My Top 25 Shows of the Last 25 Years
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It should feel wrong to type these words this deep into the Golden Age of Television, but the genre of prestige TV has come to resemble the glut of craft beers. Everyone who indulges in different degrees of binging has to pace themselves so their Caring Too Much reserves are not crucially depleted by the finales of various shows. Maintaining interest throughout all these programs across a growing number of streaming platforms isn’t easy for anyone involved, but the people whose livelihoods depend on having strong opinions on, like, Ted Lasso must feel some sort of strain. The salons of the online recapping community and all its attendant subreddits and Twitter threads keep everyone involved in a state of perfect irrationality and thermonuclear pettiness. The rest of our days and the rest of the world have to be approached on their terms and from our respective positions on the broader continuum, but the abstraction of entertainment flattens and opens things up. The blessed and idiotic alchemy of fandom means that just about anyone can be obsessive and unforgiving about how other people feel about their favorite shows. It’s a bizarre development in our discourse, because there has never been an argument between two or more humans about whether, say, Gritty is overrated, underrated, or properly rated.
In an objective sense, television is a more degraded form of art than literature because the writing and production of a novel are much less capital-intensive than making a show. The artistic expression within a prestige series is inherently constrained by being a product of a commercial enterprise. Now some people may think this is a snobbish position to hold, but the structural reality here is the degree to which a TV show is a worthwhile endeavor depends on its ability to deliver an ROI—and this leavens its artistic expression because it has to be relatable to the largest possible audience. Art in translation eventually gets lost. When these shows are focus-tested or full of confirmation-bias-bliss nonsense, the priority is to keep you on the hook for commercials or lull you into a liminal state as the Watch Next function drifts you into the following episode. The point of a long-running program is not to be challenging, but to make identity politics for whoever watches it, to appeal to people’s desires to see themselves reflected in the show.
Audience feedback and the expectations set by SEO-propped thinkpieces have corroded this genre. The advent of prestige TV established a more artistically adulterated medium with the potential to challenge boundaries, and this trajectory was completely arrested by the emergence of blog culture and the AV Club. This recap economy created a meta-narrative about shows, and an overarching creative vision was immediately sublimated into week-by-week discourse and focus-group bullshit that infects and stunts the showrunner’s understanding of what they were doing. Also, American culture produces many disparate types of people, living in fantasies or developing insane mannerisms to cope with the demeaning, pointless, alienating aspects of modernity—and they’re largely unreflected in pop culture. Instead, their idiosyncracies or maladaptive patterns are flattened into demographic data points. This ruthless marketing efficiency delivers a narrowcasting, triangulating, wheezing monstrosity that obscures more interesting stories and perspectives that could be channeled into compelling entertainment.
While prestige TV can be great, if we demand that the idiot box must be some form of high art or cultural touchstone, then we are a society that has not acknowledged its limitations. A lot of these series wind up as panegyrical forms of banal liberal slop to insulate BlueAnon from an upsetting reality that has become a savage refutation of their failed and flailing political vision. The gravitational pull of lib-brained discourse sucks prestige TV into the orbit of rote culture war bullshit, which dictates that “good” television should carry some political valence or on-the-nose moralism. Something like Handmaid’s Tale is fine on its merits, but considering the broader insistence that art should be didactic instead of entertaining, I can’t shake that these kinds of programs are a byproduct of some flaccid, compulsive slapping of The Culture Button to sublimate our inability to slam The Politics Button.
The end product is an oversaturation of contemporary big-ticket television that is an absolute full-spectrum triumph of production value and technical virtuosity and filmmaking craft that would’ve been unimaginable for television even a decade ago—and somehow Just Fine despite all that. Shows like The Crown and The Bear and The Last of Us all fall under this category: Highly watchable, generally enjoyable, and also overwrought or distended or meandering in ways that sprawling prestige television often winds up being. Few stories truly require dozens of hours to tell. You know these kinds of shows. They’re pretty good, about several hours or seasons overlong, and, when it’s over, you will not think about them very often or very much. There are a lot of this kind of show.
So I’ll stop with my gripes about prestige TV and start celebrating the ones that stand out or have stood the test of time. I kept the write-ups brief and high-level so there are minimal spoilers. Let’s get to it.
