Mindfield by Vsauce

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.

No such thing as a fish podcast and TV show on bbc called Qi are all about fun and interesting facts

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 would consider MythBusters an edutainment show given there were science, history and entertainment.

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.

Ze Frank on YouTube does animal documentaries spruced up with dick jokes and silly talk.

https://youtube.com/@zefrank

10 watch Look Around You
20 goto 10

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

If HIMYM counts, then check out The Good Place.

There's plenty of educational stuff on YouTube that isn't just tutorials. Veritasium is good. Primative technology (turn on subtitles).

How I Met Your Mother? Teaching morals? I think we didn't watch the same show.

With this logic just watch any reality TV and it will look like a moral lesson too.

If you haven't yet watched Cosmos with Carl Sagan as the host, you should consider watching it. It's borderline not what you asked for because it doesn't really have fiction, however Carl was so incredibly good at storytelling and making incredibly complex Science understandable through his awesome narrative abilities, I'd recommend it if you hadn't already seen it.

Some other mentions -

Chernobyl - HBO drama of the disaster, but the last episode goes into extreme detail of the actual event and why things happened the way they did. Fascinating

MythBusters - I'm sure you have likely seen this but it's entertaining and you learn a lot. Lots of jokes and personality.

Forged in Fire - show where blacksmith/bladesmith contestants compete to make forged blades using varied metals, and then the judges put those finished blades through grueling tests, to ultimately crown a single smith as the winner each episode. I'm not anywhere close to this profession, yet it taught me a TON about blacksmithing and bladesmithing, and if I had an acreage with a big shop, I'd definitely be doing it as a hobby. So cool to see the things they create.

I feel like travel and food shows fit this nicely. Very entertaining, bit also very educational about other areas, cultures, histories, foods, traditions, etc.

I haven't watched too much content like this, but "Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown" really got me hooked for a while, he did a great job with that show. And I feel like we need more knowledge and understanding about other cultures, now more than ever.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2845786

--Edit--

Actually, I don't remember which one I watched No Reservations, or Parts Unknown, both seem good though.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475900/

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 are some problems with Kurzgesagt who were mentioned in another comment. xkcd's "What If?" can be a fun way to kill a few minutes in a similar-ish vein.

Something I've quickly come to embrace after watching this Zoe Bee video about Peterson "University" is the concept of "friction", namely that your brain will trick you into thinking you're learning a lot when there's little friction (e.g. a lecture, an infographic, etc.) and vice-versa when there's a lot of friction (e.g. solving problems on your own, having to teach others, etc.). She remarks that there needs to be friction for learning to happen (albeit that it is not sufficient for learning) and that people are consistently terrible at self-evaluating how much they've learned because of this inverted thinking.

I think 3Blue1Brown can achieve this edutainment ideal, for example, but I firmly believe that unless you already know the subject, those "pause and ponder" opportunities aren't just a formality.

It's on the lower–medium end of "friction", but I genuinely think undergraduate-level history textbooks (where you don't need to know a ton going in, unlike e.g. a STEM textbook where you could be lost) can be a great form of edutainment on their own. I've been reading "A Concise History of Korea" (2nd ed., 2016) by Michael J. Seth. It concisely (read: ~500 fairly dense pages, but hey, it's an entire-ass country dating to at least 676 as a cohesive nation) covers the history of Korea that we know of from ancient times until 2015. The prose is engaging and understandable but not flowery, the end of every chapter has primary source material you can read, there are tons of interesting one-off stories (especially as it pertains to folklore), and to me, the coherence of the reality – the running threads throughout – is more interesting than fiction.

What I just said sounds absurd – that calling a history textbook "edutainment" must be a joke – but please, if your library has one of these and you have spare time for entertainment, spare it a thought the next time you're picking out a book (or generally looking for something to do).

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

The Newsroom - this clip, from the pilot, you've probably seen.

Deep dives into 21st century US History, as it happened in real time. Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) style. Remixed with melodrama about the people within the Newsroom. Sloan Sabbith is my favourite.

Topics include:

• Deepwater Horizon

• SB 1070 (Arizona's racist detention law)

• the Gabrielle Giffords shooting

• Arab Spring

• Citizens United ruling

• Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident

• the Death of Osama bin Laden

• Glass-Steagall Act (this video threads a few scenes together)

• the Tea Party (described as the American Taliban) - significant because The Tea Party is antecedent to MAGA

• Occupy Wall Street

• The Boston Marathon bombing

• Climate Polycrisis (chef's kiss)

• Edward Snowden leaks

Kind of Americana/nostalgia but The Andy Griffith Show really does this well. In fact, I feel like a lot of the older shows from the 60s did this.

Only podcasts, unfortunately 😭😭 sorry.