NBC
2009-15

The half-hour comedy is a format built around comfort and familiarity, and while “Community” had those trappings — a quirky ensemble, a relatable setting, a will-they-won’t-they storyline — the Dan Harmon series was best when it got weird. Several times per season, Greendale Community College disappeared to make room for difficult family memories to be unpacked in a stop-motion Christmas wonderland, or for sexual tension to unravel in a paintball-driven war zone. “Community” was ambitious, but, like any good sitcom, it knew how to reset. It brought its characters from its endless alternate universes back to Greendale as though nothing unusual had happened at all.

NBC 
2013-15 
 
Somehow, showrunner Bryan Fuller tricked NBC into airing an avant-garde homoerotic romance between Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) — practicing psychiatrist, preening aesthete, noted gourmand — and Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), an FBI profiler who could inhabit the mindset of a sociopath. Their dynamic played out more like a twisted fairy tale than a standard cat-and-mouse game. The crime scenes on “Hannibal” were quite literally works of art; one morbid tableau was styled after a Botticelli painting, and Lecter’s meticulously prepared meals were gorgeous to behold, even as you knew what was in them. But the heart of the show was the tragic, just-barely-subtextual romance between Hannibal and Will, a bond of true understanding that could only end badly. “Hannibal” was canceled before it could play out in full, though it concluded on a perfectly ominous image of its doomed lovers careening over a cliff. 

Showtime  
2011-20 
 
Carrie Mathison has all the hallmarks of an unreliable narrator — except she’s usually right. That was what made “Homeland’s” first two seasons so compelling: The CIA agent played masterfully by Claire Danes ought to have been a superspy, but the very mania that lent her a special insight also clouded her judgment, and made her appear untrustworthy to superiors. “Homeland” illustrated Carrie’s lack of balance through her vexed, passionate liaison with suspected terrorist Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis); her frustration at not being trusted pulsed through Danes’ clenched jaw. Landing deep within the war on terror, “Homeland” painted a picture of a national-security apparatus built around imperfect, wild-eyed Americans; it regained its footing after a few rocky seasons to conclude with an elegant spy game. It notched Showtime’s only best series Emmy win ever, and was the culmination of a notably strong era for the cabler, built around shows like “Weeds” and “Nurse Jackie” that featured complicated female antiheroes. And you don’t get much more complicated than Carrie Mathison. 

Bravo 
2006-present 
 
As a genre, reality has a largely lowbrow reputation. Not so with “Top Chef,” the Bravo tentpole that’s evolved over 20 seasons into the Rolls-Royce of food television. Thanks to the culinary imprimatur of judges like Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons, and the steely glamour of longtime host Padma Lakshmi, “Top Chef” has elevated itself into an arbiter of true prestige. The show has a chicken-or-egg relationship to American food culture: Did it introduce concepts like prix fixe and mise en place to the viewing public, or has it deftly incorporated grassroots phenomena like social media and an increased reverence for non-European traditions? As the show heads into a post-Lakshmi era led by former contestant Kristen Kish, the answer — and the secret to the series’ enduring success — is both.

Paramount+ 
2017-22 
 
Premiering one year after its progenitor series “The Good Wife” — starring Julianna Margulies — ended on CBS, “The Good Fight” revolved around “Wife” character Diane Lockhart, played by Christine Baranski. Since Trump had just been unexpectedly elected, “The Good Fight,” in which Diane joined a prestigious Black-owned law firm in Chicago, became a primal scream against his presidency, as scripted by creators Robert and Michelle King. Though it occasionally fell into #resistance clichés, “The Good Fight” overall was a brilliantly written, funny, intricate drama, as well as a character study of a 60-something woman — in itself a rarity on television. Whereas “The Good Wife” started strong, then got wobbly and eventually sputtered to a disappointing ending, “The Good Fight” was consistently excellent throughout its six-season run. 

Channel 4/Netflix 
2011-present 
 
Everyone has their favorite, to such an extent that maybe “Black Mirror” installments ought to be titled like “Friends” episodes: “The One Where People Can Replay Their Memories.” “The One Where the Afterlife Is Virtual Reality.” “The One With Jon Hamm.” Taken in all, “Black Mirror” — from its first days on British television to its current life as a world-beating streaming sensation reappearing to shock and delight every few years — has made its name as an anthology of unusual ambition and cumulative power. Its sense of dystopia, one generated at every turn by the battery-powered “black mirrors” all of us carry in our pockets, takes many avenues: Sometimes the worlds this series depicts are outright post-apocalyptic; sometimes the social order has degraded only perceptibly enough to simply make it feel that way. Few other series have demonstrated “Black Mirror’s” versatility, or its ambition to speak on this moment, and the moment just beyond it. 

HBO 
2020  
 
Michaela Coel’s series was, above all else, gutting. A riveting look at the trauma of rape and how it reverberates throughout every aspect of the survivor’s life, the series followed London-based writer Arabella (Coel), who, while racing to meet the deadline for her second novel, is drugged and sexually assaulted during a night out. In the days and weeks after, Arabella struggles to piece together what happened to her while interrogating every aspect of her life. “I May Destroy You” was revelatory in examining consent and agency while using humor and introspection; it ended in a place of triumph, with a young Black woman discovering how to reclaim her power. 

NBC 
1998-2006/2017-20 
 
It’s possible to get a bit windy and overblown about the impact of television over time, but a few shows can, concretely, be said to have had a positive effect on our world. “Will & Grace” is one, as the millions who tuned in each Thursday night came to feel more tolerant, leading to gains for the gay rights movement. The show is broadly credited with convincing Americans that they had a couple of gay friends whose foibles and quirks were recognizable and charming. That was the thing about “Will & Grace” — at least before its surprisingly sour ending and somewhat misbegotten Trump-era reboot. It had an equal-opportunity approach to puncturing its characters, from the brutally vain Platonic couple of the show’s title (played by Eric McCormack and Debra Messing) to their delusional and clueless best friends, Jack and Karen (Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally). To a one, the central performers landed in a place of sublime daffiness. It’s little wonder so many people came to see them as pals. 

NBC 
1982-88 
 
This critically beloved hospital drama is often associated with another NBC series that premiered the year before: Like “Hill Street Blues,” “St. Elsewhere” had a realistic, issues-based approach, and told its story through a large ensemble (and a gray haze). The trio of William Daniels, Ed Flanders and Norman Lloyd led the depressed Boston hospital, and Denzel Washington got his big break here. Never a ratings hit, “St. Elsewhere” also featured Mark Harmon, Alfre Woodard, Howie Mandel and former child actor Helen Hunt as she was about to set off on her movie career. “St. Elsewhere” fearlessly tackled issues such as sexual assault and HIV, and its storytelling could be inventive and experimental. The show had, of all things, a “Cheers” crossover, and Dr. Fiscus (Mandel) died and went to heaven (or something) before being revived. Showrunner Bruce Paltrow and the writers weren’t afraid to indulge in flights of fantasy. The show’s finale episode remains divisive, but its strongest legacy lies in using the medical system as a prism for examining the modern world.

MTV 
1997-2002 
 
Before Gen Z showed everyone how to be unbothered, Daria Morgendorffer (voiced by Tracy Grandstaff) was the reigning queen of introverted cynicism. A spinoff of “Beavis and Butt-Head,” MTV’s animated series moved beyond its source series’ nihilism to showcase the disaffection — and the occasional tenderness — of a ’90s teen forced to navigate suburban American life. In a school populated almost exclusively with posers and hangers-on clamoring to get into the popular crowd, Daria wore her pessimism like a coat of armor. Wittily written and sharply observed, the show skewered its setting, but it got its heart from a character who made for a surprising fit for MTV: a teenager who was only ever interested in being herself. 

NBC 
1984-92 
 
In a vacuum, this series would be significantly higher on our list — for its comic imagination, the charm of its ensemble and the pathbreaking nature of the characters played by Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad, Black professionals and parents at the heart of a family sitcom. But off-screen, its creator, the actor who played Brooklyn Heights physician and father of five Cliff Huxtable, was convicted of sexual assault in 2018. While that conviction was vacated on procedural grounds, he was not exonerated, and remains the subject of dozens of credible allegations of drugging and raping women. All of these have tarnished Cosby’s legacy near to the point of erasure. But the work of his collaborators, and the significance of this show in its moment, make excluding it entirely feel strange. Kids of this and future generations will likely not watch “The Cosby Show” — what a shame its star ruined his own work, and that of others, so thoroughly. 

PBS 
1968-2001 
 
For 33 years, Fred Rogers harnessed the lo-fi tools of public television to deliver the gospel of kindness to generations of children. Each episode followed a comfortingly familiar pattern, starting with Rogers inviting the viewer in song to be his neighbor as he changed into his signature cardigan sweater. Then, with his gentle, deliberative inflections, he spoke directly to his young (and old) viewers about anger and bravery, about death and divorce, about how every one of them was unique in the world, and was worthy of love. On a medium most often used for crass commerce or easy distraction, Rogers saw TV as a powerful conduit to communicate empathy. There’s never really been anyone else like him, and we’re the poorer for it. 