Honorable Mentions (Alphabetized):
Better Call Saul
The Boondocks
The Eric Andre Show
Fargo
Girls
Lodge 49
Louie
Master of None
Severance
Six Feet Under
The Whitest Kids U Know
#25: Narcos
Narcos blends drama with documentary to deliver a true-to-life account of the rise of Pablo Escobar and the DEA hunt that brought him down, laced with stellar performances and tension-filled stand-offs. Its blend of archival footage reminds us that the horrors depicted actually happened, while depicting Escobar as both a menacing drug lord and a frighteningly sympathetic family man and community leader. While the first season spanned 10 years, the sophomore season captures his last days on the loose, making each episode tightly packed with uneasy alliances and gross tactics to snare Escobar. The fall is more thrilling than the buildup, as you can read the worry and interior dread on his face. The stakes throughout the show are elevated to a gut-wrenching degree, and even as season three moves past the magnificent account of Escobar’s life, DEA agent Javier Peña becomes the main protagonist, expanding the scope of his character through his relationship with his father. Overall, Narcos is a sweltering thrill ride that you’ll want to stay with until the end.
#24: You
You pairs a thrilling drama with trashy fun to create an addictive social media thriller that works its way under your skin—and stays there. The character of Joe Goldberg is a perversely endearing serial stalker who serves as a stand-in for the psychoanalysis of erotomania and obsessive love over an idealized relationship. Once Love Quinn is introduced, the show balances this approach with an emotional conflict that deconstructs the Manic Pixie Dream Girl and the Cool Girl tropes, and examines how her trauma and internalized misogyny influence how she tries to manifest her idealized soulmate. While this show is typically analyzed through the lens of toxic masculinity, You is essentially a love story and a horror movie. It peels back the gloss and sheen of John Cusak with the boombox. Swap the sappy music for a David Fincher score, and the romantic hero chasing his love interest through an airport to win her back quickly turns into criminal activity. You takes this subtle psychosis to its logical conclusion.
#23: Lost
It’s been nearly 20 years since Lost debuted, and it’s still shockingly modern. It is the show that The Handmaid’s Tale and Orange Is the New Black want to be: Massive ensemble cast, flashback-infused storytelling, and mystery box appeal. The first season is one of those lightning-in-a-bottle moments that pitted a group of stranded airline crash survives on a seemingly deserted island, and an entanglement of storylines unfurl from there. The most addictive aspect of Lost was how it sprinkled its mysteries over the rich backstories so the character stuff fed the mystery stuff and vice versa. Since the show prioritized the story over lore, it left all the nerd shit to the hardcore fans to decode. The show certainly had its issues, as stretching this stranded-on-an-island premise across 121 episodes led to some inevitable dead-ends and unnecessary bloat. But Lost is frustrating and wonderful and dopey and endlessly brilliant. It remains one of the greatest series ever made, and watching it is to watch the TV culture of the 2010s being born.
#22: White Lotus
Equal parts satire and soap opera, White Lotus follows the lives of well-heeled travelers vacationing in pricey resorts: Dysfunctional families, honeymooning couples masking their internal issues, a sad-sack blonde hauling her abusive mother’s ashes, divorced dads. They bicker, make snide comments about nearby guests, fret over their health, maintain denial of their privilege, find romance, and stray from their significant other. Even the resort’s beleaguered staff can’t escape the raving camera’s merciless eye. The gorgeous vistas, twisty drama, and pitch-perfect casting make this a compelling and uncomfortable viewing destination that focuses on the corrosive influence of carnal desire. If you want to be a voyeur, the various storylines play out from one fabulous room-with-a-view to the next, from this table at the spectacular oceanside restaurant to the one All The Way Over There. The subtleties of emotions and relationships between out-of-touch rich people are captured in the hilarious and pitch-perfect dialogue, spot-on acting, and gorgeous scenery. It’s like watching a Greek drama or tragedy in a colorful and warm modern setting.
