A ranking of the most game-changing, side-splitting, tear-jerking, mind-blowing, world-building, genre-busting programs in television history, from the medium’s inception in the early 20th century through the ever-metastasizing era of Peak TV
ILLUSTRATION BY SELMAN HOŞGÖR FOR ROLLING STONE
How do you identify the very best series in a medium that’s been commercially available since the end of World War II? Especially when that medium has experienced more radical change in the nine years between the finales of Breaking Bad and its prequel, Better Call Saul, than it did in the 60-odd years separating Walter White from Milton Berle? The current Peak TV era is delivering us 500-plus scripted shows per year, many of them breaking boundaries in terms of how stories are told and who’s doing the telling. So, we decided to update our list of television’s all-time best offerings, originally compiled in 2016. Once again, we reached out to TV stars, creators, and critics — from multihyphenates like Natasha Lyonne, Ben Stiller, and Pamela Adlon to actors like Jon Hamm and Lizzy Caplan as well as the minds behind shows like The X-Files, Party Down, and Jane the Virgin — to sort through television’s vast and complicated history. (See the full list of voters here.) Giving no restrictions on era or genre, we ended up with an eclectic list where the wholesome children’s television institution Sesame Street finished one spot ahead of foulmouthed Western Deadwood, while Eisenhower-era juggernaut I Love Lucy wound up sandwiched in between two shows, Lost and Arrested Development, that debuted during George W. Bush’s first term. Many favorites returned, and the top show retained its crown. But voters couldn’t resist many standouts of the past few years, including a tragicomedy with a guinea-pig-themed café, an unpredictable comedy set in the world of hip-hop, and a racially charged adaptation of an unadaptable comic book. It’s a hell of a list.
The first of several movie-to-TV projects on this list. This one is a spinoff rather than an adaptation, though, since Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi have appeared on the show in the roles they played in the 2014 vampire rockumentary film. The FX version moves the action from Wellington, New Zealand, to Staten Island and focuses on three traditional vampires — preening warrior king Nandor (Kayvan Novak) and narcissistic, sex-crazed spouses Laszlo (Matt Berry) and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) — who share a house with superhumanly dull “energy vampire” Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) and Nandor’s frustrated human familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillen). Shadows is unspeakably raunchy, remarkably silly, and diabolical in the way it manages to be stupid and clever within the same breath.
Before The Wire, before The Sopranos, there was Oz, the canary in the coal mine for the idea of scripted dramas existing outside the broadcast network ecosystem. Created by St. Elsewhere and Homicide: Life on the Street vet Tom Fontana, Oz took place in a maximum security prison that housed some of the nastiest humans depicted on television, before or since. There was sadistic white supremacist Vern Schillinger (J.K. Simmons), menacing gang leader Simon Adebisi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), the predatory Chris Keller (Chris Meloni), and many more. The world of Oz was so vicious that even the relatively benign prisoners — audience surrogate Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), Black nationalist Kareem Saïd (Eamonn Walker), or third generation inmate Miguel Alvarez (Kirk Acevedo) — would be tempted into heinous deeds over time. Yet in the midst of all the murder, torture, and psychological warfare, Oz was also a thoughtful, deeply experimental drama with a lot to say about the tension between punishing criminals and rehabilitating them, and what confinement does to good men and bad ones.
For seven seasons, The Good Wife was a fine example of how loftier creative ambitions could be smuggled into the formula of a broadcast network procedural drama. When that show ended, creators Robert and Michelle King built a spinoff designed for the lack of restrictions of the streaming universe. Not only could Christine Baranski’s legal grande dame Diane Lockhart now use words she was never allowed to say on Good Wife, but The Good Fight could go to much stranger and more ambitious places in terms of style and substance, as Diane wound up at a predominantly Black law firm and also struggled to accept the surreality of life under President Trump. Some creators benefit from working with some degree of limitation, but unshackling the Kings has unleashed their creative best selves.
The 1968 film version of Neil Simon’s play about a mismatched pair of divorced middle-aged friends sharing an apartment was a beloved, Oscar-nominated, box office hit. Yet the sitcom adaptation that debuted two years later has arguably left a larger cultural footprint than either the film or the many, many productions of the play. That’s just how divinely paired Tony Randall and Jack Klugman were as, respectively, anal retentive photographer Felix Unger (in many ways, the prototype for Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory) and slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison. The two were so smashing together that their personalities took over not only much of the Odd Couple legacy, but of other series that briefly intersected with it. It’s impossible to think about the classic game show Password, for instance, without first thinking of Felix and Oscar competing together and arguing over Felix’s attempt to use “Aristophanes” as a clue for “bird.” Or to hear anyone else talk about the dangers of assuming without flashing to Felix delivering that lesson in a courtroom.
Rick Sanchez is a mad scientist whose many inventions allow him to go anywhere and do anything, from visiting parallel realities to turning himself into a talking pickle to get out of going to family therapy. The animated Rick and Morty, created by Justin Roiland (who voices the title characters) and Dan Harmon from Community, seems to be similarly without limits — not only in how disgusting and bizarre individual adventures can be, but in how easily the series can toggle from celebrating Rick’s unstoppable brilliance to pointing out what a toxic, emotionally abusive jerk Rick can be to his grandson and everyone else unlucky enough to cross paths with him.
The newest show on this list, and the only non-English one, Squid Game is emblematic of the way the streaming era has broken down content borders, so that your new obsession can just as easily be an Israeli drama about an Orthodox Jewish man who falls in love with a widow as it can be the latest Disney+ Marvel series. But beyond what it represents for the TV business, Squid Game — in which a group of financially desperate South Koreans compete in a deadly series of children’s playground contests with a huge winner-takes-all cash prize — is a gripping thriller, a ruthless socioeconomic satire, and a great showcase for actors like Emmy winner Lee Jung-jae.
The red-headed stepchild of the Must-See TV era, NewsRadio seemingly aired on every night of the week but Thursdays, even though the workplace sitcom’s strongest moments should have earned it a place in NBC’s all-star lineup alongside celebrated series like Seinfeld or Friends. Everything was slightly, amusingly off about this show. The creative team decided, for instance, to just let anxious station manager Dave (Dave Foley) and confident reporter Lisa (Maura Tierney) have sex in the second episode instead of stringing out the romantic tension in a manner typical of Nineties comedy. Stories could spin out of the strangest ideas, like arrogant news anchor Bill (Phil Hartman) becoming addicted to the disgusting sandwiches in the office vending machine, or eccentric station owner Jimmy James (Stephen Root) having his memoir translated from English to Japanese and then back into English, so that it was suddenly titled Jimmy James: Macho Business Donkey Wrestler. The fifth and final season, produced after Hartman was murdered, is bumpy, and it can be difficult now to watch scenes with Joe Rogan as the station’s electrician without thinking about who and what Rogan has become. But the series as a whole deserved so much better than it got from a network that never seemed to appreciate what it had in Paul Simms’ creation.
The primetime landscape used to be as dotted with private-eye dramas as it was with cop shows, hospital shows, and Westerns. By far the best and breeziest example of the whole genre starred the preternaturally relaxed James Garner as Jim Rockford, a low-rent detective living in a trailer on a beach in Malibu, working for anyone who will pay his rate of $200 a day plus expenses, and getting punched in the stomach every 10 minutes or so for his smart mouth. In addition to its staggering likability, Rockford also represents a cross-section of TV drama history. One of its creators was Roy Huggins, the man responsible for Fifties and Sixties classics like Maverick (also starring Garner) and The Fugitive. The other was Stephen J. Cannell, who would become one of the first celebrity showrunners on the back of a tidal wave of Seventies and Eighties hits like this, The A-Team, and 21 Jump Street. And within a few seasons, the show began employing writer David Chase, who would go on to create The Sopranos.
The variety show, once one of TV’s most thriving genres, was on its last legs by the mid-Seventies. (The deservedly short-lived variety-show sequel to The Brady Bunch also debuted in 1976.) Jim Henson and friends, though, gave the format one last, glorious burst of life through two choices. The first was to center itself around Kermit the Frog and brand new Muppet creations like inept comedian Fozzie Bear and the egotistical, violent Miss Piggy; simply having the Muppets as the performers gave all the familiar showtunes and comedy bits a feeling of everything old being new again. The second, and more crucial one, was to split the focus between the performances and the chaos backstage, as Kermit attempted to wrangle lunatic Muppets like Gonzo the Great while appeasing celebrity guests like Bernadette Peters and Mark Hamill. The most sensational, celebrational, Muppetational Henson project of them all.
Johnny Carson was the third of six hosts who’ve sat at the Tonight Show desk so far. But with all due respect to Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and now Jimmy Fallon, Johnny’s 30-year tenure stands apart as its own entity. His cool, detached, self-deprecating persona — he was usually funnier in the aftermath of a joke bombing than when delivering the more successful punchlines — made Tonight appointment viewing regardless of NBC’s fortunes in primetime. The period in the early Seventies when the show had just moved from New York to Los Angeles stands out as the platonic ideal of the late-night talk-show format. Frequent A-list guests like Burt Reynolds were so comfortable with Johnny that it began to feel like the audience was eavesdropping on conversations that the participants didn’t know were being filmed. Johnny’s retirement was the beginning of the end of the monoculture, as audiences quickly fractured between Team Dave, Team Jay, and Team Arsenio, when no one had come close to successfully challenging Carson’s own supremacy.
The greatest Boomer nostalgia project of them all, before Boomer nostalgia threatened to overwhelm the entire world. A young Fred Savage played Kevin Arnold, a naive suburban kid running the gauntlet of adolescence at the same moment America was enduring the turbulence of the late Sixties and early Seventies. The Wonder Years was equal parts frothy and sad, bookended by a pilot where Kevin’s longtime friend (and frequent crush) Winnie Cooper (Danica McKellar) learns that her brother Brian died in Vietnam, and a finale where the adult Kevin (the voice of Daniel Stern) tells us that Kevin’s father (Dan Lauria) will die not long after the events of the series. The show’s air of innocence was infectious, and that’s been ably captured by the current reboot (which was for a time produced by Savage, before colleagues at the show accused him of sexual harassment and assault), focusing on a Black family in the South in the same era, with one brief but powerful link to the original.