ABC 
1963-present 
 
Soap operas are an American art form, having begun on Chicago radio in 1930. And on TV in the 1950s and ’60s, they became a popular method of delivering products on the daily to housewives (giving the genre its name). But “General Hospital” took the format to stratospheric heights in the early 1980s, because of supercouple Luke (Anthony Geary) and Laura (Genie Francis). The pair married before tens of millions of viewers on Nov. 16 and 17, 1981, an event that transcended daytime TV (and included Elizabeth Taylor as a guest star), and made the show a zeitgeist phenomenon. One of four soaps left, and the longest-running scripted TV series on the air, “General Hospital” turned 60 on April 1, 2023 — a feat.

ABC 
1974-84 
 
The 1970s was obsessed with looking back at the 1950s, and there was no more concrete manifestation of that trend than Garry Marshall’s “Happy Days,” a sitcom revolving around Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) and his family and friends: one friend in particular — Arthur Fonzarelli, aka Fonzie (and the Fonz), played by Henry Winkler. “Happy Days” is responsible for approximately 4 billion kids’ lunchboxes, the delightful spinoffs “Laverne & Shirley” and “Mork & Mindy,” the phrases “sit on it” and more lastingly, “jump the shark” — and launching Howard and Winkler as major stars.

HBO 
2012-17 
 
It’s taken a decade for “Girls” writer, director, creator and star Lena Dunham to get her due for the groundbreaking HBO comedy. Time has mellowed out the once-fever-pitch discourse around nudity, representation and supposed nepotism, allowing the sharp comedy and brutal honesty to stand on their own. The pilot positioned a quartet of downwardly mobile, alliteratively named New York millennials as a counterpoint to “Sex and the City,” trading aspiration for closely observed cringe. That Dunham, just 26 when the show premiered, was so consistently conflated with her character is at once a product of misogyny and a testament to her performance. Lena is certainly not Hannah, yet each woman was right to brand herself a voice of a generation.

NBC/ABC 
1971-78/1989-2003 
 
Peter Falk’s namesake lieutenant is back in the zeitgeist, thanks to a second life on streaming — as well as the loving homage of Peacock hit “Poker Face.” What a relief: The show’s distinctive “howcatchem” structure, which revealed the killer in the cold open before Columbo himself even appeared on the scene, was nowhere near as popular as the whodunit, fading out of fashion after the NBC series’ initial run in the 1970s. That’s a shame, because the format was an actor’s feast. Legendary guest stars (Dick Van Dyke, Janet Leigh, Faye Dunaway) got to wear their motivations on their sleeve, while Falk himself was an audience avatar in a signature camel coat. With his beetle brows and ever-present cigarette, the sleuth acted as the common denominator — well, him and the murder — through all manner of shifting milieus. In the end, he’s all we need. 

FX 
2016-22 
 
In its early going, “Atlanta” was a phenomenon: Creator Donald Glover was widely credited for changing the landscape of television after the debut of his thinly veiled manifesto on the surreal cost of trying to “make it.” The first two seasons were as structurally sound as they were ingenious in format, as a mismatched group of Black Atlantans navigated a city and a music industry populated with cartoon villains — and sometimes became villains themselves. Then the show went off the air for four years, and came back as something completely new. The back half of “Atlanta” was less a half-hour comedy and more a series of absurdist vignettes. The identity crisis matched what the characters were going through, and was as thought-provoking as it was self-referential. In short, “Atlanta” had guts.

Netflix 
2016-present 
 
Beloved by fans from the start, the Steven Spielberg-inspired supernatural drama has grown up with its audience over the years: The bike-riding gang of kids from the fictional small town of Hawkins, Ind., will have matured into young adults by the time “Stranger Things” ends with its fifth season. Not only have creators Matt and Ross Duffer — aka the Duffer brothers — repurposed 1980s tropes of friends going on adventures who end up saving the world, but they’ve created a next generation of stars (Millie Bobby Brown, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke and Noah Schnapp, among others) with the series’ superior casting (as well as reviving the career of Winona Ryder, herself an ’80s icon). Outside of the show’s creative strengths, though, “Stranger Things” has — more than any of Netflix’s other series — demonstrably proven the streamer’s fearsome power, with each season of the show outpacing the one before, to reach a massive global audience. 

Amazon Prime Video 
2016/19 
 
Has any performer in memory weaponized the direct-to-camera address as effectively as Phoebe Waller-Bridge? On “Fleabag’s” first season, she used her isolating ability to look beyond the people around her to deconstruct her unnamed character’s insecurities around sex, family and the loss of her best friend. And on the Emmy-bedecked second, the shared understanding that they were performing for an audience brought together Waller-Bridge’s character and Andrew Scott’s “Hot Priest” for an exploration of faith, and its absence. Few recent shows have had quite as much in mind, or such a capacious sense of how to express Big Ideas through comedy. Perhaps it takes a performer, and a writer, like Waller-Bridge (from whose Edinburgh Festival Fringe solo show the series was drawn) to know precisely where to look. 

ABC
1987-91

OK, boomers: Listen up. “Thirtysomething” aspired to be a television version of “The Big Chill.” It was a serialized story about a group of close friends, affluent Philadelphia baby boomers, having feelings: about their careers, their marriages, their kids — everything sensitive (and, yes, 30-something) professional people might want to discuss at length. “Thirtysomething” introduced Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz as TV talents with a singular, cozy point of view — they went on to make “My So-Called Life” and “Once and Again,” which had similar aesthetics (and anxieties). “Thirtysomething” may have been all about introspection, but it also pulled off what we’d argue is the best bait and switch in TV history. In a much-anticipated episode about whether Nancy (Patricia Wettig) would survive cancer, just when the audience found out she would be OK, Gary (Peter Horton) got hit by a car and killed! Still not over it.

ABC 
2012-18 
 
“Grey’s Anatomy” launched Shonda Rhimes, but “Scandal” crystallized her approach in the public imagination. Perhaps the most startling aspect of the series, in retrospect, is its pacing: Showstopping monologues don’t literally stop the show, but instead feel a part of the endless flow of incident in the life of Olivia Pope, crisis consultant and crisis magnet. As played by Kerry Washington, Olivia is both the solution and the problem — she has embedded herself deep within the political establishment, so deep that her love affair with the Republican president (Tony Goldwyn) is perpetually threatening to shake up both her life and the state of the union. “Scandal” was, in its moment, a live-tweetable, popcorn-and-red-wine-quaffing phenomenon. It remains the high-water mark of Rhimes’ gift for the destabilizing twist — and Olivia, a Black woman holding the reins of power with fearless confidence and human-scale neuroses, may be Rhimes’ greatest character.

Syndicated 
1976-81 
 
Perhaps there’s a reason the TV variety show died out by the 1980s: It’s that no one could do it better than Kermit the Frog. The five-season vaudeville extravaganza gave characters like Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, the Swedish Chef and Beaker a permanent place in pop culture. “The Muppet Show” was surreal at times, corny at others, but almost always subversive. Its parodies paved the way for a young 1980s audience ready for genre-destroying talent like “Weird Al” Yankovic and David Letterman, and made it OK for “kids programming” to entertain the grown-ups in the room with a wink and a nod. On “The Muppet Show,” it wasn’t just OK to be weird — it was mandatory. 

CBS/TNT
1978-91/2012-2014

There had certainly been galvanizing, community-building moments on television before “Dallas” asked “Who shot J.R.?” But in the summer of 1980, the question posed by a twist in the show’s third-season finale spurred a movement — people wore T-shirts (“I shot J.R.” was popular too); Vegas oddsmakers took bets — and “Dallas” became a sensation for CBS. The series not only helped popularize the cliffhanger as a plot device, but spurred a huge wave of glossy nighttime soap operas that soon included the massive “Dynasty” on ABC. Meanwhile, cast members Larry Hagman, Patrick Duffy, Victoria Principal and others were among the biggest stars of the 1980s.

Comedy Central
1999-2015

As Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite were to the mid-20th century, so was Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” to the new millennium: a singular voice millions turned to every night to make sense of the chaos and nonsense of the day’s events. It’s just that Stewart spiked his journalism — and yes, despite his many protestations on this point, Stewart was doing journalism — with comedy, satire and even ridicule, if the subject demanded it. A murderer’s row of talent (Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Samantha Bee, John Oliver) emerged under his tenure and replicated many of his methods, and Trevor Noah took the reins admirably just as Trumpism began to rise. But no one has been able to match the force and clarity of Stewart’s 16-year run — not even Stewart himself.

NBC
1990-96

Will Smith was already a Grammy-winning recording artist when “The Fresh Prince” began, but the sitcom cemented his place in pop culture as a charmer who thought he could get away with anything. Andy and Susan Borowitz’s scripts boasted an ambitious joke-per-minute count, a pace Smith effortlessly achieved even as he threw his lanky frame into constant physical comedy. And the show was bold enough to avoid wrapping its conflicts in a bow, often choosing to punctuate 22 minutes of laughs with uncomfortable conversations about race or family right before the credits rolled.

