The 50 Best TV Shows Of The 21st Century So Far, Ranked

Back in April, THR‘s team of intrepid film critics got together and ranked the 50 best films of the 21st century so far, delivering a list that was fascinating, head-scratching and packed with cinematic greatness. Like all well-conceived lists, it offered room for enthusiastic agreement and virulent disagreement — as well as a guarantee that any title you had yet to see was surely worth checking out.

That list began with an important question: “Why now?” Their conclusive answer: “Why not?”

That makes it even easier for us to justify our own stab at the same project: Why rank the best TV shows of the past 24 years — which isn’t even a quarter of a century — right now? Because the film critics did it first and it looked like a lot of fun!

It was not fun.

OK, that’s not exactly accurate. Debating great TV is always fun. But the past 24 years have been a television boomtown (not to be confused with the NBC drama Boomtown, which didn’t receive much consideration, though its first season was excellent). Whether you call it a golden age (or platinum, or your metal of choice), expand the boundaries of John Landgraf’s “Peak TV” well beyond its actual definition or just employ the #TooMuchTV hashtag, there’s little doubt that the television landscape on Dec. 31, 1999, has almost no resemblance to what the kids are watching on their iWatches today. (That, incidentally, is a different problem. “The kids” are watching their content on YouTube and TikTok, and they probably don’t even know what an “NBC” is, much less a Boomtown.)

There were 600 original scripted shows airing on broadcast, cable and streaming in 2022 alone. That it was already hard enough to list the 50 best shows of last year is a luxury problem. We’re living through the greatest era of television content ever, and that’s fantastic, but it makes listing very challenging. It’s likely that we excluded at least five of your favorite shows ever. We apologize.

We had to start with parameters. We agreed that any show that had episodes airing after Dec. 31, 1999, was eligible for consideration, even if that show first premiered in the 20th century. That meant, for example, that The Sopranos was eligible, but only for the five seasons that aired from 2000 on. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was eligible, but it lost three and a half seasons. You get the idea.

The next parameter was harder to set and entailed more bickering. We decided that while the volume of available international television has expanded exponentially in the streaming era, it’s hard to feel like we’ve seen a representative output of, say, the Korean TV industry. To avoid claiming authority based on such a limited sample, we decided to restrict the list to English-language options. (That said, we collectively urge everybody to watch HBO’s My Brilliant Friend.)

The democratizing required for three critics to co-author one list meant that we went from a tentative and amorphous blob of several hundred contenders to a more refined blob that was still over 100. We watched and rewatched countless episodes, a task that was frequently a real pleasure. And, in a handful of multi-hour Zooms, we deliberated on every single one of those contenders and then spent hours hashing out placement.

There was, as you would imagine, some consensus, and then there were spirited fights. When you have partisans of stately costume dramas and wonky multi-part political documentaries and CBS multicam sitcoms all making their cases, things can get heated.

This final list doesn’t look like what any of our individual Top 50s would be — and that’s exactly how a process like this is supposed to work. A lot of these shows are canon, and you’ll see them in any ranking of this type. But hopefully you’ll find some of our inclusions strange and unexpected. Even more hopefully, perhaps when you read our explanations, you’ll come away understanding our perspective and, if you haven’t watched the show yourself, you’ll seek it out — even if you’re not sure you care about a Southern Gothic drama revolving around a wrongfully accused murderer or the story of sisters trying to save a bar in East Los Angeles.

It’s also a living list. After a wave of series finales in the past year, we ended up selecting very few active shows here. But there are definitely a few shows that, if they close their runs strong, would have a great case for inclusion if we re-ranked this list in five years. Or if we re-ranked this list in a week. Or if we reconsidered the list before it was published.

We each have feelings about things that are missing from the list or things that the list could use more of. Short version: Needs more British TV! Needs more animation! Needs more reality TV!

So, enjoy reading the list and getting worked up about what we got right and what we got wrong.

OK, fine: We did have fun making it.

Honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): America to Me, Arrested Development, Bob’s Burgers, The Good Wife, The Great British Bake-Off, Happy Valley, Harley Quinn, It’s a Sin, Justified, The Office (U.S.), Sense8, Somebody Somewhere, This Country, Up, Watchmen

‘Sex and the City’ (HBO, 1998-2004)

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Sex and the City may have technically debuted in the 1990s, but the groundbreaking HBO dramedy defined the early 2000s. It also inspired a generation of millennials who imprinted themselves on the show at a young age and dreamed of moving to Manhattan to live a life of glamorous brunches and shopping sprees. Well, those young people probably ended up living a more harrowing, Great Recession-era, Girls-like adulthood. But maybe they were never really paying attention, anyway. Sex and the City’s blithe legacy sits in contrast to the intense pathos it actually depicted. Probing sex columnist Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), uptight attorney Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), prim trophy wife Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and man-eating publicist Samantha (Kim Cattrall) all patently struggled through the onset of middle age. They faced cancer, divorce, financial collapse, unwanted pregnancy and the creeping existential dread that they may never be good enough for the men they loved. No one fantasizes about being lost in their 30s and beyond. Audiences were always meant to relate to and learn from these complex women, yet somehow, they got stuck adorning their personae like costumes.
‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ (Nickelodeon, 2005-2008)

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Avatar: The Last Airbender may be a kids’ show, but it’d be a mistake to presume its target audience reflects a lack of sophistication. Set in an Asian-influenced fantasy land where certain people can control one of the four elements — water, earth, fire, air — the animated series follows a 12-year-old chosen-one figure (Zach Tyler Eisen) and his teenage allies on their quest to bring peace to the four factions. Creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko balance rich world-building with intricate character work, yielding a series flexible enough to flit between goofy adolescent shenanigans and geopolitical maneuvering, and confident enough to balance episodic detours with long-form character development. (Zuko’s arc remains, to this day, one of the most satisfying redemption stories the medium has to offer.) In doing so, it delivers one of the most compelling ruminations on the cost of war and the power of peace for viewers of any age.
‘South Side’ (Comedy Central and Max, 2019-2022)