#21: 30 Rock
30 Rock is the Manhattan Project of a great sitcom. The amount of quality jokes they can breeze through in a single conversation is the closest we’ve had to the frenetic writing of mid- to late-’90s Simpsons. It’s a dense mix of callbacks, setups, surrealism, self-deprecation, slapstick, 4th wall breaks, character interaction, and multi-layered jokes that mix all of the above. Even the Lemon/Donaghe relationship mocks the will they/won’t they trope. As one of the big three network sitcoms of the aughts, it’s strange to me that 30 Rock isn’t as revered in the broader culture as The Office or Parks and Recreation, and maybe it’s because there aren’t as many emotional storylines or feel-good moments—just night cheese and assorted meat byproducts. But there’s a wider range of comedic repertoire, from third-grade humor to high-brow cultural/political commentary, and it all hits home.
#20: Peaky Blinders
Peaky Blinders is widely celebrated for its stylish cinematography and charismatic performance, though it shines for casting an eye over a part of England and English history rarely explored on television. The series can be purposefully pulpy and heavy-handed at times, but it is a riveting and fast-paced tale of post-WWI Birmingham scalawags that goes against the grain of period dramas and gangster epics. Cillian Murphy is masterful in portraying the ever-so-cool Tommy Shelby, but if you’re a fan of morally grey characters, you’ll find yourself engrossed in the immersive world-building and depictions of the real-life Peaky Blinders. As the show progresses, the tone becomes more somber, the slow-motion strutting dialed back in favor of deeper explorations of human emotion, which makes all the villains less cartoonish and the heroes more real.
#19: Eastbound and Down
Eastbound and Down stands apart from other American comedy series, exemplified when Kenny Powers arrives at a car dealership for a pitch-off and knocks Craig Robinson’s eye out, and his brother—who has been trying to straighten him out—joins him in destroying everything around them while chaos ensues. Most American comedies feature someone with an outsider status or sense of anxiety; while they might be oafish or selfish, they’ll always be punished or roiled with the discomfort of knowing they fucked up, like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. In the Danny McBride universe, Kenny Powers is a self-centered, egotistical monster comprised of nothing but avarice and desire. He is bone-deep in the conviction that he is always right, everything he does is correct, and he will never have to repent for anything. The outside world confirms this belief, and no matter how unbelievably awful he is, he is forgiven and rewarded. It represents the American Protestant worldview: If you sin, you will be redeemed; if you are temporarily wrong, it is a necessary detour on your way to being more right.
#18: Veep
West Wing is the idealistic liberal fantasy of how government ought to work; House of Cards is how conservatives think government works; Veep depicts a twisted world of how it actually works. This is the sharpest Beltway satire I’ve seen, mostly because it doesn’t focus on the power wielded by politicians, but on their desperate venality. It works because the characters are so human in their foibles. Veep is like a comedic snowball—as the seasons progress, the scenarios become more brash and bonkers, the words coming out of each character’s mouth are more deranged, and everything is unapologetically absurd. The premise became more prescient during the 2024 Democratic Party primaries as Joe Biden’s withdrawal coronated Kamala Harris as the presidential nominee, revealing her as a real-life Selena Meyer.
#17: Rick and Morty
Rick and Morty is over-the-top, unhinged, and relentlessly existential, but the more you dissect it, the more you find it has to say. The show’s philosophy centers around our place in the universe, and our ability to become masters of our destiny while gripping with the reality that nothing matters and nobody is special.
The citadel episode in season three is the purest distillation of this ethos: It’s a world entirely populated with Ricks and Mortys—all with the same capacity for brilliance—and it still results in an arbitrary hierarchy that squanders their potential by placing them into specific roles, like a janitor or on the assembly line. Even the pantheon of Ricks are identical in their capabilities as the smartest person in the universe, and they also evolved into a social order of leaders, politics, and the primitive desire for an established pecking order. It makes us consider how anyone could do our job or our boss’s job, or even why our current system of governance is the only or best way of establishing social networks.
Rick is a nihilist, insisting that nothing is sacred, nothing is special, anything is permitted—and his answer to how you can live with this knowledge is to derive joy from living in the moment. The show touches on that kind of existential dread without ever becoming preachy. The recurring joke is that we are all empty, alone, and despondent, and everything we do in life is all for silly and arbitrary reasons. There is no plan or meaning, so our lives may as well be for McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce.