In the 1973-74 TV season, CBS rolled out arguably the greatest night of TV programming ever, with a five-show Saturday comedy lineup — All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show — that was all killer, no filler. Spoilers: All five shows are on this list, starting with the sketch series that would bring the evening to an uproarious close. Carol Burnett had been a variety-show and sitcom staple for most of the Sixties, most famously in her collaborations with pal Julie Andrews, but her talents weren’t fully unleashed until she was given her own series where she could parody movies (like the famous Gone With the Wind spoof featuring a dress with a curtain rod sticking out) or TV (the recurring fake soap opera “As the Stomach Turns”), try on accents, sing, and even expertly play the straight woman for co-stars like Vicky Lawrence, Harvey Korman, and Tim Conway. The comic energy of the show was so strong that it soon became as beloved for the moments where the actors would crack each other up mid-sketch as for the scenes that went off without anyone breaking character. At the end of each episode, Burnett would tug on her ear — a secret signal to her beloved grandmother that also told her audience to be thankful they had just spent three hours watching some of the best small-screen comedy shows ever made.
In the years leading up to this dramatization of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, Peter Morgan had written a number of films (most notably 2006’s The Queen) about the royal family and/or British prime ministers. With The Crown, Morgan got to dive deep into his favorite subjects, casting multiple actresses (Claire Foy, then Olivia Colman, and soon Imelda Staunton) to play Elizabeth at various ages, and depicting her complicated relationships with various prime ministers (especially Foy opposite John Lithgow’s Winston Churchill, and Colman opposite Gillian Anderson’s Margaret Thatcher). Morgan also mined rich dramatic terrain in the many times where Her Royal Highness felt she had to put the best interests of the monarchy ahead of the best needs of her husband Philip (Matt Smith, then Tobias Menzies, and soon Jonathan Pryce), her sister Margaret (Vanessa Kirby, Helena Bonham Carter, Lesley Manville), and her son Charles (played in recent seasons by Josh O’Connor, with Dominic West about to take over), among others. The Crown walks a narrow tightrope — made perhaps even narrower in the aftermath of the real Queen Elizabeth’s recent passing — between criticizing the very nature of royalty and feeling great sympathy for the people living within the family’s tight strictures.
Thirty Helens agree: With apologies to Barenaked Ladies, this sketch-comedy Gen X touchstone was the best thing to come out of Canada in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson shared a gift for wringing enormous laughs out of premises that sound utterly incoherent on the page. A bitter man who sits in a folding chair on the sidewalk and pretends to crush the heads of people in the distance? A lonely, sex-obsessed half-chicken woman? A man whose refusal to shave his vacation beard threatens to ruin his life? None of this should be funny. Somehow, all of it is, including this year’s revival that lodged Seventies novelty hit “Brand-New Key” into the heads of everyone lucky enough to watch it.
Being the straight man in a comedy can be a thankless role. Bob Newhart, though, built an entire career out of making audiences laugh as the one sane man in an insane world. His first and best sitcom vehicle (though his Eighties hit Newhart had its charms) didn’t take that concept quite literally, but it was close. Newhart played Dr. Bob Hartley, a Chicago psychologist with a roster of eccentric patients, a sarcastic but loving wife in Suzanne Pleshette’s Emily, and a life overall that seemed designed to take Bob out of his very tiny comfort zone. Smart, sophisticated, and damned funny.
The first show to suggest the streaming era could make room for the kinds of characters and stories that TV had no place for, even in those heady post-Sopranos years on cable. Orange started with Taylor Schilling’s annoying, entitled Piper being sent to federal prison, where she was initially terrified by all the Black, brown, and/or lower-class women she met there. Quickly, though, the Jenji Kohan-created series opened the eyes of both Piper and the audience to the fact that her fellow inmates — mentally ill Suzanne (Uzo Aduba), trans hairdresser Sophia (Laverne Cox), wisecracking addict Nikki (Natasha Lyonne), maternal Gloria (Selenis Levya), justice-seeking Taystee (Danielle Brooks), and many more — were complicated human beings with interesting stories of their own. (Most of them, frankly, much more interesting than Piper’s, but even the writers seemed to understand that.) Orange took big creative swings that didn’t always connect, but had plenty of incredible moments, and opened up vast new possibilities for TV as a whole.
Why would anyone want to do this? Who would find it in any way a smart or useful idea to take Fargo, an Oscar winner, and perhaps the most beloved movie of one of the most idiosyncratic filmmaking teams of all time in Joel and Ethan Coen, and attempt to turn it into a TV show? Somehow, though, it’s worked. The masterstroke of Noah Hawley’s ongoing anthology is that it is not a remake or reboot of the film, but a kind of Coen Brothers remix, set in the same fictional universe as the adventures of pregnant Minnesota cop Marge Gunderson, and filled with allusions to other Coen films, but telling its own stories. There are characters meant to evoke the Coens, most notably Allison Tolman’s dogged investigator Molly Solverson in the first season, and actors like Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Stuhlbarg who have appeared in one or more Coen film. Mostly, though, what Hawley has managed to do (particularly in the first two seasons) has been to bottle some of the spirit of those movies while letting the TV series ultimately feel like its own offbeat thing, as well as a fabulous showcase for actors like Tolman, Patrick Wilson, Kirsten Dunst, Ted Danson, Bokeem Woodbine, Carrie Coon, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, David Thewlis, Glynn Turman, and more.
Steve Coogan has been playing Alan Partridge — an obnoxious, socially incompetent, insecure radio and TV presenter in complete denial of just how minor his celebrity is — for over 30 years, on the radio, on television, in films, podcasts, and even live stage shows. It’s not hard to understand why the English actor has made this the role of his lifetime, especially when you watch I’m Alan Partridge. In the wake of ruining his career and personal life at the end of his previous series (the talk-show parody Knowing Me, Knowing You), Alan retreats to a spartan existence as a local radio host manning the graveyard shift, living in a small hotel whose employees quickly grow tired of his special requests and desperate attempts to get to know them better, and struggling to make his way back to the BBC. Coogan and collaborators like Armando Iannucci (future creator of Veep) did not shy away from how difficult it was to be in the company of their title character, though they periodically gave glimpses of the great entertainer Alan believed himself to be, like his attempt to act out the entire opening sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me.
What is dead may never die, but for the most part, the TV titles that have been resurrected over the last several years have tended to belong to big hits that still had currency with contemporary viewers. So why is Starz in 2023 bringing back Party Down, a show whose audience in a given week could be written with only five digits, and that got no awards love to speak of in its two-season run? Does a comedy about cater-waiters frustrated that their bigger Hollywood dreams aren’t coming true really have the same cachet as, say, The X-Files or Will & Grace? But Party Down was just that great in its short existence — a wry, witty, well-crafted, and frequently filthy piece of entertainment, with a wonderful comic bond among an ensemble led by Adam Scott — that if the majority of the people involved the first time are willing to reunite for more misadventures, then it’s worth trying. Are we having fun yet?
For decades, the record for the longest-running live-action sitcom of all time was held by The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, an aggressively wholesome sitcom that debuted in the early Fifties and starred a real-life family playing idealized versions of themselves. That record was finally broken a few years back by Always Sunny, a grubby, uncouth, deceptively brilliant comedy that is such a stylistic and philosophical departure from Ozzie & Harriet in every way that the Nelson family would likely all faint at the sight of it. Sunny stars Rob McElhenney (who also created it), Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day, and Kaitlin Olson as four self-involved idiots who keep colliding with hot-button topics in the news, with financing and interference from Danny DeVito as Howerton and Olson’s grotesque father. Where most classic sitcoms are gasping for air by the time they hit their third or fourth season, Sunny has proved so improbably durable that it wouldn’t be a shock to eventually get to an episode called “The Gang Is Eligible to Join AARP.”
This and fellow HBO miniseries epic From the Earth to the Moon aren’t exactly Tom Hanks-produced spinoffs of his Nineties classics Saving Private Ryan and Apollo 13, respectively. But both suggest that Hanks realized those films only scratched the surface of their subject matters, and that television was the best place to go for a deeper dive. Based on the nonfiction book by Stephen Ambrose, Band follows a single company of airborne infantrymen in World War II, from the innocent days of training camp to the violent chaos of D-Day to the brutal endurance challenge of the Battle of the Bulge all the way to victory in the European theater of the war. And though many of the faces change as soldiers die and naive replacements arrive, the whole 10-hour journey is grounded by the presence of a young Damian Lewis as Easy Company’s humble and reassuring leader, Dick Winters. In 2001, it was the most expensive limited series ever made, and there is plenty of spectacle to be found as Winters’ men fight their way through France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany. But the parts that linger all these years later are the small human ones depicting the physical and psychological wounds Easy Company endured along the way to peacetime.
Part of the shock of Bob Odenkirk’s work on Better Call Saul was that he was so well known for comedy — and particularly for the sort of askew alt comedy that he and David Cross made for four epically weird seasons. Mr. Show was a series about commitment, even if the characters in each sketch tended to commit to the worst possible ideas, like Cross hosting a pre-taped call-in show where viewers are constantly asking about the previous week’s subject, or Odenkirk playing a mob boss who believes, with homicidal conviction, that 24 is the highest number. And from time to time — like Cross auditioning for an acting job with a monologue about auditioning for an acting job — those seemingly awful choices pay off beautifully for all involved.
As we cast our votes, we couldn’t help but wonder: Should we penalize the turn-of-the-century sensation for the sins of its movie spinoffs, and especially of its misguided sequel series …And Just Like That? But Sex and the City isn’t the only hit show in TV history — or even the only one on this list — to suffer from misconceived follow-up projects. (Netflix seasons of Arrested Development, we are looking at you.) And the original run (especially after Michael Patrick King replaced Darren Star as showrunner following the first season) did more than just set fashion trends or inspire countless games of “Are you a Charlotte or a Samantha?” It was a witty and smart look at four women at a particular moment in their lives, and a particular period in New York (even if its cross-section was almost exclusively white and straight) that was as much about the challenges of maintaining friendships as it was about figuring out the right romantic partner. Whatever mistakes came later, Sex and the City itself still deserves to walk proudly in its tallest pair of Manolo Blahniks.