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Comedies like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Great News and Girls5eva are the obvious legacies of 30 Rock. But there’s no show in the post-30 Rock epoch that quite captures its absurdist, Easter egg-y, frenetic-joke-machine brilliance more than the criminally under-discussed gem South Side, the funniest sitcom you’ve probably never heard of. Across three outstanding seasons and one network shift — from Comedy Central to Max — the show zeroes in on the lovable hustlers who work at and frequent a dinky rent-to-own business in inner-city South Chicago. Boasting a pitch-perfect ensemble, South Side showcases a Chicago microculture so specific that not all viewers — not even all Chicagoans — will understand every layer and nuance. And yet each laugh feels like a private in-joke between the writers and the audience. Behind the fun and weirdness, creators Diallo Riddle, Bashir Salahuddin and Michael Blieden audaciously chronicle issues like police brutality, gentrification and political corruption.
‘Vida’ (Starz, 2018-2020)

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Your typical Los Angeles-set series spends most of its time in familiar, upscale neighborhoods — your Silver Lakes or WeHos — and features at least one character whose only dream is making it as an actor-writer-director. Tanya Saracho’s Starz half-hour — calling Vida a “comedy” isn’t right, even if there are occasional laughs — wasn’t your typical Los Angeles-set series. Entrenched deeply in its Boyle Heights setting, Vida carved out a thoroughly distinctive space as a scathing commentary on gentrification, a touching portrait of sisterhood, a wide-ranging exploration of the LGBTQ community’s place in Mexican American culture and, for those who like such things, one of the sexiest shows ever made. Thanks to In the Heights and the past two Scream movies, Melissa Barrera has seen the biggest post-Vida career bump after burning up the screen as free-spirited and initially self-destructive Lyn. But casting directors should be working their way through this ensemble to take advantage of Mishel Prada’s tightly wound fragility, Roberta Colindrez’s confident swagger and Ser Anzoategui’s character-acting chops.
‘The Underground Railroad’ (Amazon Prime, 2021)

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Like the Colson Whitehead novel it’s based on, the miniseries version of The Underground Railroad is built around a fantasy: that of a literal train snaking south to north, ferrying its passengers to freedom. But it’s the sort of embellishment that illuminates, rather than hides, deeper truths. The perilous journey undertaken by Cora (a stunning Thuso Mbedu) is deeply personal on the one hand, fueled by the fear and sorrow and rage left behind by her mother’s apparent abandonment. It’s also a panoramic view of Black America under slavery that casts its eye beyond the usual trauma narratives. Barry Jenkins deploys his signature close-ups and rich color palettes to find the ghosts that linger after the past has burned away, to weigh the pain and resilience passed through generations, to make room for tenderness and beauty amid unspeakable horror. At times, it can be hard to watch. Always, it’s impossible to ignore.
‘The Crown’ (Netflix, 2016-present)

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You basically know what you’re getting with British costume dramas: stuffy people in gorgeous clothes sticking their noses up at societal changes, while galumphing through the inevitable marriage plot. An addictive genre for many, naturally. And Peter Morgan’s planned six-season royal epic The Crown, a retelling of the seven-decade reign of Queen Elizabeth II (played by Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton as the character ages), is perhaps the apotheosis of British costume dramas. One of the most expensive TV series of all time, The Crown boasts casting, art design and photography that suggests no expense has been spared in re-creating the entire second half of the 20th century — one can only imagine the wig budget alone. Sumptuous visuals accompany an intricate soap opera in which real-life family dynamics cannot be disentangled from political intrigue. Ultimately, The Crown is about the destructive nature of duty: When one is bred to serve a nation, “self” must be extinguished in favor of symbol.
‘The Leftovers’ (HBO, 2014-2017)

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Rightly or wrongly, audiences watched the first season of Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s adaptation of the latter’s novel and came away craving answers about the so-called Sudden Departure, in which 2 percent of the world’s population … well … suddenly departed. That, however, was not what Lindelof had in mind, as subsequent seasons became less and less about solutions and more and more about the melancholy of unresolved grief and the frustration of the unknowable. The Leftovers jumped forward and backward in time, moved from the New York suburbs to a Texas border town to Australia, contemplated the wonders of inter-dimensional travel and marveled at the cultural significance of Perfect Strangers. And while it wallowed in a kind of sadness that went straight to the marrow of its main characters, it found joy in the mere act of survival. Wholly unpredictable on narrative and emotional levels, The Leftovers got better and better as it went along, anchored by Justin Theroux and the astonishing Carrie Coon — to hell with the Emmy voters who never acknowledged her.
‘Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown’ (CNN, 2013-2018)

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The arc of American culture has pushed toward xenophobic isolationism in recent years, but don’t blame the late Anthony Bourdain. From A Cook’s Tour to No Reservations to The Layover to Parts Unknown, the former celebrity chef refined his focus from an enthusiasm for food that required some travel to an enthusiasm for the world that used food as one of several gateways to understanding and embracing other cultures. While his earlier shows might have offered the blueprint for subsequent food/travel hybrids like Somebody Feed Phil, Taste the Nation and Chef’s Table, Parts Unknown was the tragic summation of Bourdain’s personal and ideological journey. Traversing the globe many times over, Bourdain made friends wherever he went and endeavored to build bridges, no matter how foreign he initially found each destination. We’re all poorer in Bourdain’s absence, but richer for the archive of journeys he left us.
‘Station Eleven’ (HBO Max, 2021)

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“I remember damage,” goes an oft-repeated refrain in Station Eleven. And what damage it is: The precipitating event of Patrick Somerville’s adaptation of the Emily St. John Mandel novel is a flu that decimates the global population over the course of mere days. In the immediate aftermath, we bear witness to survivors extending love and care to each other amid overwhelming panic and grief; many years later, we pick up with a theater troupe performing Shakespeare in the ruins of civilization, in costumes cobbled together from the detritus of the old world. Arriving in the thick of the very real COVID-19 pandemic, the series stood out for its emphasis not only on survival but on life: on the found families that form in the rubble, on the renewed sense of purpose to be discovered in desperate times, and above all on the power of art to bring meaning and catharsis to a hurting world. As long as people endure, Station Eleven reminds us, so do culture and community.
‘Beef’ (Netflix, 2023)