#16: Barry
Unfortunately, Barry is a bland, terrible, functionally useless title and its premise is a hitman who decides to become an actor, which sounds like the hackiest sitcom imaginable. It’s understandable why that would cause some viewers to overlook this show, but it’s a perfect balance of PTSD and unsettling dark comedy, while steering clear of antihero overindulgence. Barry is about a man who is very good at being something he doesn’t love and yearns for more, which is basically an allegory for creator Bill Hader’s time at SNL. As the series unfolds, it becomes good in ways you don’t see coming. When it wants to be funny, it’s as hilarious as anything on TV. When it wants to be tense, it’s as unbearable as anything on Breaking Bad. When it wants to be horrifying, it turns into Lynchian arthouse. There’s a sequence when Barry becomes embroiled in a shootout on a motorway, and it could qualify as a thrilling climax of a blockbuster action movie. Season four jettisons the entire notion of comedy, and as Barry confronts the finality of the consequences of his actions, delving into some bleak territory. Overall, the writing is great, the characters are quirky, and it’s loaded with unbelievably violent high-stakes and stressful moments.
#15: The Righteous Gemstones
The Righteous Gemstones premiered on HBO as a massive Politico exposé revealed mass corruption at Liberty University, and it’s uncanny how it mirrors the Falwell family and this moment of Prosperity Gospel. It weaves together specific details of Evangelical Christianity, bizarre corruption, JV-level scamming, a swinger hot wife cuckold fetish, a dynasty of failsons, and the overall trajectory of Trump-era conservatism.
The Gemstones are a family of televangelists who built an empire based on preaching the gospel and fleecing in the rubes; they constructed an amusement park and a stadium cathedral, and drive around in matching SUVs and fly on private jets. These threads give us a sense of how the Evangelical faith evolved alongside American capitalism, creating a uniquely apocalyptic mindset that holds us all hostage. The world bends to their will, just look at how George W. Bush has been rehabbed. Evangelicals worship America personalized as God—its flag and military, kicking ass, making money, the McMansion. Their comfort and luxury are evidence of how right they are.
Danny McBride begins a prayer with, “Good afternoon, Jesus. Thank you for forgiving me for my sins, which you know are not who I am.” It’s the perfect distillation of the Evangelical mindset: There is a separation of who I am and what I do. However, Danny McBride is too charismatic to portray the inert, sluggish dullness of a guy like Jerry Falwell Jr., and the sickness at the heart of American conservatism lies in someone that flat would ever be in such a high-status position.
#14: True Detective (Season 1)
It could be cheating to only include season one, but with its rotating casts and completely severed storylines, each iteration of True Detective is functionally a separate show. This was a perfect storm of jaw-droppingly magnetic performances, mesmerizing monologues, a captivating narrative, and unexpected pacing and cinematography. Director Cary Joji Fukunaga combines Lovecraftian fiction, the “normality” of police procedurals, and the atmosphere of Southern Gothic to create this threshold of anxiety. You’re never quite sure if the crimes are caused by mundane human perversion or a dark cosmic horror.
The plot harkens back to the Satanic Panic of the ‘90s, as the Tuttle Cult ritualistically abuses and murders children at schools. Rust and Marty are two morally ambiguous detectives, and the duality between the intellectual and the hard-ass dick-swinger takes the ‘70-era good cop/bad cop cliché and turns it into the idea that knowledge isn’t necessarily empowering. Rust had a deeper, more intrinsic premonition than Marty as the case progressed, and he experienced a deeper descent into insanity. As each of them confronted temptation, corruption, drugs, deceit, the questioning of reality itself, their struggles became a depiction of everything that makes life challenging, scary, and intriguing. It’s a circular experience.
#13: Succession
I wouldn’t consider Succession an explicitly comedic show, but when it goes for a joke, it’s a knockout punch every single time. The scene where Roman texts his dad a picture of his dick by accident is possibly the funniest moment I’ve seen on television. If you consider prestige TV an art form, Succession does everything well: Flawed and complex three-dimensional characters, relevant social commentary about the Murdoch family and nepo babies, fantastic acting and writing, great pacing, visual symbolism, and limited tropes and clichés. Everyone is terrible, but they’re sympathetic enough: I’d end up rooting for Shiv and Kendall because of how damaged they are, and the next moment, they’ll screw someone over. Tom Wambsgans perfectly encapsulates the type of sycophancy and cynicism that’s often rewarded in modern corporate culture. Ultimately, every shot and word serves a specific purpose, which is relatively rare in TV.
