More than 500 influential stars, showrunners and other notable names in the world of TV voted on the best series released since Jan. 1, 2000. See what they chose.
Television has defined 21st century popular culture. And with the rise of Peak TV and streaming, and the flood of film stars to the small screen, an ambitious and diverse new wave of storytellers have revolutionized the medium over the past two-plus decades.
To identify the best work of that period (as we did with books and movies), we polled hundreds of stars, showrunners, craftspeople, executives and other industry experts and asked them to vote for the 10 best series that have premiered since Jan. 1, 2000. (So don’t expect to see “The Sopranos,” which debuted in 1999.)
Among the more than 500 people who responded were stars like Elisabeth Moss, Adam Scott, Bryan Cranston, Rose Byrne, Colman Domingo and Jason Bateman, and showrunners like Damon Lindelof, Lena Dunham, Lena Waithe and Noah Hawley. See how your favorite shows ranked and save the ones you’ve always meant to watch.
“It’s handled.” When uttered by Olivia Pope, the ultimate D.C. fixer, the “it” might refer to a multinational conspiracy or some minor bit of presidential intrigue. But it had definitely been handled. As the glamorous, steely-eyed Pope, Kerry Washington was the first Black woman to lead a network drama in almost 40 years, and the show turned her into a household name. Fast-paced, sumptuously stylish and full of interracial intimacy — Pope was the long-term lover of the married president of the United States, played by Tony Goldwyn — “Scandal” established the creator Shonda Rhimes, then known for “Grey’s Anatomy,” as a bona fide TV hit-maker with a distinct aesthetic and a feminist point of view. — Salamishah Tillet
Celebrated shows often push viewers out of their comfort zones. “Gilmore Girls,” created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, succeeded by doing the opposite: charming viewers with low-stakes drama, snappy dialogue and unmatched cozy vibes. The “girls,” Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) and her daughter, Rory (Alexis Bledel), live in Stars Hollow, Conn., a storybook hamlet teeming with nosy neighbors and quirky townies. Years after its seven-season run ended, “Gilmore Girls” found new life on streaming, becoming synonymous with autumn nostalgia and sending fans to Washington, Conn., the real-life inspiration for Stars Hollow, for a taste of the show’s small-town fantasy. — Maya Salam
This memory mystery, about an abductee (Brit Marling) who returns home, forms a support cult, calls herself “The OA” and ardently believes she’s meant for divinity (and revenge), joins “Happy Endings” and “Enlightened” down in Canceled Before Its Time Valley. Marling and Zal Batmanglij came up with this show, which arrived in the thick of our captive white-lady crisis (“Orange Is the New Black,” “Room,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” “Search Party”). The kitchen-sink plot was ludicrous, but “The OA” filled it with nicely dented characters, committed to its exploration of abuse and wound up grazing the sublime. (That cafeteria dance sequence alone…) When Netflix pulled the plug after two seasons, the show clearly had more time to warp and mind to lose. — Wesley Morris
“Community” once devoted an entire episode to a spoof of “My Dinner With Andre.” On a Thursday night on NBC. This and other improbable prime-time meta stunts — the Ken Burns-style blanket-fort documentary, the stop-motion Christmas special — made Dan Harmon’s absurdist sitcom about a community college study group Must See TV for comedy nerds of all degrees. But it was the committed, emotionally textured performances from Joel McHale, Donald Glover, Gillian Jacobs and the rest of the cast — yes, even Chevy Chase — that kept the show from disappearing up its own rabbit hole. — Jeremy Egner
This drama began in the early days of the personal computer revolution — before social media, before FOMO, before A.I. angst — to tell the story of a quartet of tech pioneers who looked at those clunky beige desktop boxes and saw a kaleidoscopic future. Computers were “the thing that gets us to the thing,” the latter thing being connection, empowerment, even a new kind of art. What began as a familiar tale of business-suite intrigue — “Mad Men” with processors — became a rich, heartfelt, human exploration of the costs and rewards of work and the necessity of failure. Its portrait of ’80s and ’90s techno-optimism may seem quaint now, but its rendering of the love of creation remains bleeding-edge. — James Poniewozik
Network television wasn’t lacking in hospital procedurals when the gruff, pill-popping diagnostician Dr. Gregory House limped onto screens, a character Hugh Laurie owned like he was gobbling the Vicodin himself. But Dr. House had little in common with TV’s usual noble medics, who even when flawed still cared about their patients. Inspired by Sherlock Holmes, Dr. House was intellectual, cold, interested only if he found a case interesting. “House” made it hard to love House, stubbornly eschewing easy sentiment toward or from its lead protagonist. That made the love, when it did come, feel especially earned. — Austin Considine
A hard-charging diplomat suddenly conscripted to be America’s ambassador to the United Kingdom — and possibly the next U.S. vice president — Kate Wyler (a strenuously de-glammed Keri Russell) seems about as familiar with political niceties as she is with shampoo, which is to say, hardly at all. But it turns out Kate is pretty great at statecraft, and the top-shelf cast (including Rufus Sewell as Kate’s smooth-operator husband and Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford as a combative First Couple) rounds out a crackling drama whose bravura mix of international and personal crises feels like smart-people snack food, in the best way. — Leah Greenblatt
I could say it’s unexpected that one of the most uplifting shows of the past quarter-century is set in a postapocalypse, but who would I be kidding? It’s precisely in times of cataclysm and collapse that stories of other people going through it speak loudest. This limited-series adaption of the 2014 Emily St. John Mandel novel, set mostly in the years after a pandemic wiped out most of the world’s population, follows a band of survivors in a Shakespeare troupe traveling and performing in the Lake Michigan area. Wistful, whimsical and stubbornly hopeful, it embodies the idea that making art is the best thing that humans do — and maybe our best shot at outsmarting death. — James Poniewozik
OK, so the ending felt shrugged. But most of this murder-mystery-courtroom-drama-character-study-prison-show served atmosphere, intrigue, moral indictment and New York City granularity that pooled into American tragedy. Sharply written characters, by Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, receive deeply etched performances from John Turturro, Michael K. Williams and Jeannie Berlin, for starters. Riz Ahmed, who played Naz, a Pakistani American kid accused of killing a white woman, won an Emmy and applied pretzel logic to a portrait of innocence: made it hard, salty and knotted up. — Wesley Morris
American boy (Rob Delaney) meets Irish girl (Sharon Horgan) at a crowded London bar. A six-night stand — and an unplanned pregnancy — ensue. Though not a real couple offscreen, Delaney and Horgan were also the show’s writers and creators, and their delirious comic chemistry infused the script as they took on marriage, babies and midlife. Even as later seasons delved into more sobering aspects of adulthood (infidelity, financial struggles, a parent with dementia), “Catastrophe” retained its ineffable potty-mouthed spark. — Leah Greenblatt
Kenny Powers: Great American or greatest American? In his HBO comedy, created with Ben Best and Jody Hill, Danny McBride sketched one of TV’s most memorable jackasses in the form of this washed-up ex-Major League pitcher, a colossus of mouthy, mulleted overconfidence who burned out in the midst of his success. (“Sometimes when you bring the thunder,” he narrates, “you get lost in the storm.”) After alienating fans and teammates from New York to Seattle, Powers drags himself to his hometown to teach middle school and try to orchestrate his comeback. A fizzing 40-ounce bottle of pure hubris, McBride’s portrait of unrepentant obnoxiousness knocks it out of the park. — James Poniewozik
