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The 20 best TV shows based on a true story

They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and these stellar series are proof.

In a content-saturated world full of sequels, reboots, and series that overstay their welcome, one subgenre continues to elevate television in a way that is both exciting and educational: TV shows that are based on true stories. Whether it's little-known tales that deserve a spotlight (like Maid ) or well-detailed looks at history (like Chernobyl ), true story TV shows provide us with dramatic content and wonderful performances that are all the more affecting since they're rooted in reality.

The best series in this category take care to fully develop the characters while transporting audiences to a time and place, giving the people involved in the true story justice. And while these tales are definitely entertaining, they also " help us understand the mistakes of the past in a new way," as EW's Kristen Baldwin writes.

Read on for EW's list of the best TV shows based on true stories.

A Very English Scandal (2018)

This three-episode miniseries follows the publicized trial of British Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe ( Hugh Grant ) who is charged with conspiracy to commit murder against his ex-lover ( Ben Whishaw ). A Very English Scandal is, as the name suggests, very English, teetering between comedy and drama, according to Whishaw . What makes the series special beyond recounting Britain's "trial of the century" is its ability to go deeper with the source material with hefty themes for modern audiences. A Very English Scandal then, according to EW's Maureen Lee Lenker , is "a moving examination of sexuality, identity, and repression, set against the struggle to decriminalize homosexuality in Great Britain."

Where to watch A Very English Scandal : Amazon Prime Video

Cast: Hugh Grant, Ben Whishaw, Alex Jennings, Patricia Hodge, Monica Dolan

Related content: Ben Whishaw explains what's so very English about A Very English Scandal

Alias Grace (2017)

From the mind of author Margaret Atwood , Alias Grace dramatizes the grisly homicide of Thomas Kinnear and his lover, Nancy Montgomery, in 1843 Toronto. Sarah Polley (the Oscar-winning writer of Women Talking ) wrote the six-part series for Netflix that's in the same vein as Atwood's most famous work, The Handmaid's Tale . Our story follows Grace, one of the two murderers serving her time in prison, played by the " magnetically interesting " Sarah Gadon , who draws us in "without losing sight of her unreliability," says EW's critic. While The Handmaid's Tale relies on a dystopian future to reflect current anxieties and social injustices, Alias Grace uses the past to enhance an "unflinching look at the horrors of being a woman."

Where to watch Alias Grace : Netflix

EW grade: A- ( read the review )

Cast: Sarah Gadon, Edward Holcroft, Rebecca Liddiard, Zachary Levi , David Cronenberg , Anna Paquin , Paul Gross

Related content: Zachary Levi mastered an old-timey accent for Alias Grace

American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson (2016)

Winning nine Emmys and shocking audiences in spite of its well-known source material, the first season of American Crime Story focuses on the biggest pre-internet event of the 1990s: the trial of O.J. Simpson . Over the course of 10 episodes, The People v. O.J. Simpson is a captivating retelling of the scandal that took the world by storm, providing intricate details and regurgitating conversations surrounding the case. Cuba Gooding Jr. has a career-best turn as Simpson in this "meticulously crafted, powerfully resonant docudrama" that, as EW's critic writes , "crackles with timely issues — race, sexism, privilege, celebrity, broken justice, media manipulation, and more."

Where to watch American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson : Hulu

EW grade: A ( read the review )

Cast: Cuba Gooding Jr., Sarah Paulson , Sterling K. Brown , Courtney B. Vance , David Schwimmer , Nathan Lane , Bruce Greenwood, John Travolta

Related content: American Crime Story : How accurate is it compared to the real O.J. Simpson trial?

Band of Brothers (2001)

Based on the book of the same name by Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers is a 10-episode miniseries about the "Easy Company," a.k.a. the 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division of the United States during World War II. Coming off the success of Saving Private Ryan (1998), Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks served as creators and executive producers of this finely crafted, historically-moving tribute to the men who fought in the war. Band of Brothers mixes intense realism in its documentary-style cinematography with empathetic characters (some of which get their own personal episode), but it's the interviews with real-life members of Easy Company that remind viewers of the true sacrifice. As EW's writer put it , "If it doesn't put a lump in your throat, you need to have your throat checked."

Where to watch Band of Brothers : Max

Cast: Damian Lewis , Ron Livingston , Neal McDonough , David Schwimmer , Donnie Wahlberg , Colin Hanks , Michael Fassbender , Jimmy Fallon , Andrew Scott , Tom Hardy , James McAvoy , Simon Pegg

Related content: Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks talk war games

Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014)

Based on Nelson Johnson's 2002 non-fiction book about crime lord Enoch L. Johnson, Boardwalk Empire was an HBO powerhouse of programming in the early 2010s from Terence Winter , a writer and executive producer of The Sopranos . Drawing on Johnson's nearly 30 years of prominence as the crime boss controlling Atlantic City, Winter created the fictional character Nucky Thompson — played brilliantly by Steve Buscemi — to dramatize the events of the prohibition era in New Jersey. The pilot was directed by Martin Scorsese , setting the tone and visual style for a series that would run for five critically-acclaimed seasons and draw millions of viewers.

Where to watch Boardwalk Empire : Max

EW grade: N/A ( read the review )

Cast: Steve Buscemi, Michael Shannon , Kelly Macdonald, Shea Whigham, Stephen Graham , Michael Kenneth Williams , Vincent Piazza

Related content: Boardwalk Empire post-mortem: Jeffrey Wright on season 5 finale

Chernobyl (2019)

Created by Craig Mazin (showrunner of The Last of Us ), this Max miniseries is " a vivid and detailed retelling " of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in the Soviet Union. The series delicately packs the crisis into five episodes, with the pilot being a tense recreation of the calamity itself, while the following four installments cover the fallout and investigation into the government's failure to respond. Each moment is expertly (and uncomfortably) crafted to reflect the crumbling world. As EW's critic writes, "the dense realism of Chernobyl gives the show a freakish close-up terror ." And a limited series feels like just the right amount of space to flesh out the incident succinctly, honing in on small moments to give the story the power it deserves — while garnering 10 Emmy wins along the way.

Where to watch Chernobyl : Max

Cast: Jared Harris , Stellan Skarsgård , Emily Watson , Barry Keoghan , Jessie Buckley , Adam Nagaitis

Related content: Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin reflects on the powerful finale and 'the cost of lies'

The Crown (2016–present)

One of the most talked about shows in recent years is The Crown , a multi-generational drama that spans the 20th century leading up to and following Queen Elizabeth II 's reign. Starting in 1947 at the wedding of the soon-to-be Queen ( Claire Foy ) to Philip, Duke of Edinburgh ( Matt Smith ), the Netflix series takes viewers into the world of royalty while sparing no visuals or details. Though the showrunners have received backlash for some creative liberties — some even stretching so far as to call it false history — The Crown still manages to tell a pompous story of royalty, intricately bringing viewers back to a time and place that still continues to awe audiences with each new season.

Where to watch The Crown : Netflix

Cast: Claire Foy, Matt Smith, Olivia Colman, Imedla Staunton, Tobias Menzies , Jonathan Pryce , Vanessa Kirby , Helena Bonham Carter , Timothy Dalton , Emma Corrin , Elizabeth Debicki , Gillian Anderson

Related content: Battle royal: The Crown 's Dominic West and Elizabeth Debicki on portraying Charles and Diana's bitter divorce

Dopesick (2021)

With a narrative web spun across the country, Dopesick tells the story of America's opioid crisis from many angles. Channeling real-life figures and composite characters, the miniseries' ensemble format " deftly corrals the vast addiction epidemic through intimate, deeply engrossing stories of human devastation," EW's Kristen Baldwin writes. From Richard Sackler and Purdue Pharma first pushing OxyContin in the late '90s to the doctors prescribing it and the feds seeking justice years later, Dopesick 's impact is "even more terrifying, because the monster at the heart of this story is real."

Where to watch Dopestick : Hulu

Cast: Michael Stuhlbarg , Will Poulter , Michael Keaton , Kaitlyn Dever , Rosario Dawson , Peter Sarsgaard , John Hoogenakker

Related content: Kaitlyn Dever says Dopesick was 'the hardest thing I've shot'

Five Days at Memorial (2022)

Five Days at Memorial presents hard-to-watch history in a way that helps us understand the mistakes of the not-so-distant past. Based on the meticulously crafted book of the same name by Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial traces the fallout and fraut decision to euthanize patients at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, presenting " an agonizing, brutally vivid retelling of a natural disaster that begat a national disgrace," says EW's critic. As it recreates the onset of Katrina through archival footage and set pieces that remind us of the devastation, the eight-episode series is just as much of a historical document as it is a warning for a future ravaged by climate change.

Where to watch Five Days at Memorial : Apple TV+

EW grade: B+ ( read the review )

Cast: Vera Farmiga, Cherry Jones, Cornelius Smith Jr., Robert Pine, Adepero Oduye, Julie Ann Emery

Generation Kill (2008)

American journalist Evan Wright was a reporter embedded with the U.S. Marines during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The following year, he published the book Generation Kill about his experiences with the 1st Reconnaissance Marines, and later adapted it into a show that captivated audiences in 2008. The collaboration between Wright and writers David Simon and Ed Burns resulted in a beautifully-worked depiction of war that goes beyond cliches and into a finely detailed historical document. As EW's critic notes , "You can tell that the writers responded to Wright's clear-eyed reporting with all the precise details that accumulate to create a nuanced look at young men thrown into circumstances way beyond their control."