#12: Arrested Development (OG Pre-Netflix Run)
This could also be cheating, but the pre-Netflix run of Arrested Development feels like a distinct show from the latter seasons. It’s not often that every character in a sitcom is equally hilarious while managing to be a satire without explicitly skewering its target. It has a unique style that has never been replicated; so many actresses have tried to imitate Jessica Walters’s icy and withholding rich bitch mom, but none have been as funny. Arrested Development was a streaming show that unfortunately ran in the pre-binge cable era, because the jokes aren’t immediate and require you to remember a previous setup or see a bigger picture. The humor compiles on itself, and some zingers may go unnoticed until subsequent watches. Once you know the full story, the nuance in the character’s lines and actions are much easier to appreciate. Arrested Development is the kind of show where you will be showering one day and put something together, laugh out loud, then admire the genius and restraint of the subtle jokes and running gags.
#11: Twin Peaks: The Return
Before diving into this, you should ask yourself whether you’re a fan of David Lynch’s other work, because this is more in line with his films than the first two seasons of Twin Peaks. It focuses less on the characters and maintains a different tone from the sometimes campy and sometimes cozy humor of the original run, and instead emphasizes surrealism, suspense, and the visually stunning dream-like stuff. It’s a force of auteurism. The complex plotlines challenge just about every storytelling convention we know. It’s not quite a film or episodic television—it’s a free-flowing 18-hour unit with some rolling credits sprinkled in. If you’re fine with an abstract story, the series is worth watching for episode eight alone. Twin Peaks: The Return is weird and creepy and slow—just pure Lynchian horror. But it is interesting, even if it is disturbing and not always fun to watch. There is never a sense that you’re indulging in something devoid of vision or intention, because what David Lynch is doing is so total and absolute that he can get away with what would otherwise be unacceptable.
#10: Atlanta
Atlanta is this generation’s Twin Peaks. It’s ambitious and refreshing, the perfect vehicle for Donald Glover’s eccentric brand of humor, as well as a number of timely, trenchant observations. As the only American cable television series to feature an all-Black writing staff, the series focuses on examining race, class, identity, the American Dream, existentialism, and modern African-American culture through a surrealist lens. These topics are brought up subtly, presenting these occurrences as a given and placing the onus on the viewer to provide a reason for why it should be this way. All these themes can be densely packed into a single scene: The radio guy not saying the N-word around Paper Boy, a waitress upcharging Earn at an upscale restaurant, the white-faced black kid, the trans-racial guy, the jail holding cell, Coconut Crunch-Os, and fucking Liam Neeson at a bar. Atlanta’s storyline works as a drama but the perspective works like a comedy. Its tone is now a template for shows like Dave, Mythic Quest, Shrill, Feel Good, etc.
#9: Band of Brothers
There are many shows and films about World War II, but Band of Brothers balances the ideal of heroism with the violence and terror of battle, reflecting what is both civilized and savage about war. The miniseries offers a visceral, intense dramatization of “Easy” Company’s participation in the Western Front of World War II, but it places its focus on the setting. The soldiers are not obsessed with the war, and everyone’s individual stories are captured magnificently. World War II tore civilizations apart but brought this band of men together through sacrifice and a fight for democracy. This is a story of a group of people in a horrific situation with no personal desire to be there, but they’re still holding together. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks made one of the best films about men in war and it’s superior in a lot of ways to Saving Private Ryan.
#8: Chappelle’s Show
Chappelle’s Show has been off the air for 20 years and still has many culturally relevant skits: The Frontline feature of Clayton Bigsby, The Racial Draft, Player Hater’s Ball, Black George Bush, R. Kelly’s “Piss on You,” Charlie Murphy’s Stories. The show turned tropes on their ear. The skits roamed through well-trod ground, dealing in issues like being a Black man in America, hip-hop, and male-female relationships—but Dave’s goofy, dry demeanor and offhanded way of delivering brutal but hilarious truths made the humor fearless. Not every sketch was funny because it was prurient or funny only because it was blue; the writing was clever and kept finding new ways to explore race, identity, and politics. It used race to make a cultural point. This is some of the realest comedy to be mainstream, and its success is a miracle. Its continual influence is a testament to undeniably great comedy.
