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BEST OF THE BEST

The 100 Greatest TV

Shows of All Time
A ranking of the most game-changing, side-splitting, tear-jerking, mind-blowing,
world-building, genre-busting programs in television history, from the medium’s
inception in the early 20th century through the ever-metastasizing era of Peak TV

BY ALAN SEPINWALL

SEPTEMBER 26, 2022

ILLUSTRATION BY SELMAN HOŞGÖR FOR ROLLING STONE
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H O W D O Y O U identify the very best

series in a medium that’s been
commercially available since the end of
World War II? Especially when that
medium has experienced more radical
change in the nine years between the finales
of Breaking Bad and its prequel, Better
Call Saul, than it did in the 60-odd years
separating Walter White from Milton
Berle? The current Peak TV era is delivering
us 500-plus scripted shows per year, many
of them breaking boundaries in terms of
how stories are told and who’s doing the
telling. So, we decided to update our list of
television’s all-time best offerings,
originally compiled in 2016. Once again, we
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reached out to TV stars, creators, and critics
— from multihyphenates like Natasha
Lyonne, Ben Stiller, and Pamela Adlon to
actors like Jon Hamm and Lizzy Caplan as
well as the minds behind shows like The X-
Files, Party Down, and Jane the Virgin —
to sort through television’s vast and
complicated history. (See the full list of
voters here.) Giving no restrictions on era
or genre, we ended up with an eclectic list
where the wholesome children’s television
institution Sesame Street finished one spot
ahead of foulmouthed Western Deadwood,
while Eisenhower-era juggernaut I Love
Lucy wound up sandwiched in between two
shows, Lost and Arrested Development,
that debuted during George W. Bush’s first
term. Many favorites returned, and the top
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show retained its crown. But voters couldn’t
resist many standouts of the past few years,
including a tragicomedy with a guinea-pig-
themed café, an unpredictable comedy set
in the world of hip-hop, and a racially
charged adaptation of an unadaptable
comic book. It’s a hell of a list.
 SUBSCRIBE

RUSS MARTIN/FX

100 ‘What We Do in the Shadows’

FX, 2019-PRESENT

The first of several movie-to-TV projects on

this list. This one is a spinoff rather than an
adaptation, though, since Jemaine Clement
and Taika Waititi have appeared on the
show in the roles they played in the 2014
vampire rockumentary film. The FX version
moves the action from Wellington, New
Zealand, to Staten Island and focuses on
three traditional vampires — preening
warrior king Nandor (Kayvan Novak) and
narcissistic, sex-crazed spouses Laszlo
(Matt Berry) and Nadja (Natasia
Demetriou) — who share a house with
superhumanly dull “energy vampire” Colin
Robinson (Mark Proksch) and Nandor’s
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frustrated human familiar Guillermo

(Harvey Guillen). Shadows is unspeakably
raunchy, remarkably silly, and diabolical in
the way it manages to be stupid and clever
within the same breath.   
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HBO

99 ‘Oz’
HBO, 1997-2003

Before The Wire, before The Sopranos,

there was Oz, the canary in the coal mine
for the idea of scripted dramas existing
outside the broadcast network ecosystem.
Created by St. Elsewhere and Homicide:
Life on the Street vet Tom Fontana, Oz took
place in a maximum security prison that
housed some of the nastiest humans
depicted on television, before or since.
There was sadistic white supremacist Vern
Schillinger (J.K. Simmons), menacing gang
leader Simon Adebisi (Adewale Akinnuoye-
Agbaje), the predatory Chris Keller (Chris
Meloni), and many more. The world of Oz
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was so vicious that even the relatively
benign prisoners — audience surrogate
Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), Black
nationalist Kareem Saïd (Eamonn Walker),
or third generation inmate Miguel Alvarez
(Kirk Acevedo) — would be tempted into
heinous deeds over time. Yet in the midst of
all the murder, torture, and psychological
warfare, Oz was also a thoughtful, deeply
experimental drama with a lot to say about
the tension between punishing criminals
and rehabilitating them, and what
confinement does to good men and bad
ones.  
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ELIZABETH FISHER/PARAMOUNT+

98
‘The Good Fight’
CBS ALL ACCESS, 2017-20; PARAMOUNT+,
2021-PRESENT

For seven seasons, The Good Wife was a

fine example of how loftier creative
ambitions could be smuggled into the
formula of a broadcast network procedural
drama. When that show ended, creators
Robert and Michelle King built a spinoff
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designed for the lack of restrictions of the
streaming universe. Not only could
Christine Baranski’s legal grande dame
Diane Lockhart now use words she was
never allowed to say on Good Wife, but The
Good Fight could go to much stranger and
more ambitious places in terms of style and
substance, as Diane wound up at a
predominantly Black law firm and also
struggled to accept the surreality of life
under President Trump. Some creators
benefit from working with some degree of
limitation, but unshackling the Kings has
unleashed their creative best selves.   
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ABC/GETTY IMAGES

97 ‘The Odd Couple’

ABC, 1970-75

The 1968 film version of Neil Simon’s play

about a mismatched pair of divorced
middle-aged friends sharing an apartment
was a beloved, Oscar-nominated, box office
hit. Yet the sitcom adaptation that debuted
 p
two years later has arguably left a larger
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cultural footprint than either the film or the

many, many productions of the play. That’s
just how divinely paired Tony Randall and
Jack Klugman were as, respectively, anal
retentive photographer Felix Unger (in
many ways, the prototype for Sheldon on
The Big Bang Theory) and slovenly
sportswriter Oscar Madison. The two were
so smashing together that their
personalities took over not only much of the
Odd Couple legacy, but of other series that
briefly intersected with it. It’s impossible to
think about the classic game show
Password, for instance, without first
thinking of Felix and Oscar competing
together and arguing over Felix’s attempt to
use “Aristophanes” as a clue for “bird.” Or
to hear anyone else talk about the dangers
to hear anyone else talk about the dangers
of assuming without flashing to Felix S U B S C R I B E
delivering that lesson in a courtroom.  