Where to watch Generation Kill : Max

Cast: Alexander Skarsgård , James Ransone , Lee Tergesen

Related content: Alexander Skarsgård on Tarzan, True Blood, and the roles that shaped him

I Am the Night (2019)

A disgraced journalist ( Chris Pine ) and a young girl looking for her father (India Eisley) team up in this six-episode series about L.A.'s most infamous cold case: the Black Dahlia murder. Based on the memoir by Fauna Hodel, I Am the Night is a worthwhile entry into the true crime zeitgeist, anchored by the performances of Pine and Eisley as Fauna. The directors, which includes Patty Jenkins ( Wonder Woman ), handle the visual style of the show with a keen eye for the mid-century period, steeping the era in what EW's critic calls " magic-hour noir , shot on painterly film under sunlight as golden-glorious as Chris Pine's hair." Impressive visuals and carefully-crafted characters help propel this part biopic, part murder mystery into new forays.

Where to watch I Am the Night : Hulu

EW grade: B ( read the review )

Cast: Chris Pine, India Eisley, Jefferson Mays, Connie Nielsen

Related content: A brief history of every Black Dahlia adaptation (and some conspiracy theories)

John Adams (2008)

Paul Giamatti stars as the titular president in this series about the first 50 years of the United States. Directed by Tom Hooper ( Les Misérables ), John Adams is a well-produced dramatization of American history that comes alive thanks to its incredible cast of characters. Joining Giamatti is Laura Linney as the " iron-willed " Abigail Adams, Stephen Dillane as Thomas Jefferson, David Morse as George Washington, Tom Wilkinson as Benjamin Franklin, Rufus Sewell as Alexander Hamilton, Justin Theroux as John Hancock, Danny Huston as Samuel Adams, Sarah Polley as Abigail Adams Smith, and Tom Hollander as King George III. It's a wonderfully-acted miniseries that dramatizes the past succinctly and creatively in the same vein as works like Lincoln and Selma . To quote EW's critic, "Who says TV doesn't make history thought-provokingly exciting?"

Where to watch John Adams : Max

Cast: Paul Giamatti, Laura Linney, Stephen Dillane, David Morse, Tom Wilkinson, Rufus Sewell, Justin Theroux, Sarah Polley, Tom Hollander

Related content: How John Adams set the stage for Hamilton

Maid (2021)

Based on the memoir by Stephanie Land, Maid is an earnest limited series about Alex ( Margaret Qualley ), a young mother who escapes an abusive relationship and survives by cleaning houses. Alex has to deal with her violent ex Sean ( Nick Robinson ), her bipolar mother (Qualley's real mom, Andie MacDowell ), and government red tape that thwarts her attempts at financial assistance in this adaptation that reflects the book's harsh realities. Qualley is the shining star of Maid , with EW's writer declaring that her performance "hits each beat with an authenticity that will leave you thinking about the protagonist's plight long after the credits roll."

Where to watch Maid : Netflix

Cast: Margaret Qualley, Nick Robinson, Anika Noni Rose, Tracy Vilar, Billy Burke

Related content: Andie MacDowell to star alongside daughter Margaret Qualley in Netflix's Maid

Manhunt (2019)

Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton ( Martin Clunes ) leads an investigation and subsequent race to track down a serial killer in Manhunt , based on the 2004 murder of French student Amélie Delagrange. When The acclaimed series broke viewership records when it premiered on ITV in Britain in 2019, garnering an international audience. Its brilliance comes from the way the showrunners expertly adapt Sutton's memoirs to retell the story without delving into clichés, instead relying on a tightly woven script, excellent acting, and fine details to give proper space to this true crime program.

Where to watch Manhunt : Acorn TV

Cast: Martin Clunes, Claudie Blakley, Stephen Wight, Katie Lyons, Steffan Rhodri

Mindhunter (2017–2019)

Set in the '70s and '80s, Mindhunter follows two FBI agents ( Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany ) who are tasked with interviewing serial killers to solve open cases, pioneering the bureau's practice of criminal profiling and the Behavioral Science Unit. In a media landscape where true crime shows are often exploitative, Mindhunter stands out for its cerebral and focused atmosphere, curious nature, and historical significance. The series is at its best during the interviews, with Cameron Britton 's being the standout (he earned an Emmy nomination for portraying notorious killer Ed Kemper). Fans were recently disappointed when showrunner David Fincher confirmed that there would be no season 3 — but the first two installments are still absolutely worth your time.

Where to watch Mindhunter : Netflix

Cast: Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, Anna Torv , Hannah Gross, Cotter Smith, Cameron Britton

Related content: The true connection between Mindhunter and The Exorcist

Narcos (2015–2017)

The hit Netflix series Narcos dramatizes the story of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug kingpin who made billions from the 1970s to the 1990s. Played brilliantly by Wagner Moura , Escobar is beautifully complex, and " striking for his profound decency ," says EW's critic. Rounding out the main cast are two DEA agents, played by Pedro Pascal and Boyd Holbrook . Pascal stands out as Javier Peña, "deeply and effortlessly" connecting with his character and becoming the glue that held all three seasons of the original series together. Narcos spawned a spin-off, Narcos: Mexico , that continued the terrifying bloodshed and action for audiences. But it's the story of Escobar, bolstered by Moura's charismatic performance, that remains the most remarkable retelling of this corner of history.

Where to watch Narcos : Netflix

Cast: Wagner Moura, Pedro Pascal, Boyd Holbrook, Joanna Christie, Maurice Compte

Related content: The return of Pablo: Original Narcos star Wagner Moura on helping bring Mexico to a close

Unbelievable (2019)

Told over the course of several years, Unbelievable is the story of Marie Adler (Kaitlyn Dever), whose life is turned upside down when she is charged with lying about rape. Years later, two detectives — the foul-mouthed, cynical Grace Rasmussen ( Toni Collette ) and soft-spoken Karen Duvall ( Merritt Wever ) — work to reveal the truth of her assault. Each actress is given the space to shine in this " deeply and unapologetically female " story that avoids cliches and delicately weaves a narrative with urgency. The show was nominated for four Emmy awards, including Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie for Collette. As EW's Kristen Baldwin writes, "watching Unbelievable is an extremely satisfying experience — not just for its storytelling, but for its depiction of women who confront their reality rather than succumbing to it."

Where to watch Unbelievable : Netflix

Cast: Kaitlyn Dever, Toni Collette, Merritt Wever, Eric Lange, Bill Fagerbakke

Related content: Real-life inspiration for Netflix's Unbelievabl e praises series: 'That was closure for me'

Under the Banner of Heaven (2022)

One of the newest titles on this list, Under the Banner of Heaven stars Andrew Garfield as a devout Mormon detective investigating a murder of a Latter-day Saint mother and her baby daughter. The series owes much of its success to Garfield's dramatic performance and the 2003 source material, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer. Creator Dustin Lance Black worked for 10 years to adapt Krakauer's story for the screen , a lengthy process that was successfully honors rather than exploits the families affected. "I want people to be able to make comparisons between what the Laffertys were going through in Utah in the '80s and what so many people in the world are going through right now," Black told EW. "That's the lesson of this true-crime thriller."

Where to watch Under the Banner of Heaven : Hulu

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Gil Birmingham, Adelaide Clemens, Sandra Seacat, Daisy Edgar-Jones

Related content: Under the Banner of Heaven 's Andrew Garfield on what sets his character apart from other true-crime detectives

We Own This City (2022)

A show that has flown under the radar since it premiered on HBO in April 2022, We Own This City is an unflinching, true-to-life drama about corrupt cops and a broken system. Jon Bernthal stars as Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, a Baltimore police officer and member of the Gun Trace Task Force that was at the center of 2017's corruption charges. What makes this miniseries a rough " six fleet hours of simmering rage " is its well-written, non-chronological script that pulls no punches in its bleak depiction of reality. From George Pelecanos and David Simon, the producer team on The Wire , this drama miniseries is, according to EW's critic, "a blistering and brilliant cop show about the corrosion of American law enforcement and America itself."

Where to watch We Own This City : Max

Cast: Jon Bernthal, Wunmi Mosaku, Jamie Hector, Josh Charles, McKinley Belcher III, Darrell Britt-Gibson

Related content: Oughta Get a Nod: We Own This City and its dynamic star Jon Bernthal

When They See Us (2019)

Ava DuVernay directed this tough to watch but utterly essential dramatic series about the Central Park Five, a.k.a. the group of Black and Latino teens who were unjustly accused of the rape and assault of a white woman in Central Park in 1989. Told over the course of four episodes, When They See Us takes viewers behind the scenes of the police pressure to find a suspect that led to real-life consequences for five innocent children. As time progresses and the boys turn into men whose lives are upended by a crime they didn't commit, the series draws on their experience to paint a detailed portrait of race, incarceration, and injustice. Jharrel Jerome is notably outstanding as both young and adult Korey — and his speech during his trial was one of the most remarkable scenes to hit screens in 2019.

Where to watch When They See Us : Netflix

Cast: Asante Blackk, Caleel Harris, Ethan Herisse , Jharrel Jerome , Marquis Rodriguez, Justin Cunningham, Jovan Adepo, Chris Chalk, Freddy Miyares, Vera Farmiga, Felicity Huffman

Related content: Ava DuVernay goes deep on her new Netflix series When They See Us

Related Articles

10 Best Biographical TV Shows, Ranked

The majority of TV shows focus on original, fictional tales, but a few have also told true stories quite convincingly.