ABC/NBC
1978-83

“Taxi’s” misfit cab drivers are a lot like New York in the 1970s: Rough, messy, disillusioned — and hopeful. As created by James L. Brooks, Stan Daniels, David Davis and Ed. Weinberger, “Taxi” took what the writers had learned from series like “The Bob Newhart Show” and added a bit more edge. Where else could you find a cast that brings together the eccentricities of Andy Kaufman and Christopher Lloyd, the booming personalities of Tony Danza, Danny DeVito and Jeff Conaway, and the class and sophistication of Marilu Henner and Judd Hirsch?

HBO 
2004-06 
 
At first, David Milch’s neo-Western seemed poised to pit Montana lawman Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) against Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), a saloon owner, pimp and de facto mayor of the drama’s namesake 19th-century settlement. But underneath its expletive-laden dialogue, “Deadwood” turned out to be something much more nuanced and cerebral: an exploration of who benefits, or doesn’t, from the onset of civilization, as Deadwood goes from a chaotic backwater to an established civic entity. Bullock and Swearengen become uneasy allies as they attempt to look out for their community’s best interests, heading up a deep bench of outlaws and eccentrics, including real historical figures like Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert). “Deadwood” is sometimes overlooked as a part of HBO’s turn-of-the-millennium salad days, but it’s just as exacting a portrait of our national character as “The Wire.”

ABC 
1993-2005 
 
As played by Dennis Franz, Andy Sipowicz was a character for the ages — a racist, miserable whiner who abused his power as a New York City cop. His struggles with alcohol and his grief over the loss of a son made his life into a roller-coaster ride, one that we at home, along with his wife, Sylvia (Sharon Lawrence), couldn’t seem to disembark. Franz won four Emmys, and — after the surprise departure of original co-lead David Caruso — built a relationship with a partner (played by Jimmy Smits) that had the capacity to surprise, and to humanize the gruff Sipowicz. The show pushed boundaries for network TV even beyond its use of nudity (which became a national topic); its depiction of police brutality, and of the complexity of one tortured man in blue, paved the way for shows from “The Shield” to “The Wire.”

ABC 
1988-93 
 
The 1960s changed America forever. And while the history of that decade, from the race riots to the Vietnam War, may be familiar, “The Wonder Years” beautifully illustrated what it meant to live through that time, and to come of age. Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) recalls his boyhood days in suburbia, as the changes in his life mirror a country redefining and reshaping itself. “The Wonder Years” was aptly titled: It had a poetic sense of awe as it depicted the trials associated with young adulthood, and a deep understanding of how painful (and wonderful) those life shifts could be. 

Fox 
1993-98 
 
In 1993 with “Living Single,” Yvette Lee Bowser became the first Black woman to create a primetime show, and she brought with her an ensemble unlike anything the industry had allowed before. Most Black women on TV at that point had been wives and mothers, but Khadijah (Queen Latifah), Regine (Kim Fields), Synclaire (Kim Coles) and Max (Erika Alexander) reset the paradigm — enjoying the unattached life with good hearts, bad habits and a healthy dose of 20- and 30-something selfishness. “Living Single” was “Friends” before “Friends” existed, pioneering the sitcom standard of anchoring young, socially active busybodies around a single New York apartment.

FX
2016

Ryan Murphy is perhaps the defining voice in contemporary American television, but no other of his achievements is as tonally or qualitatively consistent as this opera of American greed. Race, sex, class and celebrity collided in the courtroom as ex-football star Simpson (Cuba Gooding Jr.) stood trial on two counts of murder; this series’ supreme accomplishment was braiding together the machinations of the defense (notably attorney Johnnie Cochran, played by Courtney B. Vance) and the prosecution (led by Marcia Clark, as played by Sarah Paulson). Both sides pursue their case doggedly and not without cynicism, but Clark — an inept public figure in a case hinging on notoriety — can’t help losing the PR war. Paulson’s performance as a woman eddying toward the most public sort of failure was the standout in a show littered with brilliant performances and keen observations. Murphy has had a long-standing interest in prizing open recent history to find what lies within; this time, he struck gold.

ABC 
1988-1997/2018

This one makes us so sad. And mad. The brilliant Roseanne Barr created “Roseanne” — though she wasn’t credited as its creator, much to her rage — out of her stand-up act, and the ABC sitcom drew from the Norman Lear comedies of the ’70s while feeling completely new. Set in an Illinois suburb, “Roseanne” revolved around the Conners, a working-class family who can never get ahead. Its appeal was universal, and the show was a massive ratings winner, despite Barr injecting her then-left-wing politics into it. “Roseanne” was always warm and brilliantly funny. Tragically, though, the incorrigible Barr destroyed her own legacy. A 2018 revival of “Roseanne” yielded astronomically high ratings, and it finished as the No. 1 show of the season. But a week after the season finale, Barr self-immolated on Twitter, comparing former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to an ape. Despite Barr’s previously expressed anti-Muslim sentiments and espousal of QAnon conspiracy theories, the Jarrett tweet was a bridge too far, and ABC immediately canceled the show. That fall, “Roseanne” was reborn as “The Conners,” having killed the Roseanne character.

ABC 
2005-present

Through its 19 seasons, “Grey’s Anatomy” has been many things. At this point in the show’s life, it’s a well-acted, enjoyable primetime soap opera that revolves around a Seattle hospital. But when the Shonda Rhimes-created show premiered on ABC, it was radical, and changed both television and pop culture. Rhimes simply showed the world as it is, where people of color can be doctors and ambitious women can enjoy sex. Revolving around the character Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), “Grey’s Anatomy” became an instant phenomenon, and also announced Rhimes as a revolutionary creator and thinker. Long may she reign.

Logo/VH1/MTV 
2009-present

Perhaps only a drag queen could lampoon reality TV while expertly nailing its rhythms — and that’s what RuPaul and the production company World of Wonder have done with “Drag Race.” With challenges like the Snatch Game, Reading Is Fundamental, and Lip Sync for Your Life, the show brought drag culture firmly and finally into the cultural mainstream. It also turned drag from a niche hobby into a full-blown industrial complex replete with spinoffs, fan conventions and successful alumni. But nearly 15 years in, “Drag Race” has yet to lose all of its subversive edge, nor the sincere celebration of self-love and found family that’s always been at its core. If you can’t love yourself — or a sickening runway look — how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?

CBS 
1972-78  
 
Hi, Bob! There have been many workplace comedies over the years. Countless stand-up comedians have gone on to front wildly successful television sitcoms. Several shows have developed a tremendously large cast of supporting and recurring characters. And, of course, plenty of shows have used psychology as a hook to develop strongly defined characters and plotlines. “The Bob Newhart Show” checked every one of these boxes early enough in the history of the medium to be rightly deemed a pioneer — and broke this ground while centering its story on its star’s unassuming, nebbishy persona. The comedian went on to lead another character-driven comedy ensemble, “Newhart,” but this show set the template for his sensibility.

NBC 
1999-2000 
 
In the late ’90s, teen soaps like “Party of Five” and “Dawson’s Creek” dealt melodrama with a heavy hand. Paul Feig and Judd Apatow took on the social order of the suburban high school environment in a different way, with a frank, acute realism. The result, “Freaks and Geeks,” was painful, but often brutally funny. Its early-’80s setting was joyously specific, but allowed the show to communicate universal truths about the ungainliness of growing up too. Perhaps fittingly, the series fit as awkwardly into its time slot as a geek into a football jersey: While universal acclaim didn’t translate to strong ratings, the decades of success later achieved by Linda Cardellini, Jason Segel, James Franco, Seth Rogen and Busy Philipps stand as testament that William McKinley High School existed. 

CBS 
1975-85 
 
You know you want to sing it. If you’re of a certain age, the second you saw the title, your brain went to that shot of George Jefferson strutting into his deluxe apartment in the sky, to the tune of Ja’Net DuBois’ “Movin’ On Up.” The second spinoff of “All in the Family” (after “Maude”), “The Jeffersons” broke ground: It showcased a Black family who had built a successful life for themselves. Like many shows created by Norman Lear, “The Jeffersons” wasn’t afraid to touch on hot-button topics or place its characters into heady arguments. But “The Jeffersons” is also remembered for stars Sherman Hemsley, Isabel Sanford and Marla Gibbs, who exuded the kind of chemistry that keeps a series on the air for 11 seasons and 253 episodes. 

HBO 
2003

“Angels in America” is a monumental achievement not just within the medium of television, but for the world entire. Director Mike Nichols transferred Tony Kushner’s stage masterwork — a brilliantly unwieldy two-part epic about AIDS, homosexuality, religious dogma — into a towering yet shapely miniseries. Like Kushner’s play, the screen version of “Angels” shed light on human struggle and reached toward divinity. What this production uniquely boasted — thanks to HBO’s casting prowess — was a cast of heavy hitters, among them Meryl Streep, Al Pacino and Jeffrey Wright, all working in (sometimes discordant) harmony. The series represented queer characters’ stories in a manner that was, even a decade after the stage production, groundbreaking; it sparked essential conversations about identity, love and acceptance.