Hilarious and heartbreaking, this Netflix limited series stars Richard Gadd as a struggling London comedian and Jessica Gunning as the ebullient, unhinged stalker who makes his life hell — when she isn’t filling an unnameable void in his soul. Created by Gadd, “Baby Reindeer” followed the path of “Fleabag,” beginning as a solo stage show at Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Like its predecessor, it is a singular stunner, a nervy, mercurial mix of laugh-out-loud comedy and gut-punch despair. — Jeremy Egner
Grouping Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) with the great TV anti-heroes of his age never felt quite right. He was, after all, a genuine serial killer; even at their worst, Tony Soprano and Walter White never assembled kill rooms or organized samples of their victims’ blood. But Dexter had a code: He was a police forensics investigator who killed only violent criminals who had escaped justice. And wouldn’t you know it? Most of the time, you wound up rooting for him, despite having to reconcile that with some of the creepiest, most gruesome scenes in TV history. — Austin Considine
Set among the residents of the Muscogee Nation in rural Oklahoma, this comic drama from Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi was a watershed in Indigenous representation. After a frenetic pilot, it relaxed into a looser series, at once hypernaturalistic and surreal. Anchored by the performances of D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Devery Jacobs, Paulina Alexis and Lane Factor, as the teenage pals at the show’s heart, it dealt both lightly and deeply with themes of loss, growth and belonging. — Alexis Soloski
“Shogun” was conceived and produced as a limited series, but it ended up setting a record for the most Emmy Awards in a year for a drama (18) after FX renewed it for additional seasons. Based on James Clavell’s 1975 novel and created by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, it begins during a power vacuum in 17th-century Japan and chronicles the political and military maneuvering that follows. The chief maneuverer is the crafty samurai general Yoshii Toranaga, played brilliantly by Hiroyuki Sanada, who forges strange alliances with an English navigator (Cosmo Jarvis) and others in order to outflank his rivals. A beautifully filmed epic presented primarily in Japanese with a doomed romance at its center, “Shogun” was tragic, transportive and utterly transfixing. No wonder FX couldn’t let it go. — Salamishah Tillet
The whole concept of this series, with its serene wind-in-the-willows setting, wonderfully ordinary contestants and gentle cooperative humanism, seemed to go against everything we knew about competitive reality shows. But it turned out there are few things more pleasurable than watching a medical student from Glasgow build a bicycle out of choux pastry, or seeing a Liverpudlian grandma flirt over lemon curd with the perennially flinty judge Paul Hollywood. (Cue much naughty banter on “tight buns” and “soggy bottoms.”) — Leah Greenblatt
The first major nature documentary series shot entirely in high-definition, this 11-part BBC production from 2006 literally set a new standard: Each episode, narrated by the dulcet-voiced natural historian David Attenborough, was a wonder of technical innovation and storytelling. As with most great filmmaking, the virtuosity is often most impressive when it is least conspicuous. But the 10-minute “making of” mini-docs remind viewers of what astonishing feats of daring, patience and ingenuity each second of its 550-minute running time required. — Austin Considine
TV did justice to Elmore Leonard, which was a small Hollywood miracle. It probably helped that Leonard, before his death in 2013, was an executive producer of this series based on his Raylan Givens stories. Timothy Olyphant played Raylan, the laconic lawman, and Walton Goggins played Boyd, the childhood friend who grew up to be Raylan’s criminal nemesis and romantic rival. They brought soul and style to a violent crime story that was also a fractured family drama, a warm workplace comedy and, most resonantly, a dry dissection of the morals and manners of Kentucky hill country. While Raylan and Boyd carried out their series-long battle, an inexhaustible rogues’ gallery of moonshiners, drug dealers, gun runners and every other kind of rural miscreant kept us pleasurably occupied. — Mike Hale
An autofictional comedy from the show-business veteran Pamela Adlon (she created it along with Louis C.K., who left after the second season), this sun-kissed series embedded with Adlon’s Sam Fox, a middle-aged actress living in the Hollywood Hills with her free-spirited mother and three indelible daughters. (The future Oscar winner Mikey Madison played the eldest.) Unsparing in its anatomy of relationships among women, and of the trials and rewards of single motherhood, it never lost its loud mouth or its open heart. — Alexis Soloski
Possibly the biggest thing to happen to chess in popular culture since Bobby Fischer, “Gambit” offered a troubled wunderkind so believable, many viewers assumed it was a biopic. As Beth, the shy, prickly orphan who discovers she has more than an ordinary knack for the game — and that it’s also her ticket out of 1960s Kentucky — the actress Anya Taylor-Joy employs her watchful gaze and fierce intelligence to carry us through the complicated journey of a natural-born genius who is also a fanatical competitor, a pill-popping addict and, ultimately, a lost soul finding her purpose in knights and bishops. — Leah Greenblatt
It takes a special talent to show New Yorkers problems with the city that they’ve never noticed. John Wilson has that talent, yet his sublime HBO docuseries is more of an obsessive love letter than a complaint slip, each episode a wild assembly of clippings from the endlessly layered text that is New York. Wilson’s free-associative journeys are by turns comedic and melancholic — one might start with an effort to cover his furniture and wind up in the basement of a singing “foreskin restoration advocate.” Somehow it all makes beautiful sense. — Austin Considine
This zingy drama from Robert and Michelle King was juicy, delectably current and way more individualistic than your average lawyer show. It starred Julianna Margulies as Alicia Florrick, a former lawyer who returns to work after her politician husband (Chris Noth) is imprisoned on corruption charges. Drawing from New York’s reserve of theater actors, it was perhaps the best-cast procedural on television. — Alexis Soloski
Joel Kim Booster
believes “The Good Wife” is one of the last great network dramas.
See his full ballot here.
“Sunny” didn’t become history’s longest-running live-action sitcom by warming viewers’ hearts. It started out crass and nihilistic with contemptible characters, employees at a scuzzy Philadelphia pub, and stayed that way. “The gang” never grows, learns lessons or sprouts a conscience — they may even have gotten worse. “Sunny” has always prized laughs over “awws,” and that might be the secret to its staying power: no will-they-won’t-theys to lose steam; no insufferable boss with a secret heart of gold; no redemption for the vain womanizer. “Sunny” outlasted “The Office.” It outlasted “Cheers.” It may last as long as we need to laugh at horrible people, which shows no signs of abating. — Austin Considine
It’s gotta be the smartest show about dumb people ever made.
D.B. Weiss, co-creator, “Game of Thrones”
See his ballot here.
“Modern Family” was an old-style network sitcom — wacky dads, cute kids, 24-episode seasons — reskinned for a new century, with gay and blended families and a single-cam mockumentary format. Some aspects haven’t aged well, but it won a boatload of Emmys and ran for 11 highly rated seasons because it nailed the basics: sharp jokes, relatable dynamics and terrific performances, particularly from Ty Burrell as the wackiest dad of all. — Jeremy Egner
Bryan Cranston
on the fun of directing “Modern Family.”