The TV industry is just as obsessed with true stories as much as the movie industry is, hence numerous biographical TV shows have been made. Such shows either shed more light on the lives of world-famous figures or educate viewers about the adventures of people only known in niche circles.

RELATED: 10 Best Movie Spin-Offs Based On Popular TV Shows

Among the numerous biographical projects that have been made for TV, a few are likely to be enjoyed by all because they are more historically accurate. On the other hand, there are also those that are entertaining because they are a perfect blend of dramatized and factual content.

10 Genius (2017 – Present)

Stream on disney+.

Genius is a smorgasbord of a TV show as it covers the lives of several influential historical figures instead of one. Viewers can follow Albert Einstein as he develops the Theory of Relativity, watch Pablo Picasso paint the Guernica, or dance as Aretha Franklin records "Natural Woman."

All these individuals are accorded their own complete season, hence qualifying Genius as one of the best anthology TV series . The format allows any potential viewer to pick only the seasons featuring the legends that they care about. Even so, fans would be advised to watch everything since the show has outstanding performances from the likes of Antonio Banderas and Geoffrey Rush, who all received Emmy nominations.

9 Welcome To Chippendales (2022)

Stream on hulu.

The Chippendales dance troupe achieved global recognition in the '80s by offering wild striptease performances that shocked society. Interestingly, the man who founded the group never got the same recognition because his business partner took all the glory. How such a toxic business atmosphere permeated behind the scenes is explained in Welcome To Chippendales.

RELATED: 10 Best TV Villains Ruined By One Scene

Still, the show isn't all about money. A couple of dance routines are shown, and they are as well choreographed as what people watched in the '80s. Even so, the source of entertainment remains Steve Bernajee: the real brains of the operation, and overall first founder of America's first male strip club. He is as vindictive as he is ambitious hence it doesn't take long for events to descend into murder and mayhem.

8 The Crown (2016 – Present)

Stream on netflix.

The Crown is advertised as a show about Elizabeth II, but the queen's story only serves as the skeleton, with most of the flesh coming from the scandalous personal lives of other royal family members. Additionally, the professional careers of Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher make for some entertaining political plots too.

The Crown has established itself as one of the most adored political dramas because it often picks tabloid tales over what is considered actual fact — but fans don't mind the dramatization. The lack of accuracy in the story has been made up for in the costume design, with the show constantly featuring the exact same stunning attire the characters were photographed with in real-life.

7 Narcos (2015 – 2017)

A show about the most infamous drug kingpin of all time is unlikely to fail, especially if the world's biggest streaming service is behind it. That's the case with Narcos , which wowed global audiences instantly because of its captivating chronicles and high production values that had initially only been reserved for American projects.

Extreme violence and a fast-paced plot make Narcos a perfect binge, and so does the narration, which provides context to every single subplot. The show also expands beyond the Medellín Cartel, going on to cover the more reserved Cali Cartel before branching off into Mexico for a spinoff of the Guadalajara Cartel.

6 Wu Tang: An American Saga (2019 – Present)

In Wu Tang: An American Saga , a couple of young Black men are forced to make the tough choice between dealing drugs and getting into music. After all, it's the early '90s when the crack epidemic is still wide and those trading in drugs are living large. Hip Hop, on the other hand, is becoming a global phenomenon.

RELATED: 10 Most Meta TV Shows

Well, the talented youngsters choose right, leading to the formation of one of the greatest rap groups of all time: The Wu-Tang Clan. Fans thus get to see what made them connect and how they were able to make such classic songs. With fame also comes plenty of drama and the show explores that too through personal relationships.

5 Spartacus (2010 – 2013)

Stream on starz.

A decade after Spartacus ended, few shows have managed to match the flowery dialogue fans got to hear in the Starz series. The real Batiatus might have never asked a question such as "Do you sh** gold coins?" but the show runs away with such outrageous remarks to good effect.

Overall, Spartacus thrills through its fight sequences, where the emphasis is placed on blood splatter and the cries of victory. There are hardly any boring characters either and even though the mannerisms of most are exaggerated, the course of their lives mirrors that of those that existed at the height of the Third Seville War, hence qualifying the show as one of the greatest historical dramas .

4 The Offer (2022)

Stream on paramount+.

There have always been rumors about the behind-the-scenes tussles that occurred during the making of one of the best crime epics so Paramount decided to tell the story through The Offer . The miniseries covers the development of The Godfather and how the process impacted the lives of several others by default.

Watching The Offer feels like watching a spinoff of the movie itself since real-life Cosa Nostra members are included as supporting characters. Overall, it sheds a light on the office politics that happen in major film studios as well as the outside forces that inspire the tone of Hollywood projects.

3 American Crime Story (2016 – Present)

American Crime Story is yet another neatly done anthology series that only picks the sappiest of tales. From the O.J. Simpson murder case to President Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, viewers are given plenty to feed on.

RELATED: 10 Best TV Crossover Romances

The show doesn't just recount what happened but also uses supporting characters to condemn the injustices. Moreover, by focusing only on specific moments in the lives of the characters rather than the whole journey, American Crime Story comes off as positively precise and more educative.

2 Mike (2022)

The development of Mike drew plenty of criticism after Mike Tyson clarified that he never authorized it, but it could be argued that this was a good thing. Without the boxer's green light, the miniseries unapologetically explores his controversial moments and avoids painting him as an angel.

The format used is laudable since it involves an older Tyson telling his story to an audience and then cutting to the actual events using flashbacks. Additionally, there are plenty of fourth-wall-breaking moments which help sprinkle humor and make the boxer appear funnier than he probably is in real life.

1 Band Of Brothers (2001)

Stream on hbo max.

There are plenty of Hollywood biopics about members of the military but TV shows often opt to go the fictional route when exploring the armed forces. Thankfully, Band Of Brothers discards the trend by delving into the adventures of the famed 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment.

The HBO series perfectly balances the horrors of the battlefield with the heroic acts of the soldiers, hence the mood alternates between joy and heartbreak. Generally, everything from the production to the acting is handled with meticulous perfectionism and that's no shocker because the series is created by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.

NEXT: 10 Best TV Shows That Are Surprisingly Short

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The 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time

What makes a great television show?

There may be as many types of excellence as there are excellent shows. Series can wow us with how broadly they changed society, from “Seinfeld” redefining American slang to “Mad Men” bearing all the hallmarks of an early-21st-century TV Golden Age to “The Oprah Winfrey Show” making daytime viewers feel part of a special club of millions. Or they can feel like closely held secrets, always ready to welcome curious viewers for the first time, like “The Leftovers” or “Enlightened.” They can bring together insights about a rapidly shifting society with humor that stands the test of time, like the shows created by Norman Lear, who died this month at age 101. And they can dazzle us with spectacle or entrance us with intimate character moments — or, if they’re “The Sopranos,” they can do both.

This issue of Variety looks at all the ways that TV is a part of our lives, and, fittingly, it’s topped by the show so appealing that television has been chasing its success since its earliest days. Lucille Ball let the world into a fictionalized version of her home, and in so doing became a fixture in all of ours. And her endless transformations — her plug-and-play approach to new careers, her rubbery face — suit a medium in which the most reliable constant is change.

The list around which this issue is built reflects decades’ worth of evolutions and revolutions; the entries were chosen by a team of Variety staff and contributors, taking into account the quality of each show and its cultural impact. (With apologies to countless programs that deserve celebration, we limited ourselves to English-language series that aired or streamed stateside — because the entire world of television is prohibitively broad for this undertaking.) We hope this list will reflect two particular ways television can be great: familiarity and discovery. Our top 100 television shows, the product of heated staff debates, may remind each reader of past favorites, and may introduce future binge-watches too.

Not that Ball, this list’s marquee star, would have known what that phrase means — to her, “binge” is what you do with a bottle of Vitameatavegamin. But we hope she’d have appreciated the idea. Spending time getting to know a show and to anticipate its rhythms is a pleasure that’s been available since Lucy Ricardo first begged to perform at Ricky’s club. And it’s not going anywhere.

These writers contributed suggestions for list entries: Joshua Alston, BreAnna Bell, Amber Dowling, LaToya Ferguson, Hunter Ingram, Cynthia Littleton, Ramin Setoodeh and Brian Steinberg.

NBC 2009-15 The half-hour comedy is a format built around comfort and familiarity, and while “Community” had those trappings — a quirky ensemble, a relatable setting, a will-they-won’t-they storyline — the Dan Harmon series was best when it got weird . Several times per season, Greendale Community College disappeared to make room for difficult family memories to be unpacked in a stop-motion Christmas wonderland, or for sexual tension to unravel in a paintball-driven war zone. “Community” was ambitious, but, like any good sitcom, it knew how to reset. It brought its characters from its endless alternate universes back to Greendale as though nothing unusual had happened at all.

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

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

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

The Good Fight

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

Black Mirror

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

I May Destroy You

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

Will & Grace

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

St. Elsewhere

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

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

The Cosby Show

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

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

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

General Hospital

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

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

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

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

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

Stranger Things

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

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

Thirtysomething

ABC 1987-91 OK, boomers: Listen up. “Thirtysomething” aspired to be a television version of “The Big Chill.” It was a serialized story about a group of close friends, affluent Philadelphia baby boomers, having feelings : about their careers, their marriages, their kids — everything sensitive (and, yes, 30-something) professional people might want to discuss at length. “Thirtysomething” introduced Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz as TV talents with a singular, cozy point of view — they went on to make “My So-Called Life” and “Once and Again,” which had similar aesthetics (and anxieties). “Thirtysomething” may have been all about introspection, but it also pulled off what we’d argue is the best bait and switch in TV history. In a much-anticipated episode about whether Nancy (Patricia Wettig) would survive cancer, just when the audience found out she would be OK, Gary (Peter Horton) got hit by a car and killed! Still not over it.