HBO 
2005/2014

Is she being heard? That’s the essential question of this surreally precise vérité sitcom, in which Lisa Kudrow, a year removed from “Friends,” turned her sitcom fame inside out to play a venal, grasping, always-camera-ready starlet given a second chance. Her Valerie Cherish thrives on the glimpse of celebrity she got as a TV actress in the early 1990s. Given the opportunity to feature on TV again, even with the Faustian bargain that it’s on a bad-on-purpose sitcom with an accompanying reality show about the dramas of her life, she takes it. The elaborate premise gives way to comedy with clean narrative lines and a sense of just how far to push Valerie’s humiliation: As played by Kudrow (who created the series with Michael Patrick King), she’s the monster that Hollywood made. And she’s a woman whose narcissism — especially in the poignant, long-delayed second season — gives way to a startling humanity. All Valerie wants is to show the world what she can do. It’s how she expresses that desire that gets her into painful, achingly funny trouble every time. 

Netflix 
2013-19

Creator Jenji Kohan famously billed her Netflix prison dramedy as a “Trojan horse,” referring to how white Brooklyn yuppie Piper (Taylor Schilling) serves as an introduction to a sprawling ensemble cast of Black, queer, Hispanic, trans and working-class inmates when she’s convicted on a drug trafficking charge. But the term also applies to how “Orange Is the New Black” helped viewers adjust to the idea of streaming series bankrolled by what was then a DVD rental company. Along with “House of Cards,” “Orange Is the New Black” opened the door for the next decade of formal innovation and industry expansion, yet it’s “Orange” that endures as the better and more influential show. Well before representation became a buzzword, the inmates at Litchfield Penitentiary made our standards for it look quaint.

Fox 
1990-94

“In Living Color” was unapologetic. Fox’s answer to “Saturday Night Live” — drawn from the sensibility of creator, writer and star Keenen Ivory Wayans — made its lasting impact through sharp sketch comedy and electric dance numbers. It built the case that there could be an alternative to “SNL,” and it could be a show that addressed social issues, challenged stereotypes and reverberated through Black and Latino households. The show launched talents like Jim Carrey, Jennifer Lopez and Jamie Foxx, as well as various members of the Wayans family, and it helped define the early Fox brand as a network willing to try things others wouldn’t. Most of all, its short run impressed upon viewers that there’s more than one way to do sketch comedy on TV.

Comedy Central 
1997-present

When it debuted in 1997, “South Park” was known for being the cartoon show with dirty language and bizarre storylines, like a Mechagodzilla-esque Barbra Streisand attacking the titular Colorado town. But as the years have passed, series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have perfected a style of storytelling that keeps them and the anarchic, nihilistic fourth graders at the center of their story as relevant now as they were when the show launched. With the ability to turn around episodes in just six days, “South Park” keeps its finger on society’s pulse, before pulling back and using that finger to flip society off time and time again. 

NBC 
2016-20

As popular discourse began to posit that there was nothing interesting left on broadcast TV, Michael Schur decided to go back to the basics — way back to Plato and Aristotle, foundations-of-Western-thought-type basics. His philosophy reading led him to create a surprisingly cerebral sitcom. Kristen Bell starred as Eleanor, a lovably bad person who mistakenly wound up in a heaven-like afterlife architected by Ted Danson’s Michael, also joined by William Jackson Harper, Manny Jacinto and Jameela Jamil — a carefully matched group of then-newcomers cast by comedy veteran Allison Jones. The characters spent four studious seasons with the explicit objective of examining personhood and goodness, and in that time, Schur deftly avoided the saccharine and preachy. Governing itself by the chaos stirred up when Kant and Nietzsche are applied to an elastic world with a thousand frozen yogurt shops per capita, “The Good Place” was both wildly inventive and a network sitcom down to its DNA.

Comedy Central 
2003-06

Dave Chappelle left no swear word unuttered in his excavation of race, sex and class in early-2000s America. Cheerily vulgar in pursuit of his version of comic truth, Chappelle drew in a Black audience with a style of humor distinctly of the diaspora. At the same time, he held a mirror up to his white audience members and popular culture. With everything from absurd sketches about a blind Black white supremacist to iconic tales involving pancakes, basketball and Prince, Chappelle’s wit was unparalleled. Though “Chappelle’s Show” ended unceremoniously when the comedian walked away from his set — only contributing to the series’ legend — the jokes and sketches have never been more relevant.

NBC 
1999-present

While the original “Law & Order” series mostly revolved around murder mysteries, “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” redefined the police drama. By focusing on sex crimes, the series has given voice to sexual assault survivors in a way that had never been done before on television. Although difficult to watch at times, “SVU’s” stories (often drawn from real cases) have pushed the culture to unpack the meaning of consent, guided survivors toward support and dropped real-world tips to help people protect themselves from predators. After 24 seasons and counting as Olivia Benson, Mariska Hargitay has become a cultural icon, and the longest-running live-action character in a primetime series. And fans can be forgiven for missing her onetime scene partner Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni); in earlier seasons, the show leaned into the detectives’ lives when they weren’t seeking justice, all to give a sense of why the fight was personal. 

Netflix 
2014-20

Animation isn’t given enough credit as a source of complex emotional storytelling, not just visual ingenuity or jokes. “BoJack Horseman” had all three in spades, and may have done more to expand general audiences’ ideas of what animation can do than any show in the past decade. The brainchild of creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg and his high school classmate Lisa Hanawalt, an artist who would become the “BoJack” art director and go on to create “Tuca & Bertie,” “BoJack Horseman” told the story of a washed-up sitcom star, voiced by an all-too-convincing Will Arnett, who also happens to be a horse (and his agent-manager who happens to be a pink cat, and his asexual permanent houseguest who sounds suspiciously like Aaron Paul). Combining elaborate puns with a searching saga of change and accountability, “BoJack” struck a singular tone and maintained it for six seasons straight.

The WB/The CW/Netflix 
2000-07/2016

You’re either a “Gilmore Girls” person or you aren’t. You either love the show’s speedy, screwball comedy-inspired patter — the signature style of creator Amy Sherman-Palladino (later behind the Emmy-winning “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) — or you don’t! We think Sherman-Palladino is a visionary, and we adore the mother-daughter relationship between Lorelai and Rory Gilmore (Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel), not to mention between Lorelai and her own mother, Emily (Kelly Bishop). Sherman-Palladino built the cozy world of Stars Hollow, Conn., purely from her imagination; she’d barely been to the state. But for years, we all lived there with her, and though she left the show in 2006 before its seventh and final season on network TV after a bitter standoff with Warner Bros., she was able to complete her vision for its ending on Netflix in 2016 with “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.” (The show also introduced the world to Melissa McCarthy, who played Lorelai’s best friend Sookie — for which we’re also thankful.)

HBO 
2001-05

The difficulty in looking at the legacy of “Six Feet Under”? Five seasons of exceptional television are inevitably overshadowed by 10 minutes of perfect television. Creator Alan Ball’s series follows the lives of the funeral home-operating Fisher family and those in their orbit, while exploring both the profound and the mundane in death. The final moments of “Six Feet Under,” a succession of emotional jolts underscored by a soulful Sia ballad, felt in the moment surprisingly daring. But, looking at a series that for its entire run had been keenly observed but startlingly openhearted, one might say that the show died the way it lived. 

NBC 
1962-92

Johnny Carson was the original social influencer: His stamp of approval could make or break careers, particularly comedians’. And as he became one of the most important voices on television — rivaled only by Walter Cronkite — millions of Americans tuned in every night to get Carson’s take on the day’s headlines. “The Tonight Show” was a TV staple when Carson took it over in 1962, but he became the benchmark for all talk show hosts — leading, of course, to the controversy surrounding who would succeed him. Carson’s farewell is still considered an iconic moment, and remains one of the most-watched broadcasts in TV history. 

Fox/Netflix
2003-06/2013, 2018-19

This isn’t the only story of one wealthy family that loses everything to make this list. (Sorry, Roy siblings! It’s true! You lost!) But it is the only one that could have pulled off an intricate season-long running gag about the family’s high-strung youngest brother, Buster (Tony Hale), finally escaping his codependent relationship with his mother, Lucille (Jessica Walter), only to have his hand bitten off by — yes — a loose seal. A single-camera sitcom this comedically dense about such flagrantly unlikable people was never built to last (much like the Bluth family houses). But from its vérité aesthetics to its serialized storytelling, the show had a profound effect on the next 20 years of TV comedy. So much so that Netflix scooped it up in 2013 for a two-season revival that had no creative issues (Ron Howard narrator voice: It did) and was considered a triumph by everyone involved (it wasn’t). It’s “Arrested Development.”  

