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" THE 100 BEST TV SHOWS OF THE 21st CENTURY: #1"20

Breaking Bad. The Wire. Mad Men. Succession. Fleabag. These aren't simply shows people enjoyed " they're series that helped redefine what television could accomplish.

For much of television history, the small screen was considered cinema's less prestigious cousin. Movies attracted the great directors, the giant budgets and the serious critics, while television was expected to deliver something entertaining enough to bring audiences back after the commercial break.

Then the 21st century happened.

Television became more cinematic, but something even more important changed: writers and creators began fully exploiting the one advantage television had always possessed over movies " time.

Instead of spending two hours with a character, audiences could spend sixty. Personalities could evolve gradually. Decisions made in an early season could come back years later. Supporting characters could become essential. Entire worlds could develop with the depth of novels.

The New York Times' ranking of the 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century captures that extraordinary era.

We're beginning at the very top.

Here are #1 through #20 " twenty shows that helped make television impossible to dismiss.

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1. BREAKING BAD
2008"2013

A high-school chemistry teacher learns he has cancer and decides to manufacture methamphetamine to provide financial security for his family.

That's the premise.

What Breaking Bad becomes is something far more unsettling.

Creator Vince Gilligan constructs the transformation of Walter White with almost frightening patience. Bryan Cranston begins the series playing a frustrated, overlooked family man and gradually reveals someone capable of increasingly terrible things.

The genius is that Walter never simply wakes up evil one morning.

Every step seems explainable.

Every compromise leads to another.

Every justification makes the next decision slightly easier.

Aaron Paul's Jesse Pinkman, originally conceived as a much more disposable character, develops into the emotional heart of the story. His relationship with Walter moves between partnership, dependency, affection, manipulation and outright horror.

The New Mexico desert becomes almost another character, while the cinematography turns ordinary objects " a swimming pool, a bell, a pizza, a pink teddy bear " into unforgettable imagery.

For all the violence and criminal intrigue, Breaking Bad is ultimately a story about pride.

Walter says he is doing everything for his family.

The series spends five seasons asking whether even he believes that anymore.

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2. THE WIRE
2002"2008

The Wire begins as a police drama.

Calling it one feels almost misleading.

Created by former police reporter David Simon, the series uses Baltimore to examine how entire institutions function " and fail.

The first season focuses largely on police officers investigating a drug organization. Later seasons widen the lens to include the docks, city politics, public schools and journalism.

Gradually, you realize the real protagonist isn't a detective.

It isn't a drug dealer.

It's Baltimore itself.

Characters such as Jimmy McNulty, Stringer Bell, Avon Barksdale, Omar Little and Bubbles became legendary because the show refuses to categorize people neatly as heroes or villains.

Good cops make bad choices.

Drug dealers can possess principles.

Politicians may genuinely want reform while participating in the machinery that prevents it.

The central tragedy of The Wire is that people frequently understand what's wrong and still cannot change the institutions surrounding them.

It rewards patience more than almost any television series ever made.

And once its enormous puzzle begins fitting together, very few dramas feel as complete.

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3. MAD MEN
2007"2015

On the surface, Mad Men concerns advertising executives working on Madison Avenue during the 1960s.

Beneath the immaculate suits and cigarette smoke, it's really about people trying to invent better versions of themselves.

Don Draper seems to embody the American dream.

He's handsome, successful, creative and respected.

He also happens to be living behind an identity he constructed for himself.

Jon Hamm gives Don a fascinating combination of confidence and profound insecurity, while characters including Peggy Olson, Joan Holloway, Roger Sterling and Pete Campbell reveal different responses to a society undergoing enormous change.

The 1960s unfold around them: feminism, civil rights, Vietnam, political assassinations and shifting attitudes toward sex, work and family.

But Mad Men rarely screams, "Look, this is history!"

Instead, history enters quietly.

A television appears in the office.

A news bulletin interrupts dinner.

An employee suddenly realizes that the rules governing her entire life are beginning to change.

It is elegant, melancholy television about desire, identity and the enormous distance between the life people advertise and the life they actually live.

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4. SUCCESSION
2018"2023

Imagine Shakespeare with helicopters, luxury yachts and corporate lawyers.

That's roughly the territory occupied by Succession.

Brian Cox plays Logan Roy, the aging patriarch of an enormously powerful media empire. His children " Kendall, Shiv, Roman and Connor " orbit him while competing for power, approval and control of the company.

They have almost unlimited money.

Emotionally, they're bankrupt.

Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin and Alan Ruck turn the Roy siblings into a wonderfully dysfunctional family whose viciousness is frequently inseparable from their desperation to be loved.

Creator Jesse Armstrong also gives the series some of television's sharpest dialogue.

People insult one another with such astonishing creativity that corporate meetings occasionally feel like blood sports.

Yet underneath the mergers, board votes and betrayals lies something painfully ordinary.

These are children fighting for their father's approval.

Logan understands that.

And his ability to grant or withdraw affection may be the most powerful weapon he possesses.

Succession is savage, hilarious and occasionally devastating.

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5. FLEABAG
2016"2019

Two seasons.

Twelve episodes.

That's all Phoebe Waller-Bridge needed.

Fleabag follows an unnamed young woman in London navigating sex, family, grief and her remarkable ability to sabotage her own life.

She also speaks directly to us.

At first, breaking the fourth wall feels like a clever comedic device. Fleabag glances toward the camera, shares a joke and lets the audience become her secret accomplice.

Eventually, the show makes you reconsider exactly why she needs that relationship with us.

And suddenly the joke becomes something much more intimate.

The second season introduces Andrew Scott's priest, creating one of the most memorable romantic relationships in recent television.

Their chemistry is electric, funny and painful because both characters understand that wanting something doesn't necessarily mean you can have it.

Fleabag can move from filthy comedy to genuine heartbreak in seconds.

And remarkably, it never feels forced.

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6. GAME OF THRONES
2011"2019

Before Game of Thrones, fantasy on this scale belonged primarily to movie theaters.

Then HBO built Westeros.

Adapted from George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels, the series combined dynastic politics, war, fantasy, betrayal and enormous spectacle into a television phenomenon.

The secret of its early success wasn't actually dragons.

It was consequences.

Characters made mistakes and paid for them.

People who seemed protected by traditional storytelling conventions suddenly weren't.

Political strategy mattered as much as swordsmanship.

The sprawling cast produced countless memorable performances, including Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, Lena Headey as Cersei Lannister, Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen and Charles Dance as Tywin Lannister.

As the series grew, so did its scale.

Battles that once would have been unimaginable on television became regular events.

Dragons became enormous.

Entire cities burned.

The final stretch remains heavily debated among viewers, but the series' cultural footprint is difficult to overstate.

For years, the question wasn't whether somebody watched Game of Thrones.

It was how quickly you had to watch the newest episode before somebody spoiled it. EfEe

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7. VEEP
2012"2019

Political ambition has rarely looked this humiliating.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus stars as Selina Meyer, first serving as vice president of the United States and discovering that being one heartbeat away from enormous power frequently means possessing almost none of it.

The people around her aren't exactly helping.

Created by Armando Iannucci and later run by David Mandel, Veep turns Washington into an ecosystem populated by ambitious people constantly insulting, betraying and accidentally sabotaging one another.

The dialogue moves at extraordinary speed.

Characters don't simply insult each other.

They construct elaborate verbal weapons.

Louis-Dreyfus gives one of television comedy's defining performances, making Selina narcissistic, furious, ambitious and somehow endlessly watchable.

Veep is political comedy stripped of inspirational speeches.

Nobody is trying to save democracy.

Most of them are trying to survive the next meeting.

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8. 30 ROCK
2006"2013

Tina Fey took her experiences working in television comedy and turned them into something gloriously ridiculous.

She plays Liz Lemon, head writer of a fictional sketch show whose job involves managing temperamental actors, absurd executives and the endless disasters required to produce live television.

Then Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy walks into her life.

The unlikely friendship between Liz and Jack becomes the show's backbone, while Tracy Morgan's Tracy Jordan and Jane Krakowski's Jenna Maroney provide almost unlimited chaos.

30 Rock operates at an absurd density of jokes.

Sometimes the punchline arrives before you've finished laughing at the previous one.

It satirizes network television, corporate America, celebrity culture, advertising and show business while cheerfully acknowledging that it is itself part of the machine.

Few sitcoms have ever been this relentlessly fast.

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9. CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM
2000"2024

Larry David discovered an almost limitless comedy formula:

Take one tiny social irritation.

Then escalate it until everybody hates each other.

In Curb Your Enthusiasm, David plays a fictionalized version of himself " wealthy, successful and completely incapable of ignoring behavior he considers mildly unfair or illogical.

A dinner invitation can become warfare.

A restaurant reservation can destroy a friendship.

An incorrectly interpreted gesture can consume an entire episode.

Much of the dialogue is improvised around detailed story outlines, giving conversations a wonderfully unpredictable quality.

Larry is sometimes right.

That's what makes everything worse.

For more than two decades, Curb found comedy in the unwritten rules everyone else politely follows.

Larry notices those rules.

Then he argues about them.

And inevitably, disaster follows.

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10. ATLANTA
2016"2022

Atlanta begins with a relatively straightforward premise.

Earn Marks starts managing the music career of his cousin Alfred, an emerging rapper known as Paper Boi.

Then Donald Glover's series begins wandering into places television rarely visits.

One episode might be a grounded comedy.

Another becomes social satire.

Another resembles horror.

Another barely features the main characters at all.

Glover, Brian Tyree Henry, LaKeith Stanfield and Zazie Beetz give the series an emotional center even as the world surrounding them becomes increasingly surreal.

Episodes can feel like dreams in which something isn't quite right, although explaining exactly what's wrong can be difficult.

Atlanta explores race, fame, money, identity and modern American culture without feeling obligated to deliver a conventional message at the end.

It trusts viewers to sit with the strangeness.

That's part of what made it so distinctive.

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11. THE OFFICE (U.S.)
2005"2013

A documentary crew enters a paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Nine seasons later, millions of viewers feel like they know everybody working there.

The American adaptation of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's British series initially stayed close to the original concept but quickly developed its own warmer personality.

Steve Carell's Michael Scott begins as an almost unbearable boss and gradually becomes one of television comedy's most strangely lovable characters.

Jim and Pam's slow-building relationship gave the show its romantic heartbeat, while Dwight Schrute became a comedy institution all by himself.

The mockumentary style turned glances toward the camera into an entire comedic language.

But the series lasted because beneath all the absurdity, The Office understood something surprisingly sentimental:

The coworkers who annoy you every day can eventually become part of your life.

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12. ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
2003"2019

The Bluth family loses its fortune.

Unfortunately, losing money does absolutely nothing to improve them.

Jason Bateman's Michael Bluth attempts to hold together a family populated by narcissists, magicians, spoiled socialites, aspiring actors and one dangerously enthusiastic mother.

Ron Howard's narration ties everything together while frequently contradicting what the characters believe about themselves.

Arrested Development became famous for jokes that function like elaborate machinery.

A seemingly meaningless line in one episode can become hilarious several episodes later.

Background signs matter.

Word choices matter.

Running jokes mutate.

The first three seasons in particular rewarded repeated viewing because the show frequently planted jokes before audiences even knew they were jokes.

It was television comedy built for rewinding " years before streaming made rewinding everything normal.

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13. GIRLS
2012"2017

Lena Dunham's Girls followed four young women attempting to construct adult lives in New York City.

They weren't always likable.

That was very much the point.

Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna are selfish, vulnerable, funny, ambitious and frequently capable of making spectacularly poor decisions.

Instead of presenting early adulthood as a glamorous adventure, the series examines financial insecurity, bad relationships, career confusion and the uncomfortable realization that friendships don't necessarily survive simply because they once mattered.

Adam Driver's performance also helped turn him into a major star.

Girls generated arguments almost immediately and continued generating them throughout its run.

But television doesn't have to provide role models.

Sometimes its job is simply to make complicated people interesting enough that we cannot look away.

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14. FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS
2006"2011

Yes, Friday Night Lights is about high-school football.

No, you absolutely do not need to care about football to care about Friday Night Lights.

Set in the fictional Texas town of Dillon, the series follows coach Eric Taylor, his wife Tami, their family and the young athletes living inside a community where Friday night football is almost a religion.

Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton create one of television's most believable marriages.

Their relationship isn't perfect.

It feels lived in.

The young cast changes over the years, allowing the series to explore ambition, class, family expectations and the anxiety of growing up in a place where everybody already seems to have an opinion about your future.

The football games provide excitement.

The people provide the reason to keep watching.

Clear eyes. Full hearts. Can't lose.

Few television slogans earned their emotional power quite so completely.

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15. SIX FEET UNDER
2001"2005

Every episode begins with death.

The real subject is life.

Created by Alan Ball, Six Feet Under follows the Fisher family, who operate a funeral home in Los Angeles.

That unusual setting allows the series to confront mortality constantly without becoming merely a show about funerals.

Peter Krause, Michael C. Hall, Frances Conroy and Lauren Ambrose portray a family whose members love one another while regularly failing to understand one another.

The dead bodies arriving at Fisher & Sons become reminders that life can end in ordinary, tragic, ridiculous and completely unexpected ways.

Few dramas have spent so much time considering what people do with the limited time available to them.

And its finale remains one of the most celebrated endings in television history.

Keep tissues nearby.

Seriously. Efyo

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16. THE OFFICE (U.K.)
2001"2003

Before Michael Scott, there was David Brent.

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's original The Office transformed an ordinary workplace into one of the most influential comedy settings of the century.

Gervais plays Brent, a manager convinced that his employees admire both his leadership and his sense of humor.

They generally admire neither.

The brilliance lies in the silences.

A bad joke lands.

Nobody laughs.

Somebody looks toward the documentary camera.

And somehow that tiny glance becomes devastatingly funny.

Martin Freeman and Lucy Davis provide the show's gentler emotional story as Tim and Dawn, coworkers whose obvious connection is complicated by circumstance and hesitation.

The entire original run is remarkably short.

It arrived, changed television comedy and left before it had time to wear out its welcome.

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17. THE AMERICANS
2013"2018

Elizabeth and Philip Jennings appear to be an ordinary married couple raising two children near Washington, D.C.

They're actually Soviet intelligence officers.

That premise could have produced a perfectly entertaining spy thriller.

Instead, The Americans became one of television's most fascinating examinations of marriage.

Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys play two people whose relationship originally existed because of an assignment.

Years later, the assignment has become a family.

Their espionage work requires disguises, seduction, deception and occasionally murder, while their children have no idea who their parents truly are.

Complicating matters further, their neighbor happens to work for the FBI.

The missions are suspenseful, but the deeper question is more intimate:

After spending your life pretending to be someone else, how do you know which parts of you are real?

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18. I MAY DESTROY YOU
2020

Michaela Coel created, wrote, co-directed and stars in one of the century's boldest limited series.

She plays Arabella, a writer trying to understand what happened after a night out leaves gaps in her memory.

As those memories return, she realizes she was sexually assaulted.

But I May Destroy You refuses to become a simple story about one event.

Across twelve episodes it examines consent, trauma, friendship, memory, social media, sexuality and the complicated ways people understand experiences that resist easy categorization.

Coel allows characters to be contradictory.

Victims can hurt others.

Friends can fail each other.

Memory can be unreliable.

Healing isn't a straight line.

The result is frequently funny, occasionally uncomfortable and constantly unpredictable.

It also demonstrates just how much a limited series can accomplish when its creator has complete command of the story being told.

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19. CHERNOBYL
2019

On April 26, 1986, Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded.

HBO's five-part Chernobyl dramatizes the disaster and the enormous human effort required to understand what happened and contain the consequences.

Jared Harris plays scientist Valery Legasov, while Stellan Skarsg|Nrd portrays Soviet official Boris Shcherbina. Emily Watson's Ulana Khomyuk is a composite character representing scientists involved in investigating the catastrophe.

The series creates extraordinary tension from something invisible.

Radiation has no dramatic monster face.

You cannot see it coming.

People simply begin understanding that they have been exposed.

But the show's deeper concern is institutional denial.

Officials minimize what happened.

Information becomes dangerous.

Admitting reality carries political consequences.