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

The Muppet Show

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

CBS/TNT 1978-91/2012-2014 There had certainly been galvanizing, community-building moments on television before “Dallas” asked “Who shot J.R.?” But in the summer of 1980, the question posed by a twist in the show’s third-season finale spurred a movement — people wore T-shirts (“I shot J.R.” was popular too); Vegas oddsmakers took bets — and “Dallas” became a sensation for CBS. The series not only helped popularize the cliffhanger as a plot device, but spurred a huge wave of glossy nighttime soap operas that soon included the massive “Dynasty” on ABC. Meanwhile, cast members Larry Hagman, Patrick Duffy, Victoria Principal and others were among the biggest stars of the 1980s.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Comedy Central 1999-2015

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

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

NBC 1990-96

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

ABC/NBC 1978-83

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

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

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

The Wonder Years

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

Living Single

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

The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story

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

ABC  1988-1997/2018

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

Grey’s Anatomy

ABC  2005-present

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

RuPaul’s Drag Race

Logo/VH1/MTV  2009-present

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

The Bob Newhart Show

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

Freaks and Geeks

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

The Jeffersons

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

Angels in America

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

The Comeback

HBO  2005/2014

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

Orange Is the New Black

Netflix  2013-19

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

In Living Color

Fox  1990-94

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

Comedy Central  1997-present

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

The Good Place

NBC  2016-20

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

Chappelle’s Show

Comedy Central  2003-06

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

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

NBC  1999-present

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

BoJack Horseman

Netflix  2014-20

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

Gilmore Girls

The WB/The CW/Netflix  2000-07/2016

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

Six Feet Under

HBO  2001-05

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

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson 

NBC  1962-92

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

Arrested Development

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

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

My So-Called Life 

ABC  1994-95 

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

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

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

Friday Night Lights

NBC-DirecTV 2006-11

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

The Leftovers

HBO 2014-17

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

The Dick Van Dyke Show

CBS 1961-66

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

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Syndicated 1987-94

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

The Larry Sanders Show

HBO 1992-98

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

The Americans

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

The Real World

MTV 1992-2017

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

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The WB/UPN 1997-2003

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

NBC 2005-13

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

The X-Files

Fox 1993-2002/2016-18

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

Enlightened

HBO 2011-13

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

Curb Your Enthusiasm

HBO 2000-present

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

Late Night With David Letterman

NBC 1982-93

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

NBC 1994-2009

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

Syndicated 1964-present

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

ABC 2004-10

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

CBS 2000-present

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

Hill Street Blues

NBC 1981-87

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

NBC 1994-2004

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

The Civil War

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

ABC/Showtime 1990-91/2017

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

HBO 2012-19

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

The West Wing

NBC 1999-2006

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

CBS 1972-83

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

The Carol Burnett Show

CBS 1967-78

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

NBC 2006-13

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

Game of Thrones

HBO 2011-19

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

CBS 1968-present

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

Playhouse 90

CBS 1955-60

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

The Golden Girls

NBC 1985-92

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

The Oprah Winfrey Show

Syndicated 1986-2011

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

All in the Family

CBS 1971-79

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

Saturday Night Live

NBC 1975-present

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

The Twilight Zone

CBS 1959-64

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

HBO 2018-23

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

Sesame Street

PBS/HBO/Max 1969-present 

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

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

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

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

CBS 1970-77

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

NBC 1989-98

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

HBO 2002-08

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

Sex and the City

HBO 1998-2004

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

Breaking Bad

AMC 2008-13

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

The Simpsons

Fox 1989-present

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

The Sopranos

HBO 1999-2007

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

AMC 2007-15

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

I Love Lucy

CBS 1951-57

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

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Hollywood Reporter Critics Pick the 50 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century (So Far)

Over the course of a few months, several Zoom meetings, lots of emails and countless Excel spreadsheets, three THR TV critics joined forces to hash out, and rank, what they consider the greatest shows since 2000.

By Daniel Fienberg , Angie Han , Robyn Bahr October 4, 2023

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

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

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

It was not fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, fine: We did have fun making it.

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

'Sex and the City' (HBO, 1998-2004)

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

'Avatar: The Last Airbender' (Nickelodeon, 2005-2008)

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

'South Side' (Comedy Central and Max, 2019-2022)

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

'Vida' (Starz, 2018-2020)

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

'The Underground Railroad' (Amazon Prime, 2021)

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

'The Crown' (Netflix, 2016-present)

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

'The Leftovers' (HBO, 2014-2017)

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

'Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown' (CNN, 2013-2018)

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

'Station Eleven' (HBO Max, 2021)

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

'Beef' (Netflix, 2023)

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

'Insecure' (HBO, 2016-2021)

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

'The Deuce' (HBO, 2017-2019)

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

'Band of Brothers' (HBO, 2001)

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

'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' (The CW, 2015-2018)

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

'The Shield' (FX, 2002-2008)

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

'Chernobyl' (HBO, 2019)

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

'Jane the Virgin' (The CW, 2014-2019)

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

'Orange Is the New Black' (Netflix, 2013-2019)

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

'Veep' (HBO, 2012-2019)

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

'Fleabag' (BBC Three and Amazon Prime Video, 2016-2019)

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

'Game of Thrones' (HBO, 2011-2019)

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

'Broad City' (Comedy Central, 2014-2019)

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

'How To With John Wilson' (HBO, 2020-2023) 

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

'Parks and Recreation' (NBC, 2009-2015)

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

'Battlestar Galactica' (Sci-Fi/Syfy, 2003-2009)

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

'Review' (Comedy Central, 2014-2017)

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

'I May Destroy You' (BBC One and HBO, 2020)

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

'Survivor' (CBS, 2000-present)

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

'Better Things' (FX, 2016-2022)

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

'Deadwood' (HBO, 2004-2006)

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

'Peep Show' (2003-2015, Channel 4)

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

'Rectify' (SundanceTV, 2013-2016)

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

'Friday Night Lights' (NBC and The 101 Network, 2006-2011)

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

'Halt and Catch Fire' (AMC, 2014-2017)

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

'Breaking Bad' (AMC, 2008-2013)

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

'Atlanta' (FX, 2016-2022)

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

'Enlightened' (HBO, 2011-2013)

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

'30 for 30' (ESPN, 2009-present)

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

'The Americans' (FX, 2013-2018)

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

'The Daily Show' (Comedy Central, 1996-present)

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

'BoJack Horseman' (Netflix, 2014-2020)

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

'Freaks and Geeks' (NBC, 1999-2000)

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

'Girls' (HBO, 2012-2017)

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

'Better Call Saul' (AMC, 2015-2022)

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

'Reservation Dogs' (FX/Hulu, 2021-2023)

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

'The Wire' (HBO, 2002-2008)

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

'30 Rock' (NBC, 2006-2013)

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

'Succession' (HBO, 2018-2023) 

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

'The Sopranos' (HBO, 1999-2007)

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

'Mad Men' (AMC, 2007-2015)

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

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19 Best Biopics Streaming Now on Hulu

February 24, 2023

Do you ever wonder how your favorite musician or actor rose to fame? Or, maybe you’re curious to know what really went on behind closed doors during big historical moments and headline-making scandals. You might even be wondering where to watch the Elvis movie ahead of the upcoming Oscars ® (hint — you can watch it right here on Hulu). 

We’ve gathered some of the best biopic movies and shows to stream, including the Oscar-nominated biopic film, Elvis . 

What is a Biopic?

“Biopic” is a nickname for the genre “biographical picture,” a type of film or TV series that brings a dramatized version of a real person’s life story to the screen. Filmmakers typically choose to make biopics about notable figures throughout history — namely celebrities, athletes, politicians, musicians, etc. 

Best Biopics on Hulu

Elvis (2022) — elvis presley.

Whether you know him for his devilish good looks, his signature dance moves, or his iconic melodies that have proven to transcend time — we all know who the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll is … or do we? Sideburns, bejeweled body suits, pelvis swings, and all of it — this Academy Award ® -nominated biographical film about the one and only Elvis Presley (Austin Butler) tells the little-known story of his equally beautiful and tragic life.  

If you like Elvis , be sure to check out more of our favorite movies about musicians .

Watch: Elvis *

*Elvis is available on Hulu with HBO Max® add-on subscription

Wu-Tang: An American Saga — The Wu-Tang Clan

When you think of East Coast hip-hop in the 1990s, the work of the Wu-Tang Clan is sure to be at the top of the list. You might know their hit songs like “Rushing Elephants,” “Gravel Pit,” and “A Better Tomorrow,” but do you know their origin story?

Wu-Tang: An American Saga is a Hulu Original series inspired by the true tale of the Wu-Tang Clan and how they came to be in 1992 during the height of the cocaine epidemic in New York City. Follow along in this three-season series as RZA (Ashton Sanders) brings his vision of hip-hop and unity to fruition.