ABC 
1994-95 

It’s rare for art made by adults to perfectly nail the angst, anguish and hope of being a teen. While series like “Beverly Hills, 90210” were giving high schoolers a glossy, sexy view of adolescent life, Winnie Holzman’s “My So-Called Life,” which starred Claire Danes as 15-year-old Angela Chase in lovelorn pursuit of her crush, Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto), offered something more grounded and tangible. The show’s sole season is distinctly of its time, but “My So-Called Life” has something for teens (and former teens) today too. It’s a series about thrilling and heart-wrenching experiences — first love, coming to understand your parents and trying to understand your own frenzied emotions.  (To read guest contributor Mara Brock Akil’s tribute to “My So-Called Life,” click here.)

HBO
2019

The “Watchmen” graphic novel is one of the most celebrated works in the medium. So when HBO announced a “Watchmen” series from Damon Lindelof, and it became clear that the project would serve as a sequel rather than a direct adaptation, fans were naturally apprehensive. (Not least because a previous attempt at a feature-film version fell flat.) But Lindelof and his team expertly crafted a story about race, identity, gender, sexuality and more, all set within an alternate America. One thing that’s consistent between “Watchmen’s” world and ours? The fact of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which haunted the series like the specter of racism itself. It all lay elegantly within the overarching narrative about masked vigilantes that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons created in 1986 — but updated it for a new age.

FX
2002-08

“The Shield” — which revolved around a corrupt, murderous L.A. cop named Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) — was the progenitor of several crucial trends that led to television’s second Golden Age. Shawn Ryan’s FX drama was the first truly great series on basic cable, and set an inspired template for the channel to then launch “Nip/Tuck” and “Rescue Me” in successive years. All of them centered on antiheroes, and all pushed the boundaries of what TV could be. “The Shield” also invented the concept of high-profile stars dropping into an established series for a single-season arc, as Glenn Close did during the fantastic fourth season. But beyond “The Shield’s” significance as a trend-setter, each one of its seven seasons was excellent, with always surprising, riveting plotting, superlative acting from its large ensemble and an exceptional series finale in which Vic got exactly what he deserved.

NBC-DirecTV
2006-11

TV has long privileged the coastal elite — take a look at all of the New York and Los Angeles-set titles on this list. Other landscapes are often relegated to the sidelines — but was there ever a locale as vital, as everyday, as real, as Dillon, Texas? The fictional town, a stand-in for small communities in the rural western region of the Lone Star State, helped “Friday Night Lights” use high school football as a believable backdrop for life-and-death stakes. Led by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton and featuring teenage talents like Minka Kelly, Jesse Plemons and Michael B. Jordan, the drama stood apart from much of the TV of its era in giving a tough, if sentimental, representation of how much of the rest of America lives.

HBO
2014-17

For his follow-up to “Lost,” creator Damon Lindelof pivoted from constructing intricate plot puzzles to embracing the unknown. (“Let the mystery be,” Iris DeMent reminds us in the series’ theme song as of Season 2.) The HBO drama’s first season adapted Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name, a bleak and wintry portrait of a population paralyzed by grief in the wake of a mass disappearance known as the Sudden Departure. But “The Leftovers” is post-apocalyptic in the truest sense. Through the journey of small-town police chief Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux), mourning mother Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) and their blended family, “The Leftovers” reckoned with the myriad ways human beings attempt to explain the unexplainable. For every rigid rationalist like Nora or dour, chain-smoking member of the Guilty Remnant cult, there’s a group worshiping a lion via orgy on an Australian ferry. Whatever floats their boat! Each of us copes with existential emptiness in our own way, and with increasing humor and invention, “The Leftovers” became a testament to enduring however we can.

CBS
1961-66

Television shows about television shows, including the critically acclaimed “The Larry Sanders Show” and “30 Rock,” have been a popular standby. But years before that, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” found a way to balance a workplace comedy with a family dynamic to great effect. It helped that “Dick Van Dyke” was built on the strength of icons: Carl Reiner, inspired by his time as a writer on “Your Show of Shows,” built a winning premise and ensemble led by Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore as sitcom writer Rob Petrie and his wife, Laura. The show, which ultimately won 15 Emmys, earned raves for its one-liners and premises, many of which continue to be ranked as some of TV’s most memorable episodes.

Syndicated
1987-94

Without a doubt, Gene Roddenberry’s 1960s original series established “Star Trek” as one of the great sci-fi franchises of the 20th century. But “The Next Generation,” executive-produced largely by Rick Berman and Michael Piller, was far more successful as television, and created the template for “Trek” to endure as a phenomenon well into our current century. Led by Patrick Stewart’s cerebral and humane Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, the show unfolded in a series of deeply satisfying morality plays as edifying as they were entertaining — and eminently re-watchable decades later. Whether you connect with the emotionless Data (Brent Spiner) and his quest to become more human, or the empathic Troi (Marina Sirtis) and her wells of deep feeling, “TNG” presents a portrait of a possible future that remains an essential balm of compassion and intellect.

HBO
1992-98

Shrewd and clever, “The Larry Sanders Show” is under-discussed in the story of HBO’s rise as a home for truly original television. Its masterstroke may be using the tools of what would become the premium-cable genre to dissect a style of TV as old as the medium itself. Larry Sanders (series co-creator Garry Shandling) is a hacky late-night host who understands, with painful clarity, that he’s clocking in each day to make a not-that-funny talk show. But his ego, as well as those of his sidekick and producer (Jeffrey Tambor and Rip Torn) still needs constant stroking — and it was in deconstructing the self-obsession of those who make television that “Larry Sanders” found its sharpest comedy.

FX
2013-18

Perhaps the final great cable drama of the second Golden Age, this cerebral-yet-sexy spy drama alternately pitted Matthew Rhys’ and Keri Russell’s characters against one another and forced them into an uneasy alliance. In other words, it was a story about a marriage. Rhys and Russell both excelled as Russian sleeper agents embedded within Reagan-era America, thrown together by the Kremlin and compelled by patriotism, pragmatism and a strange and grudging sort of love. Never before had the Cold War burned so hot.

MTV
1992-2017

It’s impossible to overstate the impact MTV’s “The Real World” had on culture, and, we’d argue, on U.S. politics writ large. The creation of Jonathan Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim — which premiered with its “New York” season in 1992, toward the end of the George H.W. Bush presidency — the prescribed diversity of the show’s “seven strangers, picked to live in a house, and have their lives taped” produced an immediate shift. This was especially true for LGBTQ people, who had literally never seen themselves represented on television as cool. “Real World” fans can cite the series’ various high-water marks: AIDS activist Pedro Zamora getting married on camera in 1994 during the “San Francisco” season, long before same-sex marriage became a central civil rights issue, is certainly one. Over its 30-plus seasons, the show devolved into drunken mayhem — but, oops! It had already changed the world.

The WB/UPN
1997-2003

In its moment, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” looked like a quintessential cult-classic TV series. Today, it’s clear: The show’s just a classic. Sarah Michelle Gellar’s performance as a student and loyal friend who stuck it to vampires rather than being sucked dry by them ingrained itself in pop culture, creating a whole new archetype for the horror heroine. Allegations of on-set abuse by series creator Joss Whedon have changed how some see the Sunnydale gang. But at its best, “Buffy” is not about one man’s sensibility but the inspiring power of a singular woman. It’s a monster-fueled coming-of-age story; it’s a metaphor for the loss of innocence and teen angst; it’s a tragic romance. And it’s a common answer to “What’s your favorite TV show?” for many a grown-up whose taste was forged as a ’90s kid.

NBC
2005-13

The outcry over “The Office” leaving Netflix in favor of Peacock in 2021 said it all. The show had become that rare thing for a new generation: comfort food. The source material for this adaptation, Ricky Gervais’ 2001-03 BBC sitcom, had sharp teeth. While the Steve Carell-led American version could be surprisingly — even shockingly — dark, at its core lay love and sympathy for the drones stuck working in a relatably beige setting. Catapulting the writing careers of Mindy Kaling, B.J. Novak and Michael Schur and establishing John Krasinski as an unlikely swoon-worthy leading man, “The Office” may be the last unifying workplace comedy — perfect streaming-and-chill escapism for a generation that seems to have outgrown the office itself.

Fox
1993-2002/2016-18

Let’s be clear: Your imagination has to be very large to appreciate the world of “The X-Files.” But thanks to David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson (and their undeniable chemistry), fans hung on to every surreal and fantastical thing Mulder and Scully said. Balancing a rich (if eventually frustrating) mythology with its famous “Monster of the Week” episodes — and balancing Duchovny’s true believer with Anderson’s perpetually shocked skeptic, “The X-Files” was a canny, glossy mixture of FBI work with the endless possibilities of the universe. It worked well enough to last nine seasons, two movies and another two seasons in revival, and many fans still believe the truth is out there.

HBO
2011-13

A decade before checking into “The White Lotus,” Mike White crafted what may be his magnum opus. Laura Dern delivered an astoundingly raw performance as Amy Jellicoe, a rage-filled corporate striver who breaks down and then tries, desperately, to heal herself and the world. Awkward and needy, Amy puts off everyone she meets, and that’s the point: “Enlightened’s” writing and directing probed painful questions of what it means to be good and just how hard it can be to find one’s place in a hostile world.