That makes the central question of Chernobyl much larger than a nuclear accident:

What happens when maintaining a lie becomes more important than acknowledging reality?

Five episodes.

That's all it takes.

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20. THE CROWN
2016"2023

Peter Morgan's lavish historical drama follows the reign of Queen Elizabeth II across decades of enormous social and political change.

Its unusual structure periodically replaces the principal cast as the characters age.

Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton each portray Elizabeth at different stages of her life, while other major royal figures are likewise reinterpreted by new performers.

The production is sumptuous, but the most interesting conflict often happens behind closed doors.

The Crown repeatedly examines the collision between two identities:

The private person.

And the public institution.

Marriage, family, grief and personal desires exist alongside constitutional responsibility and relentless public scrutiny.

The series dramatizes real historical figures and events rather than functioning as a documentary, and some of its interpretations have naturally generated debate.

As television drama, however, its central idea is compelling:

What happens when duty isn't simply your job...

rCabut the structure of your entire existence?

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EfAa THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

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" AND WE'RE ONLY GETTING STARTED...

Reaching #20 might sound like we've already covered television's heavy hitters.

Not even close.

Because the next twenty include mysterious luxury resorts, one of television's most famous islands, ruthless Old West entrepreneurs, technological nightmares, troubled lawyers, World War II paratroopers, sketch-comedy brilliance and several series that many viewers would happily place inside their own personal Top 10.

Coming next: The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century " #21"40.

We'll begin with The White Lotus at #21 and continue through Adolescence at #40.

If you thought the first twenty were stacked, wait until you see what's coming next. Efi+"


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On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk" <MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.


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BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk"
<MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

And notice that this list doesn't contain any classic shows
from the Golden Age of television.

I'd guess their "experts" are in their 30s at the most.

It's not a valid list of the Top Whatever Many if it doesn't
include the entire span of time that television has been part
of the culture.

Nyssa, who also thinks if these "experts" were ever to actually
watch any of the true classic shows (Twilight Zone!), they'd
mark down their ratings of the ones they now think are just
SO wonderful

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From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

MummyChunk wrote:
[snip]

" THE 100 BEST TV SHOWS OF THE 21st CENTURY: #21"40

The first twenty contained some of television's most famous giants. Now the countdown gets stranger, darker and arguably even more interesting. From murderous luxury vacations and mysterious islands to nuclear-age science fiction, galactic rebellion, emergency-room chaos and one of television's most technically audacious crime dramas, these are #21 through #40 exactly as they appear on The New York Times list.

If the Top 20 demonstrated how television grew into a serious dramatic art form, the next twenty demonstrate something else:

There is no longer any single definition of great television.

A masterpiece can be a grim Western.

It can be an experimental comedy about a desperate actress.

It can be reality television.

It can be Star Wars.

It can follow a lawyer you already know will eventually become someone else.

It can take place almost entirely inside an emergency department.

And sometimes it can make an audience stare at the credits afterward wondering what on earth they just watched.

Here we go.

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21. THE WHITE LOTUS
2021"present

Beautiful resorts.

Beautiful people.

Absolutely terrible vacations. Efi|

Mike White's The White Lotus takes the traditional luxury getaway and turns it into a pressure cooker.

Each chapter brings together wealthy guests and the employees serving them at an exclusive White Lotus resort. Everyone arrives expecting paradise.

Then the masks begin slipping.

Relationships fracture. Resentments emerge. Money distorts nearly every interaction, and seemingly harmless social encounters become exercises in power, class, jealousy and humiliation.

One of the show's great pleasures is the contrast between its surroundings and its characters.

The scenery is spectacular.

The people are frequently disasters.

Its anthology structure also allows the series to reinvent itself while retaining the same wicked sense of humor.

The White Lotus may make you want to book a luxury vacation.

It may also convince you never to speak to another hotel guest again.

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22. LOST
2004"2010

Oceanic Flight 815 crashes on a mysterious island.

Television was never quite the same afterward.

Lost became one of the defining television obsessions of the 2000s by combining a survival story with science fiction, mythology, philosophy and one gigantic collection of mysteries.

Who are the Others?

What's inside the hatch?

What do those numbers mean?

What's that thing in the jungle?

And why does this island seem to have plans of its own?

But the secret weapon wasn't the mythology.

It was the characters.

Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke, Hurley, Sayid, Sun, Jin, Charlie and the rest of the survivors gradually became more important than any individual mystery.

Flashbacks revealed that almost everyone had arrived on the island carrying emotional baggage considerably heavier than their luggage.

Fans still debate its answers and ending.

But during its peak, Lost made watching television feel communal.

You didn't simply watch an episode.

You spent the next week arguing about what it meant.

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23. THE COMEBACK
2005"2026

Lisa Kudrow's Valerie Cherish wants you to know that she is still very famous.

Or at least she'd very much like to be.

The Comeback follows an actress attempting to revive her career while a reality-TV crew documents the entire humiliating process.

The joke is that Valerie is constantly conscious of the camera.

She performs happiness.

She performs confidence.

She performs relevance.

And the harder she tries to control how audiences see her, the more revealing the footage becomes.

Created by Kudrow and Michael Patrick King, the series arrived during reality television's explosion and understood very early how fame itself was changing.

What initially appears to be merciless cringe comedy gradually becomes surprisingly compassionate.

Valerie can be vain, exhausting and spectacularly awkward.

But beneath all that desperation is somebody terrified that the world has decided her moment is over.

Few television characters have worked harder to keep smiling while everything collapses around them.

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24. DEADWOOD
2004"2006

Welcome to Deadwood.

There is gold in the hills, mud in the streets and profanity practically everywhere else.

David Milch's Western takes place in the lawless Dakota Territory settlement before formal government fully takes hold.

The question isn't simply who will survive.

It's how a society gets built when everyone arrives pursuing his or her own interests.

Ian McShane's Al Swearengen is the unforgettable center of the series: saloon owner, criminal, businessman, political operator and one of television's great antiheroes.

Timothy Olyphant's Seth Bullock provides a very different kind of force.

The fascinating part is watching people who don't necessarily like one another slowly discover that commerce, safety and survival require some form of civilization.

Deadwood is violent, dirty and often brutally funny.

And its famously elaborate dialogue occasionally sounds as if Shakespeare wandered into a saloon and learned some extremely creative new vocabulary.

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25. THE LEFTOVERS
2014"2017

One ordinary day, approximately two percent of the world's population disappears.

Nobody knows why.

There is no warning.

There is no obvious pattern.

And The Leftovers makes an extraordinary decision:

It isn't particularly interested in solving the mystery.

Instead, Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta ask what happens to everybody who remains.

How do you continue living after reality itself appears to have broken?

Some people turn to religion.

Others join cults.

Some desperately seek explanations.

Others simply try to put breakfast on the table and make it through another day.

Justin Theroux's Kevin Garvey and Carrie Coon's Nora Durst become the emotional center of a story that grows increasingly strange, ambitious and moving.

The Leftovers is about grief, faith and humanity's need for explanations.

Its most powerful idea may be that sometimes an explanation isn't coming.

You still have to live.

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26. BLACK MIRROR
2011"present

Technology will improve our lives.

Right?

Black Mirror has spent years responding:

"Well... about that." Efy4

Created by Charlie Brooker, this anthology series takes recognizable technologies and social behaviors and pushes them several uncomfortable steps into the future.

Social ratings.

Virtual worlds.

Artificial intelligence.

Digital consciousness.

Surveillance.

Memory.

Celebrity.

Our endless desire to stare into screens.

Some episodes are bleak.

Others are romantic, funny or unexpectedly hopeful.

Because each story stands largely on its own, Black Mirror can constantly reinvent itself.

At its best, the technology isn't really the villain.

Human beings are.

The gadgets simply give us exciting new ways to make the same old mistakes.

And if you've ever finished an episode and immediately felt suspicious of your smartphone, the show has done its job.

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27. BETTER CALL SAUL
2015"2022

When Breaking Bad ended, creating a prequel about Walter White's flamboyant lawyer sounded like fun.

Nobody expected it to become this devastating.

Bob Odenkirk returns as Jimmy McGill, a struggling lawyer with intelligence, charm, genuine compassion and an unfortunate belief that bending the rules is often more efficient than following them.

We already know where Jimmy ends up.

He becomes Saul Goodman.

That knowledge doesn't diminish the suspense.

It intensifies it.

Because every compromise raises the same question:

Is this the moment?

Rhea Seehorn's Kim Wexler becomes every bit as important as Jimmy, while Michael McKean's Chuck McGill gives the early seasons an intensely personal conflict.

The series is slower and quieter than Breaking Bad.

That patience is its strength.

Better Call Saul shows how a life can change not because of one enormous decision, but because of hundreds of tiny ones.

By the time the transformation is complete, you realize the tragedy was happening in front of you all along.

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28. BAND OF BROTHERS
2001

Before television regularly attempted movie-sized productions, Band of Brothers arrived looking and feeling enormous.

Produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and based on Stephen E. Ambrose's book, the miniseries follows Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment through the European theater of World War II.

The story begins with training and carries its soldiers through Normandy, Operation Market Garden, Bastogne and eventually into Germany.

But spectacle isn't what gives the series its lasting power.

It's familiarity.

Because we remain with these soldiers across multiple episodes, faces that initially blur together gradually become people we know.

Damian Lewis' Richard Winters provides a quiet center, surrounded by an ensemble depicting men enduring conditions most viewers can barely imagine.

Band of Brothers isn't primarily interested in making war look exciting.

It is interested in the people who had to keep moving through it.

And the bonds they formed because nobody else could completely understand what they experienced.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

29. KEY & PEELE
2012"2015

Sometimes all you need for great television is a brilliant idea, two fearless comedians and several increasingly ridiculous wigs.

Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele created one of the century's essential sketch-comedy shows.

Teachers butcher students' names.

College football introductions become absurd theater.

A presidential anger translator says what the president supposedly cannot.

Gangsters discover unexpected vulnerabilities.

Action-movie conventions are dismantled one joke at a time.

But beneath the silliness, Key & Peele frequently explored race, identity, masculinity, language and the strange performances people adopt depending upon who is watching.

Both performers could transform completely from sketch to sketch.

And because many segments were short and instantly memorable, the series became perfectly suited to the internet era.

You may have forgotten which episode contained your favorite sketch.

You almost certainly haven't forgotten the sketch.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

30. SEVERANCE
2022"present

Finally, someone solved work-life balance.

The solution is horrifying.

Employees at Lumon Industries can undergo a procedure that separates their work memories from their personal memories.

Your outside self never remembers going to work.

Your workplace self never experiences leaving.

To the person outside, that may sound convenient.

To the person inside, it means an existence in which work never ends.

Adam Scott's Mark Scout enters this bizarre environment of fluorescent lights, endless corridors, mysterious computer tasks and corporate rituals that make increasingly little sense.

Severance combines science fiction, mystery, office comedy and psychological horror into something immediately distinctive.

Its genius lies in taking ordinary workplace language and making it sinister.

Team building.

Corporate culture.

Employee wellness.

Work-life separation.

Suddenly those phrases don't sound quite so harmless.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

31. SURVIVOR
2000"present

Sixteen, eighteen or twenty strangers.

Limited food.

Limited comfort.

Challenges.

Tribal Council.

And one deceptively simple instruction:

Outwit. Outplay. Outlast.

Survivor became one of reality television's foundational American hits because underneath the tropical locations and physical contests lies a remarkably durable social experiment.

Contestants need alliances.

But only one person can win.

That means every friendship contains an eventual contradiction.

The person helping you survive today may be the person you need to eliminate tomorrow.

Host Jeff Probst and that now-famous Tribal Council setting became fixtures of television culture, while hidden immunity idols and other strategic twists continually complicated the game.

Reality television is sometimes treated as separate from "serious" TV.

Its appearance this high on the ranking makes a different argument.

Few shows have influenced the medium more.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

32. ANDOR
2022"2025

Star Wars without Jedi at the center.

Without constant lightsaber battles.

Without treating rebellion as something easy.

Andor follows Cassian Andor before the events of Rogue One, tracing how an ordinary survivor gradually becomes committed to fighting the Galactic Empire.

Diego Luna returns as Cassian, but the series widens far beyond him.

Stellan Skarsg|Nrd's Luthen Rael, Genevieve O'Reilly's Mon Mothma and an exceptional ensemble reveal different faces of resistance.

Some fight openly.

Some operate from the shadows.

Some compromise themselves so deeply that victory may not leave much of them behind.

Meanwhile, the Empire isn't portrayed simply as a collection of villains in black uniforms.

It functions through bureaucracy, surveillance, career ambition and people simply doing their jobs.

That makes it frightening in a different way.

Andor takes a familiar universe and asks an unusually serious question:

What does rebellion actually cost the people who build one?

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

33. ENLIGHTENED
2011"2013

Before The White Lotus, Mike White co-created another wonderfully uncomfortable HBO series.

Laura Dern stars as Amy Jellicoe, a corporate executive who experiences a spectacular emotional breakdown and returns from treatment determined to become a calmer, healthier and more enlightened human being.

There's one problem.

Everybody else remembers the old Amy.

And quite a bit of the old Amy remains.

Dern plays her with an extraordinary mixture of sincerity, selfishness, optimism and complete social obliviousness.

Amy genuinely wants to make the world better.

She also desperately wants everyone to recognize that she is making the world better.

That contradiction gives Enlightened both its comedy and its sadness.

It lasted only two seasons, but its reputation continued growing afterward.

Some shows become hits immediately.

Others wait patiently for audiences to catch up.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

34. SCHITT'S CREEK
2015"2020

The Rose family loses everything.

Well, almost everything.

They still own a tiny town they once purchased as a joke.

So wealthy businessman Johnny Rose, his former soap-opera-star wife Moira and their adult children David and Alexis relocate to Schitt's Creek.

At first they're horrified.

Then something unusual happens.

They begin becoming better people.

Created by Eugene Levy and Dan Levy, Schitt's Creek starts as a fish-out-of-water comedy and gradually develops an enormous heart.

Catherine O'Hara turns Moira's vocabulary, wardrobe and pronunciation into an art form.

Dan Levy's David evolves from spoiled outsider into one of the show's most emotionally satisfying characters.

Annie Murphy transforms Alexis from a seemingly shallow socialite into something far richer.

The series never loses its weirdness.

It simply discovers that kindness can be funny too.

And by the end, leaving Schitt's Creek feels considerably harder than arriving there.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

35. TRUE DETECTIVE " SEASON 1
2014

Two detectives.

One ritualistic murder.

Seventeen years of consequences.

The first season of True Detective arrived with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson playing Louisiana detectives Rust Cohle and Marty Hart across multiple periods in their lives.

Creator Nic Pizzolatto's writing combines detective fiction, Southern Gothic horror and philosophical darkness, while Cary Joji Fukunaga's direction gives the eight episodes an unusually unified visual identity.

The mystery is compelling.

The atmosphere is suffocating.

But Rust and Marty are the real story.

They are partners who frequently dislike each other, men who can analyze a murder scene far more effectively than they can understand their own lives.

McConaughey's Rust became an instant television icon, delivering grim observations about existence while Marty frequently reacts exactly as the audience might.

Other seasons would tell completely different stories.

But Season 1 stands alone as one extraordinary, self-contained descent into darkness.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

36. THE PITT
2025"present

The emergency room has always been perfect territory for television.

The Pitt finds a way to make it feel urgent again.

Noah Wyle leads the ensemble as Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch inside a busy Pittsburgh emergency department.

The show's central structural idea is beautifully simple:

One hour of television roughly equals one hour of an exhausting hospital shift.

That real-time approach creates relentless momentum.

Patients arrive before previous emergencies have been resolved.

Doctors make decisions with incomplete information.

Nurses juggle multiple crises.

There is rarely enough time, space or staff.

Instead of transforming medicine into glossy melodrama, The Pitt finds drama in the process itself " triage, diagnosis, difficult conversations and the accumulated exhaustion of people responsible for keeping strangers alive.

For a show that only began in 2025 to appear at #36 demonstrates just how quickly it made an impression.

Sometimes a new series doesn't need years to announce itself.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

37. BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
2005"2009

Human civilization is nearly annihilated.