#7: Curb Your Enthusiasm
From its razor-sharp wit to its unapologetic irreverence, Curb Your Enthusiasm stands as a testament to the genius of Larry David and the hilarious improv of its ensemble cast. Whether you agree with his POV on minutia or not, the show exploits the silliness and arbitrary nature of social norms. Whenever Larry tries to call this out, he often handles those arguments poorly, or he could’ve articulated his point more logically but fails miserably. Larry’s character sums up the rude moronic behavior of entitled people milling about and making everyone’s lives in customer-facing jobs more frustrating. And there’s the juxtaposition between high-achieving, wealthy strivers and how petty and childish they act. A good example is Ted Danson losing his mind because Larry won’t take a bite of the dessert he recommended, or Suzie going from placid to insane because Larry won’t take a house tour. You wander so far into Larry David’s mind, and you’ll eventually absorb his neuroticism.
#6: The Wire
The Wire is an epic told as something closer to a documentary, a meta-procedural of the sausage being made. It’s a slow-burn, vérité-style crime show that depicts the rigidity of American institutions and the ramifications this dysfunction has on Baltimore’s most collapsed neighborhoods.
The justice system is messy, the characters are morally ambiguous, nothing is cleanly resolved. CSI would have the cops receiving a DNA sample in a few hours, but in The Wire, any investigation is riddled with backlogs, errors, bureaucracy, underfunding, or conflicting interests. Its portrayal of police procedure was so realistic, that criminals studied the show to evade incarceration. Police are punished for their competence: When state senator Clay Davis was about to be exposed for fraud and money laundering, the investigation was shut down; when the Greek was about to be taken down, that case was nixed because he was funneling intel to higher-ups at the FBI. Seemingly well-intentioned politicians would convince themselves they can help their communities if they’re elected to higher office, but what they have to do to achieve power precludes them from doing anything meaningfully altruistic with it—like shafting Baltimore’s public education system.
The drama comes from the intersection of the character’s egos and the inflexibility of the institutions they serve—there is no good cop vs. evil drug dealers. The closest anyone comes to pure evil is Marlo Stanfield, who is denuded of any shadings of personality outside of predation, someone who came from nothing and relishes in his command of life and death, and only seems to desire that kind of power. Drug dealers survive through a Darwinian code of conduct, the police force is instructed to make meaningless arrests to give city council flattering crime stats so they can receive more funding. Stringer Bell dies in his transition from drug dealer to real estate, because he doesn’t have the connections or background to make that switch—he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, another instance of entrenched injustice.
Every character understands Baltimore’s issues, but not enough people step up to produce any positive change. Any idealistic do-goodery gradually forecloses into a melancholic acceptance of this fundamental intransigence.
#5: Breaking Bad
Breaking Bad is the last broadly acclaimed and watched show that sets out to be straightforwardly entertaining, absent of politics, genre-bending, too-clever-by-halves, or any of the trappings that characterize TV and film from 2014 onward. It essentially killed off the antihero drama, and nothing since has been able to top Walter White’s depraved descent from milquetoast chemistry teacher to meth overlord.
There’s the longstanding joke that if this show took place in a country with universal healthcare, the series would’ve been resolved in a single episode, but this is a superlatively fresh metaphor for a mid-life crisis. It took cancer and lawbreaking to jolt Walter out of his suburban stupor. He took chances, risked danger, pushed himself beyond what he thought he was capable of—he experienced life again. It’s a ridiculous transformation: He goes from a pompous chemistry teacher deploying mid-tier cunning to outsmart meth-fried dullards and high schoolers to a Bond villain kingpin taking down cartels. None of this works without Bryan Cranston’s ferocious performance; Breaking Bad began two years after Malcolm in the Middle finished, and he created two perfect characters that could not be more different.
Its legacy set the cultural terms for the unfolding relationship between TV protagonists and social responsibility. Breaking Bad helped create a critical space around television that evaluates the virtue of the show’s POV through its main characters, an unfortunate analysis that equates depiction with endorsement. Walter White, along with Don Draper, as a white male antihero became the locus of popular response, and many shows are now written to deny this archetype, or it regressed into a Marvel Hero or Ted Lasso-type who falls into the stereotypical affectations of left-liberal manners in the most uninteresting ways.