Small by design, this HBO comedy argued that a person can come of age at any age. Created by the raunchy cabaret star Bridget Everett (with Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen) and set in Everett’s hometown of Manhattan, Kan., it starred Everett as Sam, a woman who moves home after failing to make it in the big city. Faced with tremendous loss, she finds her voice (what pipes!) and an eccentric chosen family, including Jeff Hiller as Joel, a cockeyed optimist and Sam’s skinny rock. — Alexis Soloski
This sitcom, about an American coach (Jason Sudeikis) who moves to England and transforms a soccer club and others with kindness and folksy wisdom, has a sunny reputation. But the outstanding first season, especially, is shot through with bitterness and despair as characters cope with crumbling marriages, bad dads and other traumas. Their confronting and eventual conquering of the darkness gave a very funny sports comedy surprising depth and gravity, and a kind of soul-nourishing power in the dark days of the pandemic. — Jeremy Egner
“The Bear” was by any definition (except that of Emmy voters) more a workplace drama than a workplace comedy. That criticism grew tiresome, as did the backlash to that criticism, but for millions of viewers it was all beside the point: As a depiction of the ennobling potential of hard work and shared commitment, this series about an anxious chef (Jeremy Allen White) who returns home to Chicago to run the family restaurant after his brother’s suicide — hilarious! — had a giant, irresistible heart, with characters you couldn’t quit if you tried. It also brought a whole world of gastronomic jargon and ideas into the mainstream. Ask any restaurant worker if “Yes, Chef!” has gotten old yet. — Austin Considine
Sure, he’s a hitman. But what’s his motivation? This midnight-black comedy from Bill Hader and Alec Berg starred Hader as a discontented assassin who stumbles into an acting class led by Henry Winkler’s Gene Cousineau. Does he kill a fellow student? You bet. But he also finds new purpose. A celebration and subversion of both Hollywood satires and crime shows, it was also a showcase for Anthony Carrigan as NoHo Hank, a cheerful gangster, and Sarah Goldberg as Sally Reed, a recklessly ambitious actress. — Alexis Soloski
A desperate man (Lee Jung-jae) walks into a subway station and soon finds himself on an island playing lethal kids’ games for the delight of oligarchs. This hyperviolent Korean thriller’s message is obvious — capitalism is a dehumanizing blood sport! — and its methods are unsubtle. But as conceived by Hwang Dong-hyuk, its style is undeniable (the green track suits, the funhouse interiors) and the bitter infighting among the competitors, especially, is dispiritingly resonant. “Squid Game” is also, in its gory, garish way, highly entertaining, the most popular Netflix show ever. Maybe there’s a little oligarch in all of us. — Jeremy Egner
Why this show? Well it just. Kept. Pushing. It was funny. It was nasty. It was weird. It was never content to stay cute. The road rage incident that begins it — between two Asian American entrepreneurs (Steven Yeun and Ali Wong) — culminates nine episodes later in what can only be described as transcendental contempt. It slashes through reams of plot toward sinister, desperate zones that evoke a wit’s-end master like Bong Joon Ho. But this farce by Lee Sung Jin is pungent with American Dream discontent. It’s tragedy as child-of-immigrant game show — a self-loathing class-struggle contest with Yeun and Wong each in it to win it, in this life and possibly whatever comes after. — Wesley Morris
Loosely based on the Rampart Division corruption scandal in the Los Angeles Police Department, this deliciously pulpy crime drama hit American TV like a hard slap in the face from a dirty cop. Shawn Ryan, in his first TV series, lathered on the dark, gritty atmosphere, beginning with a shocking intramural murder in the pilot. But what kept you watching were the larger-than-life performances, led by Michael Chiklis as the merciless Vic Mackey and Walton Goggins as Vic’s tragically loyal right-hand man, Shane Vendrell. — Mike Hale
Anthony Bourdain had one of the best mouths on TV. As a trained chef he had the gift of taste. As a host he was a natural raconteur and provocateur who could break down cuisine and culture with ease and no-bull directness. On his Travel Channel docu-gourmandism show, he went beyond superficial pleasure-touring to show how eating is a way of exploring a land — not just its delights and delicacies, but its history, its ways of life and sometimes its pain. “No Reservations” took him to places like Lebanon, Haiti and Vietnam, where he spun his travels into a combination of reportage and personal essay. Intensely curious, with a sharp tongue and a common touch, Bourdain showed us that the best way to understand the world is one bite at a time. — James Poniewozik
A mild-mannered midlife family man who loves his family is pulled into a dark underworld of drug dealers, crime bosses and unrepentant psychopaths? We’ve heard that elevator pitch before. But while “Ozark” shares the bare outlines of its premise with “Breaking Bad,” the show quickly found its own story beats and bleakly comic tone — thanks in large part to the multilayered performances of Jason Bateman, Laura Linney and Julia Garner, who throughout four wildly zigzagging seasons each earned a Ph.D. in moral ambiguity. — Leah Greenblatt
Arriving in the early months of the first Trump presidency, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, reflected the era’s intense debates about women’s rights and reproductive freedom like nothing else on TV. The creator Bruce Miller imagined Gilead, a place plagued by low birth rates, environmental disasters and extreme gender hierarchies, as both a full dystopia and a not-so-distant future. Elisabeth Moss and Yvonne Strahovski were outstanding as a Handmaid and a Wife to a commander, evolving from antagonists locked in their respective roles to refugees and, ultimately, rebels. The show’s themes were so vividly told and viscerally felt that activists began wearing scarlet cloaks and white bonnets, the Handmaid uniform, at real-world political protests. — Salamishah Tillet
Alexis Bledel
on why starring in “The Handmaid’s Tale” was an “instant yes.”
See her full ballot here.
If “Nathan for You” was the basement laboratory for Nathan Fielder’s mad-scientist social experiments, “The Rehearsal,” which bankrolled him with HBO’s resources, was the equivalent of handing him the keys to a supercollider. Fielder scaled up his stunt comedy with a simple and productively philosophical question: What if you could solve all of life’s problems by simulating and practicing difficult situations? The results were spectacular, leading him to stage-manage marriage, childhood and airplane flight, but they were coupled with an insight into his control-freak character and, by extension, all of us in the audience. What Fielder was really testing, after all, was the poignant wish to engineer away anxiety, social awkwardness and regret itself. Practice may or may not actually make perfect. But “The Rehearsal” came pretty damn close. — James Poniewozik
Murder. Mayhem. A frazzled Kate Winslet in lumberjack flannels, relentlessly vaping and pronouncing the word water like “wooter.” This HBO crime drama from Brad Ingelsby, set in a blue-collar township outside Philadelphia, had everything, including Pennsylvania atmosphere so thick you could slap it on a hoagie and eat it with sweet peppers. As the titular Mare, a divorced detective with a messy personal life, Winslet is pressed to solve the killing of one young woman and the disappearance of another while still maintaining her professional distance — tough work in a place where everybody knows your name (and your weak spots). — Leah Greenblatt
Following up “No Reservations” was no easy feat, but Anthony Bourdain pulled it off to Emmy- and Peabody-winning effect while telling “Stick to the food!” naysayers to kick rocks. Leveraging his growing cultural influence, he used cuisine as an entry point to explore politically charged issues in locations like Congo, Hong Kong and, unforgettably, Iran. “Parts Unknown,” which ran for 12 seasons, also scuttled the grittier, frenetic travel-diary vibe of “No Reservations” in favor of thoughtful pacing and polished cinematography. What didn’t change was Bourdain’s signature cynicism and his capacity to eat, drink and reckon with the human condition. — Maya Salam
Padma Lakshmi
on Anthony Bourdain’s “ebullient personality.”
Before he clowned Washington in “Veep,” Armando Iannucci had a go at British politics in this acidly funny satire about hapless ministers and their minions — and their constant scramble to avoid bad press and the wrath of a vituperative spin doctor, played by Peter Capaldi. The accents are different, but the premise is the same: Great nations are governed largely by small people driven less by the common good than by their own craven aspirations and status panic. Ha ha? — Jeremy Egner
I remember tuning in and thinking it was just unbelievable. Every line an absolute banger. The characters are superb. You can’t speak about “The Thick of It” without talking about Peter Capaldi. Malcolm Tucker is one of the greatest characters of all time.