©CARTOON NETWORK/EVERETT COLLECTION

96 ‘Rick and Morty’ 

ADULT SWIM, 2013-PRESENT
96 ADULT SWIM, 2013 PRESENT

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Rick Sanchez is a mad scientist whose

many inventions allow him to go anywhere
and do anything, from visiting parallel
realities to turning himself into a talking
pickle to get out of going to family therapy.
The animated Rick and Morty, created by
Justin Roiland (who voices the title
characters) and Dan Harmon from
Community, seems to be similarly without
limits — not only in how disgusting and
bizarre individual adventures can be, but in
how easily the series can toggle from
celebrating Rick’s unstoppable brilliance to
pointing out what a toxic, emotionally
abusive jerk Rick can be to his grandson
and everyone else unlucky enough to cross
paths with him. 
 SUBSCRIBE

NETFLIX

95 ‘Squid Game’
NETFLIX, 2021-PRESENT

The newest show on this list, and the only

non English one Squid Game is
non-English one, Squid Game is
emblematic of the way the streaming Sera
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has broken down content borders, so that

your new obsession can just as easily be an
Israeli drama about an Orthodox Jewish
man who falls in love with a widow as it can
be the latest Disney+ Marvel series. But
beyond what it represents for the TV
business, Squid Game — in which a group
of financially desperate South Koreans
compete in a deadly series of children’s
playground contests with a huge winner-
takes-all cash prize — is a gripping thriller,
a ruthless socioeconomic satire, and a great
showcase for actors like Emmy winner Lee
Jung-jae.  
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BRILLSTEIN-GREY ENTERTAINMENT/EVERETT COLLECTION

94 ‘NewsRadio’ 
NBC, 1995-99

The red-headed stepchild of the Must-See

TV era, NewsRadio seemingly aired on
every night of the week but Thursdays, even
though the workplace sitcom’s strongest
h ld h di l i
moments should have earned it a place in
NBC’s all-star lineup alongside celebrated
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series like Seinfeld or Friends. Everything

was slightly, amusingly off about this show.
The creative team decided, for instance, to
just let anxious station manager Dave
(Dave Foley) and confident reporter Lisa
(Maura Tierney) have sex in the second
episode instead of stringing out the
romantic tension in a manner typical of
Nineties comedy. Stories could spin out of
the strangest ideas, like arrogant news
anchor Bill (Phil Hartman) becoming
addicted to the disgusting sandwiches in
the office vending machine, or eccentric
station owner Jimmy James (Stephen Root)
having his memoir translated from English
to Japanese and then back into English, so
that it was suddenly titled Jimmy James:
Macho Business Donkey Wrestler. The fifth
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and final season, produced after Hartman
was murdered, is bumpy, and it can be
difficult now to watch scenes with Joe
Rogan as the station’s electrician without
thinking about who and what Rogan has
become. But the series as a whole deserved
so much better than it got from a network
that never seemed to appreciate what it had
in Paul Simms’ creation. 
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NBCUNIVERSAL/GETTY IMAGES

93 ‘The Rockford Files’ 

NBC, 1974-80

The primetime landscape used to be as

dotted with private-eye dramas as it was
with cop shows, hospital shows, and
Westerns. By far the best and breeziest
example of the whole genre starred the
preternaturally relaxed James Garner as
Jim Rockford, a low-rent detective living in
a trailer on a beach in Malibu, working for
anyone who will pay his rate of $200 a day
plus expenses, and getting punched in the
p p g gp
stomach every 10 minutes or so for his
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smart mouth. In addition to its staggering

likability, Rockford also represents a cross-
section of TV drama history. One of its
creators was Roy Huggins, the man
responsible for Fifties and Sixties classics
like Maverick (also starring Garner) and
The Fugitive. The other was Stephen J.
Cannell, who would become one of the first
celebrity showrunners on the back of a tidal
wave of Seventies and Eighties hits like this,
The A-Team, and 21 Jump Street. And
within a few seasons, the show began
employing writer David Chase, who would
go on to create The Sopranos.   
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TV TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

92 ‘The Muppet Show’  

SYNDICATED, 1976-81

The variety show, once one of TV’s most

thriving genres, was on its last legs by the
mid-Seventies. (The deservedly short-lived
variety-show sequel to The Brady Bunch
also debuted in 1976.) Jim Henson and
also debuted in 1976.) Jim Henson and
friends, though, gave the format one last,
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glorious burst of life through two choices.

The first was to center itself around Kermit
the Frog and brand new Muppet creations
like inept comedian Fozzie Bear and the
egotistical, violent Miss Piggy; simply
having the Muppets as the performers gave
all the familiar showtunes and comedy bits
a feeling of everything old being new again.
The second, and more crucial one, was to
split the focus between the performances
and the chaos backstage, as Kermit
attempted to wrangle lunatic Muppets like
Gonzo the Great while appeasing celebrity
guests like Bernadette Peters and Mark
Hamill. The most sensational,
celebrational, Muppetational Henson
project of them all.  
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NBCUNIVERSAL/GETTY IMAGES

91
‘The Tonight Show With Johnny
Carson’  
NBC, 1962-92

Johnny Carson was the third of six hosts

who’ve sat at the Tonight Show desk so far
who ve sat at the Tonight Show desk so far.
But with all due respect to Steve Allen,
S U BJack
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Paar, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and now

Jimmy Fallon, Johnny’s 30-year tenure
stands apart as its own entity. His cool,
detached, self-deprecating persona — he
was usually funnier in the aftermath of a
joke bombing than when delivering the
more successful punchlines — made
Tonight appointment viewing regardless of
NBC’s fortunes in primetime. The period in
the early Seventies when the show had just
moved from New York to Los Angeles
stands out as the platonic ideal of the late-
night talk-show format. Frequent A-list
guests like Burt Reynolds were so
comfortable with Johnny that it began to
feel like the audience was eavesdropping on
conversations that the participants didn’t
know were being filmed. Johnny’s
retirement was the beginning of the end of
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the monoculture, as audiences quickly

fractured between Team Dave, Team Jay,
and Team Arsenio, when no one had come
close to successfully challenging Carson’s
own supremacy.  
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DISNEY GENERAL ENTERTAINMENT/ABC/GETTY IMAGES

90 ‘The Wonder Years’ 

ABC, 1988-93

The greatest Boomer nostalgia project of

them all, before Boomer nostalgia
threatened to overwhelm the entire world.
A young Fred Savage played Kevin Arnold,
a naive suburban kid running the gauntlet
of adolescence at the same moment
America was enduring the turbulence of the
late Sixties and early Seventies. The
Wonder Years was equal parts frothy and
sad, bookended by a pilot where Kevin’s
longtime friend (and frequent crush)
Winnie Cooper (Danica McKellar) learns
that her brother Brian died in Vietnam, and
a finale where the adult Kevin (the voice of
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Daniel Stern) tells us that Kevin’s father
(Dan Lauria) will die not long after the
events of the series. The show’s air of
innocence was infectious, and that’s been
ably captured by the current reboot (which
was for a time produced by Savage, before
colleagues at the show accused him of
sexual harassment and assault), focusing on
a Black family in the South in the same era,
with one brief but powerful link to the
original.    
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EVERETT COLLECTION

89 ‘The Carol Burnett Show’

CBS, 1967-78

In the 1973-74 TV season, CBS rolled out

arguably the greatest night of TV
programming ever, with a five-show
Saturday comedy lineup — All in the
Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore
Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The
Carol Burnett Show — that was all killer,
no filler. Spoilers: All five shows are on this
list, starting with the sketch series that
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would bring the evening to an uproarious
close. Carol Burnett had been a variety-
show and sitcom staple for most of the
Sixties, most famously in her collaborations
with pal Julie Andrews, but her talents
weren’t fully unleashed until she was given
her own series where she could parody
movies (like the famous Gone With the
Wind spoof featuring a dress with a curtain
rod sticking out) or TV (the recurring fake
soap opera “As the Stomach Turns”), try on
accents, sing, and even expertly play the
straight woman for co-stars like Vicky
Lawrence, Harvey Korman, and Tim
Conway. The comic energy of the show was
so strong that it soon became as beloved for
the moments where the actors would crack
each other up mid-sketch as for the scenes
each other up mid-sketch as for the scenes
that went off without anyone breakingS U B S C R I B E
character. At the end of each episode,
Burnett would tug on her ear — a secret
signal to her beloved grandmother that also
told her audience to be thankful they had
just spent three hours watching some of the
best small-screen comedy shows ever made.
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ALEX BAILEY/NETFLIX