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The 21st century has had no shortage of series about the sheer anguish of existence, but few have articulated that malaise more persuasively, or movingly, than Beef. The series begins with an averted disaster, as two strangers (Steven Yeun and Ali Wong) nearly collide in a parking lot — only for their ensuing road rage to metastasize into a feud far more uproarious, more shocking and more destructive than any fender-bender would have been. But the show’s biggest surprise is the profound care that creator Lee Sung Jin directs toward these hurting characters. No detail of their lives is too subtle to clock — Lee’s portrait of the hyper-specific milieu that is the Asian American community of the greater Los Angeles area is practically unmatched in its specificity. No fear of theirs is too enormous to name, no sin too dark to face. In its tenderness, Beef offers a salve to that most mortifying of human conditions: the conflict between our desperation to be seen and our terror of being known.
‘Insecure’ (HBO, 2016-2021)

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Insecure distinguished itself early in its run as one of the sharpest, funniest and sexiest comedies on television at the time, but star-creator Issa Rae and showrunner Prentice Penny never let the series get high on its own supply of jokes and sitcom setups. Instead, over time they crafted a vibrant narrative that continued to lean into the pathos of late-20s existentialism and friendship discord. South L.A. BFFs Issa (Rae), a nonprofit drone, and Molly (Yvonne Orji), a high-powered attorney, were just trying to figure it all out — passions, boyfriends, forward progress. But their top dog/underdog dynamic couldn’t last forever as bougie Molly failed again and again at love because of her impossible standards and awkward Issa gained self-assuredness when she finally untethered herself from the things holding her back. Was Molly also holding her back? Sometimes the show’s honesty was too painful.
‘The Deuce’ (HBO, 2017-2019)

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One of the most thematically ambitious and creatively meticulous TV series ever produced, this sprawling epic chronicles the decades-long evolutions of the sex economy and porn industry in the ’70s and ’80s. Centered on the seediest era of Times Square, David Simon and George Pelecanos’ three-season drama refuses to romanticize a historical hellscape that saw sex workers degraded by violent pimps, johns and skin-flick producers alike. Stars James Franco (playing shady businessmen twins) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (as a streetwalker turned acclaimed erotica director) add wattage, but it’s an extensive cast of lesser-known actors that anchor the emotions of a series rooted in byzantine systemic dealings. (Gary Carr, Emily Meade, Dominique Fishback, Jamie Neumann, David Krumholtz, Sepideh Moafi and Roberta Colindrez will take your breath away.) Ultimately, The Deuce is an exacting and heartbreaking study in how the knotted intersections of police, artists, activists, politicians and crime syndicates all rerouted the lives of brutalized women.
‘Band of Brothers’ (HBO, 2001)

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A remarkably balanced mix of Greatest Generation hagiography and war-is-hell iconoclasm, HBO’s 10-part adaptation of Stephen Ambrose’s book about the journey of the 101st Airborne Division’s “Easy” Company from jump training to stops throughout the European Theater is on the Mount Rushmore of Hollywood’s World War II treatments. The chronicle of that complicated road to heroism is also a pinnacle of one of this era’s great TV partnerships, with HBO and Gary Goetzman and Tom Hanks’ Playtone shingle subsequently working together on miniseries standouts John Adams, The Pacific and Olive Kitteridge, as well as Big Love (one of those very good Peak TV offerings that has gotten a little lost in a sea of greatness). The cast of up-and-coming stars is packed with familiar faces — so many that you’ll want to watch twice to properly take in the epic cinematography and impeccable period costumes and production design.
‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ (The CW, 2015-2018)

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“You’ve ruined everything, you stupid bitch,” Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) croons to herself in a power-ballad ode to the bizarre satisfaction of emotional self-flagellation. “You’re a stupid bitch. And lose some weighhht.” The brilliance of Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna’s improbable four-season musical comedy is how expertly it incorporates hilariously specific and quippy lyrics into catchy pop melodies to tell unspoken truths about modern womanhood and mental illness. After Rebecca abandons her successful NYC law career to pursue a sweet-natured old camp boyfriend (Vincent Rodriguez) on the West Coast, she embarks on a journey into her own fractured mind through the delight — and weirdness — of song. One of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend‘s refreshing strengths is rerouting expectations without dragging plot: At the drop of a hat, bitter enemies become best friends, annoying bosses become sensitive confidants and socially inappropriate behavior becomes a treatable DSM-5 diagnosis. Memorable tunes include klezmer-infused Jewish mother guilt trip “Where’s the Bathroom?” and lonely-kid bop “I Have Friends.”
‘The Shield’ (FX, 2002-2008)

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Shawn Ryan’s fictionalized treatment of the Rampart Division police scandal hasn’t always been the easiest show to embrace. It’s a brash and violent nightmare of a series, either ripping stories of police brutality from the headlines or presaging subsequent law enforcement horrors, with Michael Chiklis’ Vic Mackey as perhaps the most reprehensible antihero in an era of reprehensible antiheroes. Leaving aside whether or not The Shield celebrates bad cops — it doesn’t, but misreadings are understandable — it’s hard to think of any show that started better or ended stronger than this one, which put FX on the prestige drama map. Between the poles of its spectacular pilot and finale, The Shield expertly combines misbehavior and Shakespearean tragedy, all built around Chiklis’ lead performance and boosted by extended guest turns from the likes of Glenn Close, Forest Whitaker and Anthony Anderson. Not to mention Walton Goggins’ career-making work as a character who went from racist cad to series conscience.
‘Chernobyl’ (HBO, 2019)