Richard Gadd, creator and actor, “Baby Reindeer”
See his ballot here.
Based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels, this series reimagines the institutional spy thriller as a distinctively British variety of dark workplace comedy — John le Carré by way of Evelyn Waugh by way of Ricky Gervais. (The actual creator was the comedian and writer Will Smith.) A disgruntled crew of “losers, misfits and boozers,” in the words of Mick Jagger’s theme song, is exiled to a shabby satellite office of the intelligence service MI5. But they consistently pull themselves together to save Britain’s bacon — driven by revenge, or professional pride, or simply the withering abuse piled on them by their boss, Jackson Lamb, played with a brilliant, artisanal foulness by Gary Oldman. — Mike Hale
When this reality competition debuted in 2009, it was so low-budget that camera lenses were covered in cellophane to create a flattering soft-focus effect. (Fans call it the “vaseline filter.”) Over 18 seasons (plus 11 “All-Stars” seasons and numerous international spinoffs), what was once niche has become a pop culture phenomenon that celebrates freedom, identity and exuberance while expanding our everyday lexicon with slang like “tea,” “shade” and “clock.” RuPaul Charles, the creator and host, has won 14 Emmys along the way. — Maya Salam
Before Jesse Armstrong created an era-defining show about familial dysfunction with “Succession,” he (along with Andrew O’Connor and Sam Bain) created this seminal British comedy about two dysfunctional roommates, played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb. The stylistic gimmick that gives the show its title was fun and original — scenes were shot from its main characters’ perspectives and narrated by their internal thoughts. More important was its honest and often melancholy look at male friendship and frustrated ambition through a lens that was as humane as it was humorous. — Austin Considine
The history of 21st-century TV comedy is in many ways the history of cringe. But before there was cringe TV, there was middle school. In this remarkable, uncomfortable and socially acute comedy, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle played versions of themselves as BFFs in the ungainly phase of early adolescence, donning their gawky child personas for a transformation more effective than any special effect. But even more effective than their self-stunt-casting is the show’s sharp eye for the details of this confused moment between babyhood and full-on teendom, as well as for the fanatical intensity of young friendship. Like a raunchier “Freaks and Geeks,” it offers the delight of thumbing through someone else’s old yearbook, one hilarious, regrettable page at a time. — James Poniewozik
For two-plus seasons, our national conversations about race, sexuality and entertainment had a sardonic commentary track in Dave Chappelle’s sketch-comedy series (which he created with Neal Brennan). Inhabiting stereotypes in order to annihilate them, Chappelle exposed, with unflappable precision, the clichés, prejudices and appetites that defined our media-saturated culture. And he was coolly, brutally funny. Just ask Rick James. — Mike Hale
The odd-ball premises in this rapid-fire sketch comedy series, from Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, run a strange gamut, with some of the best seeming like musings from your most stoned college roommate. “What happens when a hot dog car gets into an accident?” “How could I sneak a hot dog into a meeting?” What unites them, other than a preponderance of hot dogs, are Robinson’s characters — generally awkward, repressed, hypersensitive men. You know them. They live in your suburb or work in your office, their normie veneers just a stray comment or awkward faux pas away from splitting wide open. — Austin Considine
I watched it with my father, who was in his 80s at the time. And you may as well have given him a show from Jupiter. He was laughing, but he wasn’t laughing at the content of the show. He was laughing at the fact that he had no idea how this qualified as a television show.
D.B. Weiss, co-creator, “Game of Thrones”
See his ballot here.
Rarely has a show’s thumbnail description felt so inadequate. Armed with his Canadian business degree, “Nathan Fielder,” who may or may not be anything like Nathan Fielder, offers to help real companies improve their profits. His suggestions are unique, to put it mildly, and spin off in wildly unpredictable directions. Over time, a meta-narrative develops around Fielder’s persona and motivations, as he pushes himself and his subjects toward ever-more creative forms of self-promotion and self-debasement in pursuit of success. Whither the American Dream? “Nathan for You” had a few unsettling ideas. — Austin Considine
Co-created by and starring Issa Rae, “Insecure” was a love letter to an ungentrified Los Angeles, striving 30-somethings and the enduring and evolving power of Black women’s friendships. Rae made her own big break with her web series “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl,” and at the time of its 2016 debut, “Insecure” was only the second American comedy created by and starring a Black woman. More importantly, it portrayed Black millennials as imperfect, funny and uncertain, just like their white peers, giving them permission to be messy and learn from their mistakes as an essential rite of passage. — Salamishah Tillet
This crackerjack thriller about the lives of secret agents deserves to be higher on this list, but it’s French, so c’est la vie. Created by Éric Rochant, it has a rare and seamless combination of procedural rigor and psychological density — the agents’ missions are immersions in a foreign land and culture, and we see them from meticulous preparation to hazardous and sometimes heartbreaking extraction. Tense and moving but devoid of sentimentality, the show paid us the great compliment of trusting our intelligence. — Mike Hale
Voted for by Aline Brosh McKenna, screenwriter and co-creator, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”
See her full ballot here.
More than any other Netflix hit, this sci-fi nostalgia fantasy from the hitherto unknown Duffer brothers has been a global phenomenon, spawning spinoffs, a play, live “experiences,” companion novels, video games and endless amounts of merch. But after nearly 10 years and five seasons that grew overstuffed with lore and computer wizardry, it became easy to lose sight of what made the show special: its cast, led by a core group of previously unknown child actors. Their loyal gang of small-town ’80s outsiders reminded grownups of how they felt watching “E.T.” and gave 21st-century kids their own group of onscreen adventurers to grow up with. — Austin Considine
An upstairs-downstairs tale for the ages, this gilded early 20th-century romp — set almost entirely on the sprawling estate of the title — brought the world more than the deathless bons mots of Dame Maggie Smith’s delightfully prickly Dowager Countess. Julian Fellowes’s period drama was a gimlet portrait of landed British gentry and their liveried support staff and also a sweeping soap opera in which deaths, double crosses and the untenable horror of using the wrong salad fork played out across six expansive seasons (and three feature film spinoffs). — Leah Greenblatt
The whole house is such a microcosm — the way they care for the house and preserve its history and alchemize any wounds from the past in order to carry on. That could apply to any environment, any house or business or country.
Alexis Bledel, actor
See her ballot here.