88 ‘The Crown’ 
NETFLIX, 2016-PRESENT

In the years leading up to this

dramatization of the reign of Queen
Elizabeth II, Peter Morgan had written a
number of films (most notably 2006’s The
Queen) about the royal family and/or
British prime ministers. With The Crown,
Morgan got to dive deep into his favorite
subjects, casting multiple actresses (Claire
Foy, then Olivia Colman, and soon Imelda
Staunton) to play Elizabeth at various ages,
and depicting her complicated relationships
with various prime ministers (especially
Foy opposite John Lithgow’s Winston
Foy opposite John Lithgow s Winston
Churchill, and Colman opposite Gillian
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Anderson’s Margaret Thatcher). Morgan

also mined rich dramatic terrain in the
many times where Her Royal Highness felt
she had to put the best interests of the
monarchy ahead of the best needs of her
husband Philip (Matt Smith, then Tobias
Menzies, and soon Jonathan Pryce), her
sister Margaret (Vanessa Kirby, Helena
Bonham Carter, Lesley Manville), and her
son Charles (played in recent seasons by
Josh O’Connor, with Dominic West about
to take over), among others. The Crown
walks a narrow tightrope — made perhaps
even narrower in the aftermath of the real
Queen Elizabeth’s recent passing —
between criticizing the very nature of
royalty and feeling great sympathy for the
people living within the family’s tight
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strictures.   

TORONTO STAR/GETTY IMAGES

87 ‘The Kids in the Hall’  

CBC, 1988-95; AMAZON PRIME VIDEO, 2022
Thirty Helens agree: With apologies to
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Barenaked Ladies, this sketch-comedy Gen

X touchstone was the best thing to come
out of Canada in the late Eighties and early
Nineties. Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch,
Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and
Scott Thompson shared a gift for wringing
enormous laughs out of premises that
sound utterly incoherent on the page. A
bitter man who sits in a folding chair on the
sidewalk and pretends to crush the heads of
people in the distance? A lonely, sex-
obsessed half-chicken woman? A man
whose refusal to shave his vacation beard
threatens to ruin his life? None of this
should be funny. Somehow, all of it is,
including this year’s revival that lodged
Seventies novelty hit “Brand-New Key” into
the heads of everyone lucky enough to
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watch it.  

CBS/GETTY IMAGES

86 ‘The Bob Newhart Show’ 

CBS, 1972-78
 SUBSCRIBE
Being the straight man in a comedy can be
a thankless role. Bob Newhart, though,
built an entire career out of making
audiences laugh as the one sane man in an
insane world. His first and best sitcom
vehicle (though his Eighties hit Newhart
had its charms) didn’t take that concept
quite literally, but it was close. Newhart
played Dr. Bob Hartley, a Chicago
psychologist with a roster of eccentric
patients, a sarcastic but loving wife in
Suzanne Pleshette’s Emily, and a life overall
that seemed designed to take Bob out of his
very tiny comfort zone. Smart,
sophisticated, and damned funny.   
 SUBSCRIBE

JESSICA MIGLIO/NETFLIX

85 ‘Orange Is the New Black’

NETFLIX, 2013-19

The first show to suggest the streaming era

could make room for the kinds of
characters and stories that TV had no place
for, even in those heady post-Sopranos
years on cable. Orange started with Taylor
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Schilling’s annoying, entitled Piper being
sent to federal prison, where she was
initially terrified by all the Black, brown,
and/or lower-class women she met there.
Quickly, though, the Jenji Kohan-created
series opened the eyes of both Piper and the
audience to the fact that her fellow inmates
— mentally ill Suzanne (Uzo Aduba), trans
hairdresser Sophia (Laverne Cox),
wisecracking addict Nikki (Natasha
Lyonne), maternal Gloria (Selenis Levya),
justice-seeking Taystee (Danielle Brooks),
and many more — were complicated human
beings with interesting stories of their own.
(Most of them, frankly, much more
interesting than Piper’s, but even the
writers seemed to understand that.)
Orange took big creative swings that didn’t
Orange took big creative swings that didn t
always connect, but had plenty of incredible
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moments, and opened up vast new

possibilities for TV as a whole.  

CHRIS LARGE/FX

‘Fargo’
84 Fargo  
FX, 2014-PRESENT
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Why would anyone want to do this? Who

would find it in any way a smart or useful
idea to take Fargo, an Oscar winner for best
screenplay, and perhaps the most beloved
movie of one of the most idiosyncratic
filmmaking teams of all time in Joel and
Ethan Coen, and attempt to turn it into a
TV show? Somehow, though, it’s worked.
The masterstroke of Noah Hawley’s
ongoing anthology is that it is not a remake
or reboot of the film, but a kind of Coen
Brothers remix, set in the same fictional
universe as the adventures of pregnant
Minnesota cop Marge Gunderson, and
filled with allusions to other Coen films, but
telling its own stories. There are characters
meant to evoke the Coens most notably
meant to evoke the Coens, most notably
Allison Tolman’s dogged investigator SMolly
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Solverson in the first season, and actors like

Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Stuhlbarg
who have appeared in one or more Coen
film. Mostly, though, what Hawley has
managed to do (particularly in the first two
seasons) has been to bottle some of the
spirit of those movies while letting the TV
series ultimately feel like its own offbeat
thing, as well as a fabulous showcase for
actors like Tolman, Patrick Wilson, Kirsten
Dunst, Ted Danson, Bokeem Woodbine,
Carrie Coon, Mary Elizabeth Winstead,
David Thewlis, Glynn Turman, and
more.     
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BBC

83 ‘I’m Alan Partridge’ 

BBC, 1997-2002

Steve Coogan has been playing Alan

Partridge — an obnoxious, socially
incompetent, insecure radio and TV
presenter in complete denial of just how
i hi l b it i f
minor his celebrity is — for over 30 years,
on the radio, on television, in films, SUBSCRIBE

podcasts, and even live stage shows. It’s not

hard to understand why the English actor
has made this the role of his lifetime,
especially when you watch I’m Alan
Partridge. In the wake of ruining his career
and personal life at the end of his previous
series (the talk-show parody Knowing Me,
Knowing You), Alan retreats to a spartan
existence as a local radio host manning the
graveyard shift, living in a small hotel
whose employees quickly grow tired of his
special requests and desperate attempts to
get to know them better, and struggling to
make his way back to the BBC. Coogan and
collaborators like Armando Iannucci
(future creator of Veep) did not shy away
from how difficult it was to be in the
company of their title character, though
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they periodically gave glimpses of the great
entertainer Alan believed himself to be, like
his attempt to act out the entire opening
sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me. 
 STARZ ORIGINAL