On All in the Family, the arrogant George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) and his patient wife Louise (Isabel Sanford) lived in a blue-collar Queens neighborhood right next door to Archie and Edith Bunker. Hemsley was so instantly electric opposite both Sanford and Family star Carroll O’Connor that George and “Weezy” quickly graduated to their own sitcom. Even better for George, he got to move far away from Archie, to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The spinoff broke new TV ground by making George and Weezy’s best friends the interracial couple of Tom (Franklin Cover) and Helen (Roxie Roker). And, like its parent series, it could get serious about race relations and other current events, such as in an episode where George accidentally attends a KKK recruitment meeting, or a flashback to George’s struggle to get a loan from a prejudiced banker, to open his first dry cleaning store. Mostly, though, the series was a relentless laugh machine, trusting that any combination of Hemsley, Sanford, and Marla Gibbs (as the Jeffersons’ brassy maid Florence) would make comedy magic together.
“You make me pull, I put you down.” Those eight words represent the pithy yet lethal code by which Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) — a U.S. Marshal reluctantly reassigned to the Kentucky field office close to the Harlan County community he had hoped to escape forever — lives his violent yet extremely entertaining life. Throughout Graham Yost’s adaptation of a character featured in several Elmore Leonard novels, Raylan would find ways to make himself judge, jury, and executioner by maneuvering bad guys into situations where his deadly use of force against them would be, well… you see the title of the show here, right? Olyphant’s wisecracking yet vulnerable performance commanded the screen, even as Yost and the other writers threw an army of colorful bad guys at him — Walton Goggins’ fast-talking explosives expert Boyd Crowder above all others. A rollicking ride from start to finish, by which point we all felt like we had dug coal together with Raylan and Boyd.
As Cheers was nearing the end of one of the most successful runs any sitcom has ever had, Kelsey Grammer’s arrogant shrink Frasier likely wouldn’t have been the betting favorite to lead a potential spinoff. But the fact that Frasier never really fit in at the bar made him the perfect candidate in the end. (What would a Norm-centric show have been about if he wasn’t sitting on his stool next to Cliff?) Instead, Frasier returned to his Seattle home to become a minor local celebrity as a radio call-in show host, to help care for his estranged and ailing father Martin (John Mahoney), and to reconnect with his even more repressed brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce), with help along the way from his producer Rob (Peri Gilpin) and Martin’s nurse Daphne (Jane Leeves). It was such a potent mix of characters, actors, and comic muses — more farcical and given to wordplay than Frasier’s adventures back in Boston — that Grammer wound up playing the role for 11 more seasons (after nine on Cheers). Not bad, Dr. Crane.
Consider the numbers around the original kitchen sink comedy: One season. Thirty-nine episodes. Four characters. One primary, extremely cramped set. Within those seemingly narrow confines, Jackie Gleason (as hot-tempered bus driver Ralph Kramden), Audrey Meadows (Ralph’s frustrated wife Alice), Art Carney (Ralph’s goofball best friend Ed Norton), and Joyce Randolph (Ed’s bossy wife Trixie) seemed capable of accomplishing almost anything. It was a broad, silly comedy, sending the studio audience into conniptions over how easily Ralph could be triggered, or how strangely Ed looked at the world. (Told during a golfing lesson to “address the ball,” Ed looks at it and cheerfully says, “Hello, ball!”) It was also a barely-disguised tragedy about a marriage between two people who had expected much more of themselves and each other. (Ralph’s constant threats to send Alice “to the moon!” play far more darkly today than they did in the mid-Fifties.) It was ridiculous, it was deep, and it was immortal — and not just because Gleason and Carney couldn’t resist continuing to play Ralph and Ed in sketches for another two decades. There’s a reason Gleason’s nickname was “The Great One.”
It’s become less fun to look back on this one in light of the many recent allegations of abusive behavior made against its creator, Joss Whedon. But if we can separate the art from the artist (a challenge with several shows on this list), Whedon’s do-over of an early-Nineties movie about a perky high schooler (played here by Sarah Michelle Gellar) who is secretly a warrior against supernatural evil is both a great show and a very influential one. It helped define several generations of both teen and fantasy drama, and its self-aware, cliché-puncturing sensibility wound up as the default mode of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. Not only that, the show’s use of creatures of the night as metaphors for real-life adolescent turmoil — Buffy loses her virginity to Angel (David Boreanaz), and he literally becomes a soulless monster as a result — remains incredibly potent.
Is this the best spinoff of a spinoff? That may depend on whether you classify, say, the Nineties Star Trek shows or the CW’s various Arrow-verse superhero dramas as spinoffs or as entries in a larger franchise. Either way, Good Times — which spun off from Maude, which had already spun off from All in the Family — has a good argument for the title. Esther Rolle and John Amos played Florida and James Evans, spouses trying their best to raise their kids right and keep them safe while living in a Chicago housing project. Amos and then Rolle would eventually leave the show, frustrated that their characters had been marginalized in favor of co-star Jimmie Walker’s broad antics as eldest son J.J. But Good Times managed to provide plenty of thoughtful, issue-oriented comedy around all the excuses for Walker to shout his “Dyn-o-mite!” catchphrase, including a classic episode where youngest son Michael (Ralph Carter) figures out that his school’s IQ test is racially biased, or another where the Evans family realizes their neighbor Penny (a very young Janet Jackson) is being physically abused by her mother.
The 2010s were the decade of the auteur dramedy: half-hour shows where one person wore multiple hats as creator, writer, director, and star, and where the tone and even genre could shift from episode to episode. Among the best of these was Better Things, a thinly autobiographical vehicle for Pamela Adlon (who co-created it with Louis C.K., before he departed due to his mistreatment of women), inspired by her life as a slightly recognizable actor raising three kids on her own. Adlon and company had such command of her world and its characters that Better Things often felt less like a story than an experience — and one that it was easy to keep returning to, week after week, season after season, until we understood every facet of Adlon’s alter ego Sam Fox.
When Lorne Michaels raided the Second City stage casts from Chicago and Toronto for the original Saturday Night Live lineup, it dawned on the people running the famed improv comedy group that perhaps they should make their own show, and fill it with other Second City stars like John Candy, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin, and Dave Thomas. SCTV was built around the idea that everything we saw was being broadcast from the world’s smallest TV station, whether it was a talk show with Thomas and Rick Moranis as Canadian stereotypes Bob and Doug McKenzie; Flaherty and Levy as local newscasters; or Candy and Levy as the polka-playing Shmenge brothers. In time, SNL would wind up poaching several SCTV regulars (most notably Martin Short), and NBC even made the show (which was produced and broadcast in Canada) part of its late-night lineup for a couple of years. But despite the origins of its name, the sketches were first rate, and a great showcase for that incredible cast.
Another art-versus-artist mess. Dave Chappelle’s legacy has unquestionably been tainted by his commitment in recent years to hardcore transphobia. Can we still enjoy the sketch-comedy series that he and Neal Brennan created, and the ways that the show bearing his name mixed hysterical parodies of Black celebrities like Rick James, Prince, and Lil Jon with more nuanced but still funny ideas like the fake game show “I Know Black People”? As with several series on this list (and ones that didn’t quite pass muster with our voters, like Louie and The Cosby Show), perhaps it’s best to fondly remember the experience of watching it back in the day, rather than attempting to revisit and having to think more directly about the now controversial guy at the center of it.
John Cleese did his version of the Larry David deal with HBO long before anyone had heard of the Curb Your Enthusiasm star. A year after the end of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Cleese and his wife (and fellow Python vet) Connie Booth created Fawlty Towers, a sitcom about a small English hotel run by Cleese as the arrogant, easily offended, mostly idiotic Basil Fawlty. They produced six absolutely perfect episodes — most famously the one where Basil can’t stop himself from bringing up World War II when he and wife Sybil (Prunella Scales) play host to a group of German guests — and then just… stopped. And then four years later, they had the inspiration for another six, those were great as well, and then they stopped again, this time seemingly forever. But given how much of modern comedy — particularly the kind that makes you cringe like you’re watching a horror movie — owes a debt to this show, don’t count out the possibility of Basil Fawlty making a belated, uncomfortable return sometime soon.
We could try calling this cop show the missing link between the straightforward, good-versus-evil dramas that typified most of 20th-century television and the more morally ambiguous series that would come to define the medium in the 21st century. But that might suggest that any TV viewer on earth missed NYPD Blue, whose use of more graphic language and nudity helped make it a controversial, incredibly popular sensation from the start. And in Dennis Franz’s brutish, bigoted, alcoholic, and ultimately beloved Detective Andy Sipowicz, the series had an iconic character who helped prepare viewers for the likes of Tony Soprano and Walter White. Mostly, though, NYPD Blue was a great police procedural, filled with cleverly profane dialogue, memorable figures on both sides of the law (particularly in the years when Sipowicz was partnered with Jimmy Smits’ laid-back and soulful Bobby Simone), and a palpable understanding of the trauma that violence inflicts on all exposed to it.
The first three seasons of The Daily Show were primarily parodying the inanity of local TV newscasts. When Jon Stewart succeeded Craig Kilborn as host, the focus quickly expanded to a national, then international, scale. The tone, meanwhile, gradually shifted to one not of gentle satire, but righteous indignation at the terrible things our country’s politicians were doing and saying, and the even more terrible ways the traditional news media apparatus so often covered them. There was still plenty of room for antics from a murderer’s row of correspondents like Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and John Oliver — all of whom eventually graduated to hosting their own terrific variations on the concept. But the Stewart incarnation as a whole developed such a potent reputation for speaking truth to power, surveys at the time suggested that younger viewers were more likely to keep up on current events via this fake news show than from the genuine article.
Some viewers saw this Lena Dunham-created series as a sharp, frequently funny, often poignant look at a group of young women at a precarious moment in their lives. Others saw the whole thing as a massive troll designed to make them angry with the myopia of characters like Dunham’s would-be writer Hannah, Allison Williams’ narcissistic Marnie, Jemima Kirke’s free-spirited Jessa, and Zosia Mamet’s eager Shoshanna. Our voters obviously took the former view, recognizing that Girls understood how often the members of that quartet were being ridiculous, even as it depicted them and their struggles with great empathy. (Though the show had its own blind spots, particularly in being yet another story about a virtually all-white New York.) Girls also effectively launched Adam Driver’s career, and he was wonderful as Hannah’s mercurial on-again, off-again boyfriend Adam. But to love Girls, you had to love its title characters. And we did, no matter how infuriating they could get.