HBO
2000-present

In addition to a brilliant juggling act — keeping aloft a wholly improvised sitcom with absurdist elements and bizarre characters is no easy thing — “Curb Your Enthusiasm” makes for a remarkable archive of grievances. For more than 20 years, Larry David has used the show as a stunningly complete catalog of the social customs that drive him (or, at least, his on-screen avatar) nuts. It’s a perfect companion piece to “Seinfeld,” which David co-created: Once again, we’re rooting for a character with an utter disregard for society’s rules. But here, the comic chaos, and the gleefully dispensed profanity, is turned all the way up.

NBC
1982-93

David Letterman didn’t invent irony, but he did single-handedly bring it to late night. Letterman was a fan of deconstructing the medium, a modern-day Ernie Kovacs who took advantage of his extremely late (or early morning, depending on your vantage point) time slot to mess with the form any way he could. Letterman wanted to entertain, yes, but he also took delight in seeing how far he could go. He’d stick a camera on a monkey, needle his corporate bosses, crash his neighbors, call on recurring eccentric characters and more. Letterman’s sarcasm and winking nod at the absurdity of societal norms was the perfect antidote to the Reagan era’s slick conservatism, inspiring an entirely new generation of comedians and TV hosts.

NBC
1994-2009

When “ER” premiered on NBC in September 1994, there had simply never been anything like it on television. Created by Michael Crichton and executive-produced by John Wells, “ER” was a medical drama on a dose of adrenaline. Yes, there’d been medical shows before — even great ones, such as “MASH” and “St. Elsewhere.” But “ER,” with that magical original cast — George Clooney, Julianna Margulies, Eriq La Salle, Noah Wyle, Anthony Edwards and Sherry Stringfield — made the action leap off the screen. NBC marketed its Thursday-night lineup (which in 1994 also included the first season of “Friends”) under the slogan “Must See TV,” and in the pre-DVR era, you couldn’t miss “ER,” or you’d lose out on what tens of millions of people would be discussing the next day. The cast changed many times over its 15 seasons, but you know what? “ER” was still pretty good, with one of the best final seasons of all time: The entire original cast, including Clooney, all came back!

Syndicated
1964-present

The success of “Jeopardy” comes down to its ingenious structure. Syndication makes it easy to pop in and out of the show, while the fact that contestants keep playing until they lose draws in repeat viewers. The tone is intense but understated, moving swiftly between trivia questions instead of halting to celebrate or ridicule every right or wrong answer. And the careful curation of factoids presented ensures that most people can participate in a category or two — maintaining play-along appeal for regular audiences while rewarding the most knowledgeable people society has to offer. That humming its theme song is the universal signal for “I’m waiting on you,” and that the death of long-running host Alex Trebek was mourned like that of a head of state, just proves that when told to name the greatest game show of all time, one can’t go wrong by saying, “What is ‘Jeopardy’?”

ABC
2004-10

What’s in the hatch? Who are the Others? Where did that polar bear come from? Yes, “Lost” hooked tens of millions with tantalizing mystery box questions like these. And yes, many of the answers showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse ultimately provide don’t quite live up to that fervor. But what made the show was its vibrantly rendered characters, dozens upon dozens of them — Hurley (Jorge Garcia) and Sayid (Naveen Andrews), Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway), Sun (Yunjin Kim) and Jin (Daniel Dae Kim), Locke (Terry O’Quinn) and Ben (Michael Emerson) — all striving to make sense of their upside-down circumstances within an expansive, rip-roaring, fabulously weird adventure. It was a flawed show, sometimes deeply so, but between its characters and, yes, those damned questions, “Lost” engaged its audience like no other, precipitating the online ecosystem of fevered fan theorizing that dominates how so many of us experience our favorite shows today.

CBS
2000-present

Perhaps the 21st century didn’t really begin until Richard Hatch won the final jury vote. “Survivor’s” first season was a thrill ride up until its final moments, when Hatch, who embraced an amoral and bloodless style of play, beat out the last of his earnest and well-meaning island mates. Then it became a revolution. The entire modern competition-reality apparatus was built on what “Survivor” started, but it’s no museum piece: The show has in recent years had a renaissance of attention and fandom as a whole new generation sees how compelling it can be when normal people go to a tropical island with the goal of doing everything but making friends.

NBC
1981-87

The gritty realism of “Hill Street Blues,” set in a police precinct in an unnamed city, paved the way for great cop dramas to come, from “NYPD Blue” to “The Wire.” Most episodes took place over the course of one day, and it was shot documentary style, with a bluish-gray tinge. It was also the first show to feature a large, racially diverse ensemble, a template that’s standard now, but was completely new in 1981. Created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll, “Hill Street Blues” faced immediate cancellation in its first season, but went on to run for seven in total, and to win the Emmy for outstanding drama series for four of those (a record it shares with “Mad Men,” “L.A. Law,” “Game of Thrones” and “The West Wing”). The phrase “Hey, let’s be careful out there” — said by Sgt. Esterhaus (Michael Conrad) at the end of the roll call that kicked off every episode (until Conrad’s death in Season 4) — was the ’80s equivalent of a meme, and has since become an entrenched part of the American vernacular.

NBC
1994-2004

There are very few series, whatever the genre, that are led by more than one or two main characters. In the case of “Friends,” the six perfect ingredients formed a meal that is still devoured night after night, two decades after its end. All of the characters and the actors playing them could have carried a show by themselves — Courteney Cox’s high-strung Monica or Jennifer Aniston’s spoiled Rachel; Lisa Kudrow’s spacey Phoebe or Matt LeBlanc’s sultry, stupid-but-lovable Joey; the late Matthew Perry’s sarcastic Chandler or (maybe most of all) David Schwimmer’s smart, sappy Ross. Instead, a true ensemble sitcom was created and became comedy gold. The Gen Z crowd has even come to love it — see the cut-off “vintage” tees with the logo sold at H&M — but will likely have no idea what a videotape is in “The One With the Videotape” or why Rachel bothered to handwrite that long letter when she and Ross were on a break.

PBS
1990

At a time when the fundamental facts of American history have become controversial, there is perhaps not a more significant work on the antebellum South, slavery and the ensuing conflict than Ken Burns’ nine-part docuseries “The Civil War.” The series is stuffed with detailed information illustrating the divisions between the North and the South, the costs of enslavement and all that was lost during battle and after. Burns illuminated the country as it was while drawing a through line to the present. Using archival photographs, paintings, voiceover and music of the era, he turned his lens on 19th-century America, and placed viewers in the middle of it all. “The Civil War” — and the history within it — can’t be denied.

ABC/Showtime
1990-91/2017

David Lynch has said the iconic Black Lodge — red curtains, zigzag floor, mysterious giant — came to him in a vision while resting his arms on the roof of his car. That’s hardly a typical approach to plotting a primetime soap opera, but the director of “Eraserhead” and “Blue Velvet” was hardly a typical hire for a TV network. Alongside co-creator Mark Frost, Lynch imbued the titular Washington town with his trademark eerie Americana, starting with the indelible image of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) as a corpse wrapped in plastic. The crime attracts the attention of FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), who immerses himself in Twin Peaks’ rich tapestry of purehearted strivers, horny teens, quirky eccentrics and existential evil. A quarter century later, sequel series “The Return” would lean even further into abstraction, but the first two seasons endure as an unlikely example of an uncompromising vision offered a mass platform. (To read guest contributor Damon Lindelof’s tribute to “Twin Peaks,” click here.)

HBO
2012-19

Sharp, striking and thrillingly dark, “Veep” began its life as a comedy about the futility of the vice presidency, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Selina Meyer sequestered away from the White House, along with a staff who revered and loathed her. As the series went on, various bits of happenstance led her to seize power, then to lose it, then to begin climbing the mountain once again, all as her manic vanity grew more entrenched. Among a number of shows of a relatively placid Obama-era moment to examine politics’ poisonous side, “Veep” had grown far more trenchant by the time its antiheroine staggered to the finish line under real-life President Trump. (To read guest contributor Elisabeth Moss’ tribute to “Veep,” click here.)

NBC
1999-2006

There was a time when American politics was dignified — or at least could be made to look that way on TV. Aaron Sorkin’s “The West Wing” followed the two terms of fictional Democratic President Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) as he and his eclectic cabal of staffers ran the country while managing their personal lives. The series was sharp, poignant and often comedic, a blend of tones that borrowed as much from Sorkin’s civic piety as from his love for old-Hollywood screwball comedies. Sorkin’s staple monologues breathed life into conversations on every hot topic from religion to sexuality. “The West Wing,” though, was hardly ripped from the headlines: Its enduring appeal is in its Capraesque idealism, its fantasy view of what American politics might have been — at the moment before they descended into chaos.