82
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‘Party Down’ 
STARZ, 2009-10

What is dead may never die, but for the

most part, the TV titles that have been
resurrected over the last several years have
tended to belong to big hits that still had
currency with contemporary viewers. So
why is Starz in 2023 bringing back Party
Down, a show whose audience in a given
week could be written with only five digits,
and that got no awards love to speak of in
its two-season run? Does a comedy about
cater-waiters frustrated that their bigger
Hollywood dreams aren’t coming true really
have the same cachet as, say, The X-Files or
Will & Grace? But Party Down was just
that great in its short existence — a wry,
witty, well-crafted, and frequently filthy
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piece of entertainment, with a wonderful

comic bond among an ensemble led by
Adam Scott — that if the majority of the
people involved the first time are willing to
reunite for more misadventures, then it’s
worth trying. Are we having fun yet?  
 SUBSCRIBE

PATRICK MCELHENNEY/FXX

81 ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’  

FX, 2005-PRESENT

For decades, the record for the longest-

running live-action sitcom of all time was
held by The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet,
an aggressively wholesome sitcom that
debuted in the early Fifties and starred a
real-life family playing idealized versions of
themselves. That record was finally broken
a few years back by Always Sunny, a
grubby, uncouth, deceptively brilliant
comedy that is such a stylistic and
philosophical departure from Ozzie &
Harriet in every way that the Nelson family
would likely all faint at the sight of it.
would likely all faint at the sight of it.
Sunny stars Rob McElhenney (who also
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created it), Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day,

and Kaitlin Olson as four self-involved
idiots who keep colliding with hot-button
topics in the news, with financing and
interference from Danny DeVito as
Howerton and Olson’s grotesque father.
Where most classic sitcoms are gasping for
air by the time they hit their third or fourth
season, Sunny has proved so improbably
durable that it wouldn’t be a shock to
eventually get to an episode called “The
Gang Is Eligible to Join AARP.”  
 SUBSCRIBE

HBO

80 ‘Band of Brothers’ 
HBO, 2001

This and fellow HBO miniseries epic From

the Earth to the Moon aren’t exactly Tom
Hanks-produced spinoffs of his Nineties
classics Saving Private Ryan and Apollo 13,
respectively. But both suggest that Hanks
realized those films only scratched the
surface of their subject matters and that
surface of their subject matters, and that
television was the best place to go forSaU B S C R I B E
deeper dive. Based on the nonfiction book
by Stephen Ambrose, Band follows a single
company of airborne infantrymen in World
War II, from the innocent days of training
camp to the violent chaos of D-Day to the
brutal endurance challenge of the Battle of
the Bulge all the way to victory in the
European theater of the war. And though
many of the faces change as soldiers die and
naive replacements arrive, the whole 10-
hour journey is grounded by the presence of
a young Damian Lewis as Easy Company’s
humble and reassuring leader, Dick
Winters. In 2001, it was the most expensive
limited series ever made, and there is
plenty of spectacle to be found as Winters’
men fight their way through France,
ll d l d h
Holland, Belgium, and Germany. But the
parts that linger all these years later are the
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small human ones depicting the physical

and psychological wounds Easy Company
endured along the way to peacetime.  

BRILLSTEIN GREY ENTERTAINMENT/EVERETT COLLECTION

 BRILLSTEIN-GREY ENTERTAINMENT/EVERETT COLLECTION

79
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‘Mr. Show with Bob and David’
HBO, 1995-98

Part of the shock of Bob Odenkirk’s work

on Better Call Saul was that he was so well
known for comedy — and particularly for
the sort of askew alt comedy that he and
David Cross made for four epically weird
seasons. Mr. Show was a series about
commitment, even if the characters in each
sketch tended to commit to the worst
possible ideas, like Cross hosting a pre-
taped call-in show where viewers are
constantly asking about the previous week’s
subject, or Odenkirk playing a mob boss
who believes, with homicidal conviction,
that 24 is the highest number. And from
time to time — like Cross auditioning for an
acting job with a monologue about
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auditioning for an acting job — those
seemingly awful choices pay off beautifully
for all involved.   

CRAIG BLANKENHORN/HBO
78 ‘Sex and the City’
HBO, 1998-2004 SUBSCRIBE

As we cast our votes, we couldn’t help but

wonder: Should we penalize the turn-of-
the-century sensation for the sins of its
movie spinoffs, and especially of its
misguided sequel series …And Just Like
That? But Sex and the City isn’t the only hit
show in TV history — or even the only one
on this list — to suffer from misconceived
follow-up projects. (Netflix seasons of
Arrested Development, we are looking at
you.) And the original run (especially after
Michael Patrick King replaced Darren Star
as showrunner following the first season)
did more than just set fashion trends or
inspire countless games of “Are you a
Charlotte or a Samantha?” It was a witty
and smart look at four women at a
SUBSCRIBE
particular moment in their lives, and a
particular period in New York (even if its
cross-section was almost exclusively white
and straight) that was as much about the
challenges of maintaining friendships as it
was about figuring out the right romantic
partner. Whatever mistakes came later, Sex
and the City itself still deserves to walk
proudly in its tallest pair of Manolo
Blahniks.   
 SUBSCRIBE

EVERETT COLLECTION

77 ‘The Jeffersons’ 
CBS, 1975-85

On All in the Family, the arrogant George

Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) and his
patient wife Louise (Isabel Sanford) lived in
a blue-collar Queens neighborhood right
next door to Archie and Edith Bunker.
Hemsley was so instantly electric opposite
both Sanford and Family star Carroll
O’Connor that George and “Weezy” quickly
graduated to their own sitcom. Even better
g
for George, he got to move far away from
SUBSCRIBE

Archie, to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky

of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The
spinoff broke new TV ground by making
George and Weezy’s best friends the
interracial couple of Tom (Franklin Cover)
and Helen (Roxie Roker). And, like its
parent series, it could get serious about race
relations and other current events, such as
in an episode where George accidentally
attends a KKK recruitment meeting, or a
flashback to George’s struggle to get a loan
from a prejudiced banker, to open his first
dry cleaning store. Mostly, though, the
series was a relentless laugh machine,
trusting that any combination of Hemsley,
Sanford, and Marla Gibbs (as the
Jeffersons’ brassy maid Florence) would
make comedy magic together
make comedy magic together.   
SUBSCRIBE

PRASHANT GUPTA/FOX

76 ‘Justified’ 
FX, 2010-15

“You make me pull, I put you down.” Those

 You make me pull, I put you down. Those
eight words represent the pithy yet lethal
SUBSCRIBE

code by which Raylan Givens (Timothy

Olyphant) — a U.S. Marshal reluctantly
reassigned to the Kentucky field office close
to the Harlan County community he had
hoped to escape forever — lives his violent
yet extremely entertaining life. Throughout
Graham Yost’s adaptation of a character
featured in several Elmore Leonard novels,
Raylan would find ways to make himself
judge, jury, and executioner by
maneuvering bad guys into situations
where his deadly use of force against them
would be, well… you see the title of the
show here, right? Olyphant’s wisecracking
yet vulnerable performance commanded
the screen, even as Yost and the other
writers threw an army of colorful bad guys
t hi W lt G i ’ f t t lki
at him — Walton Goggins’ fast-talking
explosives expert Boyd Crowder above
S U Ball
SCRIBE

others. A rollicking ride from start to finish,

by which point we all felt like we had dug
coal together with Raylan and Boyd.    

