Cross-media picks for Robert Altman fans — films, series, games and books in the same vein.
Fans of Robert Altman tend to gravitate toward stories where ordinary people are caught between ambition and disappointment, where ensemble casts share the frame without a clear hero, and where the tone mixes dry humour with quiet heartbreak. These picks span film, TV, games and books in the same neighbourhood: working-class lives, institutions that wear people down, and a texture that feels resolutely unlacquered. The Last Picture Show, Giant and All in the Family are good anchors; the rest follow.
Film
The First Time
Three high-school friends chase rites of passage in a summer comedy about friendship and coming of age.
Film
Old Dogs
Thirty years of male friendship are upended when one partner discovers he has young children he never knew about.
Film
The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday
A weathered frontiersman pursues a gold-mine partner who vanished with the profits fifteen years earlier.
Film
Giant
A wealthy Texas rancher and a poor cowboy both pursue the same Maryland woman, while racial bigotry corrodes everyone around them.
Film
Cemetery Junction
Three blue-collar friends in 1970s England face the gap between the comfort of staying and the pull of wanting more.
Film
Never Say Goodbye
A surgeon's world unravels when his supposedly dead wife reappears, entangling old loyalties and present commitments.
Film
Will Penny
An aging cowhand rides the range alone, then finds a woman and her children occupying his mountain cabin.
Film
The Last Picture Show
Two boys in a dying Texas town face graduation and an unclear future in a small, elegiac drama.
Series
Till Death Us Do Part
A reactionary East End patriarch unleashes racist and anti-socialist views while his family absorbs the fallout.
Series
Hung
A divorced former high-school sports star turns to an unlikely hustle to stay afloat financially.
Series
Old Time Buddy
Two friends enter show business together, but only one is destined for stardom, straining the old friendship.
Series
In Sickness and in Health
An aged Alf Garnett navigates his wife's declining health and the daily friction of the social security system.
Series
Watching
A young Merseyside couple cycle through an on-again, off-again romance in a low-key sitcom.
Series
What's Happening!!
Three buddies come of age in 1970s Los Angeles, stumbling into schemes that reliably land them in trouble.
Series
Suburgatory
A single father moves his teenage daughter to the suburbs, where her outsider eye exposes neighbourhood absurdities.
Series
All in the Family
Archie Bunker, a working-class bigot, squabbles constantly with his family over the issues of the day.
Game
Jack Orlando: Director's Cut
In 1933, two days after Prohibition ends, a detective is framed for murder in a city still thick with corruption.
Game
Lake
A software executive returns to her quiet hometown in 1986 to fill in as the local mail carrier for a month.
Game
Tender Loving Care
A suspense story constructed from the player's own psychology, making the inner world the unreliable terrain.
Game
Blues and Bullets
Eliot Ness, running a diner in retirement, is pulled back into the corrupt city he once tried to clean up.
Game
Leisure Suit Larry
Middle-aged Larry pursues women with deluded persistence in a comedy of self-delusion and serial rejection.
Game
The Ratline
Hunt Nazi fugitives across the globe in a gritty 1971 detective puzzle built on evidence and deduction.
Game
11-11 Memories Retold
A Canadian photographer and a German technician on opposite sides of WWI each fight to hold onto their humanity.
Game
Scarface: The World Is Yours
Tony Montana rebuilds his empire from nothing after Sosa takes everything, driven by vengeance and ambition.
Book
Take Two at Bedtime
Two novellas in which newly employed women find the domestic arrangements around them concealing unsettling tensions.
Book
The death of sweet mister
A lonely thirteen-year-old is trapped between a provocative mother and a brutal, contemptuous father.
Book
Curse of the starving class
Four members of a Californian farm family collide as their land slips away and adolescence turns dangerous.
Book
Long, Tall Texans
A DEA agent's covert investigation reunites him with a former flame, bringing old feelings and new danger.
Book
Iron cast
Two friends perform illegally as illusionists in a gangster's club, using their blood to con Boston's elite.
Book
Gable and Lombard
A dual biography of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, Hollywood's most celebrated couple of the 1930s.
Book
The Blunderer
Two unconnected deaths link two men in a detective's mind, trapping one innocent man in a nightmare of suspicion.
Book
The Flame Is Love
A sheltered American heiress, briefly alone in Paris, discovers independence and desire before her arranged marriage.
Start with The Last Picture Show and Giant — both are in this list and share the ensemble social observation and slow-burn American disillusionment that Altman fans respond to. All in the Family is worth adding for working-class characters caught between stubbornness and a shifting world.
Yes — Curse of the Starving Class delivers darkly comic, dysfunctional-American-family drama on a failing farm, and The Blunderer puts an ordinary man under the pressure of mistaken suspicion in a taut psychological thriller.
Lake offers a quiet, character-driven portrait of a woman who swaps a city career for small-town mail delivery in 1986, and Blues and Bullets gives a noir atmosphere of corruption with a protagonist dragged back into a world he tried to leave.