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HBO’s miniseries is the most terrifying dramatization of the COVID-19 pandemic that both preceded the pandemic and isn’t about a pandemic at all. But Craig Mazin’s five-episode historical thriller examining the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster still chillingly captures the medical barbarity, political obfuscation and societal panic that can erupt when invisible forces endanger people’s bodies en masse. Employing a stellar English-speaking cast that includes Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard, Emily Watson and Jessie Buckley, the narrative flits between timelines as Soviet scientists, citizens and government officials respond to the nuclear meltdown in real time and eventually face the fact that an entire Ukrainian city was poisoned with radiation. At times, the series veers closer to horror than drama: It’s impossible to watch Chernobyl without your breath catching in your throat. Most TV entertains. This TV ripples through your body.
‘Jane the Virgin’ (The CW, 2014-2019)

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Jane the Virgin began with the spectacularly sensationalized premise of a 20-something virgin (Gina Rodriguez) finding herself pregnant by a hot, rich hotelier (Justin Baldoni) after an artificial insemination mix-up. And it only grew wilder from there: Kidnappings, secret twins and fake deaths were all on the table, alongside more grounded storylines about co-parenting, love triangles and green card applications. The show not only managed to keep all those plates spinning at once but did so with a panache that made it look positively easy. The juicy twists might have been “straight out of a telenovela,” as its mahogany-voiced narrator (Anthony Mendez) was so fond of gasping, but its North Star was the deep and abiding love that bound all of its characters. In combination, they made Jane the Virgin into one of the most purely enjoyable primetime soaps on television — equal parts smarts, heart and just plain fun.
‘Orange Is the New Black’ (Netflix, 2013-2019)

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Showrunner Jenji Kohan famously described her funny and often heartbreaking prison dramedy as a “Trojan horse” show that used its affluent white, blond protagonist (Taylor Schilling) as a gateway into a world populated by the types of women who were and are still not as commonly seen on television. One of the first true streaming hits, OITNB employed its minimum-security federal women’s prison setting to shed light on the lives of some of society’s most vulnerable constituents, characters who ended up in the judiciary system due to a combo of unjust circumstances and complicated choices. Its cast of mostly female and genderqueer performers brought together one of TV’s most diverse and exciting ensembles, which allowed the show to tell stories of women across the spectra of age, class, gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality.
‘Veep’ (HBO, 2012-2019)

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Veep could probably earn a spot on any TV favorites list just for its insults, so deliciously crass that they verge on poetry. (“Jolly Green Jizzface,” directed at Timothy Simons’ detestable string bean Jonah, is a particularly snappy classic.) But Armando Iannucci’s political satire leapfrogs up the rankings for its savagely cynical understanding of power — which is that the quest for it can be deeply stupid and the people gunning for it downright contemptible. Its title character, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), is neither mastermind nor idealist but a status-obsessed opportunist. Her staff consists of a mostly useless collection of rats, fools and yes-men. Their fortunes rise and fall not on their best laid plans but on embarrassing oversights, trifling quarrels and sheer random luck. That the past several years of American politics only seem to have demonstrated how accurate this portrait was makes Veep look even funnier and sharper in retrospect — if also somewhat more depressing.
‘Fleabag’ (BBC Three and Amazon Prime Video, 2016-2019)

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From the first time Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s title character turns straight to the camera, mere episodes into the premiere, Fleabag operates on a level of intimacy that feels startling. It’s not just that we’re made privy to her pettiest grievances or her dirtiest fantasies, but that, with her signature smirk, she seems for a second like she might be able to read ours as well. So we giggle with her at her sexual mishaps and groan alongside her during family drama. In time, as we glimpse the grief underneath her mask of insouciance, we come to cry along with her too. But Fleabag’s shrewdest insight of all is that to be truly loved is to be fully seen — and that to invite that gaze invites risk and pain and complication along with it. “It’ll pass,” the Hot Priest (Andrew Scott) tells Fleabag in the finale. His words come as little comfort for her broken heart. And still, we can see in her final sad smile to us that all the love has been worth all the hurt.
‘Game of Thrones’ (HBO, 2011-2019)

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There’s perhaps no show that better defined the 2010s than HBO’s awe-inspiring Game of Thrones, one of the last “appointment television” series that connected viewers in an unfractured zeitgeist. Co-creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss crafted a darkly sociopolitical high-fantasy literary adaptation that brought sex, gore and climate disaster to a genre typically populated with frolicking elves and wise dragons. Indeed, the dragons in GoT were more akin to nuclear weapons than supportive companions. Set in a medieval world where the noble houses battle it out to win the right to rule a continent while ignoring the threat of ice creatures preparing to descend from the north and create perpetual winter, Game of Thrones captured a generation of viewers who saw the real-life omnicrises of the era interpreted through this magical lens. Say what you will about the disappointingly rushed final season — at least Benioff and Weiss actually concluded a story that author George R.R. Martin likely never will.
‘Broad City’ (Comedy Central, 2014-2019)

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If Girls perpetuated a bleak vision of warring hipster chicks barely getting by in the outer NYC boroughs, then consider Broad City its sunny counterpart, a hilariously puckish scatological stoner-com about an enduring friendship between two women whose combined goal for city life isn’t to “make it” but to “make it fun.” (The show is also quite literally sunny, as all but one of its five seasons are set during endless New York summer, enhancing the show’s surreal playfulness and sense of mischief.) Comedians Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer play versions of themselves, a close-knit introvert-and-extrovert slacker duo who spend their 20s getting into schemes and scrapes and only just escaping all the expected consequences. Abbi and Ilana live out the best possible version of “fuck around and find out.”
‘How To With John Wilson’ (HBO, 2020-2023)

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Even after a few seasons, it’s still hard to explain what, exactly, How To With John Wilson actually is. It’s partially a documentary celebration of New York City minutiae and partially a comic handbook of tips on how to function in an alienating modern world. But starting with the first season finale, titled “How To Cook the Perfect Risotto,” the series became perhaps the definitive guide to being human in the Age of COVID-19 — a lament for what we lost, a celebration of what we retained and a hilarious chronicle of the interconnected absurdities that still rule our lives. Each of the three seasons represents a circuitous pathway through host/director/cinematographer John Wilson’s brain. The treat — well, one of many treats — is trying to figure out how advice on something as mundane as proper battery disposal or bird-watching could lead our laconic protagonist to MTV Spring Break, a notorious cult or a support group for Avatar fans.
‘Parks and Recreation’ (NBC, 2009-2015)