A bonkers exploration of ethics, metaphysics and phenomenology, this Michael Schur comedy pogoed between Earth, hell and heaven, with occasional giraffes. A show that began with all its characters dead might have been a bummer. But “The Good Place” was trampoline-bouncy, anchored by superb performances from Kristen Bell and William Jackson Harper as two of the recently deceased, Ted Danson as an angel (or is he?) assigned to care for them and D’Arcy Carden as an ontological supercomputer. — Alexis Soloski
This mockumentary overcame a lackluster first season to become one of the great workplace comedies. Set in the municipal offices of Pawnee, Ind., the show began as a satire of government, big and small, then progressed into something more hopeful. Now, in a happy-sad way, it also functions as a time capsule (fitting for a show that devoted a whole episode to a time capsule) — a visit to a slightly less polarized past when people with wildly different values and beliefs could still all get along and even improve one another. — Alexis Soloski
This artful adaptation of Sally Rooney’s 2018 literary blockbuster became one of the first hothouse streaming hits of the Covid pandemic: a delicately melancholy portrait of two teenage misfits (Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones) whose enduring romantic pas de deux, carried on from high school through college, exposes their deepest wounds and longings. Acted with immense sensitivity and framed in cinematic camerawork that makes the most of moody European skies, the show’s 12 brief episodes feel as intimate and beguiling as a heartbeat. — Leah Greenblatt
The Big Bang of the streaming era — top director, acclaimed film actors, a whole season but right now — was also, to invoke a more stable television era, Must See TV. We had to see how low Frank and Claire Underwood would go to humiliate enemies, consolidate power, milk secrets. The kick of the show was its framing of corruption as kink. The psychological undergirding was on loan from Shakespeare. And the vibe was soap and trash. Beau Willimon created the series, David Fincher established the air of dread, and its troupe of actors — Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright, Michael Kelly, Mahershala Ali and Kate Mara, to name just five — rolled with every punch the writers threw. When Spacey’s personal travails led to banishment from the final season, the show rolled with that, too. It was juicy and innovatively addictive: A season would end and, after a shower, you didn’t know whether to check for recaps or into rehab. — Wesley Morris
When “Twin Peaks” debuted in 1990, there had been nothing like it on television. When David Lynch and Mark Frost debuted their 18-episode revival on Showtime 27 years later, there had been nothing like it on television either, including the original. A profoundly experimental, esoteric work, “The Return” brought back familiar characters and cleared up a few longstanding mysteries, although it may have introduced more than it solved. It obeyed a dream logic perhaps known fully by Lynch and Frost alone — characters, plots and whole realities could turn on a dime. The result was astoundingly original, something on TV but barely of it, a harrowing journey into the cosmic rupture of the atomic age. — Austin Considine
It’s easy to forget how refreshing “Broad City” was when it arrived — first in 2009 as a popular web series and later as a sitcom on Comedy Central. For years “Friends” had been the dominant portrait of young people trying to make it in New York City, but here were what the apartments, hustles and dating lives of broke 20-somethings really looked like! They weren’t pretty, but in the hands of the creators and stars, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, they were funny, at least, even if sometimes you were laughing not to cry. Surrealistic flourishes made the inherent absurdities and debasements of being young in New York still feel like an adventure, even aspirational. — Austin Considine
“Broad City” showed us a different kind of female friendship, based on a desire to be close because no one else understands you. It’s these two women who are in love with each other, but it’s platonic. There’s an element of, “Thank god we found each other. Because where would we be if we hadn’t?”
Lena Waithe, actor and writer
See her ballot here.
Everything about Sally Wainwright’s harrowing, heartbreaking series was right out in the open, including the irony of its title. Happy Valley was the cops’ nickname for a drug-infested area in West Yorkshire, and the show’s heroine, the tireless policewoman Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire), could rarely be described as happy. The show took place in the shadow of the suicide of Cawood’s daughter, and it was dominated by Cawood’s unrelenting battle to bring to justice Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), the sociopathic criminal she held responsible. Despair and sometimes brutal violence were countered by compassion and everyday heroism, and Wainwright’s characters, wonderfully played by Lancashire, Norton and Siobhan Finneran as Cawood’s sister, existed in the round, living in plain sight. — Mike Hale
A heartbreaker comedy about depression, addiction and generational trauma, this animated Hollywood satire from Raphael Bob-Waksberg orbited the title character (voiced by Will Arnett), a talking horse and the one-time star of the family sitcom “Horsin’ Around.” Set in a world of human and anthropomorphized animals, the show managed to combine goofy, indelible sight gags (sloth on a treadmill!) with a sincere meditation on the depredations of fame — Nathanael West meets Looney Tunes. — Alexis Soloski
An operatic gangster epic set in the bloody milieu of Birmingham, England’s criminal underground after the First World War, “Peaky” had style to spare, from its anachronistic blues-punk soundtrack to its hoodlum-dandy wardrobe. (Beware those nifty little newsboy caps; there be razor blades in the brim.) But Steven Knight’s long-running Netflix drama was also a canny exploration of fraught family dynamics and post-war trauma, anchored by the arresting performance of Cillian Murphy as the Peaky kingpin Thomas Shelby, a man with a crack in his soul. — Leah Greenblatt
A comedy about comedy, this glitter bomb of a show, created by Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, was a glitzy hymn to great jokes and the broken people who make them. It starred Jean Smart as a legacy Vegas comic, initially past her prime, and Hannah Einbinder as the uppity Zillennial writer who gives that act a refresh. Vicious, gleeful and unashamedly insider-y about the entertainment industry’s churn, it was ultimately an intergenerational love story. — Alexis Soloski
At this comedy’s creative summit, the life-of-a-standup sitcom we’d been watching took a thrilling, emotional turn into the surreal and refused to reroute. Louis C.K., its star, writer, director and psyche, put away his Woody Allen, Larry David and “Seinfeld” stencils and embarked on a journey of societal ache and vibrant self-inspection. The show’s radiant, deranged depiction of lust, fatherhood, middle age and emotional entanglement goes deeper than any of its influences, and its behavioral audacity made it compatible with the so-called antihero era. (Offscreen, the creator’s own behavior led to disgrace.) And yet given the raft of idiosyncratic, risk-positive women who appeared on the show (Pamela Adlon, Sarah Baker, Melissa Leo, Amy Poehler, Parker Posey, Joan Rivers), it was also as crucial a depiction of the highs and bounteous humiliations of hunting for love in New York as “Sex and the City.” — Wesley Morris
What if your son isn’t just going through the usual growing pains and emotional whipsaws of puberty? What if he’s a monster in the making? The creators Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham posed those questions in their gripping, slow-drip limited series, to the consternation and night terrors of parents everywhere. Graham also starred as the father of 13-year-old Jamie (Owen Cooper), who is arrested on suspicion of murdering a classmate; soon enough, social media and the manosphere enter the chat. By shooting each episode in one continuous take, the journey of did-he-or-didn’t-he becomes a masterclass in sustained tension; you can see the actors earning their Emmys in real time. (The show won eight overall.) — Leah Greenblatt
When HBO paired Watchmen, an unapologetically literary and political comic book, with Damon Lindelof, a creator of “Lost” and “The Leftovers,” there seemed little chance it would result in a Marvel-style spectacle of C.G.I. and spandex. And it didn’t. The 1980s comic imagined a world in which Richard Nixon never resigned and superheroes became public enemies. Lindelof’s story, anchored by Regina King and set in the same world 34 years later, was a smart, philosophical and metatextual fusillade against America’s legacy of white supremacy and imperial hubris. — Austin Considine
Joel Kim Booster
thinks “Watchmen” honored the original while creating something new.
See his full ballot here.
TV is too rarely boundary-breaking, but Claire Danes’s performance in this espionage thriller was genuinely on the edge. The show’s developers and writers, including Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon and Meredith Stiehm, sketched out the bipolar C.I.A. agent Carrie Mathison, wholly consumed by her job and by her need to prove herself; then Danes fearlessly brought her to life, as Mathison went through cycles of self-destruction and agonizing recovery. Danes was beautifully supported by Mandy Patinkin, as Mathison’s mentor and sometime boss, and Damian Lewis, as the compromised Marine she was obsessed with. — Mike Hale
The aftermath of 9/11 influenced many dramas, like “24” and “Homeland,” but one of the era’s finest examinations of security versus freedom looked to the heavens. This reconception of the 1978 network space opera (cheesy but delightful in its own right) traced the survival struggle of a spacefaring human society under attack from a civilization of fanatical robots, and the existential and ethical dilemmas that followed. Not just a sci-fi thriller or a military drama, this clash of cultures was a searing moral examination of what measures are acceptable in the name of survival. Does this theme still speak to today? So say we all! (Or at least, so say our poll respondents.) — James Poniewozik
Maybe people have skipped “Battlestar Galactica” because they think it might be silly or not for them. The visual effects are very much of the time, but it doesn’t matter at all. What matters are the characters and the unbelievable stories they’re telling. It really pushes the triggers of the imagination to watch that show.