A small fleet escapes.

Somewhere ahead lies a legendary destination called Earth.

And some of the people aboard may not actually be human.

The reimagined Battlestar Galactica took a 1970s science-fiction premise and turned it into a tense examination of war, politics, religion, identity and survival.

Edward James Olmos' Commander William Adama and Mary McDonnell's President Laura Roslin lead what remains of humanity while attempting to preserve civilization under almost impossible circumstances.

The Cylons aren't merely robotic enemies anymore.

Some look human.

Some may not know what they are.

That creates paranoia throughout the fleet.

But the show's most compelling conflicts frequently involve people rather than machines.

How much freedom should survive during an emergency?

What sacrifices become acceptable when extinction is possible?

Can democracy function during permanent war?

Battlestar Galactica used spaceships to ask very terrestrial questions.

That's exactly what great science fiction does.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

38. HOMELAND
2011"2020

Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody returns home after years of captivity.

America welcomes him as a hero.

CIA officer Carrie Mathison suspects something is terribly wrong.

That uncertainty drives the beginning of Homeland.

Claire Danes gives an intense performance as Carrie, a gifted intelligence officer whose instincts can be extraordinary even when convincing other people to trust them proves difficult.

Damian Lewis' Brody is equally important to the early series because the audience is forced to wonder where his loyalties actually lie.

Is Carrie seeing something everyone else missed?

Or is she seeing something that isn't there?

Homeland combines espionage thriller mechanics with personal obsession, terrorism, bureaucracy and the moral compromises of intelligence work.

Later seasons expand beyond the original mystery and send Carrie into new geopolitical crises.

But those early episodes established the show's identity:

Trust nobody.

And when somebody tells you everything is fine, start worrying.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

39. WATCHMEN
2019

Damon Lindelof faced a nearly impossible assignment:

Create a television continuation of one of the most influential graphic novels ever published.

His solution was not to simply repeat it.

HBO's Watchmen takes place decades after the original story and relocates much of its action to Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Regina King's Angela Abar becomes the center of a mystery involving masked police, white supremacist violence, historical trauma and the complicated legacy of superheroes.

The series also brought the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to the attention of many viewers who had never learned about it.

Like the original comic, this Watchmen is interested in power.

Who possesses it?

Who abuses it?

Who gets to tell history?

And what happens when people who believe themselves righteous acquire almost unlimited ability to impose their will?

It is superhero television in appearance.

Underneath, it is something considerably stranger and more ambitious.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

40. ADOLESCENCE
2025

A 13-year-old boy is arrested for murdering a teenage girl.

From that horrifying premise, Adolescence builds four episodes of almost unbearable tension.

Stephen Graham co-created the series and plays Eddie Miller, the father of accused teenager Jamie, played by Owen Cooper.

The story doesn't treat the central crime like a traditional whodunit.

Instead, it asks how a family processes the unimaginable and what forces may be shaping young people beyond the view of their parents.

But the aspect audiences immediately notice is the filmmaking.

Each episode unfolds as one continuous shot.

No visible cuts.

No conventional editing to release the tension.

The camera follows characters through police stations, schools, homes and emotionally devastating conversations without giving viewers an easy escape.

That technique could have been a gimmick.

Instead, it creates intimacy.

You aren't simply watching scenes.

You feel trapped inside them.

And arriving at #40 despite premiering only in 2025 makes Adolescence one of the newest entries anywhere near the top of the ranking.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

" #21"40 AT A GLANCE

21. The White Lotus
22. Lost
23. The Comeback
24. Deadwood
25. The Leftovers
26. Black Mirror
27. Better Call Saul
28. Band of Brothers
29. Key & Peele
30. Severance
31. Survivor
32. Andor
33. Enlightened
34. Schitt's Creek
35. True Detective (Season 1)
36. The Pitt
37. Battlestar Galactica
38. Homeland
39. Watchmen
40. Adolescence

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

EfA4 FORTY DOWN. SIXTY TO GO.

At this point, something about this ranking becomes obvious.

There are far too many great television shows for twenty spots.

Consider what we just passed.

Better Call Saul is only #27.

Band of Brothers is #28.

Severance is #30.

The first season of True Detective is #35.

And those shows still haven't gotten us halfway through the Top 100.

Which means the next chapter is loaded too.

We're heading into #41"60, where comedy, crime, animation, romance and some profoundly strange television are waiting.

Louie opens the next group at #41.

Then come shows including Hacks, Peaky Blinders, BoJack Horseman, Happy Valley, Broad City, Twin Peaks: The Return, Normal People, Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, Downton Abbey, Stranger Things, Insecure and more.

And waiting at #60 is one of Britain's most mercilessly funny comedies.

COMING NEXT: THE 100 BEST TV SHOWS OF THE 21st CENTURY " #41"60 Efi+

Forty shows in, and we're not even halfway there.

The next twenty prove that some of television's greatest treasures aren't necessarily found near the top of a ranking.

--
Via JLA Forums web gateway for rec.arts.tv
--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

On 9/25/2026 2:26 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk" <MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

Iirc, they said 'The Sopranos' began *last* century.


--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

On 2026-09-25 05:19 PM, moviePig wrote:

On 9/25/2026 2:26 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk" <MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

Iirc, they said 'The Sopranos' began *last* century.

The Sopranos started on January 10, 1999, when it premiered on HBO.
--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

On 2026-09-25 05:19 PM, moviePig wrote:

On 9/25/2026 2:26 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk" <MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

Iirc, they said 'The Sopranos' began *last* century.

The Sopranos started on January 10, 1999, when it premiered on HBO.
--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

On 2026-09-25 20:19:49 +0000, moviePig said:

On 9/25/2026 2:26 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk" <MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

Iirc, they said 'The Sopranos' began *last* century.

Yep,

"The Sopranos first aired on January 10, 1999"


--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

On 2026-09-25 19:06:05 +0000, Nyssa said:

BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk"
<MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

And notice that this list doesn't contain any classic shows from the
Golden Age of television.

Umm ... it *is* the "The New York Times' ranking of the 100 Best TV
Shows of the *21st Century*" ... so is just for shows made from the
year 2000 onwards. :-)

Of course, it still ignores millions of shows from any country outside America.

Plus, like many such silly lists (like "best of all time" idiocies),
the "21st century" has barely begun. All of those shows will be long
forgotten by the time the year 2100 comes along.

I'd guess their "experts" are in their 30s at the most.

It's not a valid list of the Top Whatever Many if it doesn't include
the entire span of time that television has been part of the culture.

Nyssa, who also thinks if these "experts" were ever to actually watch
any of the true classic shows (Twilight Zone!), they'd mark down their ratings of the ones they now think are just SO wonderful

--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

MummyChunk wrote:
[snip]

" THE 100 BEST TV SHOWS OF THE 21st CENTURY: #41"60

We've made it through the first forty, but the middle of this countdown may be where the sheer variety of 21st-century television becomes most obvious. The next twenty move from Hollywood satire and British crime to surreal sketch comedy, animated despair, teenage awkwardness, French espionage and one very strange man helping small businesses.

By this point in the ranking, we're well beyond the idea that great television has to look a certain way.

Some of these shows are enormous productions.

Others are deliberately small.

One is animated.

Several are comedies that can become unexpectedly devastating.

Another turns painfully awkward business advice into something resembling experimental performance art.

And at #47 sits a series that barely seems interested in obeying the rules of television at all.

Here are #41 through #60, following the ranking exactly.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

41. LOUIE
2010"2015

Louie helped change the shape of television comedy by making a sitcom feel intensely personal, unpredictable and occasionally almost experimental.

Louis C.K. plays a fictionalized version of himself: a divorced stand-up comedian raising two daughters in New York City while navigating dating, parenthood, aging and everyday humiliation.

But calling it a sitcom doesn't really explain what it does.

An episode might contain stand-up comedy, an awkward date, a surreal fantasy and a melancholy short film that barely resembles conventional television.

Sometimes the show is extremely funny.

Sometimes it becomes unexpectedly sad.

Sometimes you're not even certain whether what you're watching is supposed to be realistic.

That freedom became enormously influential.

Louie demonstrated that a half-hour comedy didn't necessarily need a traditional plot, a laugh track or even a consistent tone.

It could simply follow an idea wherever it wanted to go.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

42. HACKS
2021"2026

What happens when two generations of comedy collide?

Jean Smart stars as Deborah Vance, a legendary Las Vegas comedian whose career suddenly appears less secure than she'd like to admit.

Hannah Einbinder plays Ava Daniels, a young comedy writer whose own career has just spectacularly imploded.

Putting them together initially seems like a terrible idea.

Which is exactly why it works.

Deborah thinks Ava is entitled.

Ava thinks Deborah is hopelessly old-fashioned.

Both are frequently correct.

Hacks uses their combative relationship to explore comedy itself: who gets to tell jokes, how audiences change, what performers sacrifice for success and how difficult it is to remain relevant in an industry constantly searching for somebody younger.

Jean Smart is magnificent, but the show's real magic comes from watching Deborah and Ava slowly realize how much they have to learn from one another.

They may drive each other insane.

They also make each other better.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

43. PEAKY BLINDERS
2013"2022

Birmingham.

1919.

The war is over, but Thomas Shelby has brought plenty of darkness home with him.

Cillian Murphy stars as Tommy, leader of the Shelby crime family and the razor-edged Peaky Blinders gang.

Tommy is a war veteran, businessman, gangster and political operator whose ambition grows far beyond the streets where he began.

Creator Steven Knight combines historical crime drama with a strikingly modern visual and musical style.

Nick Cave, Arctic Monkeys and other contemporary artists blast across scenes set a century earlier, somehow making Tommy Shelby's world feel both historical and mythic.

The clothes became iconic.

The haircuts became unavoidable.

But beneath all that style is a story about trauma, family and ambition.

Tommy keeps climbing.

The question is whether reaching the top will leave anything of him behind.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

44. BOJACK HORSEMAN
2014"2020

The main character is a talking horse.

Do not let that fool you.

BoJack Horseman begins as an animated satire about a washed-up sitcom actor living in Hollywood " or "Hollywoo," as circumstances eventually make it known.

BoJack was once the star of a beloved family comedy.

Now he's wealthy, famous and deeply miserable.

Will Arnett voices BoJack, surrounded by characters including Diane Nguyen, Princess Carolyn, Mr. Peanutbutter and Todd Chavez.

The animal jokes are ridiculous.

The background gags are constant.

And somehow the series gradually becomes one of television's most piercing examinations of depression, addiction, fame, loneliness and accountability.

Its most challenging idea is also one of its best:

Understanding why you behave badly does not excuse behaving badly.

BoJack frequently recognizes his problems.

Recognition isn't the same thing as change.

Few television comedies have ever been this funny while staring this directly into the abyss.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

45. HAPPY VALLEY
2014"2023

The title sounds cheerful.

The series definitely isn't.

Sarah Lancashire stars as Catherine Cawood, a police sergeant working in West Yorkshire while carrying enormous personal grief.

When a kidnapping spirals into something much worse, Catherine finds herself confronting Tommy Lee Royce, played with terrifying intensity by James Norton.

Created by Sally Wainwright, Happy Valley isn't primarily interested in glamorous detective work.

Its world feels ordinary.

People live in modest homes.

Families argue.

Police officers deal with mundane problems alongside horrifying ones.

And that ordinary setting makes the violence far more disturbing when it arrives.

Lancashire's Catherine is one of the great television detectives because she never feels like a conventional super-cop.

She's exhausted.

She's angry.

She's funny.

She's compassionate.

And she keeps going.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

46. BROAD CITY
2014"2019

New York City has hosted countless glamorous television characters.

Abbi and Ilana are not among them.

Broad City follows Abbi Abrams and Ilana Wexler, played by creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, as they stumble through jobs, relationships, parties and spectacularly bad decisions.

Their New York isn't penthouses and expensive restaurants.

It's terrible apartments, subway disasters, questionable employment and elaborate schemes to acquire modest amounts of money.

The heart of the show is their friendship.

Boyfriends come and go.

Jobs change.

Plans collapse.

Abbi and Ilana remain completely committed to one another.

Broad City took the familiar "young people trying to make it in New York" premise and injected it with anarchic energy.

It's messy, strange and frequently filthy.

Exactly as intended.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

47. TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN
2017

Calling Twin Peaks: The Return a television revival doesn't really prepare you for it.

Twenty-five years after the original series, David Lynch and Mark Frost returned to Twin Peaks.

But anyone expecting a comfortable nostalgia trip quickly discovered that Lynch had other plans.

Kyle MacLachlan returns as Dale Cooper " though even that sentence becomes complicated almost immediately.

The series moves between familiar characters, new locations, dream logic, horror, comedy and sequences that feel closer to experimental cinema than conventional television.

Then there is Episode 8.

Anyone who has seen it knows.

Anyone who hasn't should probably experience it without explanation.

The Return doesn't attempt to recreate 1990.

It asks what happened to Twin Peaks " and perhaps America itself " during the years that passed.

Some viewers find it hypnotic.

Others find it baffling.

Very few forget it.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

48. HOUSE OF CARDS
2013"2018

Before streaming originals became completely normal, House of Cards helped demonstrate that internet television could compete directly with traditional premium networks.

The series follows Frank Underwood, an enormously ambitious Washington politician who responds to betrayal by beginning an elaborate campaign for power.

Kevin Spacey originally led the series as Frank, with Robin Wright's Claire Underwood gradually becoming every bit as central.

Frank's habit of turning directly toward the camera and explaining his schemes makes the audience his secret accomplice.

We know what he's planning.

Everyone else usually doesn't.

House of Cards mixes political thriller, melodrama and Shakespearean ambition into a glossy portrait of power pursued almost entirely for its own sake.

Its influence goes beyond the story itself.

When Netflix released the first season all at once, binge-watching was still becoming a mainstream habit.

Soon, an entire season arriving overnight would feel completely ordinary.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

49. NORMAL PEOPLE
2020

Connell and Marianne keep finding each other.

Then losing each other.

Then finding each other again.

Adapted from Sally Rooney's novel, Normal People follows two young people from secondary school in Ireland into their university years.

Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones give remarkably intimate performances as characters whose connection is obvious even when their ability to communicate is not.

Class differences complicate their relationship.

So do insecurity, depression, other partners and the simple difficulty of saying what you actually need.

The series is quiet.

There are no giant mysteries.

No explosions.

No complicated mythology.

Sometimes the entire emotional force of an episode exists in a glance across a room.

Normal People understands something painful about relationships:

Two people can love each other deeply and still repeatedly fail to get the timing right.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

50. PARKS AND RECREATION
2009"2015

Leslie Knope really loves local government.

She loves it enough for all of us.

Amy Poehler stars as Leslie, an endlessly energetic public servant working in the Parks Department of Pawnee, Indiana.

What begins as a somewhat cynical workplace comedy gradually transforms into something much warmer.

Leslie believes government can help people.

Ron Swanson believes government should barely exist.

Naturally, they become close friends.

Nick Offerman's Ron is surrounded by one of television's great comedy ensembles: Rashida Jones, Aziz Ansari, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Pratt, Adam Scott, Rob Lowe, Retta and Jim O'Heir.

Pawnee itself becomes a character populated by some of the strangest citizens ever allowed near a public meeting.

Parks and Recreation is optimistic without being na|>ve.

Its characters fail constantly.

They simply keep trying.

And sometimes that's enough.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

51. THE GOOD PLACE
2016"2020

Eleanor Shellstrop has died.

The good news is that she's apparently gone to heaven.

The bad news is that there has clearly been some kind of administrative error.

Kristen Bell's Eleanor knows she doesn't belong in the Good Place, so she begins secretly learning ethics from philosophy professor Chidi Anagonye.

That premise could have sustained a perfectly enjoyable sitcom.

Creator Michael Schur has far bigger ambitions.

The Good Place becomes a comedy about morality, free will, personal responsibility and whether human beings can genuinely become better.

Ted Danson's Michael is essential to that journey, alongside William Jackson Harper, Jameela Jamil, Manny Jacinto and D'Arcy Carden.

The remarkable achievement is that the philosophical ideas never kill the comedy.

