Worth Watching — November 3, 2026

Political junkies may need to stay up until the wee hours as midterm election results are covered by most major broadcast and news channels. Fox goes with entertainment in prime time, featuring new episodes of Best Medicine and Doc. Stephen Merchant (the UK The Office) guest-stars on BritBox‘s Ludwig as a shady snooker champ. An animated Netflix series turns legendary Western lawman Bass Reeves into a cybernetic steampunk hero.

Best Medicine

An outlier among broadcast networks on Election Night, Fox provides an alternative with its regular entertainment lineup, including another fun episode of its quirky medical dramedy. Curmudgeonly Dr. Martin Best (Josh Charles) is easily annoyed, but few things get under his thin skin more than quackery — and when the disruptive Savannah (Heléne Yorke), who once introduced bubonic plague to Port Wenn, returns to draw patients away as a feel-good homeopath who keeps making her clients worse, Martin goes on the warpath. He’s also out of sorts after seeing Louisa (Abigail Spencer) spending time with his new monitor, Parker (Jack Cutmore-Scott).

Ludwig

Stephen Merchant, the comedian and longtime collaborator of Ricky Gervais (The Office, Extras), guests on the diverting British whodunit as an arrogant snooker champion who has the perfect alibi when his rival is found dead, stabbed in the back by a cue stick in his dressing room: He was celebrating his win on camera at the time. Leave it to puzzle master and crime consultant John “Ludwig” Taylor (David Mitchell) to figure out how the dirty deed was done. This mystery only occupies half of John’s brain, because he’s worried about his sister-in-law Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin), who’s finally sitting for an interview with the shady Member of Parliament Joanne Kemper (Fleabag‘s Sian Clifford), despite a phone call from John’s MIA twin James warning his wife not to go there: “It’s the wrong move. The danger is very, very real.”

Bass X Machina

Previously portrayed on TV by David Oyelowo in Taylor Sheridan‘s 2023 series Lawmen: Bass Reeves, the legendary Reeves, one of the first Black deputy U.S. Marshals to patrol the Wild West, is reinvented as an anime-style superhero with a powerful cybernetic arm in a violent steampunk animated adventure. Atlanta‘s Brian Tyree Henry voices Bass, with Tati Gabrielle as his engineer sidekick, Dana Starr, and Janelle Monáe as his wife, Glory. (Monáe also provides the six-part series’ theme song, “HONOR KILLING.”)

Phony

The mystery deepens when Sonny (Sam Nivola) risks ridicule as a “creepy little spy” by showing up at a rowdy teen party at Bucket’s Pond, where fellow student Shovel (Nation Sage Henrikson) claims to have seen a dead body. Convinced this is related to his belief that his mom Ellen (Connie Britton) is an imposter, Sonny isn’t thrilled when everybody seems to be treating it as a joke. For him, it’s anything but.

Election Night 2026: Whatever the results, one upside to midterm election night: a respite from the deluge of toxic attack ads that have polluted the airwaves for months. Most major broadcast and all news networks will spend much of the day, and all of the evening, parsing election returns in a hotly contested and polarized environment. However you choose to watch, on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MS NOW, Fox News, or the calmer waters of PBS and C-SPAN, there are likely to be more than a few nail-biters.