Adam Scott, actor
A show that singlehandedly reinvented the medical procedural drama for the mid-2020s, “The Pitt” retains the best of old network-TV conventions (mystery maladies of the week, verboten office romances) with the fresh perspective of characters and situations so relevant they could almost be documentary (fentanyl overdoses, ICE agents in the E.R.). Led by Noah Wyle’s flawed-yet-noble Dr. Michael Robinavitch, the show’s rich cast of scrambling interns, seen-it-all charge nurses and bloodied citizens makes for genuine must-see viewing — with or without a protective hand flung over your eyes for the gory stuff. — Leah Greenblatt
I wasn’t on “ER” when it first started but it was already a juggernaut. I thought that show had done the medical profession as well as it could be done. You needed to find a new way in. When we came upon the real-time aspect and that very immersive way to go about it, that felt worthwhile to explore.
R. Scott Gemmill, creator, “The Pitt”
Crime shows are often about whodunit, but in some of the best, the cops themselves — their outer failures and inner turmoil — are the ultimate mystery. The first season of Nic Pizzolatto’s “True Detective” doubled that pleasure, featuring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as homicide detectives hunting a serial killer in Louisiana’s Cajun country. Jumping between two timelines, with the director Cary Joji Fukunaga conjuring an eerie, elusive atmosphere throughout, the series felt like a fever broken only by the sobering, standout performances of the stars. — Salamishah Tillet
A cheerful riches-to-rags story, this Canadian comedy starred Eugene Levy, Dan Levy, Annie Murphy and an incandescent Catherine O’Hara as the Rose family, former 1-percenters exiled to a provincial backwater. Giddy and inclusive, the show gradually turned away from the cringe comedy of its early episodes toward something gentler. By the end, everyone in Schitt’s Creek had found some kind of paddle, even the town’s infuriating mayor (Chris Elliott). — Alexis Soloski
A decade before guests checked into “The White Lotus,” Mike White created this nervy, anxious comedy about a woman fighting for inner peace while surrounded by outer buffoonery. An ebullient Laura Dern starred as Amy Jellicoe, a corporate cog trying to grind the gears of late capitalism. Mostly she grinds herself. The series was canceled before a planned third season; in the finale, Amy asks, “Am I crazy?” “No,” her ex-husband (Luke Wilson) tells her. “You’re just full of hope.” — Alexis Soloski
A prequel of a prequel of the original “Star Wars,” “Andor” sounded, in concept, like a franchise snake eating its own tail. What it delivered instead, as Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and comrades schemed to scuttle the bureaucratically evil Empire, was a sprawling, detailed portrait of political rebellion that arrived with striking resonance. And in the process, “Andor” retroactively brought new emotional weight to one of our most enduring pop myths: When Luke Skywalker detonates the Death Star in “Star Wars,” it is the culmination not of one hero’s journey but of thousands of heroes making sacrifices large and small. He had friends everywhere. — Jeremy Egner
The series that popularized the mass-market reality-TV genre has gone on quite a journey, from a shocking, cutthroat, voyeuristic sensation to a familiar, generations-spanning family-viewing institution. It’s both a great game and an endlessly renewable resource, stranding new casts season after season to build mini-societies and then slowly take them apart, competing in physical challenges and social politics to claim a million-dollar prize. You can say it showcases the worst in people or the best — you would be right either way — but it has built a quarter-century of entertainment out of the simple idea that getting along with your fellow castaways is no day at the beach. — James Poniewozik
A portrait of soul-deadening 21st-century office life taken to its (il)logical extreme, “Severance” divides the conscious minds of the obedient worker bees at a monolithic biotech firm into “innies” and “outies” — what happens on either side of the company’s entrance doors stays there. As the employees of Lumon Industries (the cast is led by Adam Scott and Britt Lower) begin to catch a glimmering of the sinister machinations at play beyond their cubicles, the show becomes both a corporate espionage thriller and an existential drama in which the stakes might be no less than the fate of humanity. — Leah Greenblatt
The premise of having an innie and an outie personality is really great. And you don’t have to work in the corporate world or in any professional world to understand what that means. We are as human beings different with whomever we are.
Padma Lakshmi, host and producer, “Top Chef”
If shows like “Fleabag” were TV comedy’s equivalent of a singer-songwriter, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s sketch miracle was its Motown. Their routines had a pop song’s structure: verse-chorus-verse-chorus. Repetition established the rules of the joke, often building to twists that Simone Biles would give a 10. We knew the form, yet the content kept blowing us away, cracking us open, occasionally breaking our hearts. For this show was, with “30 Rock” and “Veep,” the other essential satirical achievement of the Obama era: a biracial duo relentlessly dared to locate racism wherever it lurked and celebrate a Blackness — no: Blacknesses that have survived to roast racism. Blacknesses that, in dozens of sketches, thrived as gloriously enunciated expressions of life. All races are is a bunch of people, and over the course of five ever-evolving seasons, these two threw the people a block party. — Wesley Morris
Bryan Cranston
also loved that “Key & Peele” football sketch.
Three years after they worked together on “Saving Private Ryan,” Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks returned to the western front, creating this absorbing, enveloping mini-series about the World War II experience of a company of American paratroopers. A large and stellar cast — including Damian Lewis, Ron Livingston, Neal McDonough, Kirk Acevedo, Michael Cudlitz, Colin Hanks and Frank John Hughes — played characters based on actual members of Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. When some of the surviving soldiers appeared onscreen at the end of the series, the effect was electrifying. — Mike Hale
Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s “Breaking Bad” prequel was a perennial Emmys loser — the biggest in history — held back undoubtedly by its adjunct status: Without Walter White, there would be no Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk). But that awards season handicap was also among the show’s greatest assets. We all knew where every Albuquerque drug dealer’s favorite lawyer was headed. That made it even more heartbreaking each time he seemed poised to break good.
— Austin Considine
A woman living in a world where humans are ranked on a five-star scale spirals as her social currency falls; two lonely astronauts teleport into their replicated bodies on Earth, to mixed results; a grieving widow recreates her lost love using the digital footprint he left behind. Little is off limits for a show whose first episode featured a prime minister being blackmailed into public sex with a farm animal, but Charlie Brooker’s near-future sci-fi anthology series could be equal parts punishing and tender, surreal and terrifying. Occasionally, it could even be lovely: See the dreamy third-season afterlife idyll “San Junipero.” — Leah Greenblatt
Every loss of a loved one comes with its own questions and a unique stamp of grief. But what happens when the loss is so inexplicable — and so common — that grief becomes an entire macroclimate? In “The Leftovers,” a Rapture-like event claims 2 percent of the world’s humans, and for those left behind survival becomes less a question of “if?” than of “why?” Their answers to that question turned this sci-fi fable into a potent parable about the pain and unexpected pleasures of living with uncertainty. — Austin Considine
A decade after revolutionizing the network cop show with “NYPD Blue,” David Milch reinvented the western for premium cable. The result was violent and hilarious, with lyrically profane dialogue and terrific performances by Timothy Olyphant, Anna Gunn and especially Ian McShane, as the louche but shrewd saloon owner and pimp Al Swearengen, one of TV’s greatest characters. Vulgar and sublime, “Deadwood” embodied both the endless mythologizing of the American West and the often grotesque reality the myths obscure. — Jeremy Egner
“The Comeback” began as a hilariously unsparing portrait of a fading star grasping for relevance. As the sitcom veteran Valerie Cherish, the sitcom veteran Lisa Kudrow inspired laughs, pity, empathy and admiration, often simultaneously, as she tried gamely to give TV executives whatever they wanted that week. Initially that was a reality show; 21 years later it was a comedy written by A.I. With three seasons in three different decades, this Hollywood character study became a longitudinal survey of Hollywood’s evolving anxieties, with Valerie emerging perhaps not on top, but intact and true to herself. — Jeremy Egner
Colman Domingo
on the dark humor of “The Comeback.”