CBS
1972-83

The backdrop was the Korean War, but “MASH” helped America understand the Vietnam years. And while its gallows humor was set in the source material — first the novel by Richard Hooker, then the 1970 film adaptation from Robert Altman — the endlessly renewing situations over 11 seasons were all a result of television ingenuity. Each week, the Army surgeons and nurses of the 4077th surgical unit faced daily peril, and long-term traumas, that resonated for the audience, since a war was still being waged in Southeast Asia as the show began its run. Star Alan Alda, playing the disillusioned Hawkeye Pierce of Crabapple Cove, Maine, became an avatar of ’70s male sensitivity, and “MASH,” nominated for a best comedy series Emmy every year it was eligible, topped off its run with a finale, featuring a teary, hopeful farewell to Korea, that was watched by some 121.6 million people. That episode, directed by Alda himself, remains one of the most memorable, uniting experiences in American media history.

CBS
1967-78

During an era when sketch comedy was defined as a “man’s genre,” Carol Burnett shattered the gender barrier with her critically acclaimed variety show. She led a game ensemble through the long-running series with one key directive: Lampoon everything. (Burnett’s parodies of soap operas and of the film “Gone With the Wind” remain classics.) Burnett and her cast exhibited their masterful ad-libbing and sharp wit, earning more than two dozen Emmys during the show’s 11-season run. Energetic and bold, “The Carol Burnett Show” wasn’t afraid to lean toward the outrageous — and then topple right into it. By the end of each episode, the audience was always glad it spent its time laughing and singing along.

NBC
2006-13

A workplace sitcom set behind the scenes of a “Saturday Night Live”-like sketch show starring a former head writer of “Saturday Night Live” and aired by the same network as “Saturday Night Live” sounds like an exercise in solipsism. But Tina Fey’s masterpiece achieved mass appeal, especially in its streaming-assisted afterlife, by leaning into its niche while doubling down on joke density, meta humor and an acerbic, whip-smart sensibility. As a middle-aged nerd ambivalent about sex and passionate about night cheese, Liz Lemon was a well-crafted alter ego for Fey. And Liz’s platonic chemistry with executive Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) formed a kind of madcap camaraderie — though it was diva Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) who delivered the most quotable one-liners on a sitcom made of them. “30 Rock” set the mold for what’s now instantly recognizable as a Tina Fey show: prickly, feminist, scored by her husband, Jeff Richmond, and above all, straightforwardly funny.

HBO
2011-19

There was no bigger television show in the 2010s than HBO’s adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy novels. Created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the fantasy epic pulled viewers into the cutthroat world of Westeros, a land rife with myths, legends, warring families and magical dragons. It was an enormous undertaking and a feat: Despite its relatively humdrum ending, “Game of Thrones” redefined television with its depictions of violence, sex and gore, and with its frank assessment of what it takes to rule. The series examined the universal lust for power, and within its spectacle drew complex portraits of the people who would tear the world apart for their chance to sit atop the coveted Iron Throne.

CBS
1968-present

The TV newsmagazine genre grew up around “60 Minutes,” but no show has ever topped it — for impact, reach, prestige or wide-ranging curiosity. The crown jewel of the CBS News division, “60 Minutes” has aired some of the most consequential TV journalism ever. While allegations of sexual misconduct against its creator, the late Don Hewitt, have complicated his own legacy, the show ticks on to this day. It remains a moment of reflection at week’s end for millions and millions of Americans.

CBS
1955-60

Before television was dismissed as the “idiot box,” it could be a platform for an art as highbrow as live theater. No series embodied that early promise like “Playhouse 90,” the weekly anthology that spent the late 1950s staging feature-length teleplays from CBS Television City. Though a success in its own right, “Playhouse 90” now reads like a talent incubator for future film and TV. Some episodes were directed by a pre-“Manchurian Candidate” John Frankenheimer or a pre-“Network” Sidney Lumet; others were written by a pre-“Twilight Zone” Rod Serling or a pre-“Dynasty” Aaron Spelling. In keeping with the open-ended format, the stories could range from takes on Daphne du Maurier and William Faulkner to an early version of “Requiem for a Heavyweight.” A scripted drama that started from scratch with each installment wouldn’t come back into vogue for decades, but contemporary series like “Black Mirror” and “Poker Face” are working off a model exemplified by “Playhouse 90” in television’s early days.

NBC
1985-92

By way of “Seinfeld,” “Living Single” and “Friends,” the ’90s taught us that simply filling a gorgeous apartment with idle 20- and 30-somethings who have some major growing up to do is a recipe for hilarity. But those adult coming-of-agers owe everything to a group of roommates somewhat more set in their ways. The show, about a quartet of women aging into their friendship, swept an already famous Betty White to legend status; she was, perhaps, first among equals in an ensemble that also included Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty. Together, the foursome gave depth, glory and a healthy degree of raunch to a demographic oft neglected on-screen: women of a certain age.

Syndicated
1986-2011

There’d be no Oprah, as the world knows her — the multimedia, world-straddling megabrand — without the Chicago-based talk show she made for 25 seasons. And for all that she’s accomplished in her career, the star is, at core, a broadcaster, in the classic sense of the term. Her show reached a big audience, making household names of the novelists Oprah read and of her best friend, Gayle King. And it also was broad-minded in its concerns, taking on not just celebrity interviews or its much-touted book club but ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Oprah is remembered for her pronouncements; what can be forgotten, years after she left the daytime airwaves, is how adept she was at listening, and making the civilians on her couch feel like they were really being heard.

CBS
1971-79

The open spewing of bigotry feels grimace-inducingly current in Donald Trump’s post-presidency. But in the late, great Norman Lear’s “All in the Family,” what’s clear is that this segment of the population, and this style of speech and thought, have always been embedded in the fabric of America. Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), a deeply prejudiced working-class white guy living in Queens, spoke brashly and without shame. Rude and stuck in his ways, Archie was a man living during the rapidly changing 1970s who was roiled by societal shifts, reflected within his own household, that he could barely stomach. While centering on a character who clung to his ignorance, even to his detriment, “All in the Family” boldly tackled numerous controversial topics, from abortion to sexual assault to the Vietnam War. Through Archie’s bluntness it sparked an ongoing national conversation.  

NBC
1975-present

It’s not just hard to think of a comedy show that’s had more of an impact than Lorne Michaels’ weekly 90-minute sketch program — it’s impossible. Sure, over the course of 49 years, some episodes (or seasons) have been less than impressive. But no other show on television has yielded more star power, generated more catchphrases or dominated its category more thoroughly. “Saturday Night Live” fans have grown accustomed to seeing their favorites leave after they’ve grown famous enough to break out of the nest; part of this understanding, of course, is the knowledge that the show will soon enough mint yet more stars. Creating viral YouTube clips before viral YouTube clips were a thing and shaping Americans’ understanding of politics, celebrity and commercial culture, “SNL” remains a trailblazer.

CBS
1959-64

Submitted for your approval: the gold standard in anthology television, the show that helped popularize science fiction, fantasy and the macabre in primetime. But what might have been the most subversive part of “The Twilight Zone” was how creator and host Rod Serling was able to use those genres to tackle issues such as race, war and humanity, all at a time of profound change for the medium and for the nation. The original ran for five seasons on CBS and spawned multiple remakes as well as a theatrical film. “The Twilight Zone” created a template used today by modern series like “Black Mirror,” and its theme song is among the most recognizable — and spooky — of all time. (To read guest contributor David Chase’s tribute to “The Twlight Zone,” click here.)

HBO
2018-23

It’s hard to know where to begin when praising “Succession,” but we’ll try. There’s creator Jesse Armstrong’s precise portraiture of the upper 1% of the 1%, as embodied by the characters within the Roy family, along with the buzzards who fly around them. There are the dazzling actors comprising the company of the Emmy-winning HBO drama, each of whom shone brightly over the course of the show’s four profound, hilarious, tragic, stressful, Shakespearean seasons. (Calling out just a few in a short blurb would be unfair to the show’s always brilliant ensemble.) And then there was its beautiful, inventive direction, led by executive producer Mark Mylod, who would consistently deepen the plots scripted by Armstrong and his writers. There were moments of merriment in which the series felt like a comedy, but just as quickly, “Succession” could become the saddest show you’d ever seen. Armstrong probably ended it at the right time, but when we realize we’ll never see the Roys again, we say “Fuck off!”

PBS/HBO/Max
1969-present 

Half a century on, “Sesame Street” looks like a profound work of televised idealism. Created by a nonprofit endeavor aiming to use the medium to educate, “Sesame Street” brings together lovable and compelling characters, lessons in both academics and morality and a cityscape backdrop that’s utopian in its ethos: Everyone on the block takes care of one another. (When the meanest guy on the block is a furry green Grouch, you’re doing all right.) Resiliently surviving network changes and evolutions in audience taste and attention span, “Sesame Street” plugs along for yet another generation of kids.