NBCU PHOTO BANK/NBCUNIVERSAL/GETTY IMAGES

 NBCU PHOTO BANK/NBCUNIVERSAL/GETTY IMAGES

75 ‘Frasier’ SUBSCRIBE

NBC, 1993-2004

As Cheers was nearing the end of one of the

most successful runs any sitcom has ever
had, Kelsey Grammer’s arrogant shrink
Frasier likely wouldn’t have been the
betting favorite to lead a potential spinoff.
But the fact that Frasier never really fit in at
the bar made him the perfect candidate in
the end. (What would a Norm-centric show
have been about if he wasn’t sitting on his
stool next to Cliff?) Instead, Frasier
returned to his Seattle home to become a
minor local celebrity as a radio call-in show
host, to help care for his estranged and
ailing father Martin (John Mahoney), and
to reconnect with his even more repressed
brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce), with
help along the way from his producerS Rob
UBSCRIBE

(Peri Gilpin) and Martin’s nurse Daphne

(Jane Leeves). It was such a potent mix of
characters, actors, and comic muses —
more farcical and given to wordplay than
Frasier’s adventures back in Boston — that
Grammer wound up playing the role for 11
more seasons (after nine on Cheers). Not
bad, Dr. Crane. 
 SUBSCRIBE

CBS/GETTY IMAGES

74 ‘The Honeymooners’
CBS, 1955-56

Consider the numbers around the original

kitchen sink comedy: One season. Thirty-
nine episodes. Four characters. One
primary, extremely cramped set. Within
those seemingly narrow confines, Jackie
Gleason (as hot-tempered bus driver Ralph
Kramden), Audrey Meadows (Ralph’s
frustrated wife Alice), Art Carney (Ralph’s
goofball best friend Ed Norton), and Joyce
Randolph (Ed’s bossy wife Trixie) seemed
capable of accomplishing almost anything.
SUBSCRIBE
It was a broad, silly comedy, sending the
studio audience into conniptions over how
easily Ralph could be triggered, or how
strangely Ed looked at the world. (Told
during a golfing lesson to “address the ball,”
Ed looks at it and cheerfully says, “Hello,
ball!”) It was also a barely-disguised
tragedy about a marriage between two
people who had expected much more of
themselves and each other. (Ralph’s
constant threats to send Alice “to the
moon!” play far more darkly today than
they did in the mid-Fifties.) It was
ridiculous, it was deep, and it was immortal
— and not just because Gleason and Carney
couldn’t resist continuing to play Ralph and
Ed in sketches for another two decades.
There’s a reason Gleason’s nickname was
There s a reason Gleason s nickname was
“The Great One.”   SUBSCRIBE

©20THCENTFOX/EVERETT COLLECTION

73 ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ 

WB, 1997-2001; UPN, 2001-03
It’s become less fun to look back on this one
SUBSCRIBE
in light of the many recent allegations of
abusive behavior made against its creator,
Joss Whedon. But if we can separate the art
from the artist (a challenge with several
shows on this list), Whedon’s do-over of an
early-Nineties movie about a perky high
schooler (played here by Sarah Michelle
Gellar) who is secretly a warrior against
supernatural evil is both a great show and a
very influential one. It helped define several
generations of both teen and fantasy
drama, and its self-aware, cliché-
puncturing sensibility wound up as the
default mode of the entire Marvel
Cinematic Universe. Not only that, the
show’s use of creatures of the night as
metaphors for real-life adolescent turmoil
— Buffy loses her virginity to Angel (David
— Buffy loses her virginity to Angel (David
Boreanaz), and he literally becomes aS U B S C R I B E
soulless monster as a result —  remains
incredibly potent.

CBS/GETTY IMAGES)

‘Good Times’
72 ‘Good Times’  
CBS, 1974-79
SUBSCRIBE

Is this the best spinoff of a spinoff? That

may depend on whether you classify, say,
the Nineties Star Trek shows or the CW’s
various Arrow-verse superhero dramas as
spinoffs or as entries in a larger franchise.
Either way, Good Times — which spun off
from Maude, which had already spun off
from All in the Family — has a good
argument for the title. Esther Rolle and
John Amos played Florida and James
Evans, spouses trying their best to raise
their kids right and keep them safe while
living in a Chicago housing project. Amos
and then Rolle would eventually leave the
show, frustrated that their characters had
been marginalized in favor of co-star
Ji i W lk ’ b d ti ld t
Jimmie Walker’s broad antics as eldest son
J.J. But Good Times managed to provide
SUBSCRIBE

plenty of thoughtful, issue-oriented comedy

around all the excuses for Walker to shout
his “Dyn-o-mite!” catchphrase, including a
classic episode where youngest son Michael
(Ralph Carter) figures out that his school’s
IQ test is racially biased, or another where
the Evans family realizes their neighbor
Penny (a very young Janet Jackson) is
being physically abused by her mother. 
 SUBSCRIBE

SUZANNE TENNER/FX

71 ‘Better Things’ 
FX, 2016-2022

The 2010s were the decade of the auteur

dramedy: half-hour shows where one
person wore multiple hats as creator,
writer, director, and star, and where the
tone and even genre could shift from
episode to episode. Among the best of these
was Better Things, a thinly
autobiographical vehicle for Pamela Adlon
(who co-created it with Louis C.K., before
h d dd h f
he departed due to his mistreatment of
women), inspired by her life as a slightly
SUBSCRIBE

recognizable actor raising three kids on her

own. Adlon and company had such
command of her world and its characters
that Better Things often felt less like a story
than an experience — and one that it was
easy to keep returning to, week after week,
season after season, until we understood
every facet of Adlon’s alter ego Sam Fox. 
 SUBSCRIBE

EVERETT COLLECTION

70
‘SCTV’  
GLOBAL, 1976-79; CBS, 1980-83;
SUPERCHANNEL, 1983-84

When Lorne Michaels raided the Second

City stage casts from Chicago and Toronto
for the original Saturday Night Live lineup,
it dawned on the people running the famed
improv comedy group that perhaps they
should make their own show, and fill it with
other Second City stars like John Candy,
Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Joe
Flaherty, Andrea Martin, and Dave
Thomas. SCTV was built around the idea
that everything we saw was being broadcast
SUBSCRIBE
from the world’s smallest TV station,
whether it was a talk show with Thomas
and Rick Moranis as Canadian stereotypes
Bob and Doug McKenzie; Flaherty and Levy
as local newscasters; or Candy and Levy as
the polka-playing Shmenge brothers. In
time, SNL would wind up poaching several
SCTV regulars (most notably Martin Short),
and NBC even made the show (which was
produced and broadcast in Canada) part of
its late-night lineup for a couple of years.
But despite the origins of its name, the
sketches were first rate, and a great
showcase for that incredible cast.  
 SUBSCRIBE