Aristotle and fart jokes can apparently coexist.

Even more impressive?

The show eventually manages to explore death itself with warmth rather than fear.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

52. DOWNTON ABBEY
2010"2015

Upstairs.

Downstairs.

And enough family drama to keep an English country estate busy for years.

Created by Julian Fellowes, Downton Abbey follows the aristocratic Crawley family and the servants who maintain their enormous Yorkshire home during the early decades of the 20th century.

Historical events reshape their lives: the sinking of the Titanic, World War I, social change and the gradual erosion of Britain's old class structure.

But much of the entertainment comes from considerably smaller crises.

Who will inherit?

Who will marry whom?

Who knows somebody else's secret?

And exactly how devastating will the Dowager Countess' next sentence be?

Maggie Smith's Violet Crawley became an instant favorite, capable of destroying another character with little more than a raised eyebrow.

Downton Abbey combines historical drama with luxurious soap opera.

And it does so shamelessly well.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

53. STRANGER THINGS
2016"2025

A boy disappears in Hawkins, Indiana.

His friends go searching.

They meet a mysterious girl named Eleven.

And somewhere beneath their small town is something called the Upside Down.

The Duffer Brothers' Stranger Things arrived as a loving tribute to 1980s genre entertainment " Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, John Carpenter, Dungeons & Dragons and childhood adventures conducted almost entirely on bicycles.

But nostalgia alone wouldn't have made it a phenomenon.

The characters did.

Millie Bobby Brown's Eleven became instantly iconic, while Winona Ryder and David Harbour gave the adult side of the story its emotional weight.

Over time, the monsters became larger and the production increasingly spectacular.

Yet the fundamental appeal remains simple:

A group of kids encounters something impossible.

And instead of running away...

Well, they usually run toward it.

Possibly while Kate Bush plays in the background. EfA|

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

54. THE BUREAU
2015"2020

One of the most acclaimed spy dramas of the century didn't come from Britain or America.

It came from France.

The Bureau " originally Le Bureau des L|-gendes " follows officers working inside France's external intelligence service, particularly agents operating abroad under carefully constructed false identities.

Mathieu Kassovitz stars as Guillaume Debailly, an intelligence officer returning to Paris after years undercover.

The problem?

Parts of his invented life have become difficult to leave behind.

Unlike many espionage thrillers, The Bureau often emphasizes procedure rather than spectacle.

Cover identities must be maintained.

Information must be verified.

Operations require patience.

One tiny mistake can destroy years of work.

That realism makes the suspense stronger.

Nobody needs to jump from an exploding helicopter when sending the wrong message may be equally dangerous.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

55. INSECURE
2016"2021

Issa Dee is trying to figure out adulthood.

Adulthood isn't cooperating.

Created by Issa Rae and Larry Wilmore, Insecure follows Issa, her best friend Molly and their circle in Los Angeles as they navigate careers, relationships and the uncomfortable realization that nobody really knows what they're doing.

Rae gives Issa an enormously relatable awkwardness.

Her private mirror raps allow her to say things she would never confidently say to another person.

The series also explores Black life in Los Angeles with specificity rarely given this much space on mainstream television.

Friendship is just as important as romance.

In fact, the relationship between Issa and Molly may be the show's true love story.

Insecure understands that becoming an adult doesn't mean insecurity disappears.

You simply get better clothes while dealing with it.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

56. NATHAN FOR YOU
2013"2017

The premise sounds innocent.

Nathan Fielder helps struggling businesses improve.

Unfortunately for those businesses, Nathan's ideas are completely insane.

A coffee shop becomes "Dumb Starbucks."

A petting zoo rescue turns into a viral marketing campaign.

A rebate requires customers to climb a mountain.

But describing Nathan for You merely as a prank show misses what makes it special.

Fielder plays an exaggeratedly awkward version of himself, approaching people with a deadpan sincerity that makes it increasingly difficult to determine where reality ends and performance begins.

Then, occasionally, something unexpectedly human happens.

A joke becomes a conversation.

A ridiculous scheme becomes strangely emotional.

And in the feature-length finale, Finding Frances, the show's entire premise seems to transform.

Nathan for You begins with bad business advice.

It ends somewhere much harder to describe.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

57. I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE
2019"present

Most comedy sketches begin with a strange situation.

I Think You Should Leave begins with a strange situation and then asks:

What if nobody backed down?

Tim Robinson's sketch series takes minor social embarrassment and escalates it far beyond sanity.

Someone pulls a door incorrectly.

A man doesn't want to admit he made a mistake.

A gift receipt becomes the source of an existential crisis.

A driving lesson goes catastrophically off course.

Characters scream, double down and destroy entire social gatherings rather than simply admitting they are wrong.

Episodes are short.

Sketches are unpredictable.

Quotable lines spread across the internet almost immediately.

The comedy frequently feels like watching somebody trapped inside the worst thirty seconds of their life and somehow making it last ten minutes.

It's absurd.

It's uncomfortable.

And once its strange rhythm gets inside your head, normal conversations may never sound normal again.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

58. CHAPPELLE'S SHOW
2003"2006

For a remarkably brief period, Chappelle's Show became one of the most quoted programs on television.

Dave Chappelle and co-creator Neal Brennan used sketch comedy to examine race, celebrity, advertising, popular culture and American hypocrisy.

Some sketches became cultural phenomena almost overnight.

The show benefited from Chappelle's unusual ability to make an audience laugh at something uncomfortable and then force them to consider exactly what they were laughing at.

The run was short and its ending famously unconventional.

Yet its influence far exceeded the number of episodes produced.

Many comedy shows become popular.

Far fewer permanently alter the language of their audience.

For a while in the 2000s, quoting Chappelle's Show seemed nearly unavoidable.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

59. PEN15
2019"2021

Being thirteen is already embarrassing.

Now imagine reliving it when you're in your thirties.

Creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle play fictionalized 13-year-old versions of themselves attending middle school around the year 2000.

Here's the brilliant part:

Everyone else playing their classmates is actually the appropriate age.

Nobody acknowledges the difference.

Within minutes, you stop questioning it.

PEN15 dives straight into adolescent humiliation: crushes, AIM conversations, sleepovers, puberty, popularity, friendship fights and the catastrophic emotional significance of things adults would consider completely trivial.

The period details are hilarious.

The emotional details are painfully accurate.

Maya and Anna may behave absurdly, but the show never treats childhood feelings as insignificant simply because children are experiencing them.

If you survived middle school around the turn of the millennium, parts of PEN15 may feel less like television and more like recovered evidence.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

60. PEEP SHOW
2003"2015

Mark Corrigan and Jeremy Usborne share a flat.

That's unfortunate for both of them.

David Mitchell's Mark is anxious, socially awkward and obsessed with appearing normal.

Robert Webb's Jeremy is irresponsible, selfish and convinced that success is probably just one terrible decision away.

Together they form one of British comedy's great dysfunctional partnerships.

Peep Show uses a distinctive point-of-view style, frequently showing the world through the characters' eyes while allowing us to hear their internal thoughts.

This creates a wonderful contradiction.

A character may politely smile during a conversation while his inner voice is experiencing complete psychological collapse.

Mark and Jeremy regularly attempt to improve their lives.

They regularly fail.

Relationships begin.

Relationships implode.

Jobs disappear.

Humiliation accumulates.

And somehow they remain together.

Not because they're particularly good friends.

Possibly because nobody else would tolerate either of them.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

" #41"60 AT A GLANCE

41. Louie
42. Hacks
43. Peaky Blinders
44. BoJack Horseman
45. Happy Valley
46. Broad City
47. Twin Peaks: The Return
48. House of Cards
49. Normal People
50. Parks and Recreation
51. The Good Place
52. Downton Abbey
53. Stranger Things
54. The Bureau
55. Insecure
56. Nathan for You
57. I Think You Should Leave
58. Chappelle's Show
59. PEN15
60. Peep Show

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

EfA4 SIXTY DOWN. FORTY REMAIN.

The deeper we travel into this ranking, the harder it becomes to think of these numbers as any indication that we're running out of great television.

Look at what just appeared between #41 and #60.

BoJack Horseman.

Twin Peaks: The Return.

Normal People.

The Good Place.

Downton Abbey.

Stranger Things.

And they're surrounded by everything from French espionage to painfully accurate middle-school humiliation.

But now we're approaching the final forty.

And #61"80 may be the strangest assortment yet.

Next time we'll encounter drag queens, British political warfare, Anthony Bourdain traveling the planet, dystopian nightmares, mobsters in New Jersey, Korean survival games, football optimism, sitcom families, legal maneuvering and one group of people who have spent decades insisting that Philadelphia is sunny.

COMING NEXT: THE 100 BEST TV SHOWS OF THE 21st CENTURY " #61"80 Efi+"

It begins with RuPaul's Drag Race at #61.

Then come Slow Horses, The Thick of It, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, Mare of Easttown, The Rehearsal, The Handmaid's Tale, Ozark, The Shield, Beef, Squid Game, Barry, The Bear, Ted Lasso, Modern Family, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and more.

We're sixty shows into a list of one hundred, and some of modern television's biggest names haven't even appeared yet.

The final forty are going to be crowded.

--
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From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

MummyChunk wrote:
[snip]

" THE 100 BEST TV SHOWS OF THE 21st CENTURY: #61"80

Sixty shows down, forty to go " and if anyone expected the quality to start dropping by now, the next twenty quickly destroy that theory. This stretch takes us from drag competitions and dysfunctional intelligence agencies to Anthony Bourdain's travels, prestige crime dramas, dystopian nightmares, Korean survival games, anxious chefs and the most relentlessly dysfunctional bar owners in Philadelphia.

One of the pleasures of reaching the second half of a list like this is discovering just how little the numbers actually tell you about variety.

At #61 we have reality competition television.

At #64 we're traveling around the world with Anthony Bourdain.

At #66 Nathan Fielder is turning ordinary human interaction into something almost impossible to categorize.

At #70 we're watching one of television's dirtiest cops.

And just four places later, we're having panic attacks inside a Chicago kitchen.

Welcome to #61 through #80.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

61. RUPAUL'S DRAG RACE
2009"present

Few reality competitions have created an entire cultural vocabulary quite like RuPaul's Drag Race.

The basic format combines elements of fashion competition, performance challenge, comedy contest and elimination reality television.

Drag performers compete in challenges involving acting, singing, design, impersonation and, naturally, lip-syncing.

RuPaul serves as host, mentor and final judge.

But the show's importance extends far beyond who wins each season.

Drag Race helped bring drag culture to an enormous mainstream audience while launching careers and turning catchphrases, runway moments and lip-sync battles into internet events.

Behind all the glamour is an extraordinarily demanding competition.

Contestants may need to sew an outfit one day, perform stand-up comedy the next and impersonate a celebrity shortly afterward.

And if everything goes wrong?

There is always one final possibility.

Lip sync for your life. '

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

62. SLOW HORSES
2022"present

James Bond these people are not.

Slow Horses follows MI5 agents who have been exiled to Slough House after making career-damaging mistakes.

They're still intelligence officers.

Technically.

Their boss is Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman as a brilliant, disheveled, spectacularly rude veteran spy who appears to regard personal hygiene as an enemy operation.

Jack Lowden's River Cartwright arrives at Slough House convinced he doesn't belong there.

Almost everybody else probably thinks the same thing about themselves.

Adapted from Mick Herron's novels, the series combines old-fashioned espionage plotting with workplace comedy.

The agents screw up.

They argue.

They resent one another.

Then genuine threats appear, and these apparent failures occasionally demonstrate why they were hired in the first place.

Slow Horses understands that spy work isn't always tuxedos and exotic casinos.

Sometimes it's paperwork, bad coffee and a boss who insults you before breakfast.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

63. THE THICK OF IT
2005"2012

Before Veep, Armando Iannucci created an equally vicious political comedy on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Thick of It follows British government ministers, advisers and communications staff attempting to survive one crisis after another.

Policies matter.

But headlines often matter more.

At the center of the chaos is Peter Capaldi's Malcolm Tucker, a terrifying government communications director capable of transforming profanity into something resembling experimental poetry.

Nobody wants Malcolm entering their office.

If he does, something has probably gone catastrophically wrong.

The series presents government not as an elegant machine operated by brilliant strategists, but as a collection of exhausted people desperately attempting to prevent today's disaster from becoming tomorrow's front page.

The dialogue is incredibly fast.

The insults are even faster.

And somewhere beneath all the shouting is a remarkably sharp satire about how modern politics is packaged and sold.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

64. ANTHONY BOURDAIN: PARTS UNKNOWN
2013"2018

Anthony Bourdain traveled the world to eat.

But food was never the entire point.

In Parts Unknown, a bowl of noodles, a family meal or a late-night drink became an invitation into somebody else's world.

Bourdain traveled through famous cities and places rarely given this kind of television attention, talking with chefs, workers, artists, activists and ordinary people.

He wasn't interested only in luxury restaurants.

Frequently the most revealing meals happened at plastic tables, street stalls or someone's home.

What separated Bourdain from conventional travel hosts was curiosity.

He was willing to admit what he didn't understand.

And he understood that food could reveal politics, history, poverty, migration and identity without turning every conversation into a lecture.

Parts Unknown made the planet seem enormous and intimate at the same time.

Come for the food.

Stay for the people.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

65. MARE OF EASTTOWN
2021

Kate Winslet trades glamour for exhaustion in Mare of Easttown.

She plays Mare Sheehan, a detective in a small Pennsylvania community investigating the murder of a young woman while carrying enough problems of her own to fill another series.

Mare knows practically everyone.

Everyone knows Mare.

That makes investigating a crime considerably more complicated.

Suspects aren't strangers.

They're neighbors, relatives, former classmates and people whose histories overlap in ways outsiders might never understand.

Winslet's performance gives Mare enormous weight.

She's competent but messy.

Strong but wounded.

Frequently impatient.

Almost permanently tired.

The murder mystery provides the structure, but Mare of Easttown is equally interested in grief, addiction, family and the claustrophobic intimacy of a community where nobody's past ever completely disappears.

It's a detective story where solving the case doesn't magically solve everything else.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

66. THE REHEARSAL
2022"present

Nathan Fielder begins with a seemingly reasonable proposition.

What if you could rehearse difficult moments in your life before actually experiencing them?

Then things get complicated.

Very complicated.

The Rehearsal constructs elaborate simulations in which real people can practice conversations and decisions.

Sets are recreated with obsessive precision.

Actors imitate people participants know.

Possible conversations branch into endless possibilities.

And then Fielder begins inserting himself deeper into the experiment.

What starts as a strange reality-comedy concept gradually becomes something much harder to categorize.

Is Nathan helping people?

Manipulating them?

Studying them?

Studying himself?

Are we watching reality television, documentary, comedy or performance art?

Eventually even the distinction between rehearsal and reality begins becoming unstable.

That's exactly what makes the series so fascinating.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

67. THE HANDMAID'S TALE
2017"2025

Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel became the foundation for one of the century's bleakest television dramas.

The Handmaid's Tale takes place in Gilead, a totalitarian society established in what was once the United States.

Women's rights have been stripped away.

Fertile women known as Handmaids are forced into reproductive servitude.

Elisabeth Moss plays June Osborne, renamed Offred under the system, who is separated from her family and forced to survive inside this regime.

The red Handmaid uniforms and white bonnets quickly became some of television's most recognizable imagery.

But the series' real power comes from the intimate experience of living under authoritarian control.

Tiny acts of resistance become dangerous.

Ordinary freedoms become memories.

Trust becomes almost impossible.

The series asks what survival looks like when the system controlling your life is designed to erase your identity.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

68. OZARK
2017"2022

Marty Byrde launders money.

Unfortunately, his employers are not particularly forgiving when something goes wrong.

Jason Bateman plays Marty, a financial adviser forced to relocate his family to Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks after becoming entangled with a drug cartel.

His plan sounds simple:

Move the family.

Launder an enormous amount of money.

Stay alive.

Naturally, nothing remains simple for very long.

Laura Linney's Wendy Byrde gradually becomes every bit as formidable as her husband, while Julia Garner's Ruth Langmore develops into the show's breakout character.

Ozark operates in a world where almost every solution creates three new problems.

One criminal organization leads to another.