In the days since Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty first played a quartet of older women enjoying their golden years in Miami, sitcom casts have on average gotten substantially younger. The theory, as many TV executives will tell you, is that younger viewers (the most valuable currency in the TV business) would rather watch characters closer to their own age. Yet ask almost any Eighties kid and teen about The Golden Girls, and odds are their faces will light up with memories of Getty’s Sophia insulting her housemates, White’s Rose telling another surreal story from her childhood home of St. Olaf, Minnesota, McClanahan’s Blanche vamping it up for another sexual conquest, or Arthur’s Dorothy destroying an opponent with just a withering stare and a slight change in inflection. When leads are as funny and likable as this group, age ain’t nothing but a number.
Decades before YouTube and TikTok stars were getting development deals, Trey Parker and Matt Stone were hired by a Hollywood executive to produce a profane animated Christmas card. The end result, pitting Jesus against Santa, went as viral as anything could in the mid-Nineties, and soon the characters from the short film — notably, Colorado elementary schoolers Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny — began starring in their own primetime cable show. A quarter century later, Parker and Stone are still telling irreverent South Park stories. Even more than The Simpsons or Beavis and Butt-Head, South Park was long treated by its detractors as the show that would bring about the end of civilization as we know it. To be fair, society’s not doing so great these days, though there remains spirited debate over how much blame should be laid on middle-aged men who grew up watching Kenny be brutally murdered every week. But as the show’s animation process has evolved from the original stop-motion construction paper approach used in the very first episode (titled, of course, “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe”), South Park can now be assembled so quickly that Parker and Stone can make fun of any current event practically within hours of when it happens.
The most enduring image of TV’s first great workplace sitcom is of its hero, variety show writer Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke) tripping over his living room ottoman after coming home from a long day at the office. After a while, though, the series began to alternate Rob’s stumble with a version where he nimbly sidestepped disaster. While viewers were denied the chance to see Van Dyke’s flair for slapstick at the top of every single episode, the alternate version was in some ways truer to the spirit of one of the most graceful shows of them all. Van Dyke and a young Mary Tyler Moore (as Rob’s adoring and adorable wife Laura) were both gifted comedians, but they also projected an air of cool sophistication so strong that viewers and critics began comparing them to John and Jackie Kennedy, who moved into the White House around the same time we first met the Petries. Pair the two of them with old pros Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam, and feed all four of them the best jokes that the great Carl Reiner (who modeled Rob on his own experience working with Fifties variety star Sid Caesar) could give them, and you had an instant, seemingly effortless classic.
Barry Jenkins’ miniseries about slavery is the greatest technical achievement in television history. And with all due respect to Game of Thrones, the new Lord of the Rings series, or any of the medium’s other recent big-budget spectacles, it is not an especially close contest. Jenkins and collaborators like cinematographer James Laxton ensure that every frame is stunning and painterly in detail, no matter how horrifying (a slave being whipped, a house being burned with people inside) or beautiful (the titular railroad is an actual train line, borrowing from the magical realism premise of Colson Whitehead’s novel) the individual images are. No show has ever put as much effort and skill into its sound design, so that viewers feel as if they are standing in the hot sun with escaped slave Cora (Thuso Mbedu), surrounded by chirping insects. And, for that matter, few directors have elicited performances as naked and lived-in as what Mbedu, Joel Edgerton (as a ruthless slave-catcher), William Jackson Harper (as a free Black man trying to get Cora to accept the possibility of good in this world), and others deliver here. A knockout for all the senses, and for the heart.
Today, we marvel at comedies like Better Things or Reservation Dogs that are capable of radically transforming themselves from one episode to the next. Taxi was doing this 40-plus years ago, only it wasn’t nearly as overt, because it was being done in a traditional sitcom format with frequent punchlines and loud audience laughter. But within that structure — and within the seemingly limited setting of a cab company garage in Manhattan where most of the drivers (other than Judd Hirsch’s practical Alex) dream of better jobs — Taxi could accomplish a whole lot. It could go broad, bordering on surreal, as it leaned on characters like Christopher Lloyd’s hippie space case Jim Ignatowski or Andy Kaufman’s chipper immigrant mechanic Latka. It could go raw and small, like an episode where diminutive but cruel dispatcher Louie DePalma (Danny DeVito) talks about his humiliating annual trip to buy suits at the husky boys section of the department store. And sometimes, it could do both at the same time, like a grief-stricken Jim telling the empty suit of his late father the things he could never say during their long estrangement. Though the cabbies rarely got to achieve their dreams, Taxi could do almost anything it set its mind to.
At first, Key & Peele drew notice for how well-timed it seemed, as a sketch comedy in which biracial comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele explored the sometimes confusing borders between Black and white America, late into the first term of our nation’s first biracial president. And an early signature bit involved Peele playing an unflappable Barack Obama while Key lurked behind him as POTUS’ “anger translator,” Luther. Soon, though, what Key & Peele became known for was its fierce commitment to every bit. Their action movie parodies bore a stunning resemblance to the real thing, and seemingly lightweight ideas like Family Matters actor Reginald VelJohnson complaining about the show being taken over by Steve Urkel took incredibly dark turns. In hindsight, it’s not hard to see how Peele made the jump from this show to becoming America’s most famous horror-movie director. But he and Key were a wonderful pair for a while.
Most of the revered cable dramas of the early 2000s used familiar, action-packed TV genres (mobsters, cops, cowboys, etc.) as Trojan horses to smuggle in more challenging commentary about modern life. The anomaly was Six Feet Under, whose premise was built around the unglamorous place where many of those other kinds of characters would end up: a funeral home, run by the repressed, dysfunctional Fisher family. Starting off with the death of patriarch Nathaniel Fisher Sr. (Richard Jenkins, who stuck around in ghostly form), Alan Ball’s series studies the struggle his widow Ruth (Frances Conroy) and kids Nate (Peter Krause), David (Michael C. Hall), and Claire (Lauren Ambrose) had dealing not only with Nathaniel’s death, but with the inescapable knowledge that their own would come one day. That lack of a traditional TV “franchise” to help drive stories led to Six Feet being more uneven than its peers, but its highs — particularly the iconic final sequence, scored to Sia’s “Breathe,” that takes the show’s premise to its logical conclusion — were extraordinary.
Time travel! What a high concept! In the first season of this audacious sci-fi comedy, software designer Nadia (Natasha Lyonne, doing the best Columbo this side of Peter Falk) keeps violently dying, only to respawn in the bathroom at her 36th birthday party. In the second, she and her uptight friend Alan (Charlie Barnett) find themselves Quantum Leaping back in time to experience life as members of their family trees. In both seasons, Lyonne (who co-created the show with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland) managed to have enormous fun with the lengths to which each idea could be taken, while also using these reality-warping adventures to examine Nadia’s inability to change her own fucked-up life. More, please.
The first episode of this ensemble comedy involves a group of oddball community college students — disbarred lawyer Jeff (Joel McHale), pretentious Britta (Gillian Jacobs), pop culture-obsessed Abed (Danny Pudi), goofy ex-jock Troy (Donald Glover), overachiever Annie (Alison Brie), maternal Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown), and intolerable boomer Pierce (Chevy Chase) — improbably becoming friends. The last episode has the remaining members of this group imagining various scenarios for what a seventh season of Community — which all of them, and not just Abed, seem to have on some level accepted is the TV show they are characters on — would be like. While gradually evolving from that relatively sane beginning to that meta conclusion, Dan Harmon’s creation managed to smuggle note-perfect film and TV parodies (most notably the action-movie-style paintball episodes) into the drudgery of life at Greendale Community College, and it treated the members of the study group as people, even in the midst of this self-aware madness. It was special.
“Computers aren’t the thing; they’re the thing that gets you to the thing,” salesman Joe McMillan (Lee Pace) explains early in this period tech-world drama. In the case of this show, the mercurial and mysterious Joe and his aggrieved partner Gordon (Scoot McNairy) were the first kind of thing: male antiheroes of the type that had become commonplace to the point of cliché in the years leading up to their introduction. But then Halt figured out how to make Joe and Gordon into the thing that got us to the thing: the story of how Joe’s ex-girlfriend Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) and Gordon’s wife Donna (Kerry Bishé) would eventually team up to be part of the birth of the internet. The men didn’t exactly vanish, and Pace and McNairy were great throughout, but the shift in POV to the women these kinds of shows generally ignored unlocked the series’ full potential, making it feel not like a Mad Men clone set in the Eighties and Nineties, but its own wonderful work.
Medicine has long been part of the holy trinity of TV professions, along with police work (whether in modern day or the Wild West) and the law. Yet of all the great doctor shows the medium has seen — St. Elsewhere, House, Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy, to name just a few — the only one to make our list was this mid-Nineties juggernaut. Created by Michael Crichton and produced by John Wells, ER combined the structure of a hospital drama with the pace and adrenaline of an action movie. It expertly conveyed the chaos, the triumphs, the tragedy and even the comedy of life in an emergency room. It made a superstar out of George Clooney as rule-breaking pediatrician Doug Ross, and also had a pretty special cast around him that included Julianna Margulies, Anthony Edwards, Noah Wyle, Eriq La Salle, and many more over the course of 15 seasons. We need to intubate! STAT!
Near the conclusion of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s mockumentary masterpiece, Tim (Martin Freeman) philosophizes, “The people you work with are just people you were thrown together with. Y’know, you don’t know them, it wasn’t your choice. And yet you spend more time with them than you do your friends or your family. But probably all you’ve got in common is the fact that you walk around on the same bit of carpet for eight hours a day.” Viewers would ultimately spend a bit less than eight hours total with Tim, his crush Dawn (Lucy Davis), the repulsive Gareth (Mackenzie Crook), and, most notably, their horrible boss David Brent (Gervais). Yet the writing, the world-building, and the performances made it feel like we had been trapped on the same bit of carpet with them for years. One of the defining shows of 21st-century comedy, without which several others on this list would not exist — and not just the American remake. And if David’s self-aggrandizing antics could at times be painful to watch, Gervais and Merchant’s unflinching commitment to depicting the agonies of workplace drudgery paid off beautifully in the series-concluding Christmas special.