Watch: Wu-Tang: An American Saga

Pam & Tommy — Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee

The year was 1996. Playmate and actress, Pamela Anderson (Lily James), and Motley Crue drummer, Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan), made headlines for their whirlwind marriage and the internet — a confusing concept at the time and still unavailable to most people. That is until everyone wanted easy access to Pam and Tommy’s infamous stolen home video.

A real-life love story, dramedy, and crime caper rolled into one, Pam & Tommy is an eight-part Hulu original limited series that explores the intersection of privacy, technology, and celebrity. 

Watch: Pam & Tommy  

Candy — Candy Montgomery 

Responsible housewife, loving mother, loyal friend, devout churchgoer, and … ax murderer? The pressure to maintain a perfect image can lead some people to do unthinkable things (like have an affair with their best friend’s husband and get caught in the violent aftermath). 

Based on the true story of Candy Montgomery (Jessica Biel), Candy revisits the shocking 1980s Texas true crime tale that made national headlines. 

Check out the Insider’s Guide to Candy for details on this shocking case.

Watch: Candy

Stardust (2020) — David Bowie

Today, David Bowie is one of the most influential artists of the 20th century — but that wasn’t always the case. When his interviews and appearances didn’t quite appeal to the masses early on in his career, Bowie decided that it was time to introduce a different side of him to the world — someone who wasn’t locked into the guise of a rock ‘n’ roll persona. 

Enter: Ziggy Stardust — a gender-fluid rock icon that disrupted the 1970s music scene and started the glam-rock revolution. Stardust tells the real-life story inspired by David Bowie (Johnny Flynn) on his first American tour. 

Watch: Stardust

The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021) — Billie Holiday

Singer Billie Holiday has fans of all colors, giving her the platform to sing about lynching and the inhumanity experienced by people of color in 1931 in the song “Strange Fruit.” The U.S. government grew concerned about the messaging as Holiday’s song gained momentum, making her the target of a sting operation intended to silence her. 

Starring Oscar-nominated actress, Andra Day, the Hulu Original film The United States vs. Billie Holiday captures a tumultuous time in the civil rights movement and one woman’s unfaltering determination to fight back. 

Learn more about Billie Holiday’s story and check out more Black history movies on Hulu. 

Watch: The United States vs. Billie Holiday

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) — Freddie Mercury

Farrokh Bulsara was under pressure : from his immigrant parents to make something of himself, from society to hide his sexuality, and from his own expectations to create rock ‘n’ roll music the way only “Freddie Mercury” could. 

Bohemian Rhapsody is a music industry biopic film inspired by the life of Farrokh, though you probably know him as Queen’s frontman Freddie Mercury. Starring Rami Malek, this biographical movie tells the story of the boy who grew up in Zanzibar, moved to London, and became one of the most iconic and influential names in music and pop culture around the world — even three decades after his tragic death. 

Watch: Bohemian Rhapsody *

*A Live TV plan is required to watch Bohemian Rhapsody on Hulu. Regional restrictions, blackouts, and additional terms apply.

Lincoln (2012) — Abraham Lincoln

When you think of Abraham Lincoln, his tall top hat and long beard probably come to mind first. But there’s much more to this Civil War leader than meets the eye. Set in 1865, Lincoln narrows in on the last four months of the president’s life — ending the war and abolishing slavery before his assassination at Ford’s Theater in Washington D.C. 

Daniel Day-Lewis stars as the 16th president of the United States in this biographical drama directed by Stephen Spielberg. 

Watch: Lincoln *

*Live TV plan required to watch Lincoln on Hulu. Regional restrictions, blackouts, and additional terms apply.

I, Tonya (2017) — Tonya Harding

Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) had difficulty being accepted into the figure skating world despite being incredibly gifted. Having grown up on the “wrong side of the rink,” Tonya never quite fit in with the wealthier high-brow skaters, so she dedicated her life to the craft to prove her worth.  

Despite her hard work, talent, and success in the sport, Tonya Harding’s name is now synonymous with “the incident” that made world headlines leading up to the 1994 Winter Olympics.

I, Tonya tells the true story of Tonya Harding — from discovering her love for figure skating to the career-altering scandal that ended it all. 

Watch: I, Tonya

King Richard (2021) — Richard Williams (Father of Venus and Serena Williams)

You know sibling tennis stars Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena Williams (Demi Singleton), but do you know how they became the champions they are today? 

It all started on the tennis courts in Compton, California, in the early 1990s with their father Richard Williams (Will Smith) at the reins. Defying the odds and bleak expectations, Richard found unwavering determination in the raw talent he saw in his daughters. 

With Venus and Serena serving as executive producers of the film, viewers can expect King Richard to tell the true-to-life Williams family story both on and off the court.

Watch: King Richard *

*King Richard is available on Hulu with HBO Max® add-on subscription.

Walk the Line (2005) — Johnny Cash

From his turbulent upbringing in Arkansas to rising to the ranks along other icons like Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash was getting everything anyone could ever dream of.  Could fame, fortune, and love be enough to keep his darkness from destroying it all?

Joaquin Phoenix walks the line in this biography film with Reese Witherspoon as Cash’s companion, June Carter. Discover the story behind one of music’s most influential names and how Cash came to write the rugged tunes he’s known for. 

Watch: Walk the Line *

*Walk the Line is available on Hulu with HBO Max® add-on subscription.

Whitney (2015) — Whitney Houston

Even after death, Whitney Houston’s voice, career, and story remain larger than life. 

From her earliest musical experiences in a church choir to her launch into superstardom and to navigating her turbulent relationship with singer Bobby Brown, Whitney is a biographical film that chronicles the entire life of this iconic singer and actress.

Grab your tissues and take in Whitney’s beautifully broken story as portrayed by actress, Yaya DaCosta. 

Watch: Whitney  

Flight (2012) — William “Whip” Whitaker

Commercial airline pilot, William “Whip” Whitaker (Denzel Washington), became an overnight hero when the passenger flight he was navigating experienced sudden mechanical failure. Whip’s experience combined with quick action allowed for a “safe” crash-landing maneuver, saving almost everyone on board. 

However, blood tests revealed high levels of alcohol and cocaine in Whitaker’s system during the hours following the incident. Flight recounts the criminal investigation against Whitaker, as well as his journey to get his addictions under control.

Watch: Flight

Women of the Movement — Mamie Till Mobley

Just as we never forgot the horrific racially-motivated murder of Emmett Till in the 1950s, neither did his mother, Mamie Till Mobley (Adrienne Warren). Despite living through a nightmarish tragedy that would leave the best of us emotionally debilitated — Mamie dedicate her entire life to opening the world’s eyes to the unfathomable pain endured by people of color. 

More than just a biographical anthology series, Women of the Movement tells a crucial story we mustn’t forget. 

Watch: Women of the Movement

The Dropout — Elizabeth Holmes

Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried) came up with a revolutionary concept — what if blood tests could be run with just a single drop of blood from a finger prick? Instead of finishing her degree at Stanford, Holmes dropped out and her company Theranos was born.

There’s just one major problem — Holmes was never able to create a working prototype. That didn’t stop her from barreling forward though, as she continued to raise millions of dollars to build an empire that would make her the world’s first self-made female billionaire. But an empire built on a foundation of deceit can only stay standing for so long. 

The Dropout is a real-life cautionary account about how far one lie can go and what happens when the world catches on.

Watch: The Dropout

Ali (2001) — Muhammad Ali

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

On the heels of his Olympic gold medal win in 1960, Muhammad Ali (Will Smith) exuded a level of confidence that had never been seen before by a Black athlete. He believed he was the greatest boxer of all time, and that belief became reality, bringing him a heavyweight championship win in 1964.  

Ali follows the famous boxer as he sacrifices everything for what he believes in.   

Watch: Ali *

*Ali requires STARZ® on Hulu add-on subscription. STARZ and related channels and service marks are the property of STARZ Entertainment, LLC. All other titles and related trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

Tesla (2020) — Nikola Tesla

Before the word “Tesla” was attached to high-tech cars, there was Nikola Tesla (Ethan Hawke) — an inventor with a revolutionary mind in the late 1800s who is credited with creating a sparkless motor with an alternating current (AC). 

Tesla tells the tale of Nikola’s uphill battle to create and sell his AC technology, while his boss, Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan), worked against him. 

Watch: Tesla

Shirley (2020) — Shirley Jackson

Based on the life and work of horror fiction writer, Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss), Shirley follows newlyweds who have been offered free room and board from Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his wife, Shirley.

While only partially biographical, Shirley explores Jackson’s life and the effects her husband’s infidelity had on her work and psyche.

Watch: Shirley

My Friend Dahmer (2017) — Jeffrey Dahmer

How did Jeffrey Dahmer become the notorious monster he’ll forever be known as? My Friend Dahmer is a biopic film that takes a deep look into how one of the most violent minds in history developed.

With actor, Ross Lynch, portraying the infamous serial killer, we get to see a different perspective on the troubled home and school life that may have played a part in the twisted psyche he developed during the years approaching adulthood. 

Watch: My Friend Dahmer

Interested in more shows and movies based on true stories? Check out our best documentaries and the most popular true crime streaming now.

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The 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time

By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

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.

‘What We Do in the Shadows’

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.   

‘Oz’

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.  

‘The Good Fight’

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 Odd Couple’

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 and Morty’ 

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. 

‘Squid Game’

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.  

‘NewsRadio’ 

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 Rockford Files’ 

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 Muppet Show’  

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.  

‘The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson’  

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 Wonder Years’ 

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.    