For all its bleakness and darkness, there’s a glowing exhilaration throughout the series. Camera angles build suspense or call back to or foreshadow something else. Everything is deliberate and even the “lulls” move the plot forward. Every character could be sympathetic or hated at any given time. People have spent the past decade dissecting and arguing about what made Breaking Bad great, but the reasons are endless.
#4: Mad Men
To appreciate Mad Men is to understand that it’s not a plot-driven series, but a character-driven one. Set in post-war America, the show weaves the events and anachronisms of the 1960s into its primary chord, and does so in the setting of Madison Avenue to explore advertising’s role in creating our modern culture of mass consumption. The writing channels Cheever, Yates, and Updike to illustrate what it felt like to live at the apogee of American prosperity only to see that our memories of this period are colored by that very prosperity, hiding the same blankness that eventually drove us to this contemporary terminal crisis. The result is a gorgeous, amber-tinted, unsentimental portrayal of the inconvenience of modernity in a man’s world.
Subtleties like haircuts and facial hair, fashion choices, the position of women in the workplace, the presence of Black people, and various events like the assassination of JFK or the countercultural confusion all affected the characters. The subplots are intricately woven and play into larger themes, like how Marilyn Monroe’s death is used as an ad campaign to target women. The themes are highbrow and cerebral, examining identity, gender and sexuality, suburban alienation, duty vs. desire, and compromise vs. principle.
The characters are equally likable and infuriating; they make poor judgments, play grab-ass, or crassly denigrate subordinates—but they’re a product of their time. Don Draper lives in a hell of his creation, and the series ends on a punchline at his expense; his actions are an endless spiral of self-pity and self-destruction and the only monument to his life is his ads. Since he’s talented at his job, he is consistently validated despite his alcoholism, serial infidelity, and identity theft, and the source of his misery stems from never having to reckon with the calculus of another person’s desires. He is never confronted with the limitations of his ability to indulge himself. Don’s description of love may be the most brilliant and brutally cynical monologue ever written for TV.
It’s debatable whether this series needed to last seven seasons, but it is interesting to see the children grow up and absorb the psychosis of these awful characters. There is an infinite reflection within this generational trauma, and the ‘60s counterculture presented this false door that led to a brick wall. Mad Men was both optimistic and cynical, and watching it reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable impulses was heartbreaking, hilarious, bleak, and inspiring—generating a lifetime of recognizable memes, marvelous quotables, and indelible moments.
#3: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
There is no sitcom that better skewers the depravities of American culture than It’s Always Sunny. Rather than following the customary tropes, moral messaging, and character development in sitcoms like Cheers, Friends, or How I Met Your Mother, this show actively subverts them. A normal sitcom has its cast interact with the world and improve themselves; It’s Always Sunny has its cast interact with the world and they make it worse for everyone else.
The show follows the Gang, a group of alcoholic narcissistic sociopaths who manage Paddy’s Pub, which progressively stops functioning as a bar and more as a headquarters for dysfunctionality. Throughout the series, the Gang explores many pertinent ethical issues and consistently robs them of any inherent goodness: Rescuing a dumpster baby only to take it to a tanning bed, exploiting welfare by becoming crack addicts, using a job as a children’s basketball coach to teach lessons about physical assault, and getting Mac’s Dad killed by trying to prove his innocence.
For the record, the running joke around Dennis isn’t whether he’s a sociopath, because he clearly is. The joke is whether he has actually murdered someone. It’s Always Sunny has run for 16 seasons; no show, especially comedy, has ever come close to such a long run and been consistently good.
#2: Deadwood
Deadwood may not have the mainstream penetration of Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones, but it lurks in the background of our cultural memory. It is an absolute heavyweight among the HBO canon, and it should be widely considered to have a rightful place on the network’s Mount Rushmore.
After gold was discovered in the Black Hills of South Dakota, which in the mid-1800s was treaty-recognized Sioux land, hordes of speculators broke out illegally from U.S. Territory and occupied it by virtue of their desire to make some money in this new frontier. The Deadwood community had no legal writ, it was not recognized by the federal government, and there was no legal authority in the settlement. With that backdrop, David Milch illustrates what happens as people come into awareness of themselves as parts of an emergent social reality versus living in one that has already been established, and to which they have lost any sense of themselves. Meanwhile, the sheriffs had to figure out on a day-to-day basis what the law stood for and what it meant. It’s the process of how social values gain their meaning, the impulses of society that necessitate the slow negotiation of the self with others.