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Even by the sunny standards of the Mike Schur-iverse, which also includes Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place and Rutherford Falls, Parks and Recreation’s determined optimism stands out. Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope is a small-time bureaucrat whose ambitious ideals are matched only by her tireless drive. So infectious is her enthusiasm that it slowly wins over nearly everyone around her, including her staunchly anti-government boss Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), to the benefit of all Pawnee, Indiana. From 2023, the buoyant show’s fundamental hopefulness about government feels like a product of a less cynical time; it makes perfect sense that its seven-season run coincided with most of the Obama era. But then, as now, the potency of its uplift lies in its insistence on acknowledging, rather than ignoring, real problems. Parks and Recreation never suggests a society without greedy power players or apathetic voters or entrenched institutional issues. It simply dares to propose that it’s worth trying to build a better world anyway.
‘Battlestar Galactica’ (Sci-Fi/Syfy, 2003-2009)

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There are plenty of superlatives one could ascribe to this groundbreaking allegorical military sci-fi dystopian thriller based on a semi-goofy cult classic ’70s TV series. To date, the Ronald D. Moore reboot, which ran for four seasons on Sci-Fi (which then became Syfy) following a miniseries, remains one of the best depictions of post-9/11 terrorism paranoia, here imagined as a robot coup that destroys all livable planets and sends the last remains of humanity out into space in search of a mythical homeland. It’s also a prescient look at how AI could advance and rewrite the meaning of humanity itself. Perhaps most astoundingly, Battlestar Galactica is one of the all-time most insightful television explorations of faith, religion and the ancient lore that makes all of us. So say we all.
‘Review’ (Comedy Central, 2014-2017)

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There is an inherent irony in ranking a series about the very folly of trying to judge anything with any pretense of objective authority. Our protagonist is Forrest MacNeil (Andy Daly), whose job is to undertake life experiences and rate them on a five-star scale. But as the unpredictable consequences of his assignments add up, it becomes darkly, hilariously apparent that his analyses aren’t reviews so much as unhinged dispatches from a man needlessly destroying his own life. Review debuted on the tail end of TV’s love affair with antiheroes, and in his warped way, Forrest stands with the baddest of them. By the end of this singular, delightfully deranged series, he’s endured divorce and jail time and been responsible for multiple deaths, all in service of a gimmicky show he considers a higher calling. It ends the only way it could: with Forrest still on that stage, forever trapped in a hell of his own making.
‘I May Destroy You’ (BBC One and HBO, 2020)

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True to its title, I May Destroy You will probably wreck you. In the premiere, inspired by star and creator Michaela Coel’s real-world experiences, Arabella is raped; she’ll spend the rest of the series reacting to that unthinkable violation. But at every turn, the show resists the tidy outlines of a sexual assault drama. It’s a gorgeously visualized work capable of delighting you with its warm, clever characters one minute and laying you flat with their sorrow the next. It sizes up the accepted cultural scripts about consent, gender, race, abuser versus abused and prods them from every angle. It raises questions of revenge, forgiveness and healing, then eschews the route of moral clarity for the more challenging, and ultimately more rewarding, wilds of ambiguity. How do you move on from the worst thing that’s ever happened to you? I May Destroy You dares to suggest that maybe you never really do. Maybe, in the end, there is just Arabella and her creator, wrestling back their own narratives to do with them as they see fit.
‘Survivor’ (CBS, 2000-present)

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When Survivor premiered in 2000, the narrative revolved around eating bugs and the potential demise of respectable television as we knew it. Twenty-three years and 44 seasons and 648 episodes later, perhaps no show has delivered more hours of entertainment to its fans, somehow managing to come up with unprecedented twists, catastrophes and emotional crescendos every week. The stars have earned mandatory exclamation points after their names — Richard Hatch! Boston Rob! Parvati! Sandra! Cirie! Survivor shaped our cultural vocabulary and established and refined a template that countless competition shows subsequently absorbed. But more than that, the show has adapted to a changing society, becoming a staging ground for challenging conversations about racial privilege, gender identity and all manner of social etiquette.
‘Better Things’ (FX, 2016-2022)

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Like Atlanta (which is a few notches higher on this list), Better Things first established its excellence as the thing it appeared to be on the surface: a comedy about an actress with some resemblance to star and co-creator Pamela Adlon, struggling with the vicissitudes of her career and raising three daughters. But then it proceeded to prove, from week to week, that it could be a completely different show with a completely different tone, all held together by one of the biggest hearts on television. That versatility became especially evident from the second season on, when Adlon took over full-time directing duties and delivered biting Hollywood satire, pensive meditations on secular Jewish identity, loving Jerry Lewis homages and respectful conversations about abortion and pronoun use. Adlon may have starred in and directed and written most of the series, but kudos also must be given to the superb ensemble featuring Mikey Madison, Hannah Riley, Olivia Edwards, Celia Imrie and more.
‘Deadwood’ (HBO, 2004-2006)

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It never really tarnished the argument for the show’s greatness, but for over a decade, David Milch’s revisionist Western came with the asterisk that its cancellation after the third season left viewers hanging. Against all odds, Deadwood: The Movie came out in 2019 and, unlike countless other reboots and revivals, did no harm to the show’s legacy, offering reassurance that a satisfying resolution existed. Not that that’s why anybody watched the show. No, you watched Deadwood for Milch’s dialogue, as beautiful and profane as poetic verse spread across the outhouse floor at a frontier saloon, delivered by an ensemble led by Timothy Olyphant and the great Ian McShane as well as nearly every scruffy, dirt-encrusted character actor imaginable. An intense, provocative and very funny exploration of the illusions of civilization and civility, Deadwood demands and rewards multiple viewings and liberal use of closed-captioning to capture every nuance.
‘Peep Show’ (2003-2015, Channel 4)