“Guys, where are we?” “Lost,” which stranded a motley bunch of plane-crash survivors on a logic-defying island, ended its bravura two-hour pilot with a question. And it kept adding more to the pile for six tantalizing, imaginative seasons. The series will always be known for its mystery-box approach, which inspired plenty of lesser imitators. But for all of its conundrums — What was the Dharma Initiative? Why the polar bears? — what made it such an efficient pleasure-delivery device were its vibrant characters, its sense of humor and its bottomless capacity for playful, teasing invention. The questions of where, when and why were constantly shifting in this magic-trick of a story, and disorientation never felt so good. — James Poniewozik
Adam Scott
on the TV trope that “Lost” introduced.
Originally conceived as a one-off for HBO in the still-Windexing-our-bananas era of the pandemic, “The White Lotus” went on to become a defining cultural product of the 2020s and perhaps one of television’s last great watercooler shows. Ostensibly, each season centers on a mysterious death at some far-flung luxury resort populated by a disparate group of high-maintenance guests and beleaguered staff (first in Hawaii, then in Sicily and Thailand). But the creator Mike White’s singular gift for lifting the rock on class inequity and vacation-induced lunacy — and then letting the crabs skitter and scurry where they may — is as indelible as the show’s hypnotic ooh-loo-loo theme song. — Leah Greenblatt
Padma Lakshmi
on the social commentary of “The White Lotus.”
Queen and country aged together, not always gracefully, across six decades in Peter Morgan’s seriously entertaining account of the life and times of Elizabeth II. Three great actresses — Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton — played the queen at different stages of her reign, as Britain and the world went through the violent changes of the 20th century and she struggled to keep up. — Mike Hale
Andy Cohen
on watching “The Crown” from this side of the pond.
Forty years on, the explosion at the Chernobyl power plant, in present-day Ukraine, remains the worst nuclear accident in history. Craig Mazin’s urgent, methodical portrait of a meltdown masterfully combined ticking-clock action, tense courtroom drama and biographies of individual loss as heartbreaking as they were infuriating. (The catastrophe, it turns out, was preventable.) The limited series also introduced much of the world to the future Oscar winner Jessie Buckley, who plays a young woman who refused to let her firefighter husband’s excruciating death by radiation exposure go unnoticed. — Leah Greenblatt
He somehow managed to make a show about this event that was bleak and in many ways awful, but also melancholy and uplifting about what people will do when they’re under the gun to save other people’s lives at tremendous cost to themselves. I was in awe of the whole thing.
D.B. Weiss, co-creator, “Game of Thrones”
See his ballot here.
A young woman is raped on a night out in London; the attack comes back to her only in jagged, opaque flashes. In dramatizing her real-life experience for the screen, the ferociously talented writer and actress Michaela Coel turned the concept of autobiographical storytelling — and what constitutes “good” victimhood — on its head. Yes, “Destroy” was about sexual assault. It was also about race, romance, friendship and the vagaries of online fame, related in ways so freshly engaging and expertly shaded (also somehow, often hilarious) that few TV creators have managed to match its bottled electricity before or since. — Leah Greenblatt
Jesse Armstrong
(creator, “Succession”) on the unpredictability of “I May Destroy You.”
See his full ballot here.
For six seasons, America’s best family drama was about a pair of Soviet spies. Created by a former C.I.A. officer, Joe Weisberg, the show was smart, brutal, sexy, funny and increasingly sad, as the sleeper agents Elizabeth and Philip Jennings became more estranged from each other and from their innocent American children. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys gave remarkable, understated performances as the Jenningses; also excellent were Frank Langella and Margo Martindale as their handlers, Noah Emmerich as their F.B.I. foil and Alison Wright in the heartbreaking role of Martha, the secretary who couldn’t help falling in love. — Mike Hale
Voted for by Brian Grazer, producer, “Arrested Development,” “24” and “Friday Night Lights”
See his full ballot here.
Few would expect a bare-bones BBC Two sitcom about a sad paper company to become one of the most influential shows of the century. But that’s what “The Office” did, kicking off a mockumentary trend on TV, helping to codify cringe comedy and launching a bunch of careers: not only for its neophyte creators, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, and its star Martin Freeman, but also for people like John Krasinski and Mindy Kaling, of the hugely successful American version. It’s an impressive return on the investment of 12 short episodes and a Christmas special — David Brent deserves a promotion. — Jeremy Egner
Almost every episode of Alan Ball’s existential family drama began the same way: a death and then the subsequent processing of the loss in the Los Angeles funeral home and house of the Fisher family, a quirky ensemble brilliantly played by Frances Conroy, Peter Krause, Michael C. Hall and Lauren Ambrose. The show was insightful and innovative in its exploration of marital infidelity, abortion, interracial gay partnerships and grief. And its finale was one of TV’s best endings. It underscored what made “Six Feet Under” extraordinarily poignant: its poetic portraits of the disappointments, fears and desires human beings have with and for each other in this life, and perhaps in the next. — Salamishah Tillet
I love “Six Feet Under.” I would put it up there with “The Wire” and “Mad Men.” I’m sure it was a big influence on “Succession” and our thinking in the room about a family show and the almost infinite number of potential relationship shapes.
Jesse Armstrong, creator, “Succession”
See his ballot here.