On this bleak, haunting comedy, SNL alum Bill Hader plays a hitman who stumbles into an acting class and discovers that he would rather kill on stage than do it with bullets. The premise could have easily devolved into a one-joke show about the blurry line between the two ruthless professions. Instead, Barry took its title character’s desire for a career change — and the implications of an emotionally stunted man having to explore his feelings, as part of the acting method taught by the self-aggrandizing Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) — very seriously. As a result, Barry can be both the funniest show on television (especially when Anthony Carrigan is around as cheerful Chechen mobster NoHo Hank) and the most tragic, often within a few beats of one another.
In the dank basement office to which the FBI has banished him for filing one too many reports about aliens and monsters, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) has a poster with a picture of a flying saucer and the slogan “I Want to Believe.” For a long time, Chris Carter’s exciting sci-fi procedural tried to play things down the middle, so that Mulder’s skeptical partner Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) could seem entirely reasonable in dismissing his conspiracy theories. But X-Files fans understandably wanted to believe in a lot of things: flukemen, shapeshifters, and, most of all, in the idea that Duchovny and Anderson’s insane chemistry would eventually lead Mulder and Scully into a romance. The show popularized the idea of a series having a “mythology” and an ongoing serialized story that you had to watch from the beginning to understand. But the majority of the episodes followed the “Monster of the Week” format, and it’s those that have held up best all these years later, especially after so many later shows did such a bad job of trying to create their own X-Files-style mythology.
When it comes to this game show that requires answers in the form of a question, we have to ask: What is an early-evening institution we took for granted until beloved host Alex Trebek was diagnosed with cancer three years ago? With the loss of the reassuringly affable Trebek, these past two seasons have been tumultuous for Jeopardy!. But the format, the challenging and diverse array of subjects, and the enthusiastically nerdy contestants remained addictive even during the bumpy transition that eventually led to actor Mayim Bialik and former champ Ken Jennings splitting Trebek’s old job.
What if they chose an earlier title, like Six of One? What if Hank Azaria had in fact been hired to play Joey, or Nancy McKeon had been cast as Monica? The success of Friends was so miraculous, and so dependent on every piece of it existing in total harmony with every other piece — most of all, the chemistry among the six pals (Courteney Cox’s uptight Monica, Jennifer Aniston’s pampered Rachel, Lisa Kudrow’s spacey Phoebe, Matt Le Blanc’s goofy Joey, Matthew Perry’s sarcastic Chandler, and David Schwimmer’s mopey Ross) — that it could have failed if any one thing was changed even slightly. But all the ingredients came together in the right proportions, leading to a show so warm it’s been embraced by a younger generation that has no frame of reference for Chandler’s “I think this is the episode of Three’s Company where there’s some kind of misunderstanding” joke.
The creative revolution kicked off by The Sopranos and Sex and the City might have stayed limited to HBO if not for the quick success of The Shield on a barely noticed stop on the basic-cable channel guide. Michael Chiklis was so instantly magnetic as brazenly corrupt LAPD detective Vic Mackey that it kicked off a rush of other cable channels and, eventually, streaming services, finding their own signature series. But even beyond historical importance, the show (created by Shawn Ryan) is pretty great, blending network cop-drama tropes with Sopranos’ antihero framing and mature content. It also surrounds Vic with a worthy group of allies (Walton Goggins’ reckless Shane), wary colleagues (CCH Pounder’s tenacious detective Claudette; Glenn Close for a season as Vic’s new boss), and outright enemies (most notably Forest Whitaker’s erratic internal-affairs cop Jon Kavanaugh, but eventually even Shane himself). And for as much as The Shield seemed to be celebrating Vic’s swagger early on, the series always understood exactly who and what he was, culminating in the devastating “Family Meeting” chapter, which is the best drama finale ever.
Like Freaks and Geeks, it’s a one-season wonder about high schoolers who don’t run with the popular crowd. This one, though, has a lyrical, intimate tone reflective of Claire Danes’ remarkable debut performance as Angela Chase, a teenager rebelling against her family and friends’ good-girl expectations, but too lost in her own head to understand exactly what she’s doing and why. Created by Winnie Holzman and produced by the Thirtysomething team of Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, My So-Called Life has no peers in its ability to re-create that distinctive adolescent mix of terror and abandon.
The past few years of American life haven’t been kind to this White House drama’s innate belief that anyone can be swayed on any political issue if presented with a cogent argument. Yet that belief is in many ways more appealing in this time of great division than it was when West Wing debuted at the end of the Clinton administration — especially when accompanied by the crackling dialogue and soaring rhetoric of creator Aaron Sorkin, and delivered by lovable characters like eloquent President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen), pragmatic White House chief of staff Leo McGarry (John Spencer), idealistic speechwriter Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff), and harried press secretary C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney).
Each Columbo episode follows the same structure: A rich and powerful person commits what they think is a perfect murder that can’t possibly be traced back to them. Lt. Columbo turns up, and his rumpled appearance and distracted, deferential manner convinces each killer that he’s an easily manipulated fool. Instead, he is shockingly tenacious and clever, talking each of these would-be masters of the universe into incriminating themselves, often for missing an incredibly minor detail, like a pair of shoelaces being tied the wrong way or a ribbon being left in a typewriter. A show this formulaic only works with a hugely likable lead, and this one fortunately had the benefit of the superhumanly charming Peter Falk in the title role.
Letterman’s version of Late Night was defined as much by what it wasn’t as what it was. It was a talk show hosted by a man with only a passing interest in talking with celebrities (even though he had memorable interviews over the years, like the time Crispin Glover nearly kicked him in the face). It featured comedy bits that still defy explanation, like Letterman climbing into a vat of liquid while wearing a suit filled with Alka-Seltzer tablets. But his disdain for talk-show and comedy norms only made every segment funnier, and helped define the ironic sensibilities of generations of comedy writers who grew up watching him. When Letterman lost the post-Carson Tonight Show job to Jay Leno, he left NBC to start over under the old Late Show title. His CBS years were ever so slightly more traditional, but Letterman’s trademark comic indifference could still appear when you least expected it.
The 2010s were a good decade for creators of web comedies to level up to TV. Some have been straightforward translations, like the stoner buddy comedy of Broad City or the extremely Canadian content of Letterkenny. Insecure co-creator and star Issa Rae, meanwhile, took some elements of her popular web show The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl with her when she made the leap to premium cable, even though she was playing a (somewhat) new character. Over the course of five seasons of incisive comedy and character study, Rae’s Issa Dee struggled to figure out relationships of various kinds as she exited her late twenties and had to accept the burdens of unequivocal adulthood. Would she end up with on-again, off-again boyfriend Lawrence (Jay Ellis), or one of the many charismatic men who wander into her life? Would she ever feel comfortable as a Black woman in a well-meaning but patronizing white-run nonprofit that helps children of color? Would she and best friend Molly (Yvonne Orji) be able to prioritize each other with so much drama in their lives? And most important, would Issa ever make peace with the face in the mirror that questioned every choice she made? By the end, both Insecure and Issa had all the answers we wanted from them.
When you remake a classic, there is nowhere to go but down. The smarter play is what happened here, when Star Trek vet Ronald D. Moore transformed a corny late-Seventies Star Wars rip-off into a gripping sci-fi allegory about 9/11 and the never-ending War on Terror, where the religious fundamentalist killers happen to be robots (like Tricia Helfer’s vivacious but multifaceted Number Six) who can pass for human. Cool space battles peacefully co-exist with grounded character stories, played by a superb cast led by Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell. The new BSG proved to be such a revelation that there’s already another remake in the works, which brings us back to the warning in this blurb’s first sentence.
None of the pieces of this animated comedy have any business fitting together. It’s set in a world where humans live and work alongside animals that walk on two legs, talk, and wear clothes. Its title character (Will Arnett) is a washed-up Nineties sitcom star struggling with substance abuse, depression, and an inability to stop hurting anyone who cares about him, including his daffy roommate Todd (Aaron Paul), manager/ex-girlfriend Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris), and biographer/friend Diane (Alison Brie). BoJack is filled with silly wordplay, Hollywood satire, and dumb humor presented in brainy fashion. But it’s also a poignant, tragic character sketch where the character just happens to be a horse-man — a parody of antihero dramas that ask you to empathize with assholes, yet one that succeeds in making you empathize with this asshole. And somehow, all of these disparate elements combine for by far the best show Netflix has ever made.
This metaphysical comedy from Parks and Recreation co-creator Michael Schur makes several big assertions as part of its premise: Heaven is irreparably broken. The universe is without meaning. Life is just a series of petty little tortures. Are you laughing yet? Somehow, The Good Place finds hilarity in every corner of its version of hell, which has just admitted four new arrivals — Kristen Bell’s unrepentant con woman, Eleanor Shellstrop; William Jackson Harper’s anxious philosopher, Chidi Anagonye; Jameela Jamil’s narcissistic do-gooder, Tahani Al-Jamil; and Manny Jacinto’s deeply stupid Florida man, Jason Mendoza — as part of a plan by demon-in-disguise Michael (Ted Danson, having the time of his life) to emotionally hurt people rather than using the traditional fire-and-brimstone approach. As Eleanor and the other dum-dums figure out that they are really in the Bad Place, and begin (with help from D’Arcy Carden’s all-powerful Janet, who is both not a robot and not a girl) journeying back and forth among death, life, and various cosmic realms, The Good Place taps endless reserves of silliness in its debates about the purpose of existence, along with a stubbornly optimistic belief that the world we know, and the people in it, can all be better. Humor and special effects can be a dangerous mix, but The Good Place strikes a healthy balance between the two. It is a comedy bursting with imagination and heart, all the way to the surprisingly profound use of “Take it sleazy” in its final scene.
The unspoken theme of Curb is the fictionalized Larry David’s struggle to find something to do with his life that will live up to co-creating Seinfeld. But the actual David has somehow turned his follow-up show into a Seinfeld sequel, a remake of it, and a rebuttal to it, posing an argument that the show about nothing might have been even funnier if George Costanza had been fabulously wealthy and able to curse up a storm. All these years later, the familiar Seinfeld-esque convergence of subplots at the end of episodes still pays huge comic dividends, whether the stories were familiar (like Jerry, Larry winds up befriending a key participant from the 1986 World Series) or wildly different (Larry hires a sex worker so he has an excuse to drive in the carpool lane and avoid freeway traffic). And if Curb has proved more uneven than its predecessor, its best moments (say, Larry’s love of Palestinian chicken and wild sex conflicting with his pride in his Jewish heritage) surpass even Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer at their peak.