‘The Carol Burnett Show’

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.

‘The Crown’ 

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.   

‘The Kids in the Hall’  

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.  

‘The Bob Newhart Show’ 

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.   

‘Orange Is the New Black’

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.) O range 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.  

‘Fargo’  

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 for best screenplay, 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.     

‘I’m Alan Partridge’ 

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 . 

‘Party Down’ 

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?  

‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’  

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.”  

‘Band of Brothers’ 

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.  

‘Mr. Show with Bob and David’

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.   

‘Sex and the City’

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.   

‘The Jeffersons’ 

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.   

‘Justified’ 

“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.    

‘Frasier’

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. 

‘The Honeymooners’

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.”  

‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ 

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.

‘Good Times’  

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. 

‘Better Things’ 

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. 

‘SCTV’  

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.  

‘Chappelle’s Show’  

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.  

‘Fawlty Towers’

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. 

‘NYPD Blue’

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 Daily Show With Jon Stewart’

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.  

‘Girls’

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.  

‘The Golden Girls’

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.  

‘South Park’ 

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 Dick Van Dyke Show’

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.   

‘The Underground Railroad’ 

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.  

‘Taxi’

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.  

‘Key & Peele’

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.

‘Six Feet Under’

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 Me,” that takes the show’s premise to its logical conclusion — were extraordinary.

‘Russian Doll’

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.

‘Community’

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. 

‘Halt and Catch Fire’

“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.

‘ER’

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! 

‘The Office’ (U.K.)

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. 

‘Barry’

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.  

‘The X-Files’

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. 

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Ten New TV Series That Can Help You Be Your Best Self

Every year, we invite staff and regular contributors to nominate TV series for Greater Goodies, the awards we give to movies and shows that might help us to be our best selves. Here’s what we came up with this year!

The True-Self Award: American Born Chinese (Disney+)

At first glance, American Born Chinese appears to tell the familiar story of a high school kid trying to fit in. But, in fact, the series consists of two separate yet entwined tales—one in suburban America, the other in the Heavenly realm of Chinese folklore. And the goal isn’t so much about fitting in as it is about embracing your true self and forging your own path.

Jin Wang, an American-born Chinese, yearns to be just a “normal” kid—playing on the soccer team, hanging with the cool kids (all white), and maybe even dating the pretty girl (also white) in his biology class. But his parents are immigrants. His mom insists that he wear shirts that are on sale; and he likes manga, even though he won’t openly admit it. Still, as far as Jin is concerned, he’s making progress. That is, until exchange student Wei Chen shows up.

The principal introduces the two of them because they have “a lot in common.” But, actually, Wei-Chen exudes boundless confidence and pride in his heritage. Turns out Wei-Chen is the son of the great Monkey King (a character from the Chinese classic Journey to the West ). He has descended to Earth in search of the Fourth Scroll, in order to stop an uprising by the Bull Demon, and he’s convinced that Jin will be his guide. 

Confused? Don’t worry. It will all make sense when you see all the drama unfold onscreen. Unlike Disney’s offerings from the Star Wars and Marvel universes, there are no superheroes in this series. But as we later learn, everyone has a superpower. You just have to say “yes”  to the journey that feels authentic to you, and use your strengths to help others along the way. — Joanne Chen

The Food-as-Bridge Award: The Bear (FX)

There’s something so therapeutic about cooking—and in The Bear , we see just how essential food can be when you come from a dysfunctional family. 

We catch glimpses of what food means to other characters throughout the season, like in the storyline revolving around sous-chef Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri), who struggles to articulate to her father why cooking is her life’s calling. We see line cook Tina Marrero (Liza Colón-Zayas) owning her new life as a sous-chef when she indulges in a soulful karaoke rendition of “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” by Freddy Fender. 

But the most dramatic scenes of the second season happen when we see the extended Berzatto family getting together for Christmas dinner—and we come to understand just why this family needs something (like food) to focus on besides each other. The family matriarch Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) has been in the kitchen all day preparing a traditional Italian meal—and when she starts to mentally unravel before our eyes, she triggers everyone at the table in unique ways. In the chaos that follows, food—cooking it and eating it—becomes the only thing that keeps them afloat as individuals and together as a family.

Is the restaurant industry fraught with fostering a toxic, chaotic atmosphere? Sure. But at its core, suggests The Bear , cooking reconnects us with ourselves; it forces us to pause and ignore all of the stresses of the outside world to focus on the task at hand. — Serena Maria Daniels

The Empathy Award: Beef (Netflix)

Amy Lau (Ali Wong) is a successful entrepreneur married to stay-at-home dad George (Joseph Lee). Danny Cho (Steven Yeun) is a much-less-successful entrepreneur living with his brother, Paul (Young Mazino). When the two meet, they explode.

The purpose of Beef is to explain why that happens—and what the consequences are. We start to get answers when Amy arrives home “riled up” after her run-in with Danny. George says to her: “Amy, before you spiral, take a breath, pause. You gotta start focusing on the positive, OK. You know, maybe we should start doing the gratitude journals again.”

Amy smiles. Amy always smiles. We get to know that smile, over the course of the show—and we come to recognize the trouble it signifies. In the next scene, Danny rages to his brother: “That’s what’s wrong with the world today, man. They want you to feel like you have no control. Like you’re gonna eat shit with a smile on your face . . . I’m so sick of smiling, dude.”

Amy and Danny both are; that’s what they have in common, at the beginning. Beef is about the rage that can grow behind smiles, and the dishonesty created by that distance between inner and outer life. George means well; you can tell he’s read all the Greater Good articles. But when he asks Amy to focus on the positive, he’s making her feel even more alone.

Amy and Danny both start out as jerks in Beef , and then proceed to make each other worse—to the point where they alienate everyone around them. In the end, they can only find understanding in each other. But the funny thing is that we understand them, too, and we’re reminded that behind every bad behavior, there’s a hidden world of pain. — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Black Joy Award: Harlem (Amazon Prime)

In its second season, Harlem builds off of the momentum of the first by centering the lives, challenges, and triumphs of four friends: university professor Camille (Meagan Goode); Quinn (Grace Byers), the fashion designer from a wealthy family; Tye (Jerrie Johnson), the queer successful business owner of a dating app; and Angie (Shoniqua Shandai), the free spirit and aspiring entertainer.

Through their stories, Harlem reveals joy in the cracks of complexity. Camille balances her desire to excel in academia, while reuniting with her now-engaged ex-fiancé. Quinn continues to try to prove she can make it in the fashion industry and embarks on her first queer romance,  which eventually ends in a breakup. Tye risks losing her business to a jaded ex-husband, while Angie struggles to assert her value in the entertainment industry and her own self-worth in love.

But life doesn’t only have rough surfaces and sharp edges for the quartet, because they are buffered by friendship, alcohol-infused brunches, full-belly laughter, and love for each other and themselves (even when it feels hard).

Many of the scenes in Harlem remind me of the textile art of Bisa Butler, whose visually complicated multimedia work shows Black people in all their joyful humanity. Similarly, Harlem shows what it means to weave the experiences of being a Black woman with the enduring, healing power of joy. — Shanna B. Tiayon

The Civic Kindness Award: Jury Duty (Freevee)

Believe it or not, television’s greatest testament to human kindness this year was on a quasi-reality show that reveled in deception, irreverence, and poop humor.

That would be Jury Duty , which follows a real guy named Ronald Gladden over three weeks as he serves on a jury in a civil trial. What Ronald doesn’t know is that everyone else involved in the trial—from the defendant to the judge to the witnesses to his fellow jurors—is an actor. The entire case is a ruse just to mess with him and see what happens.

Jury Duty presents Ronald with all kinds of ridiculous scenarios—and each time he responds with empathy, decency, and good cheer. When Ronald is (reluctantly) made jury foreman, he tries his best to run the deliberations with integrity. One fellow juror, Todd, is a social misfit whose main purpose on the show seems to be to test Ronald’s tolerance, but Ronald consistently treats Todd with compassion. And when actor James Marsden—appearing on the show as himself, serving as an alternate juror—clogs the toilet in Ronald’s hotel room, Ronald takes the fall to save Marsden from public humiliation. (Yes, you read that last sentence right.)

Though the show mocks our judicial system, Ronald never stops taking his civic duty seriously. He seems to feel a genuine and selfless commitment to doing right by the defendant, the system, and his fellow jurors—really, anyone who crosses his path. Ultimately, Jury Duty is uplifting simply for showing us that someone like Ronald Gladden exists. — Jason Marsh

The Self-Love Award: Not Dead Yet (ABC)

Nell Serrano (Gina Rodriguez) is a late 30-something newspaper reporter who returns to her old newsroom, the SoCal Independent , looking for a fresh start in life after a painful breakup. 

She’s assigned to write obituaries—and begins to encounter the ghosts of the people she is writing about. The spirits not only offer an insider’s view into their former lives, but provide our jilted protagonist with advice about how she can improve her own life, make friends, and navigate her friendships with the workmates she left five years prior. 

Not Dead Yet is about letting go of expectations and mistakes. But above all, Serrano needs to learn to love herself even in the throes of a heartache. — Serena Maria Daniels

The Midlife Cross-Gender Friendship Award: Platonic (Apple TV)

Platonic starts out awkwardly. Sylvia (Rose Byrne) discovers through social media that her estranged college bestie Will (Seth Rogen) is getting a divorce, and so she reaches out to him. In a moment that proves telling, Sylvia pretends to Will that she doesn’t know about the divorce, that it’s just a friendly mend-fences social call.