One lie requires another.

One desperate compromise becomes the new normal.

Marty may be excellent with numbers.

Unfortunately, there is no spreadsheet capable of calculating how badly things are about to go wrong.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

69. ANTHONY BOURDAIN: NO RESERVATIONS
2005"2012

Before Parts Unknown, there was No Reservations.

And this is where television audiences really got to know Anthony Bourdain as a traveler.

The concept was nominally about food.

But Bourdain had little interest in behaving like a conventional travel presenter.

He drank.

He smoked.

He complained.

He made jokes.

He ate things many viewers would hesitate to approach.

Most importantly, he talked to people.

No Reservations approached travel as something messier and more interesting than sightseeing.

You weren't simply shown where to eat.

You were shown why people ate what they ate and what their food revealed about where they lived.

The series also helped redefine food television.

Restaurants were no longer merely places to review.

A meal could become the beginning of a story about an entire culture.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

70. THE SHIELD
2002"2008

Vic Mackey is a police officer.

He is also very definitely not somebody you want policing you.

Michael Chiklis stars in The Shield as the leader of an experimental Los Angeles police strike team willing to manipulate evidence, steal money and commit violence while supposedly fighting crime.

From its earliest episodes, the series makes clear that this isn't going to be a comforting cop show.

Vic is effective.

He's charismatic.

He can even appear protective toward the people around him.

He's also profoundly corrupt.

That contradiction fuels the series.

Created by Shawn Ryan, The Shield arrived during the early explosion of serialized cable drama and pushed the police genre into morally dangerous territory.

Every illegal shortcut creates another consequence.

Every cover-up requires another lie.

Eventually the walls start closing in.

The question isn't simply whether Vic will be caught.

It's what will remain when all his compromises finally come due.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

71. BEEF " SEASON 1
2023

A road-rage incident.

That's all it takes.

Steven Yeun's Danny Cho and Ali Wong's Amy Lau encounter each other while driving.

Neither knows the other.

Both are already having terrible days.

Neither is willing to let the incident go.

And an insignificant moment between strangers begins escalating into mutual destruction.

Beef works because Danny and Amy initially seem enormously different.

Danny is struggling financially and emotionally.

Amy appears successful, wealthy and professionally accomplished.

Gradually, the series reveals that both are carrying deep reservoirs of anger and dissatisfaction.

Their feud simply gives those feelings somewhere to go.

What begins as dark comedy becomes something sadder and stranger.

Sometimes the person you hate most isn't your opposite.

Sometimes they're the person who understands your anger better than anyone else.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

72. SQUID GAME
2021"2025

Hundreds of financially desperate people are offered an opportunity.

Play children's games.

Win an enormous amount of money.

There is one small complication.

Losing can mean death.

South Korean creator Hwang Dong-hyuk turned that premise into a worldwide phenomenon.

The brightly colored sets, green tracksuits, masked guards and enormous robotic doll became instantly recognizable.

But Squid Game succeeds because beneath the shocking violence is a story about debt, inequality and desperation.

Lee Jung-jae's Seong Gi-hun enters the competition believing money can solve his problems.

He soon discovers that surviving may require deciding what kind of person he is willing to become.

The games are often terrifying precisely because they're so simple.

Red Light, Green Light shouldn't be frightening.

Squid Game makes sure you'll never look at it quite the same way again.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

73. BARRY
2018"2023

Barry Berkman is a hitman.

He would rather be an actor.

That's awkward.

Bill Hader plays Barry, a contract killer who travels to Los Angeles for a job and accidentally discovers an acting class run by Henry Winkler's Gene Cousineau.

Suddenly Barry thinks he may have found a new life.

Unfortunately, his old occupation isn't something you simply resign from.

Barry begins as an extremely dark comedy and gradually becomes even darker.

Hader proves equally impressive behind the camera, directing sequences with remarkable visual confidence.

Anthony Carrigan's NoHo Hank provides some of the show's funniest moments as an absurdly cheerful gangster.

But Barry himself becomes increasingly difficult to excuse.

He wants redemption.

He wants another chance.

He also keeps doing terrible things.

The series understands that wanting to change isn't particularly meaningful if you refuse to confront the damage you've already caused.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

74. THE BEAR
2022"2026

Welcome to the kitchen.

Try not to panic.

Jeremy Allen White stars as Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto, an enormously talented chef who returns to Chicago after his brother's death to run the family's struggling sandwich shop.

Carmy comes from the world of elite restaurants.

The Original Beef of Chicagoland does not.

Orders pile up.

Equipment breaks.

Money disappears.

Everybody shouts.

Then somebody shouts louder.

Ayo Edebiri's Sydney arrives with enormous ambition of her own, while Ebon Moss-Bachrach's Richie initially seems almost genetically incapable of making anything easier.

The Bear can create more tension from a printer spitting out food orders than many thrillers create from a gunfight.

But the series isn't really about sandwiches.

It's about grief, family, perfectionism and people trying to build something worthwhile while carrying emotional damage they haven't fully understood.

Yes, chef. "

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

75. TED LASSO
2020"present

An American football coach is hired to manage an English soccer club despite knowing almost nothing about the sport.

This should be a disaster.

And initially, that's exactly what Rebecca Welton wants.

Jason Sudeikis plays Ted Lasso, an almost aggressively optimistic coach whose relentless friendliness makes people underestimate him.

But Ted's positivity isn't simply ignorance.

The series gradually reveals the emotional cost behind it.

Ted Lasso became known for its warmth during a period when audiences were particularly receptive to it.

Characters who initially look like stereotypes become considerably more complicated.

The arrogant star.

The aging veteran.

The bitter owner.

The ridiculous coach.

All of them get room to change.

And while soccer provides the setting, the real subject is leadership.

Ted doesn't necessarily know more about football than everybody else.

He understands people.

Sometimes that's the harder skill.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

76. SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE
2022"2024

Not every great television show needs murder, dragons or international conspiracies.

Sometimes it can simply be about finding your people.

Bridget Everett stars as Sam, a woman living in Kansas and struggling with grief, family and the uncomfortable feeling that she doesn't quite fit into the life surrounding her.

Then she begins forming friendships with other outsiders.

Somebody Somewhere is intentionally small.

Its drama comes from conversations, family tensions, awkwardness and the gradual development of relationships.

There are no giant twists.

Nobody needs to save civilization.

Instead, the series asks something far more ordinary:

What does it take to feel at home in your own life?

Everett brings humor and vulnerability to Sam, while Jeff Hiller's Joel becomes an essential part of the show's warmth.

Quiet television can still hit very hard.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

77. MODERN FAMILY
2009"2020

Three interconnected families.

Eleven seasons.

An enormous number of misunderstandings.

Modern Family uses the mockumentary format to follow Jay Pritchett and the extended family surrounding him.

Ed O'Neill plays Jay, married to Sofia Vergara's Gloria.

His daughter Claire is raising three children with eternally enthusiastic husband Phil Dunphy.

His son Mitchell and Mitchell's partner Cameron are raising a daughter of their own.

The show became a giant mainstream hit because its family dynamics were instantly recognizable even when the situations became ridiculous.

Ty Burrell's Phil became one of the era's most beloved sitcom fathers, while nearly every member of the ensemble developed a distinctive comedic identity.

The title explains the idea.

There isn't one correct version of a family.

There are simply people who love each other, irritate each other and keep showing up anyway.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

78. IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA
2005"present

Meet "The Gang."

Do not trust any of them.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia revolves around the owners of Paddy's Pub: Dennis, Dee, Mac, Charlie and eventually Frank Reynolds.

They are selfish.

Dishonest.

Competitive.

Frequently delusional.

And somehow almost completely incapable of learning from experience.

Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day, Kaitlin Olson and Danny DeVito discovered a comedy engine with seemingly unlimited fuel:

Terrible people develop a terrible plan.

The plan becomes worse.

Everyone turns against everyone else.

Nothing is learned.

Reset.

The show has survived for so long partly because its characters are allowed to remain disasters.

There is no requirement that they mature.

In fact, maturity would probably destroy the premise.

After all these years, Paddy's Pub may still be one of the worst-run bars in America.

That's why we keep visiting.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

79. THE GOOD WIFE
2009"2016

Alicia Florrick begins the series standing beside her husband during a humiliating political scandal.

Then she goes back to work.

Julianna Margulies plays Alicia, an attorney returning to the legal profession after years spent raising her family.

What begins as the story of a political spouse rebuilding her life grows into one of network television's richest legal dramas.

Court cases provide weekly structure, but the larger story follows Alicia's transformation.

She becomes more confident.

More ambitious.

More politically aware.

And considerably more complicated.

Christine Baranski's Diane Lockhart and Archie Panjabi's Kalinda Sharma contribute to an exceptionally strong ensemble.

The Good Wife also demonstrated that sophisticated serialized drama didn't have to exist only on premium cable.

It could still thrive on traditional broadcast television " commercial breaks and all.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

80. HOW TO WITH JOHN WILSON
2020"2023

John Wilson wants to teach you how to do something.

Make small talk.

Improve your memory.

Split the check.

Find a public restroom.

At least that's where the episode begins.

How To with John Wilson combines Wilson's soft-spoken narration with enormous amounts of documentary footage captured while wandering around New York City.

He notices things most people walk past.

Signs.

Awkward interactions.

Strange objects.

Tiny visual coincidences.

An episode supposedly explaining one subject will wander through increasingly unexpected encounters before somehow circling back to its original idea.

The result is funny, melancholy and surprisingly moving.

Wilson makes New York seem like an endless collection of bizarre human details waiting for somebody patient enough to notice them.

It is television built from observation.

And after watching enough episodes, you may find yourself paying more attention to the strange little things happening around you too.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

" #61"80 AT A GLANCE

61. RuPaul's Drag Race
62. Slow Horses
63. The Thick of It
64. Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown
65. Mare of Easttown
66. The Rehearsal
67. The Handmaid's Tale
68. Ozark
69. Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations
70. The Shield
71. Beef (Season 1)
72. Squid Game
73. Barry
74. The Bear
75. Ted Lasso
76. Somebody Somewhere
77. Modern Family
78. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
79. The Good Wife
80. How To with John Wilson

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

EfA4 EIGHTY DOWN. THE FINAL TWENTY ARE NEXT.

And now we've reached the home stretch.

But don't mistake #81"100 for leftovers.

Just look at what's still waiting.

A chess prodigy takes over the world.

Timothy Olyphant puts the cowboy hat back on.

David Attenborough shows us the planet in astonishing detail.

Amateur bakers somehow turn a tent into one of television's most comforting places.

Feudal Japan becomes the setting for one of the biggest television events in years.

A group of Indigenous teenagers gives us one of the warmest coming-of-age stories of the century.

A charming serial killer invites us into his head.

One of television's strangest science-fiction mysteries refuses to play by conventional rules.

And two enormously influential shows " Gilmore Girls and Scandal " will close the entire ranking.

COMING NEXT: THE 100 BEST TV SHOWS OF THE 21st CENTURY " #81"100 Efi+"

We'll begin with The Queen's Gambit at #81 and finish with Scandal at #100.

Along the way:

Better Things, Justified, Planet Earth, The Great British Baking Show, Sh+igun, Reservation Dogs, Dexter, Baby Reindeer, Eastbound & Down, Catastrophe, The Night Of, Station Eleven, The Diplomat, House, Halt and Catch Fire, Community, The OA, Gilmore Girls and finally Scandal.

Twenty shows remain.

And if this list has proved anything, it's that being ranked #100 in the golden age of television can still put you in some remarkable company.

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From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

On 2026-09-25 23:02:09 +0000, Your Name said:

On 2026-09-25 19:06:05 +0000, Nyssa said:

BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk"
<MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

And notice that this list doesn't contain any classic shows from the
Golden Age of television.

Umm ... it *is* the "The New York Times' ranking of the 100 Best TV
Shows of the *21st Century*" ... so is just for shows made from the
year 2000 onwards. :-)

Of course, it still ignores millions of shows from any country outside America.

Looks like I was wrong. There is at least one UK show on the list, "The
Thick of It" ... an utter garbage show, but it is non-American.

Plus, like many such silly lists (like "best of all time" idiocies),
the "21st century" has barely begun. All of those shows will be long forgotten by the time the year 2100 comes along.

I'd guess their "experts" are in their 30s at the most.

It's not a valid list of the Top Whatever Many if it doesn't include
the entire span of time that television has been part of the culture.

Nyssa, who also thinks if these "experts" were ever to actually watch
any of the true classic shows (Twilight Zone!), they'd mark down their
ratings of the ones they now think are just SO wonderful

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From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

MummyChunk wrote:
[snip]

" THE 100 BEST TV SHOWS OF THE 21st CENTURY: #81"100

We've reached the end. After crime epics, political satires, prestige dramas, surreal comedies, reality television and some of the strangest experiments ever attempted on the small screen, only twenty shows remain. And "only" is doing a lot of work here " because the final stretch still contains chess prodigies, frontier lawmen, nature documentaries, amateur bakers, feudal warlords, dysfunctional doctors, computer pioneers and one community college where absolutely nothing behaves normally.

Being ranked near the bottom of a list this strong doesn't mean being ordinary.

Far from it.

The final twenty include shows that became worldwide phenomena, cult favorites that grew more beloved after cancellation, limited series that seemingly appeared from nowhere and changed the conversation overnight, and dramas whose influence can still be seen throughout television.

So here it is.

The final chapter: #81 through #100.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

81. THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT
2020

A television drama about chess became one of the biggest shows in the world.

That sentence probably would have sounded ridiculous until The Queen's Gambit arrived.

Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Beth Harmon, an orphan who discovers an extraordinary gift for chess and eventually enters a competitive world overwhelmingly dominated by men.

Based on Walter Tevis' novel, the limited series turns chess matches into psychological combat.

Pieces move across the board.

Nobody fires a gun.

Yet the tension can feel enormous.

Beth's talent is matched by a complicated personal life involving addiction, loneliness and the burden of possessing an ability that separates her from almost everyone around her.

Taylor-Joy makes Beth's silences as important as her dialogue.

Costumes, production design and music give the series an elegant mid-century atmosphere, while the chess itself remains understandable even for viewers who couldn't explain the Sicilian Defense if their lives depended on it.

The Queen's Gambit accomplished something remarkable:

It made millions of people suddenly think buying a chessboard sounded exciting. rOfN+A

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

82. BETTER THINGS
2016"2022

Pamela Adlon's Better Things finds enormous meaning in ordinary chaos.

Adlon stars as Sam Fox, a working actress in Los Angeles raising three daughters while also dealing with her career, her mother and the endless responsibilities of adulthood.

There are no enormous mysteries.

No villains plotting world domination.

No cliffhangers involving exploding buildings.

Instead, there are family dinners.

Arguments.

Work problems.

Parenting disasters.

Moments of affection that appear unexpectedly between moments of complete frustration.

Adlon's performance and direction give the series a naturalistic intimacy that makes the Fox household feel genuinely lived in.

Better Things understands that family life isn't divided neatly into comedy and drama.

Sometimes both happen during the same conversation.

Sometimes during the same sentence.

And sometimes loving somebody very much does absolutely nothing to prevent them from driving you crazy.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

83. JUSTIFIED
2010"2015

Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens looks like he walked out of an old Western.

The problem is that he works in the modern world.

Timothy Olyphant stars as Raylan, a Kentucky-born lawman whose quick draw and old-fashioned personal code create almost as many problems as they solve.

After a controversial shooting, Raylan is sent back to Kentucky and finds himself dealing with criminals, relatives and old acquaintances he'd probably prefer to leave in the past.

The series draws heavily from the work of crime writer Elmore Leonard, and it inherits Leonard's greatest strength:

Characters who can threaten one another while having extremely entertaining conversations.

Walton Goggins' Boyd Crowder becomes Raylan's perfect opposite " intelligent, charismatic, dangerous and linked to Raylan by a shared history neither can completely escape.

Justified has shootouts.

It has criminals.

It has lawmen.

But frequently its greatest weapon is dialogue.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

84. PLANET EARTH
2006

Sometimes television doesn't need fictional worlds.