This ensemble cop series blended pieces of several seemingly incompatible genres — the serial storytelling of daytime soaps, the raw camerawork of documentary films, the social consciousness and twisted sense of humor of Seventies independent movies — into something that felt wholly new. Throw in a squad room full of memorable characters, including sensitive captain Frank Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti), his public-defender sparring partner — and secret lover — Joyce Davenport (Veronica Hamel), perp-biting undercover officer Mick Belker (Bruce Weitz), troublemaking alcoholic J.D. LaRue (Kiel Martin), and bruising detective Norm Buntz (Dennis Franz), and you had the blueprint for most of the dramas that followed it in TV’s second golden age of the Eighties and Nineties, including some, like L.A. Law and NYPD Blue, that came from Hill Street co-creator Steven Bochco.
Mitchell Hurwitz’s Iraq War-era farce, about a family of rich morons forced to fend for themselves after the patriarch goes to jail, is as dense with jokes as a neutron star is with stellar matter. Every scene is packed with running gags, callbacks, impossible names, slapstick, and more, the impact of each building and building to irresistible payoffs. So when mama’s boy Buster (Tony Hale), for instance, tries to escape the controlling yoke of his mother, Lucille (Jessica Walter), he stubbornly ignores warnings that a loose seal is about to bite off his hand. That approach made Arrested impenetrable to newcomers after a few episodes, but viewers who were there from the start of the Fox seasons were consistently rewarded with the kind of richness the Bluth family had just lost access to.
In a ranking of the most important series in television history, this seminal comedy would probably finish ahead of even The Sopranos. Simply put, no show has been more influential or imitated than the Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz vehicle that created the multicamera sitcom (shot on a stage in front of a raucous audience) as we know it. The gender politics haven’t aged well, as much of the series involves Arnaz’s nightclub bandleader, Ricky Ricardo, paternalistically dismissing the dreams of Ball’s Lucy each time his wife’s ambition to be anything other than a housewife gets her in trouble. But the slapstick genius of Ball — on display in iconic sequences like Lucy and best friend Ethel (Vivian Vance) struggling to keep up with a candy-factory conveyer belt, Lucy getting into a brawl while stomping grapes during a trip to Italy, Lucy getting drunk while filming a TV commercial, or Lucy re-creating the Duck Soup mirror scene with Harpo Marx — sure has.
Dangers ranging from a runaway polar bear to . . . an immortal smoke monster? As one of the castaways asks early on, “Guys, where are we?” For much of its run, a civil war waged both within and without the sci-fi survival story about which was more important: solving the island’s many mysteries, or exploring the rich and diverse cast of characters trapped there (including Terry O’Quinn’s stubborn survivalist Locke, Josh Holloway’s reforming con man Sawyer, and Jorge Garcia’s unlucky Hurley). The greatest pleasures of the experience ultimately came from the whole messy, exciting, bizarre emotional journey of it, rather than the destination that so many of the “I just want answers, dammit!” crowd was hoping to visit.
When Rolling Stone last asked our experts to rank the best shows ever, NBC’s Office remake finished behind the British original. Six years later, their positions have flipped. (The U.K. version landed just outside the top 50.) Perhaps it’s a testament to how much easier it is to feel affection for Steve Carell’s inept but lonely boss, Michael Scott, despite his countless failings as a manager and as a person, than it is for Ricky Gervais’ more hostile David Brent. Or perhaps it’s that there’s so much more of the American show to love, with more than 200 episodes versus a baker’s dozen for the Gervais series. Yes, Office U.K. was more consistent, but that’s easy to do in such a small sample size. Office U.S. has some terrible lows, especially after Carell left and the show unwisely promoted Ed Helms’ obnoxious Andy to replace him. But it offers so, so many comic and romantic highs along the way, from Dwight (Rainn Wilson) staging a disastrous, heart-attack-inducing fire drill to the slow-burning courtship of Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer).
Never mind the bollocks, here’s the punk-rock sextet of sketch comedy. Together, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin exploded long-held beliefs about how comedy should function. Python could be simultaneously high- and lowbrow, like the slapstick-heavy government-satire sequence suggesting Britain had a Ministry of Silly Walks. Sketches could start and/or stop in midscene, abruptly segue into animation or meta-commentary, and go to comedic places bordering on the surreal. And for all the formal experimentation, Python still made you laugh until it hurt.
A terrible idea accidentally executed in astonishing fashion. Breaking Bad required no spinoff, especially not one built around a fun but one-dimensional character like Bob Odenkirk’s slick attorney Saul Goodman. Even Saul creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould struggled to find a direction for the prequel, assuming they would spend a little time on Saul’s true identity as sweet but mostly harmless grifter Jimmy McGill, then quickly move him into the familiar strip-mall office where he met Walter White. Instead, the creators and the audience fell in love with Jimmy — with a lot of help from Rhea Seehorn’s magnificent performance as his devoted partner, Kim Wexler — and suddenly no one was in any hurry to call Saul. The series also evolved into essentially two shows in one, each offering something to appeal to fans of Breaking Bad: The lawyer show with Jimmy and Kim delivered a Heisenberg-esque story of incremental moral descent, while the cartel show focused on Jonathan Banks’ unflappable fixer Mike Ehrmantraut got to fill in a lot of blanks in the franchise’s history, and to provide the type of explosive action not present while, say, Jimmy was discovering he had a talent for elder law. By the end, Better Call Saul eventually managed to match, and at times exceed, its parent series.
Welcome to the blockbuster age of television, as kicked off by this lavish adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels set in a parallel version of England circa the War of the Roses. Thrones would eventually become known for its jaw-dropping spectacle: fire-breathing dragons burning armies into ash, a horde of icy zombies overwhelming a fishing village’s defenses, or an angry giant crashing through a castle’s gates. But all of that came later. What made Thrones a phenomenon in the first place was not only its willingness to brutally kill off major players like Sean Bean’s noble Ned Stark, but also its absurdly deep bench of colorful characters — fast-talking imp Tyrion (Peter Dinklage), aspiring young killer Arya (Maisie Williams), and towering warrior Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie), to cite just three — that allowed the show to be so ruthless with some of them, while the rest remained locked in thrilling physical or verbal combat with one another.
So many of the comedies on this list are built on pain and anxiety. Parks and Rec rests on a happier foundation, taking its cues from its heroine, Amy Poehler’s can-do civil servant Leslie Knope. The series deployed Leslie’s unbreakable hopefulness (and Poehler’s own bottomless reserves of energy) as a weapon, not only against intractable governing problems, but also against the cynicism of colleagues like mustachioed libertarian Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman, hilariously understated) or over-it intern April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza). A series as capable of making you feel as good as it was of making you laugh at jokes like the town of Pawnee’s infatuation with a tiny horse called Li’l Sebastian, or a flu-ridden Chris (Rob Lowe) telling himself to stop pooping.
This landmark adaptation of Alex Haley’s novel about slavery was an event, unfurled over eight consecutive nights in front of an audience that at its peak comprised more than half of all Americans. As viewers sat mesmerized by the story of enslaved Mandinka warrior Kunta Kinte (played first by LeVar Burton, then by John Amos), Roots put our nation’s original sin back into the public conversation. It wasn’t just the terrible story itself, but the confident way it was told, including the tactic of casting endearing TV actors like Ed Asner, The Waltons patriarch Ralph Waite, and Robert Reed from The Brady Bunch as slave owners and slave traders. Roots almost single-handedly created the “prestige TV” notion that the small screen could debut projects as compelling as what audience members previously had to pay to see in a movie theater.
Witness a study in beliefs in conflict with one another. Friday Night Lights is a show about high school football that was adored by people with no stomach for real sports; a teen drama revered by people who hate teen drama; an adaptation made by the movie’s writer-director (Peter Berg) because he thought the film would have been better in long form; and a series that struck such a chord across demographics that in 2012, both the Obama and Romney campaigns used its “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” catchphrase. That deep love is a testament to the unbridled emotion created by Berg’s cinema-verité technique, and to the ways it unleashed spectacular performances from all its actors — including future stars like Michael B. Jordan and Jesse Plemons — but especially from Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, as Eric and Tami Taylor (a.k.a. Coach and Mrs. Coach), the devoted spouses at the heart of so much turmoil. TV writers often argue that happy couples ruin shows. Obviously, those writers haven’t seen the Taylors in action.
The sacred and the profane came together in transcendent fashion in David Milch’s talkative Western, which used the lawless Dakota territory of the late 1800s as a case study for how communities and civilizations are built. Deadwood mixed historical figures like volcano-tempered lawman Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) and cutthroat bartender Al Swearengen (the fantastic Ian McShane) with fictional ones like wealthy widow Alma Garret (Molly Parker) and defiant sex worker Trixie (Paula Malcomson). More impressively, its dialogue placed harsh profanity that would make Gary Cooper blush alongside some of the most poetic language ever written for the screen, big or small. (Swearengen, in the midst of evolving from vicious mob boss to the series’ improbable moral center, offers this as a pep talk to an upset colleague: “Pain or damage don’t end the world. Or despair or fuckin’ beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man, and give some back.”) Television in recent years has grown cluttered with unnecessary revivals of treasured old shows that already had proper finales. Deadwood, though, ended abruptly after a third season. Thankfully, the 2019 TV movie provided necessary closure for the characters and the audience who grew to love all those hoopleheads and cocksuckers.
A televisual rite of passage across multiple generations. The human cast keeps changing; the demise of actor Will Lee, who played store owner Mr. Hooper, led to the show using Big Bird to discuss the concept of death in terms preschoolers could understand. And Jim Henson’s Muppet creations have come and gone, with Kermit spinning off to hang with Fozzie and Miss Piggy, while the anxious Grover eventually took a back seat to the more eager and cuddly Elmo. (Cookie Monster remains a constant, even if the producers sometimes struggle to reconcile his addictive personality with the overall tone of the show, leading to well-meaning but misguided songs like “A Cookie Is a Sometime Food.”) But the mission remains the same: to educate and entertain both its young target audience and their exhausted parents through a mix of songs, sketches, and a voice that speaks to kids rather than at them. It’s a balance Sesame Street has long since mastered.