In fact, the characters in Platonic lie to each other all the time—and the lies often result in hilariously ferocious fights that would forever end real-life relationships. But Platonic isn’t real life; the situations are so over the top that I gradually came to realize that they had an artistic purpose.

As Sylvia and Will renew their friendship, they guide each other through many difficult transitions and into the next stages of their lives. That task is not accomplished by being nice, quite the opposite. These two might not always tell the truth, but they’re always completely real with each other. And if that realness requires pushing each other right to the edge of disaster, so be it.

It’s said midlife can be like a second adolescence, and I for one have certainly found that to be true. Sylvia and Will are Exhibit A. They’re both fully adult, in the sense that they know how to take care of themselves, but they’re also testing limits and trying to figure out who they are as they face the second half of their lives. I wouldn’t call them role models (oh hell no)—but I would say that we all have something to learn from the ways these two drive each other forward. — Jeremy Adam Smith

The Vulnerability Award: Shrinking (Apple TV)

Jimmy (Jason Siegel) is a therapist grieving the death of his wife in the most inappropriate ways, boozing it up and hiring sex workers to keep him company. Worse, he’s neglecting his also-grieving teenage daughter, Alice (Lukita Maxwell), who is infuriated by his lack of emotional support.

This doesn’t sound like a good setup for a comedy, which Shrinking is. Nor does it seem like the strongest candidate for a Greater Good TV series, especially given how poorly it depicts the practice of psychotherapy. But the show gets so much right in how it depicts the messiness of grief, the importance of admitting vulnerability, and the power of friendship and love. Plus, it’s damn funny.

The humor comes largely through side characters, like Jimmy’s work colleagues, Gaby (Jessica Williams) and Paul (Harrison Ford). Gaby is a straight-shooter who doesn’t take bullshit and delivers hilarious one-liners. Paul is the stabilizing force at Jimmy’s office, who can wax wise when it comes to helping others. such as when he soothes Alice’s overreaction to losing her mother’s plant by telling her, “Grief’s a crafty little fucker. It sneaks up on you.”

Jimmy’s attempts to re-connect with his estranged daughter are the show’s main focus. He’s got much to answer for—and without self-understanding and self-compassion, he is doomed to failure. His journey toward redemption makes the strong case that expressing emotional vulnerability and relying on the support of others is not a weakness, but a necessary step toward healing. — Jill Suttie

The Varieties-of-Resistance Award: A Small Light (National Geographic TV)

A Small Light tells the story of Anne Frank and her family during the Holocaust—not from the perspective of the Jews in hiding, but from that of the people who helped them hide: Miep Gies (Bel Powley) and other employees of the company that Anne’s father, Otto (Liev Schreiber), directed in Amsterdam.

The series is called A Small Light because of a quote that Gies often repeated after the war, as she gave talks spreading the message of hope in Anne’s diary: “Even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, in their own way, turn on a small light in a dark room.”

Her courage as an “ordinary secretary” is at the heart of the show, as we watch her risk her life to save the Franks and the others in hiding. But her form of resistance is not the only one we see. There is the resistance of countless shopkeepers, who keep quiet when Miep buys suspiciously large amounts of food; the resistance of some Nazi officers, who look the other way or actively help Jews escape; and, of course, the resistance of the persecuted Jews themselves.

“We are rebelling in our own way,” says Hermann van Pels (Andy Nyman), who is in hiding with Anne’s family, during a poignant Chanukah dinner. “Because despite their attempts to get rid of us . . . we’re here living and celebrating that life right under their noses.”

In the very first episode, Miep tells Anne’s sister Margot, “You are so much stronger than you think you are.” There is a hint that she is also talking to herself, but I think she is talking to all of us. — Kira M. Newman

The Body Positivity Award: Survival of the Thickest (Netflix)

Mavis (Michelle Buteau) is a fashion stylist whose dream of dressing famous full-figured bodies initially seems improbable. Then she discovers her long-term live-in boyfriend Jacque is cheating on her—and not only does Mavis rid herself of an unfaithful relationship, she starts to stand on her own newfound confidence in her talents, abilities, and sexuality.

Survival of the Thickest features a beautiful full-figured woman of color as the main character in an industry that typically features women over a size eight only as supporting character, best friend, or asexual witty sidekick. In Survival of the Thickest , Mavis is the complex, vulnerable, and stylish center of attention. Through post-breakup flirting, dating, and boundary setting, Mavis is able to explore her sexuality and emotions.

The series doesn’t just confine itself to Mavis’s point of view, promoting body positivity in others ways, by engaging with how social norms can erase trans and queer bodies. One episode in the series features an alternative prom scene for queer high school students denied the right to dress the way they wanted at their high school’s prom.

“Plus-size women are always being told to shrink,” says Mavis. “Literally, everyone is telling us to lose weight, be smaller.” Survival of the Thickest is all about taking up your space and flourishing—while encouraging others to do the same. — Shanna B. Tiayon

About the Authors

Jeremy Adam Smith

Uc berkeley.

Jeremy Adam Smith edits the GGSC’s online magazine, Greater Good . He is also the author or coeditor of five books, including The Daddy Shift , Are We Born Racist? , and (most recently) The Gratitude Project: How the Science of Thankfulness Can Rewire Our Brains for Resilience, Optimism, and the Greater Good . Before joining the GGSC, Jeremy was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.

Serena Maria Daniels

Serena Maria Daniels is an award-winning Chicana journalist based in Detroit. She writes about the intersection of food, culture, and identity. Her work has appeared in Eater, Thrillist, Huffington Post, Reuters, and more. She is also the founder and editor of TostadaMagazine.com.

Shanna B. Tiayon

Shanna B. Tiayon, Ph.D. , also known as “The Wellbeing Dr.,” is a writer, speaker, and trainer working in the area of well-being. Currently, Shanna is the owner of WellbeingWorks , LLC, a boutique well-being firm bringing together the best interdisciplinary knowledge in the areas of social psychology, human resources, research, and training design.

Joanne Chen

Joanne Chen is a writer and editor in New York City. Her articles on children and parenting have appeared in The Bump , Parents Magazine , and the New York Times .

Jason Marsh

Jason Marsh is the executive director of the Greater Good Science Center and the editor in chief of Greater Good .

Kira M. Newman

Kira M. Newman is the managing editor of Greater Good . Her work has been published in outlets including the Washington Post , Mindful magazine, Social Media Monthly , and Tech.co, and she is the co-editor of The Gratitude Project . Follow her on Twitter!

Jill Suttie

Jill Suttie, Psy.D. , is Greater Good ’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good .

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The latest on the massive solar storm

By Angela Fritz, Elise Hammond and Chris Lau, CNN

Incredible lighthouse picture from Maine

From CNN's Chris Lau

Among a flurry of surreal images capturing the dazzling auroras is one taken by Benjamin Williamson of a lighthouse in Portland, Maine.

"It's one of the most incredible things I've ever seen, the awe and wonder," Williamson told CNN.

He said he used a long-exposure technique to snap the shot, but did not edit it.

Watch the full interview with Williamson here .

Things could be about to ramp up

If you still haven't seen the aurora, hold on for another 30 minutes to an hour, according to CNN meteorologist Chad Myers.

The next wave of coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, which cause the aurora, is about to arrive, he said.

"Just wait a minute because things are going to start to ramp up here," he said, adding that the increase could arrive "anytime now." "When it comes, get outside, get ready, put your coat on."

For those who are too busy to witness the phenomenon tonight, Myers said the aurora is expected to last three nights.

Why does the aurora last for a weekend?

By CNN's Chris Lau

Generally, it takes just eight minutes for light to travel 93 million miles to the Earth from the sun, but astrophysicist Janna Levin said the energized particles causing the current wave of aurora travel a lot slower, causing the phenomenon to last for the weekend.

"Some of these mass ejections are trillions of kilograms," she said. "They're slower. So they're taking longer, but still hours, maybe tens of hours."

Here's how the solar storm looks in the South and on the East Coast

The aurora was visible across the East Coast and in the South Friday.

Here's how it looked in Chester, South Carolina.

Down in Florida, waves of color swam through the sky.

Up north in New Jersey, a purple-ish haze could be seen in the sky.

Will solar storms get more intense and risky in the future?

The answer is probably not in the short term, according to astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi.

He said scientists study what is constantly happening on the surface of the sun and have found a pattern.

“Geological data shows us that in the past the sun was way more active than it is today. It has cycles where it goes very quiet ... and you have events that show that the solar activity was much, much greater,” he told CNN. “So there's no evidence that we're going to see those big maxima this cycle." 

But the astrophysicist also spoke of a caveat - the limitations of modern science.

“Even though it's predictable in the short term, we still don't quite understand what creates the magnetic fields in the sun,” he said, adding: “That's why NASA has so many satellites looking at the sun.”

In Pictures: Auroras light the sky during rare solar storm

From CNN Digital's Photo Team

A series of solar flares and coronal mass ejections from the sun are creating dazzling auroras across the globe .

The rare solar storm may also disrupt communications. The last time a solar storm of this magnitude reached Earth was in October 2003, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center.

See more photos of the aurora from tonight.

Behind dazzling aurora could lie “real danger,” Bill Nye the Science Guy says

The massive solar storm could present “a real danger,” especially with the modern world relying so much on electricity, according to Bill Nye the Science Guy , a science educator and engineer.