COMEDY CENTRAL

69 ‘Chappelle’s Show’  
COMEDY CENTRAL, 2003-06

Another art-versus-artist mess. Dave

Chappelle’s legacy has unquestionably been
tainted by his commitment in recent years
to hardcore transphobia. Can we still enjoy
the sketch-comedy series that he and Neal
Brennan created, and the ways that the
SUBSCRIBE
show bearing his name mixed hysterical
parodies of Black celebrities like Rick
James, Prince, and Lil Jon with more
nuanced but still funny ideas like the fake
game show “I Know Black People”? As with
several series on this list (and ones that
didn’t quite pass muster with our voters,
like Louie and The Cosby Show), perhaps
it’s best to fondly remember the experience
of watching it back in the day, rather than
attempting to revisit and having to think
more directly about the now controversial
guy at the center of it.  
 SUBSCRIBE

©BBC/EVERETT COLLECTION

68 ‘Fawlty Towers’
BBC, 1975-79

John Cleese did his version of the Larry

David deal with HBO long before anyone
had heard of the Curb Your Enthusiasm
star. A year after the end of Monty Python’s
Flying Circus, Cleese and his wife (and
fellow Python vet) Connie Booth created
 y )
Fawlty Towers, a sitcom about a small
SUBSCRIBE

English hotel run by Cleese as the arrogant,

easily offended, mostly idiotic Basil Fawlty.
They produced six absolutely perfect
episodes — most famously the one where
Basil can’t stop himself from bringing up
World War II when he and wife Sybil
(Prunella Scales) play host to a group of
German guests — and then just… stopped.
And then four years later, they had the
inspiration for another six, those were great
as well, and then they stopped again, this
time seemingly forever. But given how
much of modern comedy — particularly the
kind that makes you cringe like you’re
watching a horror movie — owes a debt to
this show, don’t count out the possibility of
Basil Fawlty making a belated,
uncomfortable return sometime soon
uncomfortable return sometime soon. 
SUBSCRIBE

ABC

67 ‘NYPD Blue’
ABC, 1993-2005

We could try calling this cop show the

We could try calling this cop show the
missing link between the straightforward,
SUBSCRIBE

good-versus-evil dramas that typified most

of 20th-century television and the more
morally ambiguous series that would come
to define the medium in the 21st century.
But that might suggest that any TV viewer
on earth missed NYPD Blue, whose use of
more graphic language and nudity helped
make it a controversial, incredibly popular
sensation from the start. And in Dennis
Franz’s brutish, bigoted, alcoholic, and
ultimately beloved Detective Andy
Sipowicz, the series had an iconic character
who helped prepare viewers for the likes of
Tony Soprano and Walter White. Mostly,
though, NYPD Blue was a great police
procedural, filled with cleverly profane
dialogue, memorable figures on both sides
f th l ( ti l l i th h
of the law (particularly in the years when
Sipowicz was partnered with Jimmy Smits’
SUBSCRIBE

laid-back and soulful Bobby Simone), and a

palpable understanding of the trauma that
violence inflicts on all exposed to it.  

COMEDY CENTRAL
 COMEDY CENTRAL

66
‘The Daily Show With Jon SUBSCRIBE
Stewart’
COMEDY CENTRAL, 1999-2015

The first three seasons of The Daily Show

were primarily parodying the inanity of
local TV newscasts. When Jon Stewart
succeeded Craig Kilborn as host, the focus
quickly expanded to a national, then
international, scale. The tone, meanwhile,
gradually shifted to one not of gentle satire,
but righteous indignation at the terrible
things our country’s politicians were doing
and saying, and the even more terrible ways
the traditional news media apparatus so
often covered them. There was still plenty
of room for antics from a murderer’s row of
correspondents like Stephen Colbert,
Samantha Bee, and John Oliver — all of
whom eventually graduated to hosting their
own terrific variations on the concept.S UBut
BSCRIBE

the Stewart incarnation as a whole

developed such a potent reputation for
speaking truth to power, surveys at the time
suggested that younger viewers were more
likely to keep up on current events via this
fake news show than from the genuine
article.  
 SUBSCRIBE

HBO

65 ‘Girls’
HBO, 2012-17

Some viewers saw this Lena Dunham-

created series as a sharp, frequently funny,
often poignant look at a group of young
women at a precarious moment in their
lives. Others saw the whole thing as a
massive troll designed to make them angry
with the myopia of characters like
Dunham’s would-be writer Hannah, Allison
Williams’ narcissistic Marnie, Jemima
Kirke’s free-spirited Jessa, and Zosia
Mamet’s eager Shoshanna. Our voters
obviously took the former view, recognizing
SUBSCRIBE
that Girls understood how often the
members of that quartet were being
ridiculous, even as it depicted them and
their struggles with great empathy.
(Though the show had its own blind spots,
particularly in being yet another story
about a virtually all-white New York.) Girls
also effectively launched Adam Driver’s
career, and he was wonderful as Hannah’s
mercurial on-again, off-again boyfriend
Adam. But to love Girls, you had to love its
title characters. And we did, no matter how
infuriating they could get.  
 SUBSCRIBE

NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK/GETTY IMAGES

64 ‘The Golden Girls’

NBC, 1985-92

In the days since Bea Arthur, Betty White,

Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty first
played a quartet of older women enjoying
their golden years in Miami, sitcom casts
have on average gotten substantially
younger. The theory, as many TV executives
y g y y
will tell you, is that younger viewers (the
SUBSCRIBE

most valuable currency in the TV business)

would rather watch characters closer to
their own age. Yet ask almost any Eighties
kid and teen about The Golden Girls, and
odds are their faces will light up with
memories of Getty’s Sophia insulting her
housemates, White’s Rose telling another
surreal story from her childhood home of
St. Olaf, Minnesota, McClanahan’s Blanche
vamping it up for another sexual conquest,
or Arthur’s Dorothy destroying an
opponent with just a withering stare and a
slight change in inflection. When leads are
as funny and likable as this group, age ain’t
nothing but a number.  
 SUBSCRIBE