The United States’ involvement in the Korean War lasted about three years. M*A*S*H stuck around for more than a decade, including a supersize finale that is and will likely always be the most-watched single episode of television ever. That elongation of the core concept gave the show about Army doctors and nurses plenty of chances to reinvent itself. At the beginning, it was an anarchic anti-establishment comedy in the spirit of the Robert Altman movie it adapted, with Alan Alda’s Dr. Hawkeye Pierce staging wild pranks as a means of protesting the violence around him. By the end, it had become a sensitive drama about the physical and emotional toll of war, with former comic-relief characters like Jamie Farr’s cross-dressing Max Klinger or Loretta Swit’s imperious nurse, Margaret Houlihan, now taken as seriously as Hawkeye or Harry Morgan’s dignified Col. Potter. And a few lovely periods in between managed to straddle those tonal extremes.
The future of Hollywood comedy was assembled on one incredible show, and NBC was too blind to see it. Created by Paul Feig, produced by Judd Apatow, and featuring a murderers’ row of up-and-coming stars like James Franco, Seth Rogen, and Jason Segel, Freaks and Geeks went back to suburban Michigan in the 1980s for tales of high school outcasts, with frequent crossover between the teenage burnouts convinced that they have no future (newly joined by Linda Cardellini’s embittered good girl Lindsey) and the nerds just hoping the world will one day believe they’re cool (led by John Francis Daley as Lindsey’s awkward little brother, Sam). At times painfully funny, at others just painful, it showed great empathy for these kids, even as it was willing to put a spotlight on all their mortifying adolescent awkwardness. The network didn’t understand the show, it lasted only one season, and Feig et al. were set free to make their fortunes on the big screen. None of them have topped their work here, though.
We live in the age of IP, where familiar titles are adapted again and again, simply because of that familiarity, and not because anyone has an original thought about them. Then there is Watchmen. The original mid-Eighties comics masterpiece by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons proved impossible to adapt for decades. The 2009 Zack Snyder film managed to re-create most of the plot while utterly missing the point of the endeavor. Lost and Leftovers alum Damon Lindelof went a different way when the property fell into his hands, using the world Moore and Gibbons built to tell a fanciful yet raw story about the ugly history of American racism, as seen through the eyes of Sister Night (Regina King), a police officer who, like her colleagues, dons a mask and special uniform so she can do her violent work with impunity. (When some cops in our world began wearing masks while dealing with the post-George Floyd protests, the show proved unfortunately prophetic.) Sister Night finds herself at the center of a swirling narrative that incorporates the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, multiple trips to one of Jupiter’s moons, time travel, a space dildo, and a costumed hero whom cops dub “Lube Man.” Yet all those wildly disparate elements — including an all-time musical score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, plus terrific performances by King, Jean Smart, Jeremy Irons, Hong Chau, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II — feel of a transfixing piece with one another, and also with the elusive source material.
What creator Gene Roddenberry pitched as “Wagon Train to the stars” instead built a legacy far greater than any classic TV Western. The voyages of the starship Enterprise, captained by the swaggering, impulsive James T. Kirk (William Shatner), created the modern concept of fandom as we know it. And with his pointy ears and retro-future haircut, Leonard Nimoy’s half-alien science officer, Mr. Spock, became the face that launched a thousand ‘ships (a.k.a. fan fiction about the sorts of relationships the show did not feature). Since the original series, there have been 13 Trek movies, seven live-action spinoffs, and three animated series. Many of these follow-ups have offered their own magic, from Patrick Stewart’s thunderous lead performance on The Next Generation to the serialized political epic Deep Space Nine to the powerful empathy of the current Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. And some of them have been much more consistent than the adventures of Kirk, Spock, and the irascible Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley). But the dramatic highs of the Sixties show, and its audacious world-building, made the entire franchise — and the larger sci-fi/fantasy/fan ecosystem — possible.
Norman Lear’s generation-gap comedy had such a finger on the pulse of an increasingly divided nation that President Nixon was caught on tape in the Oval Office complaining about an early episode. And the show — in which racist, sexist, reactionary blue-collar slob Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) and his liberal son-in-law Michael “Meathead” Stivic (Rob Reiner) fought constantly as their respective spouses Edith (Jean Stapleton) and Gloria (Sally Struthers) tried to calm things down — could create a divide of its own, between viewers who took Archie for their hero and the ones who understood that Lear considered him a fool. In many ways, the original antihero series, and the inspiration for a brief halcyon age of network sitcoms — many of them spinoffs of this show, such as The Jeffersons, Maude, and Good Times — that managed to weave thoughtful discussion of the issues of the day around a lot of bawdy humor.
The old adage to “write what you know” has few examples better than 30 Rock. Tina Fey, fresh off a beloved run as SNL head writer and Weekend Update co-anchor, created and starred in a show on which she plays Liz Lemon, the head writer of an NBC sketch-comedy show that sounds a lot like SNL. Show-within-the-show TGS became part of a much broader satire of both television (including Tracy Morgan and Jane Krakowski as TGS’ pathologically needy stars) and corporate America (exemplified by Alec Baldwin, as supremely arrogant exec Jack Donaghy), mixed in with some of the silliest names ever put onscreen, like Chris Parnell’s Dr. Spaceman (pronounced “spuh-CHEH-men”) or Krakowski’s Jenna starring in The Rural Juror. (Try saying it aloud.) Yet, as eager as 30 Rock was to bite the hand that fed it, in the most ludicrous ways possible, there was also a palpable affection for the business that made these shenanigans possible. As Kenneth (Jack McBrayer), the ageless, unnaturally chipper NBC page, put it in the very first episode, “I just love television.” So did 30 Rock.
A genre-bending tour de force that was written, co-directed by, and starred Michaela Coel as a rising young author whose life and career are rent asunder as she realizes she was drugged and raped. I May Destroy You is at times harrowing, at others unnervingly funny and odd, and as much about the writing process — and the stories we invent about ourselves to help work through problems — as it is about the trauma that Coel’s Arabella has to learn to live with. A singular, mesmerizing limited series.
Across parts of six decades, SNL has minted stars (John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, and too many others to name), made catchphrases go viral (from “We are two wild and crazy guys!” to “I live in a van, down by the river!” to “More cowbell!!!” to “This place has everything!”), brought down political candidates (people still think Sarah Palin, not Tina Fey-as-Palin, said, “I can see Russia from my house!”), and redefined TV sketch comedy many times over. It’s also been pronounced “Saturday Night Dead” on multiple occasions, and it’s a truth that everyone’s favorite SNL cast is the one from when they were in high school. But even when our expectations outstrip the show’s fundamentally uneven execution — as creator Lorne Michaels (who has run all but a handful of the 47-plus seasons) says, “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30” — the very idea of comedy being performed live from Studio 8H still feels intoxicating, no matter the era or ensemble making it.
This meditation on grief, depression, and the search for meaning in a meaningless world — in this case, a world where two percent of the population all vanished abruptly and at random, like an off-brand Rapture — is at times among the bleakest things ever put on TV. But in so many others, The Leftovers — adapted by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta from Perrotta’s novel of the same name — is as audacious, ridiculous, and even startlingly joyful as anything the medium has seen. It boasts incredible performances from its whole cast, including Justin Theroux as a suicidal police chief, Amy Brenneman as a woman who responds to the apocalypse by joining a doomsday cult, and — in an inner-circle TV Hall of Fame dramatic performance — Carrie Coon as a woman rebuilding her life after her entire family disappears while her back is turned. If we can’t laugh in the face of death — including one episode where God is devoured by a lion while disembarking from an orgy boat — what’s the point of any of this?
The original run of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s mashup of gothic murder mystery, soap-opera melodrama, and supernatural horror was the weirdest goddamn thing most viewers had ever seen in the formulaic old days of everyone having only three or four TV channels. How did homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) wind up dead and wrapped in plastic in a seemingly peaceful Pacific Northwest logging town? Why was FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) so fixated on hot coffee and various flavors of pie? What does the phrase “The owls are not what they seem” mean, exactly? And how much of this are we meant to take seriously? The belated sequel season, Twin Peaks: The Return, arrived a quarter-century later in the far more creatively diverse and quirky Peak TV landscape, yet it somehow seemed even stranger, including MacLachlan playing at least three roles (if not more; it’s complicated), and the late David Bowie’s time-traveling agent character from the spinoff film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me reimagined as an enormous sentient tea kettle. Can we explain everything that happened in each season, or even most of it? Of course not. Did every inscrutable minute of it make us feel more deeply than all but a handful of other shows on this list? Absolutely.
No flipping! Has any show better understood the craven business of television, and the toxic stew of neurosis and ego that keeps the whole system afloat, better than Garry Shandling’s acidic comedy about the host of a second-rate late-night talk show? Larry Sanders is a man who can find no pleasure in life other than the one hour a night he’s on camera — only he often doubts himself about that, too. However middling Sanders’ show was supposed to be, Shandling’s was so smart and cutthroat that movie and TV stars were lining up to mock themselves on it, if it meant a chance to hang with Shandling, or with the late, great Rip Torn, who co-starred as Larry’s fearless producer, Artie.
“You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” “Well, you got your peanut butter in my chocolate!” Only make it a TV show. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys are Soviet sleeper agents posing as married suburban couple Elizabeth and Philip Jennings in Reagan’s America. Is it a riveting spy thriller or a quiet and nuanced examination of the compromises inherent to any marriage? As the meme goes, why not both? The suspense plots make the show’s family drama more exciting, and that character work in turn gives the espionage action more weight. The Americans smartly tracks the level of reality in each of its relationships, including Philip’s desire to make his fake marriage to Elizabeth into a real one, Philip wrestling with guilt over befriending his FBI-agent neighbor Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), and Philip and Elizabeth’s teenage daughter, Paige (Holly Taylor), debating how to feel after learning the truth about her parents. The performances are sensational in matters both domestic and spy-related. And where many classics of this era have had divisive endings, its conclusion only made everything that came before feel better.
