The streamer also has several offerings in the works that won’t quite be available for Father’s Day, but when you’ve got a Netflix account and a comfortable place to sit, isn’t every day Father’s Day? Will Ferrell is headed to the streamer for The Hawk, a new golf comedy series about a washed-up pro trying to become the face of an upstart league; it tees off on July 16. Meanwhile, on the movie side of things, there’s The Last House, a Louis Leterrier science fiction chiller about a family, headed by Wagner Moura and Greta Lee, who find themselves permanently sealed into their house by a mysterious force; it opens its doors on August 7. Plus, The Gentlemen, Dad Cinema auteur Guy Ritchie’s new foray into television, is returning for a second season later this year.

So skip the new socks and the motorized tie rack, and give your dad, or yourself, the gift of Netflix this summer. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.

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