NBC
1982-93

While high-concept shows are thick on the ground these days, “Cheers” looks deeply out of fashion. The series was built around a remarkably simple premise: the lives and interactions of the staff and regulars of an average neighborhood bar. From the recovering-alcoholic owner to waitresses both high-minded and working-class to the barflies with tabs as long as the Charles River, the show had room for all. The simplicity and purity of the setting created collisions between characters for 275 episodes and 11 seasons and launched the careers of Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, Shelley Long, Kelsey Grammer and more. Grammer led the spinoff series “Frasier” — itself in the conversation as one of the great television sitcoms. And all of that stemmed from a little bar in Boston.

ABC
1977

Few more potent examples of the power of television exist than “Roots.” Based on Alex Haley’s majestic novel, the eight episodes of this miniseries followed an American family from before it was forcibly made American. Kunta Kinte (played at different ages by LeVar Burton and John Amos) is kidnapped from Gambia and sold into slavery; after crossing the Atlantic, Kunta eventually dies, but not before bearing a child who will continue a family story reaching into and beyond the Civil War, and the end of America’s horrific practice of enslavement. While it’s been the source of sequels and a remake, the original serieshad an impact that can’t be matched — by pretty much anything — though it did kick-start a trend of massive miniseries that included “Shogun,” “The Thorn Birds” and “Lonesome Dove.” More than 100 million Americans stayed home on consecutive January nights to discover the story of Kunta and his descendants — perhaps the defining example of television acting as steward of our collective imagination, and our collective memory.

CBS
1970-77

Few TV genres would grow to be as expansive as the portrait of the single girl who lives, loves and works in the big city, which means even trailblazers in their own right — like Tina Fey or Issa Rae — are in debt to Mary Tyler Moore. After emerging in “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” the actor broke barriers both in front of and behind the camera with her self-titled sitcom, co-created by James L. Brooks and Allan Burns. Mary Richards’ independent life as a news producer in Minneapolis channeled the women’s movement that was making national headlines when the show debuted in 1970; Moore’s role as a producer, through her then-husband Grant Tinker’s company MTM Enterprises, would turn her into a mogul as well as a TV star. While “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” wasn’t always as message-forward as contemporaries like “Maude,” no one could deny that it walked the walk.

NBC
1989-98

“Seinfeld” was a brilliant showcase for the sensibilities of co-creators Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. But its masterstroke, and the reason it has lived on in syndication, was its construction of a world. Jerry’s Manhattan is bigger than his apartment building, or the interactions he has with his three best friends; each day is a collision with petulant small-business owners, love interests with quirky expectations, a bizarre and demanding entertainment industry and social mores that Jerry feels duty-bound to deconstruct. It’s little wonder the series was, at its height, a catchphrase-generating machine — few shows wereas adept at speaking, confidently, in a language entirely of their creators’ own design, and trusting that audiences would stay on the ride.

HBO
2002-08

Since it began, TV has been guilty of telling cop stories that follow familiar dichotomies: Cops good, perps bad. That’s begun to change over the past decade, but before shows like “Orange Is the New Black” dared to suggest that even murderers and drug dealers deserve humanity, there was “The Wire,” David Simon’s five-season opus that wasn’t afraid to stray from the glorious legacy TV has typically offered to men in blue. This isn’t to say that the politics of “The Wire” match a 2023 viewer’s understanding of the world precisely; these days, there are sitcoms that unpack the racialized truth about police brutality with more detail. But what the show did right was exceptional: Thanks to the journalistic lens of its creator, former police reporter Simon, and the nuanced performances of stars like Dominic West, Idris Elba and Michael K. Williams, “The Wire” was among the first dramas to depict the ways that corruption and wrongdoing happen on both sides of the line between cops and criminals.

HBO
1998-2004

A candy-colored tribute to finding oneself in the Big Apple? A romance whose principals aren’t potential lovers but best friends? A thrillingly dark character study of a woman who understands everything except her own desires? Check, check and check. “Sex and the City” is still with us, in the altered form of the reboot “And Just Like That …”; from the outsized fashions to the winsome central performance by Sarah Jessica Parker, the franchise has kept a hold on its fans. But its original run of episodes deserves special citation for its mastery of a trickily shifting tone, and for its balance. Each of the four women experiences setbacks on the path to finding what Carrie Bradshaw once called “real love.” And those challenges were depicted with a pureness of emotion, an open and uncynical willingness to talk about matters of the heart, that resonate still today.

AMC
2008-13

It’s not just that the descent of Bryan Cranston’s Walter White from unfulfilled high school chemistry teacher to meth kingpin of the Southwest is one of the true breathtaking accomplishments of the Peak TV era. It’s that, in so many ways, “Breaking Bad” exemplifies the peak of that era: the meticulously cinematic visual style; the cunning, corkscrew tonal shifts of the writing; the collision of workaday domesticity with unsparing criminal violence; the murderer’s row of supporting characters (Saul Goodman! Gus Fring! Mike Ehrmantraut!) matching its diamond-sharp main cast led by Cranston, Aaron Paul and Anna Gunn. Even the show’s transformation from basic cable darling to national sensation once it was available on a nascent streamer called Netflix epitomizes the TV culture of its moment. “Breaking Bad” was so addictively great that its makers, including creator Vince Gilligan, couldn’t quit it, and expanded the story with the excellent spinoff, “Better Call Saul.” To borrow from Walt’s most famous speech, this was the show that knocked.

Fox
1989-present

No show has had more impact on comedy — animated or live action – than Matt Groening’s creation, which originated as interstitials on “The Tracey Ullman Show” but turned into arguably the most significant program in TV history. “The Simpsons” increased the pace and metabolism of the sitcom with quick comedic flashbacks and absurd imaginary cutaways, and its sharply satiric takes on popular culture helped crystallize the sensibility of multiple generations of viewers. All of these innovations took place within the context of a series that hearkened back to TV’s earliest offerings — an admittedly warped yet loving family sitcom, one that pushed the medium forward while still recalling the togetherness and warmth of the Ricardos and the Cleavers. After 35 seasons and more than 750 episodes, “The Simpsons” isn’t merely the longest scripted primetime series ever, it’s a television institution.

HBO
1999-2007

The ultimate antihero drama is, quite literally, an analysis of the gangster. When James Gandolfini’s depressive mob boss Tony walked into the office of New Jersey psychotherapist Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), he kicked off television’s extended study of maverick masculinity in crisis — a mode that would raise the medium’s creative ceiling and define its upper echelon for decades to come. Embracing the open pastures of HBO, creator David Chase drew on his own Garden State upbringing, as well as Mafia epics like “The Godfather,” to deliver his take on assimilation, American decline and Freudian family dynamics. Tony’s interwoven personal and professional lives form a tapestry of dysfunction: the deep denial of his wife, Carmela (Edie Falco); the nagging emotional need of his mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand); and a stacked deck of pathetic failsons, from his nephew Christopher (Michael Imperioli) to his actual son, A.J. (Robert Iler). The mix of banality and brutality in a suburban dad who murders a man on his daughter’s college tour tapped something deep in the country’s subconscious. Dr. Melfi might have something to say about that.

AMC
2007-15

In the years since “Mad Men” concluded in 2015, Matthew Weiner’s brilliant, Emmy-winning drama is certainly thought of as one of the best series of all time, along with being the launching pad for stars Elisabeth Moss and Jon Hamm — yet it’s also tainted by a divisive, too-neat series finale, as well as sexual harassment allegations (and accusations of bullying) against Weiner. Perhaps its vexed legacy is fitting. “Mad Men” was set during one of the most turbulent decades in U.S. history, with the character of Don Draper (Hamm) at its center, and Don, despite his angular jawline and (usually) immaculate appearance, was often destructive and messy. The show, though, was a thing of beauty, and its aesthetics alone lifted television’s second Golden Age to new heights. Through Don’s story, Weiner used a New York City ad agency and the historical events of the 1960s (the death of Marilyn Monroe, both Kennedy assassinations) to dive into the rise of feminism, class striving (Don, after all, had stolen another man’s identity) and American ambition. “Mad Men” itself was pure ambition. With its fully realized characters — Don, Peggy (Moss), Pete (Vincent Kartheiser), Joan (Christina Hendricks), Betty (January Jones), Roger (John Slattery) and many more — “Mad Men” reached for the stars. And as Bert Cooper (Robert Morse) said just before he died, while gazing at his television in wonder as he watched the Apollo 11 astronauts walking on the moon, “Bravo.”

CBS
1951-57

Falling down in a vat of grapes. Cramming chocolates into her mouth. Begging to perform at the club or getting absolutely zooted on Vitameatavegamin. You don’t need to have seen “I Love Lucy” recently to be able to conjure, instantly, the image of its rubber-faced heroine going absolutely anywhere for a laugh. But Lucille Ball wasn’t just a performer. As co-owner of Desilu Studios (with her husband and co-star Desi Arnaz), Ball was an entertainment industry powerhouse at a time when doors weren’t open to women. And she used that power to turn Lucy Ricardo into a manically heightened Everywoman, responding to very real slights, disappointments and setbacks with a howl. Many shows — some of them later attempts by Ball herself — have tried to capture what elevated “I Love Lucy,” but there was some alchemical alignment among Ball, Arnaz, their writers and TV in its infancy that made that show, to this day, one of a kind.