Piers anthony has a series called geoddysey that teaches history in the story. It kinda has a hard to explain gimmick. The story is cohesive but each chapter jumps in time. So it starts in the stone age and ends in the future but along the way goes through some significant eras of humanity. From the characters perspective though everything in the story happened to them in the era they are in. So its like your watching reincarnations of lives where the events of their lives reapeat.

Someone mentioned in a lower level reply, but Startrek and the Orville are great for political / social commentary.

I think a fair amount of sitcoms have some element of educating on social norms. Seinfeld and Its Always Sunny maybe require more prior knowledge about subject matters, but covering things like abortion, immigration, racism, etc.

Mythbusters and similar are pretty good about being “adult” science shows.

Maybe documentaries don’t really count as “entertainment” the way you’re looking for, but Planet Earth is a great series.

There’s an anime called Dr. Stone that mildly touches on this. People are frozen in stone for thousands of years and when they begin to break out, a scientist shows them how to identify and use resources to replicate our modern tools

I know it’s not exactly what you’re after but kurzgesagt gives me major magic school bus vibes.

Some shows on YouTube fit as well, last week tonight comes to mind

There are plenty of good YouTube channels that have this sort of stuff.

Veritasium is really good for exploring various topics of science, their videos are very well-made and they help to convey information in a digestible way. A newer channel called “The Rabbit Hole” is also excellent. And of course, minutephysics and MinuteEarth make very good videos on various topics that are quick and to the point. xkcd’s What If answers lots of silly hypotheticals that are fun to watch, like draining all the water from the oceans!

And there are plenty of other channels I like too that have specific niches. If you like maths, Numberphile, Stand Up Maths, and Tom Rocks Maths are awesome. Up and Atom does videos on various topics in maths, physics, and computer science that are quite interesting. If you like astrophysics*, I would recommend Arvin Ash and PBS Space Time.

If you like geography, Jay Foreman (+ Mark Cooper-Jones) makes fun videos on various different topics. You might also like Geography Now, who has made a video on every single (U.N. recognised) country. It’s very interesting to see how their quality of videos has increased from the beginning to the end. After finishing the Zimbabwe episode, Barbs (Barbie) now covers various other things like unrecognised / partially recognised territories.

If you want some history, The Cold War (run by Kings and Generals) is awesome if you are interested in anything that happened during the Cold War era, and TimeGhost History (run by Indy Neidell) has great coverage of the interwar years between the World Wars as well as the events post WWII.

Ryan Chapman has some videos on various ideas (like nationalism, Zionism, democracy, and Marxism) and assesses conflicts, and I find he does take the points of both sides and judges them fairly. His video on the Taiwan conflict is really good as well! Many people like Johhny Harris as well, and he does make entertaining videos, but some of them are a little oversimplified, especially given that the issues he discusses are very nuanced.

Technology Connections rants about dishwashers, light bulbs, and heat pumps, and covers all the topics nobody else does! And Hank Green makes videos on all sorts of things, and as he puts it, he doesn’t have a specific niche. He’s just Hank Green! Tom Scott has recently come back to the scene and is now doing a series on weird and interesting things in every county in England. Pretty neat!

*Not what you’re looking for, but Anton Petrov is AWESOME if you want to be up to date on all the astronomical discoveries that are happening

og medical mysteries when it was around about rare diseases.

I love historical fiction in any form. The best stuff is about a historical event. I absolutely love the musical play Suffs, it’s about the suffragist fight from 1913 to 1920 and follows women’s rights leaders Alice Paul, Inez Milholland, Doris Stevens, Ruza Wenclawska, and Lucy Burns. There’s also a B plot about Ida B. Wells and Mary Terrell

There are some more current-affairs-y shows that use comedy to make deep dives into difficult-to-understand issues more palatable. I think Comedy Central and HBO both have some.

Technically almost everything is educational in some way, if you’re willing to engage with it in the right way. Like you said, period dramas and historical dramas are often a great way of learning about (some aspects of) history. The problem is you need to be able to sort out the fictional elements from the non-fictional elements and without at least a little bit of background that becomes challenging. Some methods that might be useful is cross-referencing by watching multiple shows about the same topic from different sources. If both shows include the same element, there’s a good chance it’s based on some real historical evidence. But you also have to understand that evidence is not proof, and there’s a lot of disagreement in science and understanding, and that’s good and natural. Not everything is going to match up exactly. You have to do your own research and actually study real sources and do your own experiments. This is why edutainment starts to become of limited value.

The problem with growing up is that you’re getting to a higher level of education and understanding, and that comes with caveats. No longer can you just rely on simplistic expositions of “this is absolutely how it works” and you start to get into a lot of “seems” and “maybes”. There’s a lot of stuff we just don’t know with absolute confidence and as we have learned from the historical documentary Star Wars, only a Sith deals in absolutes.

Most things at the adult level are not explicitly going to teach you things (because they effectively can’t) as much as they are going to motivate you to research further, experiment yourself, or become interested in things you might not otherwise find interesting.

With that said, there is tons of educational and entertaining content out there. Sometimes stuff that seems stupid is actually very educational. Sometimes stuff that seems boring and educational can be entertaining as hell. If you want a bunch of Youtube channels to help point your recommendation algorithm in the right direction, try some of these channels (in no particular order or topic consistency):

• Hydraulic Press Channel
• Technology Connections / Technology Connextras
• Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t
• styropyro
• NileRed / NileBlue
• Xyla Foxlin
• Chris Spargo
• Wilson Forest Lands
• James Condon
• FarmCraft101
• Tom Scott

Honorable mention for bugfishhhh’s insane and comedic hour-long video on the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England which came out of nowhere but I’m here for it.

Star trek TNG, DS9.

The Orville

Only podcasts, unfortunately 😭😭 sorry.

I think “Adam Ruins Everything” work Adam Conover counts as edutainment. He examines things in society and then explains why they’re problematic.

What about Connections? (both the old and new versions)… too sciency?

If you’re looking for a medical drama that health care workers seem to find an acceptable representation of their work, take a look at The Pitt. Apparently they put a lot of effort into being as accurate as possible.

Overall I think your definition of edutainment as requiring a narrative is overly restrictive, I think we could call narrative-less science shows like this edutainment, despite lacking narrative:

https://youtu.be/5HKH1ZjGutA

All that said, the specific combination of scientific accuracy, narrative and for-adults does seem to be a rarer combination of traits. I cannot think of very many at all, and those I can do tend to fudge some of the accuracy here and there for dramatic appeal.