COURTESY OF COMEDY CENTRAL

63 ‘South Park’ 
COMEDY CENTRAL, 1997-PRESENT

Decades before YouTube and TikTok stars

were getting development deals, Trey
Parker and Matt Stone were hired by a
Hollywood executive to produce a profane
Hollywood executive to produce a profane
animated Christmas card. The end result,
SUBSCRIBE

pitting Jesus against Santa, went as viral as

anything could in the mid-Nineties, and
soon the characters from the short film —
notably, Colorado elementary schoolers
Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny — began
starring in their own primetime cable show.
A quarter century later, Parker and Stone
are still telling irreverent South Park
stories. Even more than The Simpsons or
Beavis and Butt-Head, South Park was
long treated by its detractors as the show
that would bring about the end of
civilization as we know it. To be fair,
society’s not doing so great these days,
though there remains spirited debate over
how much blame should be laid on middle-
aged men who grew up watching Kenny be
b t ll d d k B t th
brutally murdered every week. But as the
show’s animation process has evolvedS Ufrom
BSCRIBE

the original stop-motion construction paper

approach used in the very first episode
(titled, of course, “Cartman Gets an Anal
Probe”), South Park can now be assembled
so quickly that Parker and Stone can make
fun of any current event practically within
hours of when it happens.  
 SUBSCRIBE

CBS/GETTY IMAGES

62 ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’

CBS, 1961-66

The most enduring image of TV’s first great

workplace sitcom is of its hero, variety show
writer Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke) tripping
over his living room ottoman after coming
home from a long day at the office. After a
while, though, the series began to alternate
Rob’s stumble with a version where he
nimbly sidestepped disaster. While viewers
were denied the chance to see Van Dyke’s
flair for slapstick at the top of every single
episode, the alternate version was in some
ways truer to the spirit of one of the most
graceful shows of them all. Van Dyke Sand a
UBSCRIBE

young Mary Tyler Moore (as Rob’s adoring

and adorable wife Laura) were both gifted
comedians, but they also projected an air of
cool sophistication so strong that viewers
and critics began comparing them to John
and Jackie Kennedy, who moved into the
White House around the same time we first
met the Petries. Pair the two of them with
old pros Rose Marie and Morey
Amsterdam, and feed all four of them the
best jokes that the great Carl Reiner (who
modeled Rob on his own experience
working with Fifties variety star Sid Caesar)
could give them, and you had an instant,
seemingly effortless classic.   
 SUBSCRIBE

KYLE KAPLAN/AMAZON STUDIOS

61 ‘The Underground Railroad’ 

AMAZON PRIME VIDEO, 2021

Barry Jenkins’ miniseries about slavery is

the greatest technical achievement in
television history. And with all due respect
to Game of Thrones, the new Lord of the
SUBSCRIBE
Rings series, or any of the medium’s other
recent big-budget spectacles, it is not an
especially close contest. Jenkins and
collaborators like cinematographer James
Laxton ensure that every frame is stunning
and painterly in detail, no matter how
horrifying (a slave being whipped, a house
being burned with people inside) or
beautiful (the titular railroad is an actual
train line, borrowing from the magical
realism premise of Colson Whitehead’s
novel) the individual images are. No show
has ever put as much effort and skill into its
sound design, so that viewers feel as if they
are standing in the hot sun with escaped
slave Cora (Thuso Mbedu), surrounded by
chirping insects. And, for that matter, few
directors have elicited performances as
 p
naked and lived-in as what Mbedu, Joel
SUBSCRIBE

Edgerton (as a ruthless slave-catcher),

William Jackson Harper (as a free Black
man trying to get Cora to accept the
possibility of good in this world), and
others deliver here. A knockout for all the
senses, and for the heart.  
 SUBSCRIBE

©PARAMOUNT TELEVISION/EVERETT COLLECTION

60 ‘Taxi’
ABC, 1978-82; NBC, 1982-83

Today, we marvel at comedies like Better

Things or Reservation Dogs that are
capable of radically transforming
themselves from one episode to the next.
Taxi was doing this 40-plus years ago, only
it wasn’t nearly as overt, because it was
being done in a traditional sitcom format
with frequent punchlines and loud audience
laughter. But within that structure — and
within the seemingly limited setting of a
cab company garage in Manhattan where
most of the drivers (other than Judd
Hirsch’s practical Alex) dream of better jobs
Hirsch s practical Alex) dream of better jobs
— Taxi could accomplish a whole lot. SIt
UBSCRIBE

could go broad, bordering on surreal, as it

leaned on characters like Christopher
Lloyd’s hippie space case Jim Ignatowski or
Andy Kaufman’s chipper immigrant
mechanic Latka. It could go raw and small,
like an episode where diminutive but cruel
dispatcher Louie DePalma (Danny DeVito)
talks about his humiliating annual trip to
buy suits at the husky boys section of the
department store. And sometimes, it could
do both at the same time, like a grief-
stricken Jim telling the empty suit of his
late father the things he could never say
during their long estrangement. Though the
cabbies rarely got to achieve their dreams,
Taxi could do almost anything it set its
mind to.  
 SUBSCRIBE

DANNY FELD/COMEDY CENTRAL

59 ‘Key & Peele’

COMEDY CENTRAL, 2012-15

At first, Key & Peele drew notice for how

well timed it seemed as a sketch comedy in
well-timed it seemed, as a sketch comedy in
which biracial comedians Keegan-Michael
SUBSCRIBE

Key and Jordan Peele explored the

sometimes confusing borders between
Black and white America, late into the first
term of our nation’s first biracial president.
And an early signature bit involved Peele
playing an unflappable Barack Obama
while Key lurked behind him as POTUS’
“anger translator,” Luther. Soon, though,
what Key & Peele became known for was its
fierce commitment to every bit. Their
action movie parodies bore a stunning
resemblance to the real thing, and
seemingly lightweight ideas like Family
Matters actor Reginald VelJohnson
complaining about the show being taken
over by Steve Urkel took incredibly dark
turns. In hindsight, it’s not hard to see how
Peele made the jump from this show to
becoming America’s most famous horror-
SUBSCRIBE

movie director. But he and Key were a

wonderful pair for a while.

HBO
58 ‘Six Feet Under’
HBO, 2001-05 SUBSCRIBE

Most of the revered cable dramas of the

early 2000s used familiar, action-packed
TV genres (mobsters, cops, cowboys, etc.)
as Trojan horses to smuggle in more
challenging commentary about modern life.
The anomaly was Six Feet Under, whose
premise was built around the unglamorous
place where many of those other kinds of
characters would end up: a funeral home,
run by the repressed, dysfunctional Fisher
family. Starting off with the death of
patriarch Nathaniel Fisher Sr. (Richard
Jenkins, who stuck around in ghostly
form), Alan Ball’s series studies the struggle
his widow Ruth (Frances Conroy) and kids
Nate (Peter Krause), David (Michael C.
Hall), and Claire (Lauren Ambrose) had
SUBSCRIBE
dealing not only with Nathaniel’s death, but
with the inescapable knowledge that their
own would come one day. That lack of a
traditional TV “franchise” to help drive
stories led to Six Feet being more uneven
than its peers, but its highs — particularly
the iconic final sequence, scored to Sia’s
“Breathe Me,” that takes the show’s premise
to its logical conclusion — were
extraordinary.
 SUBSCRIBE