The real one is spectacular enough. Efii

BBC's Planet Earth took viewers from mountains and deserts to jungles, caves, oceans and frozen landscapes with imagery that seemed almost impossible when the series first aired.

David Attenborough's narration guides audiences through habitats populated by animals engaged in the oldest dramas imaginable:

Finding food.

Escaping predators.

Finding mates.

Raising young.

Surviving.

Advances in camera technology allowed filmmakers to capture behavior and environments rarely seen with this kind of clarity.

The result wasn't simply another nature documentary.

It became a showcase for what modern television photography could accomplish.

Some scenes are beautiful.

Others are brutal.

Nature isn't particularly interested in happy endings.

But few television productions have made our own planet look this enormous, strange and precious.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

85. THE GREAT BRITISH BAKING SHOW
2010"present

A tent.

A collection of amateur bakers.

Cakes.

Bread.

Biscuits.

And somehow... suspense. Efi#

The Great British Baking Show, known in Britain as The Great British Bake Off, became an international comfort-watch phenomenon by rejecting much of the aggression usually associated with reality competition television.

Contestants compete.

Someone still goes home.

But they also help each other.

They encourage one another.

And when somebody's cake begins collapsing, competitors may actually run over to assist.

The central challenges test technique, creativity and the terrifying ability to remain calm while staring through an oven door.

There are disasters.

There are soggy bottoms.

Occasionally something falls on the floor and an entire nation experiences emotional distress.

Yet the overall atmosphere remains unusually warm.

Reality television discovered something surprising:

People being nice to one another can actually be entertaining.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

86. SH+iGUN
2024"present

Feudal Japan.

Political warfare.

Clashing cultures.

And ambition hiding behind almost every polite conversation.

Adapted from James Clavell's novel, Sh+igun begins when English navigator John Blackthorne becomes shipwrecked in Japan at the beginning of the 17th century.

Cosmo Jarvis plays Blackthorne, but Hiroyuki Sanada's Lord Yoshii Toranaga and Anna Sawai's Toda Mariko become equally central to the drama.

Blackthorne initially understands almost nothing about the society surrounding him.

Neither the language nor the rules are familiar.

Mistakes can have deadly consequences.

Meanwhile, Toranaga is engaged in an increasingly dangerous political struggle in which every alliance matters.

Sh+igun impressed viewers with its scale, performances and commitment to allowing much of its story to unfold in Japanese rather than filtering everything through the English outsider.

The battles matter.

But, like many great political dramas, some of its most dangerous scenes involve people sitting quietly in rooms.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

87. RESERVATION DOGS
2021"2023

Four Indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma dream about escaping to California.

First, they have to survive being teenagers.

Created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, Reservation Dogs follows Bear, Elora, Willie Jack and Cheese as they deal with friendship, grief, family and the loss of their friend Daniel.

The series mixes comedy with sadness in a way that feels effortless.

One moment can be ridiculous.

The next can quietly break your heart.

Its Indigenous cast and creative team brought stories and perspectives to American television that had rarely received this kind of space.

But what makes the series endure is how specific characters become universal without losing what makes them specific.

These teenagers want to leave home.

They also belong to home.

That tension becomes more complicated as they grow older.

Reservation Dogs is funny, strange, warm and deeply humane.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

88. DEXTER
2006"2013

Dexter Morgan solves murders for the Miami police.

He also commits them.

Michael C. Hall stars as a blood-spatter analyst who hides a very significant secret:

He's a serial killer.

Dexter follows a code taught to him by his adoptive father, directing his murderous impulses toward people he believes deserve punishment.

That immediately places viewers in uncomfortable territory.

We're inside the mind of somebody doing horrifying things while simultaneously hoping he doesn't get caught.

Hall's calm narration allows Dexter to explain the enormous effort required to imitate normal human behavior.

Work.

Relationships.

Friendships.

Small talk.

All of it can feel like camouflage.

The tension frequently comes from watching Dexter balance those two lives while investigators move dangerously close to discovering the truth.

Dexter turned an outrageous premise into one of television's most famous antihero stories.

And it made plastic sheeting look permanently suspicious.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

89. BABY REINDEER
2024

Baby Reindeer begins with a small act of kindness.

Then everything becomes increasingly uncomfortable.

Richard Gadd created and stars in the series as Donny Dunn, a struggling comedian and bartender whose interaction with a woman named Martha develops into obsessive stalking.

The story was adapted from Gadd's stage work and draws on experiences from his life.

But the series becomes more complicated than a simple victim-and-stalker thriller.

Donny examines his own decisions.

His need for attention.

His ambitions.

His trauma.

And the confusing ways damaged people can sometimes participate in dynamics they themselves don't completely understand.

Jessica Gunning's performance as Martha makes the character unsettling without reducing her to a simple monster.

The result is deliberately uncomfortable television.

It doesn't provide easy emotional distance.

And that discomfort is largely the point.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

90. EASTBOUND & DOWN
2009"2013

Kenny Powers used to be somebody.

Unfortunately, nobody forgot that more slowly than Kenny himself.

Danny McBride stars as a former professional baseball pitcher whose career collapse sends him back to his hometown, where he becomes a substitute physical-education teacher.

Kenny still behaves as though he's an international superstar.

Reality strongly disagrees.

Created by Ben Best, Jody Hill and McBride, Eastbound & Down builds comedy around an almost magnificently arrogant man who views humility as something that happens to other people.

Kenny insults friends.

Destroys opportunities.

Creates disasters.

Then somehow convinces himself that he remains the hero of every situation.

His attempts at redemption are complicated by the fact that Kenny's greatest obstacle is usually Kenny.

Subtle?

Absolutely not.

Funny?

Very often.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

91. CATASTROPHE
2015"2019

An American advertising executive meets an Irish schoolteacher in London.

They have a brief relationship.

She becomes pregnant.

So naturally they decide to try building a life together.

What could possibly go wrong?

Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan created and star in Catastrophe, a romantic comedy that has very little interest in pretending relationships remain romantic all the time.

Rob and Sharon love each other.

They also irritate each other enormously.

Marriage involves children, exhaustion, money, sex, relatives, illness and the occasional desire to be alone for approximately six months.

Their arguments are frequently brutal because they know exactly where the other's weak points are.

But underneath all the sarcasm is genuine affection.

Catastrophe understands that a lasting relationship isn't necessarily one where people stop fighting.

Sometimes it's one where they keep choosing each other afterward.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

92. THE NIGHT OF
2016

Nasir Khan borrows his father's taxi for a night out.

By morning, a woman is dead.

Nasir has been arrested.

And nothing about his life will ever be simple again.

Riz Ahmed stars as Nasir in HBO's The Night Of, with John Turturro playing attorney John Stone.

The series begins like a murder mystery but quickly expands into an examination of the criminal justice system itself.

Police procedure.

Jail.

Lawyers.

Plea bargains.

Evidence.

Public assumptions.

All begin reshaping Nasir before his guilt or innocence has even been fully determined.

Ahmed's transformation across the limited series is particularly striking.

The person entering the system isn't necessarily the same person who will eventually leave it.

The Night Of asks a disturbing question:

What happens to somebody while everyone is busy deciding what happened?

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

93. STATION ELEVEN
2021"2022

Civilization collapses after a devastating pandemic.

Station Eleven is less interested in the collapse than in what people decide to build afterward.

Adapted from Emily St. John Mandel's novel, the series moves between timelines and characters whose lives intersect before and after catastrophe.

Years later, a traveling group of actors and musicians performs Shakespeare for scattered communities.

It sounds impractical.

That's precisely the point.

Food helps people survive.

Shelter helps people survive.

But art, memory and connection may explain why survival matters in the first place.

Mackenzie Davis anchors much of the post-collapse story as Kirsten, whose childhood experiences continue shaping her adult life.

Station Eleven can be melancholic and strange.

But unlike many post-apocalyptic stories, its central question isn't:

"How terrible will humanity become?"

It's closer to:

"What parts of humanity are worth preserving?"

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

94. THE DIPLOMAT
2023"present

International diplomacy would probably be much easier if diplomats didn't also have personal lives.

Keri Russell stars as Kate Wyler, an American diplomat unexpectedly appointed ambassador to the United Kingdom during an international crisis.

She's smart, experienced and far more comfortable solving problems than performing ceremonial duties.

Her husband Hal, played by Rufus Sewell, is also a skilled diplomat.

Which is helpful.

Until it really isn't.

The Diplomat mixes geopolitical maneuvering with marriage drama.

A conversation about national security can turn into an argument between spouses.

An argument between spouses can affect national security.

Kate has to navigate governments, intelligence agencies, political ambitions and a husband who has considerable difficulty remaining in the background.

The result is fast, witty and constantly unstable.

Because apparently international relations aren't complicated enough without marriage.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

95. HOUSE
2004"2012

Dr. Gregory House is brilliant.

He would very much prefer that you not mistake brilliance for friendliness.

Hugh Laurie stars as a diagnostician at a teaching hospital who specializes in medical cases other doctors cannot solve.

House approaches illness like a detective approaches a crime.

Symptoms are clues.

Patients are unreliable witnesses.

And according to House's worldview, everybody lies.

The character deliberately echoes Sherlock Holmes: extraordinary powers of observation, addiction, social abrasiveness and a best friend whose surname even begins with "W."

Each episode usually presents a new medical mystery.

But the real fascination is House himself.

He's funny.

Cruel.

Insightful.

Self-destructive.

Occasionally compassionate in ways he would probably deny.

Laurie's performance turned what could have been a conventional procedural into a character study.

The diagnosis may change every week.

House remains the most difficult case in the building.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

96. HALT AND CATCH FIRE
2014"2017

The personal-computer revolution doesn't sound like obvious emotional-drama material.

Halt and Catch Fire proves otherwise.

Beginning in the early 1980s, the series follows engineers, programmers and entrepreneurs attempting to build their futures during a rapidly changing technological era.

Lee Pace's Joe MacMillan initially appears to be the driving force, but the story gradually becomes a true ensemble centered around characters including Cameron Howe, Gordon Clark and Donna Clark.

Computers evolve.

Networks appear.

Online communities emerge.

The technological landscape keeps shifting beneath everyone's feet.

But the machines aren't really the central subject.

Ambition is.

Friendship is.

Collaboration is.

The desire to create something before somebody else does is.

Halt and Catch Fire also became a classic example of a television series that improved dramatically as it discovered what it truly wanted to be.

By the end, the people matter far more than the computers.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

97. COMMUNITY
2009"2015

Greendale Community College may technically be an educational institution.

Technically.

Joel McHale stars as Jeff Winger, a disgraced lawyer forced to attend community college after problems with his credentials.

He forms a fake Spanish study group in an attempt to impress Britta Perry.

Unfortunately for Jeff, actual people join.

That group becomes the center of one of television's most inventive sitcoms.

Created by Dan Harmon, Community begins with familiar campus comedy and then proceeds to ignore almost every boundary available to it.

Paintball episodes become action movies.

A blanket fort becomes a civilization.

One episode explores multiple timelines.

Another transforms the characters into animation.

Another plays like a documentary.

The show loves pop culture enough to parody it without simply mocking it.

Donald Glover, Danny Pudi, Alison Brie, Gillian Jacobs, Yvette Nicole Brown, Ken Jeong and the rest of the ensemble create a group of misfits who somehow become a family.

Six seasons.

Fans know the rest. Efye

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

98. THE OA
2016"2019

A young blind woman disappears.

Seven years later, she returns.

Now she can see.

And that's approximately the last straightforward thing about The OA.

Brit Marling, who co-created the series with Zal Batmanglij, stars as Prairie Johnson.

After returning home, Prairie begins telling a group of strangers an extraordinary story involving captivity, near-death experiences and possibilities that challenge conventional explanations of reality.

To say much more risks ruining the experience.

The OA is science fiction, mystery and spiritual drama wrapped around one another.

It asks viewers to accept ideas that can initially seem bizarre.

Some audiences embraced it completely.

Others didn't know what to make of it.

But almost nobody could accuse it of being ordinary.

Its cancellation after two seasons left major questions unresolved and helped transform the show into an enduring cult favorite.

Sometimes unfinished stories linger longer precisely because we're still imagining where they might have gone.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

99. GILMORE GIRLS
2000"2007

Welcome to Stars Hollow.

Population: apparently several thousand people who all know everybody else's business.

Lauren Graham stars as Lorelai Gilmore, who had daughter Rory while still a teenager and raised her largely on her own.

Alexis Bledel plays Rory, a gifted student whose ambitions eventually take her beyond their quirky Connecticut town.

Creator Amy Sherman-Palladino gave the series one of television's most recognizable rhythms.

Characters talk quickly.

Very quickly.

Conversations are packed with pop-culture references, jokes and verbal detours.

But beneath the witty dialogue is a multigenerational family story.

Lorelai's complicated relationship with wealthy parents Emily and Richard becomes just as important as her bond with Rory.

Gilmore Girls is cozy television with sharper edges than its reputation sometimes suggests.

Families love each other.

Families disappoint each other.

And coffee solves a surprising number of problems. ryo

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

100. SCANDAL
2012"2018

And the hundredth show brings us straight back to Washington.

Kerry Washington stars as Olivia Pope, a crisis-management expert whose job is essentially making powerful people's worst problems disappear.

She is exceptionally good at it.

Her own life?

Slightly more complicated.

Created by Shonda Rhimes, Scandal combines political thriller, legal drama, romance and high-speed melodrama with an almost breathless pace.

Olivia and her team are "gladiators in suits," fixing scandals before they consume clients.

But the central complications soon involve the White House itself " particularly President Fitzgerald Grant.

Conspiracies multiply.

Alliances change.

People betray one another.

Secrets produce more secrets.

And almost nobody remains innocent for long.

Scandal also made history with Kerry Washington becoming the first Black woman in decades to lead a network television drama.

As the final entry on this list, it provides an appropriate reminder:

Even #100 can represent a show that left a significant mark on television.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

" #81"100 AT A GLANCE

81. The Queen's Gambit
82. Better Things
83. Justified
84. Planet Earth
85. The Great British Baking Show
86. Sh+igun
87. Reservation Dogs
88. Dexter
89. Baby Reindeer
90. Eastbound & Down
91. Catastrophe
92. The Night Of
93. Station Eleven
94. The Diplomat
95. House
96. Halt and Catch Fire
97. Community
98. The OA
99. Gilmore Girls
100. Scandal

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

EfAU AND THAT'S 100

From Breaking Bad at #1 to Scandal at #100, we've traveled through an extraordinary quarter-century of television.

And look at how much the medium changed along the way.

We began with dramas that helped establish television as serious long-form storytelling.

Then came streaming.

International hits became global sensations overnight.

Limited series started attracting movie stars.

Reality television developed its own classics.

Animation became a vehicle for deeply adult storytelling.

A Korean drama could become one of the biggest shows on Earth.

A French spy series could sit alongside American prestige television.

A show about amateur bakers could belong in the same conversation as crime sagas and historical epics.

And perhaps most importantly, television stopped being one thing.

There is no single formula for great TV anymore.

It can be Walter White standing in the New Mexico desert.

It can be Don Draper staring silently through an office window.

It can be Leslie Knope refusing to give up on local government.

It can be Anthony Bourdain eating dinner with strangers thousands of miles from home.

It can be Beth Harmon staring across a chessboard.

It can be actors performing Shakespeare after the end of civilization.

It can even be a group of deeply dysfunctional people running a terrible bar in Philadelphia.

The common ingredient isn't genre.

It's storytelling.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

" THE COMPLETE TOP 100 " WE MADE IT

Over five parts, we've covered:

Part One: #1"20
Part Two: #21"40
Part Three: #41"60
Part Four: #61"80
Part Five: #81"100

One hundred television shows.

Thousands of episodes.

Decades of storytelling.

And probably several years of viewing if you're brave enough to attempt them all.

The best thing about a list like this isn't agreeing with every ranking.

It's discovering the show you somehow missed.

Maybe your favorite is #1.

Maybe it's #97.

Maybe it didn't make the list at all.

That's where the real argument begins.

So now that all 100 have been revealed, here's the question:

Which show would YOU put at #1? "Efi+
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From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

Your Name wrote:

On 2026-09-25 19:06:05 +0000, Nyssa said:

BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk"
<MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

And notice that this list doesn't contain any classic
shows from the Golden Age of television.