Amid the grit and lawlessness, its immaculate set design and costumes present a vivid, unsanitized, and richly textured portrait of an Old West frontier town. Even avid watchers should turn on the subtitles because Milch’s writing is dense and staggeringly brilliant, eloquence in the face of often brutal conditions. Apparently, he read witness testimonies on unrelated cases during that period to nail the specific patois. The magnificent bastard Al Swearengen initially comes off as a villain, but his inevitably doomed campaign to save his lawless town from annexation by the U.S. and exploitation by robber barons is a brilliant allegory for the evolution of American capitalism.
I’ve heard Deadwood referred to as Shakespeare in the mud. It’s an all-time drama, and if you’ve watched all the major HBO shows except this one, you do not want to be known as someone who watched all the major HBO shows, besides Deadwood.
#1: The Sopranos
It’s the basic bitch pick, but it’s the correct one. The Sopranos didn’t necessarily invent prestige TV as a concept, but it evolved into it; the show established psychological complexity, novelistic storytelling, detail, and symbolism that had not existed on television to that point. This is a show about decline—and not as a romantic, singular, aesthetically breathtaking act of destruction, but as a slow, sad, limp slide down a hill into a puddle of garbage water that humiliates us all. The family pays peons to honor and loyalty, and it’s contrasted with the decay and sadness of the modern world, which deglamorizes the mafia into a pathetic group of Newark deadbeats.
The cowardice at the heart of every character is they find themselves in a position of unearned privilege, but not having enough guilt to do anything that would upset their degree of comfort. There is a dichotomy between how Meadow and Christopher deal with this; you can affix yourself to social justice causes and seek achievements in the PMC world, or you can numb yourself and write a terrible mafioso script. Meanwhile, Tony symbolizes capital itself: Its whims and horrible efficiency and how it will do anything to perpetuate itself. Ralph is equally great as a middleman, he’ll get his hands dirty on behalf of Tony; he is actively repulsive and despised by most people in the family, but he is essential in landing them business for an esplanade project that would build the Center for Science and Trucking. Every relationship in the show is transactional, no one is valued outside their utility. Tony is disgusted when Ralph beats a 20-year-old woman to death outside of Bada Bing, but he decides to whack him when he suspects him of killing his favorite horse.
The show comes into its own in the way it derives humor. The bits in the first season revolve around stock mob jokes, but it eventually pokes fun at the absurdity of the human condition and the prison of our consciousness. When Carmela starts seeing an elderly Jewish therapist because she feels guilty about being Tony’s husband, he tells her that being privy to a crime syndicate is eating away at her soul, and she decides to change nothing. Carmela doesn’t care about Tony’s infidelity until one of his mistresses calls the home. They eventually fight in the poolhouse and he delivers a cutting line, “You’d be content with a Toyota and a little heart locket.” Tony tries to rehab his marriage by buying beachfront property—everything in the show is resolved through material acquisition.
Everyone is so attached to material comfort, that the idea of losing it is literally worse than death. Regardless of what you think happens in the final scene, Tony dying would be the best-case scenario for him; he wouldn’t age into becoming Junior, wheelchair-bound and alone in an old person home, riddled with dementia and no one caring about him. He has no capacity or desire for redemption, and he simply exists at the anguished end of a process that has no future. He either dies in agony or lives in agony. The Sopranos is a deeply cynical and nihilistic work of literature that is so staggeringly well-written and funny that it accidentally ends up being life-affirming.
The Shield should be on here somewhere. I don't know that there has been an anti-hero like Vic Mackey. For network TV, it was groundbreaking at the time. And an unbelievable cast (Chiklis, Goggins, CCH Pounder, Glenn Close for a season or so, Anthony Anderson and Forest Whitaker both in a couple of truly memorable guest spots). Based on some true events as well.
It's as good as any of the HBO big boys (with the exception of maybe The Sopranos) with network constraints.
The Americans is considered by many, including critics, to be the best TV show ever. And I’ll add Sons of Anarchy to that list. Note: You really need to watch Justified. It’s addictive.