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Before Succession was the funniest nihilistic tale about a family that slowly destroys each other, Peep Show was the funniest nihilistic tale about a pair of best friends that slowly destroy each other. Jesse Armstrong’s searingly brilliant black comedy ran for nine seasons in the U.K. and gifted us the travails of two neurotic roommates whose toxic pettiness toward each other disrupts their careers, relationships and basically all forward movement in their lives. Thanks to a distinctive shooting style that puts the audience in the visual perspective of the leads, we’re privy to every hilariously malicious internal thought that priggish yuppie Mark (David Mitchell) and ne’er-do-well moocher Jez (Robert Webb) ever have. Their venom is our joy.
‘Rectify’ (SundanceTV, 2013-2016)

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Ray McKinnon’s rich, evocative series brings Southern Gothic literary trappings to an ostensibly conventional antihero story: wrongfully accused man gets off of death row and returns to his hometown looking to clear his name. Slower, funnier and more layered in regional and spiritual specificity than whatever you’re expecting — with lead Aden Young giving a performance that should have generated four seasons of Emmy nominations — Rectify is an earnest exploration of faith and redemption, a wonderfully bizarre fish-out-of-water story and occasionally a taut mystery. It’s also a leading contender for the “Best Show Most People Have Never Even Heard Of” crown.
‘Friday Night Lights’ (NBC and The 101 Network, 2006-2011)

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At first blush, this high school football drama seems to play on all the usual teen-soap tropes. There’s the star quarterback and his cheerleader girlfriend, the nerd and the artist and the bad boy. But its brilliance lays in how much it deepens, subverts and ultimately transcends all those stereotypes through sharp writing (led by showrunner Jason Katims) and sensitive performances. From the Peter Berg-directed pilot onward, the show’s documentary-style handheld camera roves Dillon, Texas, with a palpable curiosity about all the souls who reside there, its compassion particularly guided by head coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and his wife, Tami (Connie Britton). Friday Night Lights avoids idealizing its characters but strives to find their humanity through their lowest moments and biggest mistakes. (And there were some fumbles, particularly in the notorious second season.) Perhaps it’s the show itself that explains its philosophy in that indelible locker room motto: “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”
‘Halt and Catch Fire’ (AMC, 2014-2017)

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The narrative around Halt and Catch Fire has always been that it started off bad and eventually became something special when it shifted its focus away from Lee Pace’s Joe MacMillan and toward the characters played by Mackenzie Davis and Kerry Bishé. This is false. Did Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers’ odyssey through the early years of the personal computer revolution and into the online age improve and deepen as it went along? Absolutely! The fourth season, in which a decade of narrative and technological chickens came home to roost in alternately devastating and uplifting fashion, was as strong a series conclusion as you’ll find on this list. But really, what Halt and Catch Fire did is what any good story should do: Characters evolved and changed, developed relationships and tore relationships apart. Oh, and they came up with a pretty great search engine in the process. Above all, the things that paid off in the fourth season paid off because of three previous seasons of deep emotional investment — and because Pace, Davis, Bishé, Scoot McNairy and Toby Huss were so fantastic.
‘Breaking Bad’ (AMC, 2008-2013)

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Dramas exposing the moral rot underlying respectable-looking men are a staple of 21st century prestige television, as one can probably glean from skimming through this very list. But few transformations are more breathtaking than the one undertaken by Walter White (Bryan Cranston), who starts Breaking Bad a struggling chemistry teacher and ends it a legendary drug kingpin. Creator Vince Gilligan spares no judgment or detail in his portrait of Walt’s descent, first into semi-reluctant criminal activity and then, gradually but firmly, into outright villainy. By the time he’s roaring “I am the one who knocks” at his wife in season four, we’re equal parts disturbed, dazzled and disturbed by our own dazzlement. With Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman serving as the battered heart of the series and larger-than-life baddies like Giancarlo Esposito’s Gus Fring supplying the danger, Breaking Bad delivers delicious twists and high-wire thrills, all wrapped up in a portrait of wounded masculinity as damning as it could be alluring.
‘Atlanta’ (FX, 2016-2022)

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“A Princeton dropout (Donald Glover) manages his cousin’s (Brian Tyree Henry) burgeoning music career” went the woefully inadequate logline for FX’s brilliant comedy. More practically, Atlanta was a show about whatever happened to be on the minds of Glover, his brother Stephen Glover, frequent director Hiro Murai and the rest of a dazzling team that will be creatively fueling the industry for decades to come. Sometimes the music business actually was what was on Glover’s mind, but when you tuned in for an episode of Atlanta, you were just as likely to meet a terrifyingly pale recluse with a love for ostrich eggs; learn why A Goofy Movie was “the Blackest movie of all time”; get a prickly critique of Tyler Perry’s entertainment empire; or, for an entire season, alternate between adventures on a European tour and entirely unconnected stand-alone stories that left even fans scratching their heads. All in the best way possible.
‘Enlightened’ (HBO, 2011-2013)

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In an era awash with stories about very bad men doing very bad things, Enlightened‘s innovation was the realization that people doing very good things could be pretty awful too. By all rights, Amy Jellicoe should be a hero: a woman armed with an earnest determination to improve herself and the world around her, and the gumption to make it happen. As played by Laura Dern, however, she’s a toxic blend of self-righteous and self-absorbed. But what Amy misses, Enlightened sees. Years before The White Lotus, Mike White tapped into the aching loneliness underlying its flawed, even repellent characters. The show takes the heartaches Amy has suffered seriously and seeks out the private pains of wallflowers like Tyler (White) and screwups like Levi (Luke Wilson). In their humble lives, and in the complicated relationships flowing between them, this unexpectedly hilarious, exquisitely poignant series finds enough hope and beauty to transcend the sappiest of Amy’s self-help platitudes.
’30 for 30′ (ESPN, 2009-present)