Umm ... it *is* the "The New York Times' ranking of the
100 Best TV Shows of the *21st Century*" ... so is just
for shows made from the
year 2000 onwards. :-)

2001. :)

Of course, it still ignores millions of shows from any
country outside America.

Plus, like many such silly lists (like "best of all time"
idiocies), the "21st century" has barely begun. All of
those shows will be long forgotten by the time the year
2100 comes along.

2101. :)

I'd guess their "experts" are in their 30s at the most.

It's not a valid list of the Top Whatever Many if it
doesn't include the entire span of time that television
has been part of the culture.

Nyssa, who also thinks if these "experts" were ever to
actually watch any of the true classic shows (Twilight
Zone!), they'd mark down their ratings of the ones they
now think are just SO wonderful

Considering that commercial television hasn't even been around
a century, they're sure limiting their scope if they're only
looking at 25 years of TV shows. While there have been a handfull
of outstanding television productions in the last 25 years,
there certainly haven't been anywhere NEAR 100 that have even
been good much less stellar.

Nyssa, who thinks grade inflation is alive and unwell in places
other than the schools

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From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

On 9/26/26 7:26 AM, Ian J. Ball wrote:

On 9/25/26 11:26 AM, BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk" <MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

This list also has a serious case of "recentism".

Oh, I get it - they are only looking at shows since 2000/2001...

And including "The
Crown", considering how bad it got in later season, really calls the
whole list into question anyway.

This point is still valid, though.


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From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

On 9/25/26 11:26 AM, BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk" <MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

This list also has a serious case of "recentism". And including "The
Crown", considering how bad it got in later season, really calls the
whole list into question anyway.



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From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

On Sep 26, 2026 at 6:21:10 AM PDT, "Nyssa" <Nyssa@logicalinsight.net> wrote:

Your Name wrote:

On 2026-09-25 19:06:05 +0000, Nyssa said:

BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk"
<MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

And notice that this list doesn't contain any classic
shows from the Golden Age of television.

Umm ... it *is* the "The New York Times' ranking of the
100 Best TV Shows of the *21st Century*" ... so is just
for shows made from the
year 2000 onwards. :-)

2001. :)

Of course, it still ignores millions of shows from any
country outside America.

Plus, like many such silly lists (like "best of all time"
idiocies), the "21st century" has barely begun. All of
those shows will be long forgotten by the time the year
2100 comes along.

2101. :)

People just don't get that, do they? I remember all the arguments in 1999 between people preparing to celebrate "the new millennium" and the people who kept telling them they were doing it a year early.


--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

In <ZZSdnZbkcqAmZSr3nZ2dnZfqnPWdnZ2d@giganews.com> BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> writes:

[snip]

Plus, like many such silly lists (like "best of all time"
idiocies), the "21st century" has barely begun. All of
those shows will be long forgotten by the time the year
2100 comes along.

2101. :)

People just don't get that, do they? I remember all the arguments in 1999

between people preparing to celebrate "the new millennium" and the people who

kept telling them they were doing it a year early.

The Y2K issue [a] would have taken effect a
minute past 23:59 31-Dec-1999. Point, score...

[a] Yes, it was a very real concernt. And lots
of us worked damn hard to keep it from being
a disaster.
--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

On Sep 26, 2026 at 10:01:35 AM PDT, "danny burstein" <dannyb@panix.com>
wrote:

In <ZZSdnZbkcqAmZSr3nZ2dnZfqnPWdnZ2d@giganews.com> BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> writes:

[snip]

Plus, like many such silly lists (like "best of all time"
idiocies), the "21st century" has barely begun. All of
those shows will be long forgotten by the time the year
2100 comes along.

2101. :)

People just don't get that, do they? I remember all the arguments in 1999
between people preparing to celebrate "the new millennium" and the people who
kept telling them they were doing it a year early.

The Y2K issue [a] would have taken effect a
minute past 23:59 31-Dec-1999. Point, score...

The Y2K issue involved potential computer errors due to only having two digits representing the year. It had nothing to do with when the new millennium started.


--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

MummyChunk <mummycullen@gmail-dot-com.no-spam.invalid> wrote:

MummyChunk wrote:
[snip]

" THE 100 BEST TV SHOWS OF THE 21st CENTURY: #81"100

We've reached the end. After crime epics, political satires, prestige
dramas, surreal comedies, reality television and some of the strangest experiments ever attempted on the small screen, only twenty shows remain.
And "only" is doing a lot of work here " because the final stretch still contains chess prodigies, frontier lawmen, nature documentaries, amateur bakers, feudal warlords, dysfunctional doctors, computer pioneers and one community college where absolutely nothing behaves normally.

Being ranked near the bottom of a list this strong doesn't mean being ordinary.

Far from it.

The final twenty include shows that became worldwide phenomena, cult favorites that grew more beloved after cancellation, limited series that seemingly appeared from nowhere and changed the conversation overnight,
and dramas whose influence can still be seen throughout television.

So here it is.

The final chapter: #81 through #100.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

81. THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT
2020

A television drama about chess became one of the biggest shows in the world.

That sentence probably would have sounded ridiculous until The Queen's Gambit arrived.

Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Beth Harmon, an orphan who discovers an extraordinary gift for chess and eventually enters a competitive world overwhelmingly dominated by men.

Based on Walter Tevis' novel, the limited series turns chess matches into psychological combat.

Pieces move across the board.

Nobody fires a gun.

Yet the tension can feel enormous.

Beth's talent is matched by a complicated personal life involving
addiction, loneliness and the burden of possessing an ability that
separates her from almost everyone around her.

Taylor-Joy makes Beth's silences as important as her dialogue.

Costumes, production design and music give the series an elegant
mid-century atmosphere, while the chess itself remains understandable
even for viewers who couldn't explain the Sicilian Defense if their lives depended on it.

The Queen's Gambit accomplished something remarkable:

It made millions of people suddenly think buying a chessboard sounded exciting. rOfN+A

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

82. BETTER THINGS
2016"2022

Pamela Adlon's Better Things finds enormous meaning in ordinary chaos.

Adlon stars as Sam Fox, a working actress in Los Angeles raising three daughters while also dealing with her career, her mother and the endless responsibilities of adulthood.

There are no enormous mysteries.

No villains plotting world domination.

No cliffhangers involving exploding buildings.

Instead, there are family dinners.

Arguments.

Work problems.

Parenting disasters.

Moments of affection that appear unexpectedly between moments of complete frustration.

Adlon's performance and direction give the series a naturalistic intimacy that makes the Fox household feel genuinely lived in.

Better Things understands that family life isn't divided neatly into comedy and drama.

Sometimes both happen during the same conversation.

Sometimes during the same sentence.

And sometimes loving somebody very much does absolutely nothing to
prevent them from driving you crazy.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

83. JUSTIFIED
2010"2015

Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens looks like he walked out of an old Western.

The problem is that he works in the modern world.

Timothy Olyphant stars as Raylan, a Kentucky-born lawman whose quick draw
and old-fashioned personal code create almost as many problems as they solve.

After a controversial shooting, Raylan is sent back to Kentucky and finds himself dealing with criminals, relatives and old acquaintances he'd
probably prefer to leave in the past.

The series draws heavily from the work of crime writer Elmore Leonard,
and it inherits Leonard's greatest strength:

Characters who can threaten one another while having extremely entertaining conversations.

Walton Goggins' Boyd Crowder becomes Raylan's perfect opposite "
intelligent, charismatic, dangerous and linked to Raylan by a shared
history neither can completely escape.

Justified has shootouts.

It has criminals.

It has lawmen.

But frequently its greatest weapon is dialogue.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

84. PLANET EARTH
2006

Sometimes television doesn't need fictional worlds.

The real one is spectacular enough. Efii

BBC's Planet Earth took viewers from mountains and deserts to jungles,
caves, oceans and frozen landscapes with imagery that seemed almost impossible when the series first aired.

David Attenborough's narration guides audiences through habitats
populated by animals engaged in the oldest dramas imaginable:

Finding food.

Escaping predators.

Finding mates.

Raising young.

Surviving.

Advances in camera technology allowed filmmakers to capture behavior and environments rarely seen with this kind of clarity.

The result wasn't simply another nature documentary.

It became a showcase for what modern television photography could accomplish.

Some scenes are beautiful.

Others are brutal.

Nature isn't particularly interested in happy endings.

But few television productions have made our own planet look this
enormous, strange and precious.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

85. THE GREAT BRITISH BAKING SHOW
2010"present

A tent.

A collection of amateur bakers.

Cakes.

Bread.

Biscuits.

And somehow... suspense. Efi#

The Great British Baking Show, known in Britain as The Great British Bake Off, became an international comfort-watch phenomenon by rejecting much
of the aggression usually associated with reality competition television.

Contestants compete.

Someone still goes home.

But they also help each other.

They encourage one another.

And when somebody's cake begins collapsing, competitors may actually run over to assist.

The central challenges test technique, creativity and the terrifying
ability to remain calm while staring through an oven door.

There are disasters.

There are soggy bottoms.

Occasionally something falls on the floor and an entire nation
experiences emotional distress.

Yet the overall atmosphere remains unusually warm.

Reality television discovered something surprising:

People being nice to one another can actually be entertaining.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

86. SH+iGUN
2024"present

Feudal Japan.

Political warfare.

Clashing cultures.

And ambition hiding behind almost every polite conversation.

Adapted from James Clavell's novel, Sh+igun begins when English navigator John Blackthorne becomes shipwrecked in Japan at the beginning of the 17th century.

Cosmo Jarvis plays Blackthorne, but Hiroyuki Sanada's Lord Yoshii
Toranaga and Anna Sawai's Toda Mariko become equally central to the drama.

Blackthorne initially understands almost nothing about the society surrounding him.

Neither the language nor the rules are familiar.

Mistakes can have deadly consequences.

Meanwhile, Toranaga is engaged in an increasingly dangerous political struggle in which every alliance matters.

Sh+igun impressed viewers with its scale, performances and commitment to allowing much of its story to unfold in Japanese rather than filtering everything through the English outsider.

The battles matter.

But, like many great political dramas, some of its most dangerous scenes involve people sitting quietly in rooms.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

87. RESERVATION DOGS
2021"2023

Four Indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma dream about escaping to California.

First, they have to survive being teenagers.

Created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, Reservation Dogs follows
Bear, Elora, Willie Jack and Cheese as they deal with friendship, grief, family and the loss of their friend Daniel.

The series mixes comedy with sadness in a way that feels effortless.

One moment can be ridiculous.

The next can quietly break your heart.

Its Indigenous cast and creative team brought stories and perspectives to American television that had rarely received this kind of space.

But what makes the series endure is how specific characters become
universal without losing what makes them specific.

These teenagers want to leave home.

They also belong to home.

That tension becomes more complicated as they grow older.

Reservation Dogs is funny, strange, warm and deeply humane.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

88. DEXTER
2006"2013

Dexter Morgan solves murders for the Miami police.

He also commits them.

Michael C. Hall stars as a blood-spatter analyst who hides a very significant secret:

He's a serial killer.

Dexter follows a code taught to him by his adoptive father, directing his murderous impulses toward people he believes deserve punishment.

That immediately places viewers in uncomfortable territory.

We're inside the mind of somebody doing horrifying things while simultaneously hoping he doesn't get caught.

Hall's calm narration allows Dexter to explain the enormous effort
required to imitate normal human behavior.

Work.

Relationships.

Friendships.

Small talk.

All of it can feel like camouflage.

The tension frequently comes from watching Dexter balance those two lives while investigators move dangerously close to discovering the truth.

Dexter turned an outrageous premise into one of television's most famous antihero stories.

And it made plastic sheeting look permanently suspicious.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

89. BABY REINDEER
2024

Baby Reindeer begins with a small act of kindness.

Then everything becomes increasingly uncomfortable.

Richard Gadd created and stars in the series as Donny Dunn, a struggling comedian and bartender whose interaction with a woman named Martha
develops into obsessive stalking.

The story was adapted from Gadd's stage work and draws on experiences from his life.

But the series becomes more complicated than a simple victim-and-stalker thriller.

Donny examines his own decisions.

His need for attention.

His ambitions.

His trauma.

And the confusing ways damaged people can sometimes participate in
dynamics they themselves don't completely understand.

Jessica Gunning's performance as Martha makes the character unsettling without reducing her to a simple monster.

The result is deliberately uncomfortable television.

It doesn't provide easy emotional distance.

And that discomfort is largely the point.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

90. EASTBOUND & DOWN
2009"2013

Kenny Powers used to be somebody.

Unfortunately, nobody forgot that more slowly than Kenny himself.

Danny McBride stars as a former professional baseball pitcher whose
career collapse sends him back to his hometown, where he becomes a
substitute physical-education teacher.

Kenny still behaves as though he's an international superstar.

Reality strongly disagrees.

Created by Ben Best, Jody Hill and McBride, Eastbound & Down builds
comedy around an almost magnificently arrogant man who views humility as something that happens to other people.

Kenny insults friends.

Destroys opportunities.

Creates disasters.

Then somehow convinces himself that he remains the hero of every situation.

His attempts at redemption are complicated by the fact that Kenny's
greatest obstacle is usually Kenny.

Subtle?

Absolutely not.

Funny?

Very often.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

91. CATASTROPHE
2015"2019

An American advertising executive meets an Irish schoolteacher in London.

They have a brief relationship.

She becomes pregnant.

So naturally they decide to try building a life together.

What could possibly go wrong?

Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan created and star in Catastrophe, a romantic comedy that has very little interest in pretending relationships remain romantic all the time.

Rob and Sharon love each other.

They also irritate each other enormously.

Marriage involves children, exhaustion, money, sex, relatives, illness
and the occasional desire to be alone for approximately six months.

Their arguments are frequently brutal because they know exactly where the other's weak points are.

But underneath all the sarcasm is genuine affection.

Catastrophe understands that a lasting relationship isn't necessarily one where people stop fighting.

Sometimes it's one where they keep choosing each other afterward.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

92. THE NIGHT OF
2016

Nasir Khan borrows his father's taxi for a night out.

By morning, a woman is dead.

Nasir has been arrested.

And nothing about his life will ever be simple again.

Riz Ahmed stars as Nasir in HBO's The Night Of, with John Turturro
playing attorney John Stone.

The series begins like a murder mystery but quickly expands into an examination of the criminal justice system itself.

Police procedure.

Jail.

Lawyers.

Plea bargains.

Evidence.

Public assumptions.

All begin reshaping Nasir before his guilt or innocence has even been fully determined.

Ahmed's transformation across the limited series is particularly striking.

The person entering the system isn't necessarily the same person who will eventually leave it.

The Night Of asks a disturbing question:

What happens to somebody while everyone is busy deciding what happened?

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

93. STATION ELEVEN
2021"2022

Civilization collapses after a devastating pandemic.

Station Eleven is less interested in the collapse than in what people
decide to build afterward.

Adapted from Emily St. John Mandel's novel, the series moves between timelines and characters whose lives intersect before and after catastrophe.

Years later, a traveling group of actors and musicians performs
Shakespeare for scattered communities.

It sounds impractical.

That's precisely the point.

Food helps people survive.

Shelter helps people survive.

But art, memory and connection may explain why survival matters in the first place.

Mackenzie Davis anchors much of the post-collapse story as Kirsten, whose childhood experiences continue shaping her adult life.

Station Eleven can be melancholic and strange.

But unlike many post-apocalyptic stories, its central question isn't:

"How terrible will humanity become?"

It's closer to:

"What parts of humanity are worth preserving?"

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

94. THE DIPLOMAT
2023"present

International diplomacy would probably be much easier if diplomats didn't also have personal lives.

Keri Russell stars as Kate Wyler, an American diplomat unexpectedly
appointed ambassador to the United Kingdom during an international crisis.

She's smart, experienced and far more comfortable solving problems than performing ceremonial duties.

Her husband Hal, played by Rufus Sewell, is also a skilled diplomat.

Which is helpful.

Until it really isn't.

The Diplomat mixes geopolitical maneuvering with marriage drama.

A conversation about national security can turn into an argument between spouses.