Scientists are warning an increase in solar flares and coronal mass ejections from the sun have the potential to disrupt communication on Earth into the weekend. Solar flares can affect communications and GPS almost immediately because they disrupt Earth’s ionosphere, or part of the upper atmosphere. Energetic particles released by the sun can also disrupt electronics on spacecraft and affect astronauts without proper protection within 20 minutes to several hours.

In comparison to tonight's event, Nye drew comparisons with another incident in 1859, known as the Carrington Event, when telegraph communications were severely affected.

“The other thing, everybody, that is a real danger to our technological society, different from 1859, is how much we depend on electricity and our electronics and so on,” Nye said. "None of us really in the developed world could go very long without electricity."

He noted that there are systems in place to minimize the impact, but “stuff might go wrong,” stressing that not all transformers are equipped to withstand such a solar event.

“It depends on the strength of the event and it depends on how much of our infrastructures are prepared for this the sort of thing,” he said.

Bill Nye breaks down significance of the solar storm | CNN

This post has been updated with more details on solar flares' impact on electronics.

Here's where clouds will block the view of the northern lights in the US

From CNN's Angela Fritz

After an incredibly stormy week, most of the Lower 48 has clear skies to see the northern lights. But there are some areas where clouds and rainy weather are spoiling the view.

A deck of clouds is blocking the sky in the Northeast, from parts of Virginia into Maine, as an area of low pressure spins off the East Coast.

In the Midwest, the aurora will be hard to see through thick clouds in parts of Wisconsin, Michigan — including the Upper Peninsula — and Illinois.

A stripe of clouds is tracking across Texas, including Dallas-Forth Worth, and into Louisiana.

And in the Southwest, patchy clouds across the the Four Corners region could make the northern lights difficult to spot.

Aurora seen at least as far south as Georgia

Barely visible to the naked eye, the aurora can be seen in Atlanta in the 10 p.m. ET hour. 

It is easier to see through photographs using a long exposure. The photos below, taken by CNN's Eric Zerkel and Emily Smith, used 3- and 10-second exposures.

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British biographies and biographical shows get to revel in their rich history (and include a lot more royalty than American biopic shows). The best British biography TV shows aren't necessarily about lauded English folks - they also include other famous Europeans and even Americans. If you’ve been looking for the best biographical dramas and documentaries from England, this list of the best British biography series of all time will help you figure out what needs to go into your queue and what older shows you might need to hunt down and watch immediately.

When it comes to the famous folks in British biography television dramas , it includes everyone from queens ( Victoria ) and politicians ( Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years ) to the writer who brought the world one of the most enduring film characters ( Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond ). But it's not all British biographical dramas, there are great documentary biography series as well, including This Is Your Life and Piers Morgan's Life Stories .

Which British shows tell someone's tale the best? Vote up the best British biographies, then vote down the shows that don't even garner a chuckle, and add any biography series from England that are missing.

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NCAA.com | May 12, 2024

• NCAA Division I Softball Committee announces 2024 championship field

INDIANAPOLIS —Texas earned the No. 1 seed in the NCAA Division I Softball Championship today when the NCAA Division I Softball Committee announced the 64-team field and seeds for the 2024 NCAA Division I Softball Championship.

Thirty-two conferences were awarded automatic qualification as conference champions, while the remaining 32 slots were filled with at-large selections to complete the bracket. The top 16 teams were seeded nationally and will host at campus sites beginning Friday.

Regionals will be held May 17-19 with each campus site hosting a four-team, double-elimination tournament. The 16 winning teams advance to the super regionals.

Super regionals for the championship will be held May 23-26 on eight campus sites. At each site, two teams play in a best-of-three tournament format.

The winners from each super regional advance to the NCAA® Women’s College World Series® from May 30 to June 6/7 at Devon Park in Oklahoma City.

Dayton, Siena and Southeastern Louisiana are making their first appearance in the tournament.

In 2023, Oklahoma won its third national championship in a row and seventh overall by defeating Florida State, 5-0 and 3-1, in the best-of-three championship finals.

The Sooners became only the second school to win three in a row, joining UCLA (1988, 1989, 1990). No school has ever won four consecutive Division I softball national championships.

ESPN will provide coverage from all 16 regional sites on one of the ESPN platforms, which was announced during the NCAA Softball Selection Show. ESPN will televise every game of the Super Regionals for the 17th consecutive season, 2020 notwithstanding, since 2007. This year also marks the 23rd consecutive year that ESPN will televise every game of the Women’s College World Series.

See here for complete championship details.

Sites/Pairings | May 17-19

*Indicates Host Institution

Austin Regional – Austin, Texas No. 1 seed Texas* (47-7) vs. Siena (33-20) Northwestern (33-11) vs. Saint Francis (Pennsylvania) (40-12)

Bryan-College Station Regional – Bryan-College Station, Texas No. 16 seed Texas A&M* (40-13) vs. University at Albany (33-12) Texas State (45-13) vs. Penn State (34-18)

Baton Rouge Regional – Baton Rouge, Louisiana No. 9 seed LSU* (40-15) vs. Jackson State (33-17) California (36-17) vs. Southern Illinois (42-9)

Stanford Regional – Stanford, California No. 8 seed Stanford* (43-13) vs. Saint Mary’s (California) (30-22) Mississippi State (33-18) vs. Cal State Fullerton (36-17)

Stillwater Regional – Stillwater, Oklahoma No. 5 seed Oklahoma State* (44-10) vs. Northern Colorado (27- 24) Kentucky (30-22) vs. Michigan (41-16)

Fayetteville Regional – Fayetteville, Arkansas No. 12 seed Arkansas* (36-16) vs. Southeast Missouri State (28- 24) Arizona (34-16-1) vs. Villanova (31-22)

Lafayette Regional – Lafayette, Louisiana No. 13 seed University of Louisiana at Lafayette* (42-17) vs. Princeton (29-16) Baylor (32-20) vs. Ole Miss (31-25)

Gainesville Regional – Gainesville, Florida No. 4 seed Florida* (46-12) vs. Florida Gulf Coast (37-19) South Alabama (32-18-1) vs. Florida Atlantic (41-14)

Knoxville Regional – Knoxville, Tennessee No. 3 seed Tennessee* (40-10) vs. Dayton (33-19) Virginia (32-18) vs. Miami (Ohio) (48-7)

Tuscaloosa Regional – Tuscaloosa, Alabama No. 14 seed Alabama* (33-17) vs. University of South Carolina Upstate (30-21) Clemson (34-17) vs. Southeastern Louisiana (45-13)

Athens Regional – Athens, Georgia No. 11 seed Georgia* (39-16) vs. University of North Carolina Wilmington (33-21) Charlotte (38-16) vs. Liberty (36-23)

Los Angeles Regional – Los Angeles, California No. 6 seed UCLA* (37-10) vs. Grand Canyon (48-11) Virginia Tech (39-12-1) vs. San Diego State (31-18)

Columbia Regional – Columbia, Missouri No. 7 seed Missouri* (43-15) vs. Omaha (41-13) Washington (31-13) vs. Indiana (40-18)

Durham Regional – Durham, North Carolina No. 10 seed Duke* (47-6) vs. Morgan State (35-18) South Carolina (34-22) vs. Utah (34-20)

Tallahassee Regional – Tallahassee, Florida No. 15 seed Florida State* (43-14) vs. Chattanooga (42-14) Auburn (27-19-1) vs. University of Central Florida (30-23)

Norman Regional – Norman, Oklahoma No. 2 seed Oklahoma* (49-6) vs. Cleveland State (22-24) Oregon (28-19) vs. Boston University (52-4-1)

2024 DII softball championship teams, by conference

*Automatic Qualifier

American Athletic (2) *Charlotte Fla. Atlantic

America East (1) *UAlbany

ACC (5) Clemson *Duke Florida St. Virginia Virginia Tech

Atlantic Sun (1) *FGCU

Atlantic 10 (1) *Dayton

Big 12 (5) Baylor *Oklahoma Oklahoma St. Texas UCF

Big East (1) *Villanova Big Sky (1) *Northern Colo.

Big South (1) *USC Upstate

Big Ten (4) Indiana *Michigan Northwestern Penn St.

Big West (1) *Cal St. Fullerton

CAA (1) *UNCW

C-USA (1) *Liberty

Horizon (1) *Cleveland St.

Ivy (1) *Princeton

MAAC (1) *Siena Mid-American (1) *Miami (OH)

MEAC (1) *Morgan St. Missouri Valley (1) *Southern Ill.

Mountain West (1) *San Diego St.

Northeast (1) *Saint Francis (PA)

Ohio Valley (1) *Southeast Mo. St.

Pac-12 (7) Arizona California Oregon Stanford *UCLA Utah Washington

Patriot (1) *Boston U.

Southeastern (13) Alabama Arkansas Auburn *Florida Georgia Kentucky LSU Mississippi St. Missouri Ole Miss South Carolina Tennessee Texas A&M

Southern (1) *Chattanooga

Southland (1) *Southeastern La.

SWAC (1) *Jackson St.

Summit (1) *Omaha

Sun Belt (3) Louisiana South Alabama *Texas St.

West Coast (1) *Saint Mary’s (CA)

WAC (1) *Grand Canyon

2024 NCAA Women's College World Series TV Coverage

*Please go to https://www.ncaa.com/championships/softball/d1/broadcast-info for updates. Game times and networks are subject to change.

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