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At its best, ESPN’s flagship documentary franchise — created by Bill Simmons and Connor Schell as 30 docs tied to the cable giant’s 30th anniversary, though it has continued beyond that — gives distinctive filmmakers the chance to tell fascinating sports-adjacent stories that haven’t been in the spotlight. Early standouts included The Band That Wouldn’t Die (from Barry Levinson), No Crossover (Steve James), The Two Escobars (Jeff and Michael Zimbalist) and The Best That Never Was (Jonathan Hock). But then the series’ absolute high point, O.J.: Made in America, tackled the biggest, most chronicled story in all of 20th century sports. With the masterful Made in America, Ezra Edelman took a topically unconstrained approach that presented O.J. Simpson, his rise and his fall within the context of race, class, gender, sports, justice and, well, just about everything one could ever want to discuss about the best and worst parts of our national identity. It’s unlikely that 30 for 30 will ever top Made in America, but recent entries like The Luckiest Guy in the World (about NBA star Bill Walton) prove it’s still finding enthralling and essential stories to tell.
‘The Americans’ (FX, 2013-2018)

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It will never not be strange that for much of its run, general audiences treated The Americans like a chilly, intellectual exercise created for critics, rather than the breathlessly thrilling spy caper that it always was. Maybe the challenge was that the show’s central couple — precariously married agents Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell) — were Russians in the heart of the Cold War? If you’re still a holdout, forget about whether you’re willing to “sympathize” with the alleged bad guys; just know that Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields’ six-season series is sexy, stylish, features a killer ’80s soundtrack, a pair of brilliant central performances — and it’s a game of cat-and-mouse that would do John le Carré proud. Plus, wigs! This is popcorn entertainment, not homework! It’s just astoundingly great popcorn entertainment. But not for Martha. Poor Martha.
‘The Daily Show’ (Comedy Central, 1996-present)

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It isn’t that The Daily Show wasn’t funny under Craig Kilborn’s watch. But when Jon Stewart took over in 1999, it became funny and essential. Over the next 15 years of Stewart’s run, it was an indispensable source of political and cultural commentary, and it became the way a generation of viewers received and processed news. In addition, the stable of correspondents cultivated by Kilborn, Stewart and Trevor Noah — whose seven-year tenure following Stewart was far better than anybody could have hoped for — grew into the key voices in left-leaning comic punditry. Consider this listing an acknowledgement for The Colbert Report, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee and too many individual standouts to list, though Roy Wood Jr., Jordan Klepper, Wyatt Cenac, Michelle Wolf and Desi Lydic would be a good place to start.
‘BoJack Horseman’ (Netflix, 2014-2020)

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Perhaps it’s only appropriate that BoJack Horseman, which centers on a man who’s also a horse, should be impossible to categorize as any one thing. It’s a biting showbiz satire chronicling the rocky comeback of a washed-up sitcom star (voiced by Will Arnett). It’s an unvarnished portrait of depression that experiments with style and storytelling to trace its characters’ pain to the deepest corners of their psyches. It’s an animated joke machine that takes full advantage of its anthropomorphized animal kingdom, designed by Lisa Hanawalt, to dish out one cheeky pun and zany sight gag after another. Synthesizing all these elements into a single distinctive work of art, creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg tackles what might be the biggest question of all: whether it’s ever really possible to atone, to change, to dust oneself off and get back on the — well, you know. Crucially, BoJack Horseman does not claim to know the answer. Its epiphanies are followed by backslides as frequently as by transformations. But in its soulful, searching spirit, it delivers its own sort of catharsis.
‘Freaks and Geeks’ (NBC, 1999-2000)

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There will never be another teen dramedy like Freaks and Geeks, a simultaneously earnest and gut-wrenching 18-episode broadcast unicorn that forgoes sexy soapiness in favor of cultural specificity and unvarnished adolescent upheaval. In 1980, in the suburbs of Detroit, brainiac Lindsay (Linda Cardellini) branches out and befriends a group of unpredictable burnouts, changing the course of her life. The Paul Feig and Judd Apatow-helmed high school series unleashed an entire subgenre of heartrending gross-out alt-comedy that would help define the culture of the first 20 years of the millennium. It also launched the careers of countless young talents who grew into bona fide stars and stalwarts, from Seth Rogen and James Franco to Jason Segel and Martin Starr. Indeed, before this gang was walking red carpets and making millions at the box office, they were a bunch of relatably awkward weirdos living out all the tempest-in-a-teapot emotions of being a misunderstood kid.
‘Girls’ (HBO, 2012-2017)

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Lena Dunham doesn’t care if you love her or hate her; she only cares that she tells a story honestly. When it debuted on HBO in 2012, her stunningly authentic semi-autobiographical show rocked a TV ecosystem that primed audiences to expect a dark comedy about four, white female friends in NYC to deliver a quixotic shoes-and-cosmos fantasy. Instead, the only fantasies it peddled were the ones that depicted a fresh-out-of-college confessional writer finding literati success despite a dearth of detectable talent. And even that didn’t last long in the show’s timeline. Over the course of six delicately shot seasons, Dunham’s self-absorbed Brooklynite Hannah Horvath gloriously obliterated her friendships (with equally egocentric young women played by Allison Williams, Jemima Kirke and Zosia Mamet); her romances (most notably with a toxic fuckboi played by Adam Driver in his first major role); and her career (as a so-called “voice of [her] generation”) before she even hit 30 years old. Haters may remember the show for Dunham’s unabashed nakedness, but fans recognize we were always meant to bask in our hate. Girls was akin to an assiduously crafted Flemish still life: We may have been looking at rotten fruit, but there was beauty in every brushstroke.
‘Better Call Saul’ (AMC, 2015-2022)

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Like the series that birthed it, Better Call Saul focuses on the moral descent of a man — in this case the future Saul Goodman, here known as Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk). If Breaking Bad verged on pure wish fulfillment, though, its spinoff is the bill come due. To be sure, its pleasures are still ample: thrilling twists, delicious competence porn, the most striking visual compositions of possibly any show on this list. But its devastations even more so. Odenkirk’s performance accumulates power with every lost scrap of Jimmy’s soul, while co-lead Jonathan Banks sags under the weight of Mike’s gauntlet of tragedy and reckoning. But it’s Rhea Seehorn’s Kim Wexler who emerges as the show’s true secret weapon, a soul at once pure in her love for Jimmy and in danger of becoming corrupted by it. It didn’t take long for Better Call Saul to come out from under the shadow of Breaking Bad and reveal itself as a triumph all its own. But in its insights, it also challenged and deepened the original show in ways we never could have predicted.
‘Reservation Dogs’ (FX/Hulu, 2021-2023)