Selina Meyer’s stint as POTUS was so brief and inept that there’s no way she would ever be considered for a new Mount Rushmore lineup. The face of Veep star Julia Louis-Dreyfus, on the other hand, would have to be carved into any grand attempt to immortalize the very best of the best of TV comedy. As the foulmouthed, narcissistic center of Armando Iannucci’s savage Beltway comedy — in which Selina, her army of sycophants, and her many allies and rivals on the political stage are revealed to have no beliefs other than a craving for power and attention — Louis-Dreyfus somehow topped her Seinfeld work, creating a performance for the ages.
In TV’s first golden age, of the Fifties and Sixties, the anthology drama was king, and Rod Serling’s collection of fantastical stories — set in “the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition,” as Serling himself intones at the start of every episode — ruled them all. Before science fiction became dominated by adventure stories set in galaxies far, far away, the genre was often best used for biting social commentary on the world around us, just barely hidden beneath the trappings of alien invaders and deals with the devil. Some Twilight Zone installments functioned as commentaries on personal anxieties like fear of flying (William Shatner spotting a gremlin on the wing of his plane). Some leaned on the sorts of twists that TV would still be chasing more than a half-century later, like the famous “It’s a cookbook!” conclusion to the alien visit in “To Serve Man.” But a lot of the time, the series was looking at the world around us, and not enjoying what it saw, like using the suburban hysteria of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” as an indictment of Cold War paranoia. The franchise has been revived multiple times, including a recent streaming attempt by Jordan Peele, but the original iteration towers above all the others.
Logan Roy (Brian Cox), patriarch of this blacker-than-black comedy about the ongoing battle for control of a Fox News-style media empire among his four entitled children — ineffectual Connor (Alan Ruck), wounded addict Kendall (Jeremy Strong), smug Shiv (Sarah Snook), and childish Roman (Kieran Culkin) — would probably look at its finish just outside our top 10 and tell all of us to fuck off. Considering how deftly Succession depicts the state of modern media (and how people like Logan harm the world for their own personal gain), finds ways to get the audience to understand members of the family like Kendall or the gawky and clueless Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), and continuously churns out scathingly funny dialogue, he may have a point.
Along with Cheers, it’s the gold standard for ensemble comedy, blending sparkling dialogue with unexpected heart and a cast of actors who seemed born to trade punchlines with one another. Four years after the end of her beloved run on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mary Tyler Moore returned to TV as both producer and star of this trailblazing series about a single woman reinventing herself in a new city, with new friends (Valerie Harper’s brassy Rhoda, Cloris Leachman’s self-absorbed Phyllis), new co-workers (Ed Asner’s crabby Lou, Gavin MacLeod’s witty Murray, Ted Knight’s dim Ted Baxter), and a belief that she was gonna make it, after all. Like Lucille Ball before her, Moore used the show’s success to build her own TV-production empire, responsible for other shows on this list, like Hill Street Blues. If the episode where Mary Richards struggles to not laugh at the funeral for Chuckles the Clown isn’t the funniest half hour ever, it is on a very short list.
After years on Community as white America’s favorite Black guy, Donald Glover code-switched to create and star in Atlanta, a show that freely sheds its own identity. One week, it can be a broad comedy about Al (Brian Tyree Henry) suffering the dumbest day of his life in an attempt to get a good haircut; the next, it’s a chilling haunted-house story about racial self-loathing. It can have Al, Earn (Glover), and Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) have surreal adventures in the titular city, and it can send Earn’s ex Van (Zazie Beetz) to Paris to savagely beat up a Frenchman with a stale loaf of bread while supplying a banquet for wealthy cannibals. No show should be able to do so many radically different things as well as Atlanta does routinely.
“It’s the night before my wedding, and I’m in the middle of a sweat contest,” Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) laments when she finds herself stuck at the titular Boston bar in the classic sitcom’s debut episode. But in those early seasons where the clever, pretentious, and fragile Diane was locked in an endless cycle of makeouts and breakups with cocky ex-jock bartender Sam Malone (Ted Danson), Cheers never let you see it sweat, as it effortlessly rewrote the book on TV romance, creating the will-they-or-won’t-they template seen decades later with couples like Jim and Pam on The Office. Jokewise, it had a far higher batting average than any player who ever faced off against Sam when he pitched for the Red Sox. Whatever spark the show lost when Long exited to make movies — to be replaced by Kirstie Alley’s more desperate and pathetic Rebecca — it compensated by leaning more heavily on one of the greatest collections of goofballs ever, including Kelsey Grammer’s pompous shrink Frasier Crane (eventually to get his own classic spinoff), Rhea Perlman’s hostile waitress Carla, Woody Harrelson’s guileless bartender Woody, John Ratzenberger’s insufferable know-it-all mailman Cliff, and George Wendt’s professional barfly Norman Peterson — or, as he’s known to the gang at Cheers, NORM!
What you’re reading here isn’t a blurb. It’s a time machine, taking us back to a place — in this case, the seven seasons in which we followed mysterious, charismatic Sixties ad exec Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and his irrepressible protégé Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) — where we ache to go again. A darkly funny workplace drama, a lavishly detailed chronicle of social change across one of the most turbulent decades of American history, and a nuanced character study of Don, Peggy, the indomitable Joan (Christina Hendricks), silver-tongued Roger (John Slattery), and a host of other unforgettable figures. What would TV be like without it? Not great, Bob!
When comedian Jerry Seinfeld and his neurotic, self-destructive best friend George Costanza (Jason Alexander) are developing a sitcom based on Jerry’s life in Seinfeld Season Four, George describes it as “a show about nothing.” The fictional head of NBC they pitch it to wonders why anyone would watch that. His real-life counterparts had no such questions, as Seinfeld became a phenomenon — and one of the most influential comedies ever — through its obsession with the minutiae of everyday life (double-dipping chips, regifting presents), the unsentimental “no hugging, no learning” mantra of Seinfeld and co-creator Larry David, its collection of New York characters like the Soup Nazi and George Steinbrenner (voiced by David), and the explosive comic chemistry among Seinfeld, Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus (as Jerry’s judgmental ex-girlfriend Elaine Benes), and Michael Richards (as his shiftless, gregarious neighbor Cosmo Kramer). Impeccably designed and endlessly quotable, like when the famous episode “The Contest” defined abstaining from masturbation as being “master of your domain.”
Sure, it’s rewarding when a TV show can provide dozens of hours of mirth across many seasons. Sometimes, though, the most satisfying experience comes from series that have a few things to say, say them perfectly, and then shake their heads and walk away before you can follow them into less-interesting story arcs. Never has that short-and-sweet approach been more impeccably executed than with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s tragicomic tour de force, where she played a self-destructive woman so lonely that her healthiest relationships were with her unseen television audience, and with the Hot Priest (Andrew Scott) with whom she fell madly in lust in the second season. And whether she was talking directly to us or not (in TV’s best-ever use of breaking the fourth wall), Waller-Bridge held the audience in the palm of her hand throughout. She made Fleabag as raunchy, as funny, and as sad — sometimes more than one of those at the same time — as she wanted it to be. And then she said goodbye.
Whenever you hear a contemporary showrunner refer to their work as “a novel for television” or “a 10-hour movie,” odds are they spent a lot of time watching David Simon and Ed Burns’ drama and mistakenly assumed that it would be easy to copy. It was an urban epic that gradually touched every corner of its fictionalized Baltimore, from cops and drug dealers to middle school students and politicians. The Wire preached that “all the pieces matter,” then put the concept into action, so that the slow pacing and narrative sprawl made all the show’s tragedies — visited upon one of the most amazing casts of characters ever assembled, from ambitious drug dealer Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) down to sweet junkie Bubbles (Andre Royo) and stickup artist Omar Little (Michael Kenneth Williams) — and all of its criticisms of the state of modern America, hit harder each time. Often imitated, never duplicated — not even by Simon on impressive follow-ups like Tremé or The Deuce. As D’Angelo Barksdale (Larry Gilliard Jr.) puts it while using chess as a metaphor for the drug game, “The king stay the king.”
High school teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) tells his students that he likes to think of chemistry as “a study of change,” which conveniently is the major theme of the crime saga built around him. No series before or since has taken better advantage of the medium’s ability to track a character’s journey over a long period of time, while also crafting the kind of memorable individual installments that distinguish TV from movies. Breaking Bad travels step by agonizing step through Walt’s journey from lower-middle-class breadwinner to lord of his own crystal-meth empire, where he’s alternately helped and hurt along the way by former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), criminal lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), calculating kingpin Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), and even his own victimized wife Skyler (Anna Gunn). And the series is only as thrilling and as devastating as it is because it keeps methodically showing you how Walt and the others got from there to here.
What is there left to say about the best, longest running, most influential, most acclaimed TV comedy of them all? (Krusty the Clown, before spitting in disgust: “Acclaimed?!?!”) Should we offer loopy quotes at random, like when Abe Simpson had an onion on his belt, which was the style at the time? Should we push back against the bogus sentiment that The Simpsons hasn’t been funny in decades, since even in its 32nd season, it was able to put -together an episode as sharp as the Comic Book Guy-focused Wes Anderson tribute? Talk about Homer Simpson as an avatar of all that is great and terrible about the American male? Marvel at the wide range of tones and subjects it’s made room for, such that the poignant “You are Lisa Simpson” scene from the end of “Lisa’s Substitute” belongs on the same show where Homer went into space with NASA or once asked George Harrison where the Quiet Beatle got his brownie? Hum a few bars of the monorail song? Start ranking all of the guest stars, from Phil Hartman all the way down to the guy from Joe Millionaire? Or should we just admit that after all these years, The Simpsons’ genius speaks for itself?
The winner — and still undisputed champion — from North Caldwell, New Jersey, coming in heavy at 86 medium-transforming episodes filled with whacking, psychiatric analysis, and cunnilingus and fart jokes, it’s The Sopranos! Of course David Chase’s creation topped the list again, because we are still living in the new world of television ushered in by Mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini). As Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) helped Tony better understand himself and his relationships with wife Carmela (Edie Falco), mother Livia (Nancy Marchand), nephew Christopher (Michael Imperioli), and the dangerous idiots in his crew, Chase’s unapologetically dark examination of turn-of-the-century America took a torch to every written and unwritten rule that TV storytelling had been governed by since the days of Gunsmoke. Simplicity and holding the audience’s hand were out, and narrative and moral complexity were in, all the way through a final edit that we still can’t stop—
From Rolling Stone US.
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