An argument between spouses can affect national security.

Kate has to navigate governments, intelligence agencies, political
ambitions and a husband who has considerable difficulty remaining in the background.

The result is fast, witty and constantly unstable.

Because apparently international relations aren't complicated enough without marriage.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

95. HOUSE
2004"2012

Dr. Gregory House is brilliant.

He would very much prefer that you not mistake brilliance for friendliness.

Hugh Laurie stars as a diagnostician at a teaching hospital who
specializes in medical cases other doctors cannot solve.

House approaches illness like a detective approaches a crime.

Symptoms are clues.

Patients are unreliable witnesses.

And according to House's worldview, everybody lies.

The character deliberately echoes Sherlock Holmes: extraordinary powers
of observation, addiction, social abrasiveness and a best friend whose surname even begins with "W."

Each episode usually presents a new medical mystery.

But the real fascination is House himself.

He's funny.

Cruel.

Insightful.

Self-destructive.

Occasionally compassionate in ways he would probably deny.

Laurie's performance turned what could have been a conventional
procedural into a character study.

The diagnosis may change every week.

House remains the most difficult case in the building.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

96. HALT AND CATCH FIRE
2014"2017

The personal-computer revolution doesn't sound like obvious emotional-drama material.

Halt and Catch Fire proves otherwise.

Beginning in the early 1980s, the series follows engineers, programmers
and entrepreneurs attempting to build their futures during a rapidly
changing technological era.

Lee Pace's Joe MacMillan initially appears to be the driving force, but
the story gradually becomes a true ensemble centered around characters including Cameron Howe, Gordon Clark and Donna Clark.

Computers evolve.

Networks appear.

Online communities emerge.

The technological landscape keeps shifting beneath everyone's feet.

But the machines aren't really the central subject.

Ambition is.

Friendship is.

Collaboration is.

The desire to create something before somebody else does is.

Halt and Catch Fire also became a classic example of a television series
that improved dramatically as it discovered what it truly wanted to be.

By the end, the people matter far more than the computers.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

97. COMMUNITY
2009"2015

Greendale Community College may technically be an educational institution.

Technically.

Joel McHale stars as Jeff Winger, a disgraced lawyer forced to attend community college after problems with his credentials.

He forms a fake Spanish study group in an attempt to impress Britta Perry.

Unfortunately for Jeff, actual people join.

That group becomes the center of one of television's most inventive sitcoms.

Created by Dan Harmon, Community begins with familiar campus comedy and
then proceeds to ignore almost every boundary available to it.

Paintball episodes become action movies.

A blanket fort becomes a civilization.

One episode explores multiple timelines.

Another transforms the characters into animation.

Another plays like a documentary.

The show loves pop culture enough to parody it without simply mocking it.

Donald Glover, Danny Pudi, Alison Brie, Gillian Jacobs, Yvette Nicole Brown, Ken Jeong

Killed this show. When he became a regular, I quit watching.

Missing missing money glory and the rest of the ensemble create a group
of misfits who somehow become a family.

Six seasons.

Fans know the rest. Efye

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

98. THE OA
2016"2019

A young blind woman disappears.

Seven years later, she returns.

Now she can see.

And that's approximately the last straightforward thing about The OA.

Brit Marling, who co-created the series with Zal Batmanglij, stars as Prairie Johnson.

After returning home, Prairie begins telling a group of strangers an extraordinary story involving captivity, near-death experiences and possibilities that challenge conventional explanations of reality.

To say much more risks ruining the experience.

The OA is science fiction, mystery and spiritual drama wrapped around one another.

It asks viewers to accept ideas that can initially seem bizarre.

Some audiences embraced it completely.

Others didn't know what to make of it.

But almost nobody could accuse it of being ordinary.

Its cancellation after two seasons left major questions unresolved and
helped transform the show into an enduring cult favorite.

Sometimes unfinished stories linger longer precisely because we're still imagining where they might have gone.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

99. GILMORE GIRLS
2000"2007

Welcome to Stars Hollow.

Population: apparently several thousand people who all know everybody else's business.

Lauren Graham stars as Lorelai Gilmore, who had daughter Rory while still
a teenager and raised her largely on her own.

Alexis Bledel plays Rory, a gifted student whose ambitions eventually
take her beyond their quirky Connecticut town.

Creator Amy Sherman-Palladino gave the series one of television's most recognizable rhythms.

Characters talk quickly.

Very quickly.

Conversations are packed with pop-culture references, jokes and verbal detours.

But beneath the witty dialogue is a multigenerational family story.

Lorelai's complicated relationship with wealthy parents Emily and Richard becomes just as important as her bond with Rory.

Gilmore Girls is cozy television with sharper edges than its reputation sometimes suggests.

Families love each other.

Families disappoint each other.

And coffee solves a surprising number of problems. ryo

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

100. SCANDAL
2012"2018

And the hundredth show brings us straight back to Washington.

Kerry Washington stars as Olivia Pope, a crisis-management expert whose
job is essentially making powerful people's worst problems disappear.

She is exceptionally good at it.

Her own life?

Slightly more complicated.

Created by Shonda Rhimes, Scandal combines political thriller, legal
drama, romance and high-speed melodrama with an almost breathless pace.

Olivia and her team are "gladiators in suits," fixing scandals before they consume clients.

But the central complications soon involve the White House itself " particularly President Fitzgerald Grant.

Conspiracies multiply.

Alliances change.

People betray one another.

Secrets produce more secrets.

And almost nobody remains innocent for long.

Scandal also made history with Kerry Washington becoming the first Black woman in decades to lead a network television drama.

As the final entry on this list, it provides an appropriate reminder:

Even #100 can represent a show that left a significant mark on television.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

" #81"100 AT A GLANCE

81. The Queen's Gambit
82. Better Things
83. Justified
84. Planet Earth
85. The Great British Baking Show
86. Sh+igun
87. Reservation Dogs
88. Dexter
89. Baby Reindeer
90. Eastbound & Down
91. Catastrophe
92. The Night Of
93. Station Eleven
94. The Diplomat
95. House
96. Halt and Catch Fire
97. Community
98. The OA
99. Gilmore Girls
100. Scandal

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

EfAU AND THAT'S 100

From Breaking Bad at #1 to Scandal at #100, we've traveled through an extraordinary quarter-century of television.

And look at how much the medium changed along the way.

We began with dramas that helped establish television as serious long-form storytelling.

Then came streaming.

International hits became global sensations overnight.

Limited series started attracting movie stars.

Reality television developed its own classics.

Animation became a vehicle for deeply adult storytelling.

A Korean drama could become one of the biggest shows on Earth.

A French spy series could sit alongside American prestige television.

A show about amateur bakers could belong in the same conversation as
crime sagas and historical epics.

And perhaps most importantly, television stopped being one thing.

There is no single formula for great TV anymore.

It can be Walter White standing in the New Mexico desert.

It can be Don Draper staring silently through an office window.

It can be Leslie Knope refusing to give up on local government.

It can be Anthony Bourdain eating dinner with strangers thousands of miles from home.

It can be Beth Harmon staring across a chessboard.

It can be actors performing Shakespeare after the end of civilization.

It can even be a group of deeply dysfunctional people running a terrible
bar in Philadelphia.

The common ingredient isn't genre.

It's storytelling.

""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

" THE COMPLETE TOP 100 " WE MADE IT

Over five parts, we've covered:

Part One: #1"20
Part Two: #21"40
Part Three: #41"60
Part Four: #61"80
Part Five: #81"100

One hundred television shows.

Thousands of episodes.

Decades of storytelling.

And probably several years of viewing if you're brave enough to attempt them all.

The best thing about a list like this isn't agreeing with every ranking.

It's discovering the show you somehow missed.

Maybe your favorite is #1.

Maybe it's #97.

Maybe it didn't make the list at all.

That's where the real argument begins.

So now that all 100 have been revealed, here's the question:

Which show would YOU put at #1? "Efi+

--
The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it is still on my list.
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From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

On 2026-09-26 17:01:35 +0000, danny burstein said:

In <ZZSdnZbkcqAmZSr3nZ2dnZfqnPWdnZ2d@giganews.com> BTR1701
<atropos@mac.com> writes:

[snip]

Plus, like many such silly lists (like "best of all time"
idiocies), the "21st century" has barely begun. All of
those shows will be long forgotten by the time the year
2100 comes along.

2101. :)

People just don't get that, do they? I remember all the arguments in
1999 between people preparing to celebrate "the new millennium" and the
people who kept telling them they were doing it a year early.

The Y2K issue [a] would have taken effect a minute past 23:59
31-Dec-1999. Point, score...

[a] Yes, it was a very real concernt. And lots of us worked damn hard
to keep it from being a disaster.

It was a concern for some things, but it was also massively over-hyped
with many idiots claiming things like traffic lights and elevators
would suddenly stop working ... and a lot of conmen making massive
amounts of money "fixing" such things that weren't ever going to be a
problem.



--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: rec.arts.tv

On 2026-09-26 13:21:10 +0000, Nyssa said:

Your Name wrote:

On 2026-09-25 19:06:05 +0000, Nyssa said:

BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk"
<MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

And notice that this list doesn't contain any classic shows from the
Golden Age of television.

Umm ... it *is* the "The New York Times' ranking of the 100 Best TV
Shows of the *21st Century*" ... so is just for shows made from the
year 2000 onwards. :-)

2001. :)

The new Millennium, and therefore new century, officially started on 1 January, 2000 ... hence the supposed "Millennium bug" problem and the
great IT con-job rush to fix numerous things that didn't need actually
fixing before the clocked ticked over from 11:59pm, 31 December, 1999.
:-p

Of course, it still ignores millions of shows from any country outside America.

Plus, like many such silly lists (like "best of all time" idiocies),
the "21st century" has barely begun. All of those shows will be long
forgotten by the time the year 2100 comes along.

2101. :)

I'd guess their "experts" are in their 30s at the most.

It's not a valid list of the Top Whatever Many if it doesn't include
the entire span of time that television has been part of the culture.

Nyssa, who also thinks if these "experts" were ever to actually watch
any of the true classic shows (Twilight Zone!), they'd mark down their
ratings of the ones they now think are just SO wonderful

Considering that commercial television hasn't even been around a
century, they're sure limiting their scope if they're only looking at
25 years of TV shows. While there have been a handfull of outstanding television productions in the last 25 years, there certainly haven't
been anywhere NEAR 100 that have even been good much less stellar.

Nyssa, who thinks grade inflation is alive and unwell in places other
than the schools

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On 2026-09-26 14:27:17 +0000, Ian J. Ball said:

On 9/26/26 7:26 AM, Ian J. Ball wrote:

On 9/25/26 11:26 AM, BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk" <MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

This list also has a serious case of "recentism".

Oh, I get it - they are only looking at shows since 2000/2001...

And including "The Crown", considering how bad it got in later season,
really calls the whole list into question anyway.

This point is still valid, though.

It is valid for most shows ... especially American shows that often get dragged on and on and on WAY past their use by date (not to mention
getting numerous spin-offs in the process, each worse than the previous
one). :-p


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On Sep 26, 2026 at 3:54:30 PM PDT, "Your Name" <YourName@YourISP.com> wrote:

On 2026-09-26 13:21:10 +0000, Nyssa said:

Your Name wrote:

Umm ... it *is* the "The New York Times' ranking of the 100 Best TV
Shows of the *21st Century*" ... so is just for shows made from the
year 2000 onwards. :-)

2001. :)

The new Millennium, and therefore new century, officially started on 1 January, 2000 ...

No, it started January 2001.

The first decade of the new calendar started with year one, not year zero. So the first decade consisted of years one through ten. Not years one through nine. The second decade started on year 11. And on and on. The first
millennium consisted of years one through 1000, not years one through 999.
That means the second millennium started on year 1001. Just as the third millennium started on year 2001.


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BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:

On Sep 26, 2026 at 3:54:30 PM PDT, "Your Name" <YourName@YourISP.com> wrote:

On 2026-09-26 13:21:10 +0000, Nyssa said:

Your Name wrote:

Umm ... it *is* the "The New York Times' ranking of the 100 Best TV
Shows of the *21st Century*" ... so is just for shows made from the
year 2000 onwards. :-)

2001. :)

The new Millennium, and therefore new century, officially started on 1
January, 2000 ...

No, it started January 2001.

You would be correct, sir.

The first decade of the new calendar started with year one, not year zero. So

the first decade consisted of years one through ten. Not years one through nine. The second decade started on year 11. And on and on. The first
millennium consisted of years one through 1000, not years one through 999.
That means the second millennium started on year 1001. Just as the third millennium started on year 2001.



--
The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it is still on my list.
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Your Name <YourName@YourISP.com> wrote:

On 2026-09-26 13:21:10 +0000, Nyssa said:

Your Name wrote:

. . .

Umm ... it *is* the "The New York Times' ranking of the 100 Best TV >>>Shows of the *21st Century*" ... so is just for shows made from the
year 2000 onwards. :-)

2001. :)

The new Millennium, and therefore new century, officially started on 1 >January, 2000 ... hence the supposed "Millennium bug" problem and the
great IT con-job rush to fix numerous things that didn't need actually >fixing before the clocked ticked over from 11:59pm, 31 December, 1999.
:-p

You may count an epoch any way you like. Use of a 2-digit fixed field
length to represent a year, or two specific digits within a field,
affected a 100-year epoch from 1900-1999. But a common designation of
"decade" or "century" assumes that the first year ends in "1" and the
final year ends in "0".

Why?

The Anno Domini epoch begins with Year 1, the year of Jesus's birth (or conception?). B.C., with the years running backwards, are years before
his birth. The year Zero is not used, which has to be taken into account
when performing date arithmetic.

Dionysius created the epoch in the 6th century but it wasn't widely used
in the Church for several centuries. Biblical scholars think Jesus, or
the man presumed to be Jesus, was born four or five years earlier.

Note well that January 1 as year-change date was established
inconsistently and in some places, perhaps as late as the 18th century.
Before that, it was the spring planting date in Europe, either on a date
in March locally decreed or spring equinox.

Gregorian calendar

Let's also note that the Church's celestial observations came up with a
much more accurate formula to calculate the siderial year of orbit
(while still forcing the suppression of knowledge) but chose instead to
use the simpler formula for leap days, leaving them off in specific
century years.

The other correction not made was putting Christmas back on winter
solstice as it occurs in Europe. Christman is 3 or 4 days later. They'd
have had to have a number of transition years in the beginning to put everything back as originally designated in the Julian calendar,
although solstice and equinox might fall on the previous or next
calendar day.

The midnight date change is a sidereal convenience. When lunar
calendares were used by Romans, I have no idea when the date change
occurred. They used a lot of intercalation periods, without month
designations in winter. The Julian calendar is sort of solar but I'm not
sure when the date changed.

I've read that some solar calendars change the date at local apparent
noon.
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On 2026-09-26 22:59:25 +0000, Your Name said:

On 2026-09-26 14:27:17 +0000, Ian J. Ball said:

On 9/26/26 7:26 AM, Ian J. Ball wrote:

On 9/25/26 11:26 AM, BTR1701 wrote:

On Sep 25, 2026 at 9:03:52 AM PDT, "MummyChunk" <MummyChunk> wrote:

THE FIRST TWENTY

1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
11. The Office (U.S.)
12. Arrested Development
13. Girls
14. Friday Night Lights
15. Six Feet Under
16. The Office (U.K.)
17. The Americans
18. I May Destroy You
19. Chernobyl
20. The Crown

There's no way THE SOPRANOS doesn't make the top 20.

This list also has a serious case of "recentism".

Oh, I get it - they are only looking at shows since 2000/2001...

And including "The Crown", considering how bad it got in later season,
really calls the whole list into question anyway.

This point is still valid, though.

It is valid for most shows ... especially American shows that often get dragged on and on and on WAY past their use by date (not to mention
getting numerous spin-offs in the process, each worse than the previous one). :-p

There are of course British shows that also get dragged on too long.

"Broadchurch" and "Vigil" are two examples that had a good 'first
season', but should have stayed as just a one-off mini-series. The
following season(s) they tried to tack on simply due to the original's popularity have been pretty awful and ill-fitting.


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