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There has never been a collection of stories quite like Sterlin Harjo’s Reservation Dogs. It’s not merely that Indigenous teen characters are a demographic rarely depicted on television, though they are; nor is it just that their plotlines here shrug off centuries of stereotypes about Native Americans, though they do. It’s the way these tales are told, with boundless curiosity and a freewheeling sense of experimentation. The show allows for oddball visitors from the spirit plane, ventures with equal confidence into the boozy pleasures of a work conference and the painful history of Indian boarding schools, sets joy beside grief and mingles the mundane with the magical. Any single episode might put you in stitches over the obliviousness of a would-be influencer or in tears over the collection of departed ancestors watching over our characters in the here and now. Collectively, they build a world that feels as lived-in and as distinctive as any home.
‘The Wire’ (HBO, 2002-2008)

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We’ve done you a favor here by putting The Wire at No. 5, because now you don’t need to experience David Simon’s staggeringly great street-level Baltimore drama with the pressure that comes from your friendly neighborhood TV critic calling it the best show ever made. It still might be, but for the purposes of this list, just settle in for the Dickensian sprawl, in which cops and drug dealers and politicians and stevedores and teachers and editors and reporters cross paths, all players in the endlessly flawed and endlessly aspirational American experiment. The Wire might not always (or ever) make you feel good about the state of law enforcement, urban renewal, education, journalism and power in this country, but the dialogue is so spectacular and the cast so deep and packed with future stars that watching broken systems fail has never been this exhilarating.
’30 Rock’ (NBC, 2006-2013)

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Cynical Hollywood satires are practically as old as Hollywood itself, but few are the hilariously self-immolating sendups that also underscore the good-old importance of mentorship. Tina Fey’s scrappy, surreal and sublime NBC sitcom about the inner workings of a bottom-rung NBC sketch comedy series should never have worked on paper. Harried fictional showrunner Liz Lemon (Fey) could have been too nerdy, too feral to lead a primetime TV series in the early aughts. But the platonic chemistry between Fey and Alec Baldwin, who plays her debonaire network exec boss/foil Jack Donaghy, transforms the clever joke machine into a treatise on professional growth and leadership. Comedy duo Fey and Amy Poehler produced two of the most beloved sitcoms of the era, but whereas Poehler’s Parks and Recreation maintained that life could be sweet, Fey’s 30 Rock always anticipated the sour. And its cynicism — about Hollywood, the Bush administration, corporate greed — appears to have prognosticated the cultural and political crises we find ourselves in 15 years later. 30 Rock also inspired a generation of women to always be workin’ on our night cheese.
‘Succession’ (HBO, 2018-2023)

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Succession should be hard to swallow. It’s about the Fox News-esque Waystar Royco. Its lead characters are a collection of bumbling heirs and venal execs who spend their time rearranging their loyalties and morals to suit the whims of their CEO and patriarch, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), and mostly failing to win his approval anyway. There’s no one to root for, no thing to root for; all of it is bad. And yet the show’s dazzling virtuosity draws us in in spite of ourselves. Its scripts lay bare how an overabundance of money and a deficiency of love can warp the soul. Its performances (led by Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin and too many more to name) find the wretched humanity still buried within anyway. Meticulously composed sets, costumes and music speak their own language about the priorities of the ultra-wealthy, while an anxious, zoom-prone camera captures their inability to take much pleasure in any of it. Take a step back, and Succession starts to look like a skeleton key for understanding how and why our capitalist society feels broken. It’d be unbearably upsetting if it weren’t so bleakly hilarious — or is it the other way around?
‘The Sopranos’ (HBO, 1999-2007)

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The ingeniously gutting mafia series was not formulaic, but executive producer David Chase did create the formula that ushered in the modern Golden Age of television. James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano — anxious, violent, vulnerable, ruthless — became the paradigm of the antihero to root for, a paradoxical archetype that governed prestige dramas in the early 2000s. There is no Don Draper, Walter White, Vic Mackey or countless other “complicated” protagonists without this New Jersey mob boss, who turned to therapy to manage the stresses of running a crime family and keeping his own brood in line. Yet Tony was never the entirety of this show, and The Sopranos would never have hit its heights without a supporting gallery of charming, dangerous made men (Tony’s buddies and relatives played by Vincent Pastore, Steven Van Zandt, Tony Sirico, David Proval, Dominic Chianese and Michael Imperioli) and questionably loyal women (Edie Falco, Nancy Marchand, Aida Turturro, Lorraine Bracco and Drea de Matteo as wife, mother, sister, therapist and hit victim, respectively). Perhaps there is no HBO as we know it today without the cinematic revolution The Sopranos brought to the small screen: Its artful use of dialogue, cinematography and editing reimagined how audiences could engage with the so-called “boob tube.” Bada bing!
‘Mad Men’ (AMC, 2007-2015)

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What if the people who shape our cultural narratives, the geniuses who tell us how to feel about cars and perfume and cameras and politics, are horribly flawed? What if our sense of morality and decency is manufactured by people who are barely hanging on by a thread themselves? It’s a question that viewers frequently asked during our most recent Golden Age of television and in the #MeToo era that followed, and it’s the question that ripples through Matthew Weiner’s masterpiece. Was Don Draper (Jon Hamm) beyond repair? He certainly didn’t think so, even if he gave everybody closest to him cause for doubt. In strange ways, Mad Men was more optimistic than its prestige television cohorts, and in many other ways it was more cynical. Reconciling those two seemingly contradictory impulses over seven seasons was heartbreaking, hilarious, bleak and inspiring, generating a lifetime of instantly recognizable memes, marvelously quotable dialogue and indelible moments. Maybe you saw yourself as a Don or a Joan (Christina Hendricks) or a Peggy (Elisabeth Moss). Maybe you knew in your heart that you were a Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) or a Betty (January Jones). Or maybe you wanted them all to crash and burn in a glorious hail of ’60s and ’70s debris.