VANESSA CLIFTON/NETFLIX

57 ‘Russian Doll’
NETFLIX, 2019-PRESENT

Time travel! What a high concept! In the

first season of this audacious sci-fi comedy,
software designer Nadia (Natasha Lyonne,
doing the best Columbo this side of Peter
Falk) keeps violently dying, only to respawn
in the bathroom at her 36th birthday party.
In the second, she and her uptight friend
Alan (Charlie Barnett) find themselves
Quantum Leaping back in time to
Q p g
experience life as members of their family
SUBSCRIBE

trees. In both seasons, Lyonne (who co-

created the show with Amy Poehler and
Leslye Headland) managed to have
enormous fun with the lengths to which
each idea could be taken, while also using
these reality-warping adventures to
examine Nadia’s inability to change her
own fucked-up life. More, please.
 SUBSCRIBE

JORDIN ALTHAUS/NBC/EVERETT COLLECTION

56 ‘Community’
NBC, 2009-14; YAHOO! SCREEN, 2015

The first episode of this ensemble comedy

involves a group of oddball community
college students — disbarred lawyer Jeff
(Joel McHale), pretentious Britta (Gillian
Jacobs), pop culture-obsessed Abed (Danny
Pudi), goofy ex-jock Troy (Donald Glover),
overachiever Annie (Alison Brie), maternal
Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown), and
intolerable boomer Pierce (Chevy Chase)
— improbably becoming friends. The last
episode has the remaining members of this
episode has the remaining members of this
group imagining various scenarios forS Uwhat
BSCRIBE

a seventh season of Community  — which

all of them, and not just Abed, seem to have
on some level accepted is the TV show they
are characters on — would be like. While
gradually evolving from that relatively sane
beginning to that meta conclusion, Dan
Harmon’s creation managed to smuggle
note-perfect film and TV parodies (most
notably the action-movie-style paintball
episodes) into the drudgery of life at
Greendale Community College, and it
treated the members of the study group as
people, even in the midst of this self-aware
madness. It was special. 
 SUBSCRIBE

TINA ROWDEN/AMC

55 ‘Halt and Catch Fire’

AMC, 2014-17

“Computers aren’t the thing; they’re the

thing that gets you to the thing,” salesman
Joe McMillan (Lee Pace) explains early in
this period tech-world drama. In the case of
this show the mercurial and mysterious
this show, the mercurial and mysterious
Joe and his aggrieved partner GordonS U B S C R I B E
(Scoot McNairy) were the first kind of
thing: male antiheroes of the type that had
become commonplace to the point of cliché
in the years leading up to their
introduction. But then Halt figured out how
to make Joe and Gordon into the thing that
got us to the thing: the story of how Joe’s
ex-girlfriend Cameron (Mackenzie Davis)
and Gordon’s wife Donna (Kerry Bishé)
would eventually team up to be part of the
birth of the internet. The men didn’t exactly
vanish, and Pace and McNairy were great
throughout, but the shift in POV to the
women these kinds of shows generally
ignored unlocked the series’ full potential,
making it feel not like a Mad Men clone set
in the Eighties and Nineties, but its own
wonderful work.
SUBSCRIBE

NBCUNIVERSAL/GETTY IMAGES

54 ‘ER’
NBC, 1994-2009

M di i h l b t f th h l
Medicine has long been part of the holy
trinity of TV professions, along with police
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work (whether in modern day or the Wild

West) and the law. Yet of all the great
doctor shows the medium has seen — St.
Elsewhere, House, Scrubs and Grey’s
Anatomy, to name just a few — the only
one to make our list was this mid-Nineties
juggernaut. Created by Michael Crichton
and produced by John Wells, ER combined
the structure of a hospital drama with the
pace and adrenaline of an action movie. It
expertly conveyed the chaos, the triumphs,
the tragedy and even the comedy of life in
an emergency room. It made a superstar
out of George Clooney as rule-breaking
pediatrician Doug Ross, and also had a
pretty special cast around him that included
Julianna Margulies, Anthony Edwards,
Noah Wyle, Eriq La Salle, and many more
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over the course of 15 seasons. We need to
intubate! STAT! 

©BBC/EVERETT COLLECTION

53 ‘The Office’ (U.K.)

53 BBC, 2001-03

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Near the conclusion of Ricky Gervais and

Stephen Merchant’s mockumentary
masterpiece, Tim (Martin Freeman)
philosophizes, “The people you work with
are just people you were thrown together
with. Y’know, you don’t know them, it
wasn’t your choice. And yet you spend more
time with them than you do your friends or
your family. But probably all you’ve got in
common is the fact that you walk around on
the same bit of carpet for eight hours a
day.” Viewers would ultimately spend a bit
less than eight hours total with Tim, his
crush Dawn (Lucy Davis), the repulsive
Gareth (Mackenzie Crook), and, most
notably, their horrible boss David Brent
(Gervais). Yet the writing, the world-
building, and the performances made it feel
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like we had been trapped on the same bit of
carpet with them for years. One of the
defining shows of 21st-century comedy,
without which several others on this list
would not exist — and not just the
American remake. And if David’s self-
aggrandizing antics could at times be
painful to watch, Gervais and Merchant’s
unflinching commitment to depicting the
agonies of workplace drudgery paid off
beautifully in the series-concluding
Christmas special. 
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MERRICK MORTON/HBO

52 ‘Barry’
HBO, 2018-PRESENT

On this bleak, haunting comedy, SNL alum

Bill Hader plays a hitman who stumbles
into an acting class and discovers that he
would rather kill on stage than do it with
bullets. The premise could have easily
devolved into a one-joke show about the
blurry line between the two ruthless
 y
professions. Instead, Barry took its title
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character’s desire for a career change — and

the implications of an emotionally stunted
man having to explore his feelings, as part
of the acting method taught by the self-
aggrandizing Gene Cousineau (Henry
Winkler) — very seriously. As a result,
Barry can be both the funniest show on
television (especially when Anthony
Carrigan is around as cheerful Chechen
mobster NoHo Hank) and the most tragic,
often within a few beats of one another.  
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NICOLA GOODE/FOX

51 ‘The X-Files’
FOX, 1993-2002, 2016-18

In the dank basement office to which the

FBI has banished him for filing one too
many reports about aliens and monsters,
Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) has a poster
with a picture of a flying saucer and the
slogan “I Want to Believe.” For a long time,
Chris Carter’s exciting sci-fi procedural
tried to play things down the middle so
tried to play things down the middle, so
that Mulder’s skeptical partner Dana SScully
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(Gillian Anderson) could seem entirely

reasonable in dismissing his conspiracy
theories. But X-Files fans understandably
wanted to believe in a lot of things:
flukemen, shapeshifters, and, most of all, in
the idea that Duchovny and Anderson’s
insane chemistry would eventually lead
Mulder and Scully into a romance. The
show popularized the idea of a series having
a “mythology” and an ongoing serialized
story that you had to watch from the
beginning to understand. But the majority
of the episodes followed the “Monster of the
Week” format, and it’s those that have held
up best all these years later, especially after
so many later shows did such a bad job of
trying to create their own X-Files-style
h l
mythology. 
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IN THIS ARTICLE: Atlanta, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, Fleabag, Jeopardy!, SNL, Succession, The Simpsons,
The Sopranos, The Wire

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