It didn’t get the respect it deserved: It was shunted to DirecTV to cut costs for its home network, NBC, and it received a single, consolatory outstanding-drama Emmy nomination for its final season. But Peter Berg’s series, based on a book by H.G. Bissinger, proved that a small town in Texas and its high school football team could contain the whole world. No show has been more poignantly realistic about the lives of American teenagers, and few have showcased better acting. Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton excelled as the adults, the married coach and principal. And a large cast, some of them future stars — including Zach Gilford, Michael B. Jordan, Minka Kelly, Taylor Kitsch, Adrianne Palicki and Jesse Plemons — played the kids who grew up, or didn’t, before our eyes. — Mike Hale
When Lena Dunham was barely out of college, she sketched a half-hour comedy about a group of overeducated, underemployed friends in New York who, as she wrote in her pitch to HBO, “have that mix of know-it-all entitlement and scathing self-deprecation that is the mark of all great Jewish comedians and many 24-year-old women with liberal arts degrees.” Remarkably, that is exactly what she made. Messy, ardent and hopeful, the show is indelibly a voice of a generation and a portrait of an artist as a sloppy, ambitious young woman. — Alexis Soloski
Each dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way, but few have been as deliriously funny as the Bluths. Jason Bateman revived his career as Michael, the straight man trying and failing to manage his hopeless relatives. Created by Mitchell Hurwitz, “Arrested Development” delivered bananas story lines (and banana story lines), absurd grace notes (Lucilles, loose seals) and Ron Howard’s wry narration at a speed that left you gasping. The Bluths later reunited, awkwardly, on Netflix, and the show eventually sputtered to an unceremonious conclusion. But did anyone really think this family deserved a happy ending? — Jeremy Egner
When Greg Daniels offered his Americanized adaptation of the British workplace mockumentary “The Office,” fans of the cringey, caustic original could be excused for feeling that it lacked some vital edge. But the American “Office,” swapping in Steve Carell as the hapless regional manager of a struggling paper company, became a cultural phenomenon all its own. Viewers came to root for Michael Scott in a way they never did for David Brent (Ricky Gervais), and they fell in love with characters like Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer), keeping the series in business for nine seasons. — Austin Considine
Where is Atlanta? It’s in north-central Georgia. It’s at the heart of American hip-hop. It’s a regional capital of Black American culture and dynamism. And in this surreal series from Donald and Stephen Glover, about but not limited to the music business, it was a state of mind, a state of precariousness, a state of flux. The series followed a circle of artists and artist-adjacent characters from trap houses to world tours, but it took detours and backroads. Sometimes Atlanta was in Amsterdam. Sometimes it was in the past. Sometimes “Atlanta” was the funniest comedy on TV and sometimes the spookiest drama. What united its fragmented collage was a feel for the uncanniness of life as experienced by its characters, for whom upheaval was a constant. “Atlanta” could be anything and anywhere. And like much great TV, it never let you get too comfortable for too long in one place. — James Poniewozik
Larry David elevated petty grievance to a riotous art form as he gadded about Los Angeles, battling violators of his skewed (but often basically reasonable) code of ethics. They included — but were in no way limited to — free-sample abusers, chat-and-cutters, surly service workers and his own friends, played by, among others, Jeff Garlin, J.B. Smoove and, most indelibly, Susie Essman. The result was a foundational text of cringe comedy, to the point that the show’s bum-bum-bum theme song became the internet’s soundtrack for social misery. — Jeremy Egner
The sitcom’s sitcom. Tina Fey’s effervescent but rigorously structured satire of the TV business distilled a style of pop absurdism that traced back to Lucille Ball and Ernie Kovacs and gave it a Gen X gloss of knowingness and insecurity. Fey’s evocations of show-biz types were so spot-on that they took on allegorical dimensions: Fey as the earnest producer, Jack McBrayer as the clueless page, Jane Krakowski and Tracy Morgan as the narcissistic talent and, most prodigiously, Alec Baldwin as the brilliant, toxic boss. Only someone with an undying love for what she does could have taken it apart so completely. — Mike Hale
Julia Louis-Dreyfus won six consecutive Emmys for her role as the insecure and utterly craven vice president Selina Meyer, which says a lot about how good this HBO political comedy was. Few shows have packed in as many laughs per minute, and even fewer are as brazen (or gloriously profane). But the satire was perhaps even more prescient than its creator, Armando Iannucci, could have known: One almost feels nostalgic for a time when only fake politicians were openly nihilistic and foul-mouthed onscreen. — Austin Considine
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
on why Selina Meyer is essentially a toddler.
This bloody epic about clans battling for power as apocalypse looms was the greatest show on Earth, less in the TV sense than in the Ringling Bros. one: Some Sunday nights, you could barely believe your eyes as the armies, dragons and ice zombies laid vivid waste to Westeros. But the spectacle, gory excesses and contentious ending can now obscure how great “Thrones” could be at the TV stuff, too. The writing was wry and twisty, the world was captivating, and the actors were often outstanding, especially Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, those crazy Lannister kids. Winter eventually came, but it was a show for all seasons. — Jeremy Egner
D. B. Weiss and David Benioff
(creators, “Game of Thrones”) on re-watching their show.
See their full ballot here.
The self-sabotaging, sexually compulsive antiheroine with a gleam in her eye and a curl in her hair; the high-wire mix of galloping comic farce and tragedy; the frequent, winking fourth-wall breaks. As both the creator and star of this two-season wonder, Phoebe Waller-Bridge helped push forward the idea of what a half-hour TV format could do, adapting her one-woman stage show into a brilliantly layered evocation of grief, romance (all hail Hot Priest!) and 30-something coming-of-age, all in less than six hours of screen time. — Leah Greenblatt
It’s so unapologetically self-expressive. She’s incredibly vulnerable while being completely irreverent. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that done so precisely or pitch-perfect before.
Alexis Bledel, actor
See her ballot here.
“I love you, but you are not serious people,” the pugnacious self-made billionaire Logan Roy (Brian Cox) told his four grasping adult offspring early in the final season of this HBO inheritance drama, his face etched with bone-deep paternal disappointment. And yet we were seriously invested in the outcome of the Roy family’s vicious, baroque and often comically absurd power struggles, from the prodigal scheming of Logan’s presumed heir, the hangdog softboy Kendall (Jeremy Strong), to the marital and political whipsaws of his only daughter, Shiv (Sarah Snook). Yes, the very rich are different from you and me; but in the show’s flamboyant mix of damaged princelings and shameless wannabes, human nature found its funhouse mirror. — Leah Greenblatt
In my 36 years in media, I’ve known people like the Roys and the depiction of the lifestyle was exactly as some rarefied people live. I had a hard time with “Succession” at first. They’re all truly horrible people. It’s fascinating that a show with no one to root for could be so thrilling to watch.
Andy Cohen, host and producer
It was, as Don Draper (Jon Hamm) told us in his famous pitch for the Kodak Carousel, a time machine. This series, set in the 1960s and early 1970s ad industry, traded in nostalgia — which as Don noted in that same pitch, is a concept rooted in pain. But it sidestepped period clichés by creating characters from the past who had their own pasts, including personal secrets, memories of war and struggle. It was also a story about storytelling, set among the men — and, eventually, the women — who wrote the tale of American wants, fears and aspirations one ad at a time. With relentless wit and panache, “Mad Men” pitched us a narrative of personal change in fast-changing times. We were sold. — James Poniewozik
Matthew Weiner
(creator, “Mad Men”) wanted the show to feel like real life.
See his full ballot here.
Here is the antihero era’s antihero Olympus: messed up, narcissistic, psychopathic, obnoxious, relentlessly horny Baltimore detectives, drug dealers, dock workers and elected officials wading through a pooling urban catastrophe. It was Dickens, Dostoevsky and “Roots.” It was Jay-Z. It was Frederick Wiseman and an impossible enactment of decades of sociological, journalistic and epidemiological thought. Like “Orange Is the New Black,” its evidently now-dismissable sister (it is nowhere on this list), “The Wire” is a miracle that should never have worked: White people dreaming up Black life; who-dat performers taking star-making turns. And yet its sharp ear, hard nose and foul mouth maintained the illusion that living, breathing people were a breeze to create. It soars above the meticulous rigor of its parts and labor into a “dark corner of the American experiment.” — Wesley Morris
Early in this lab-coated crime epic, the chemistry-teacher-turned-druglord Walter White (Bryan Cranston) explains to his student-turned-accomplice Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) his plan to cook up high-quality crystal meth without using drugstore pseudoephedrine. “Yeah, science!” Jesse exults. “Breaking Bad” was full of technical problem-solving — that was the chemical engine that fueled the ever-accelerating plot. But what made the show incomparable was its humanistic moral investigation, centered on how Walter, a cancer-stricken nebbish with medical bills, descended into villainy. (Or, maybe, how the thrill and glory of criminal success uncloaked the villain always within him.) Exquisitely performed, meticulously shot, “Breaking Bad” grew from its nerd-criminal premise into a sweeping American story of greed and hubris. Yes, there was a science to the show’s thrills and heartbreak. But above all, there was art. — James Poniewozik
Bryan Cranston, Vince Gilligan and Giancarlo Esposito
look back on “Breaking Bad” and its legacy.
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Methodology
In collaboration with The Upshot — a department at The Times focused on data and analytical journalism — we sent ballots to hundreds of stars, showrunners, craftspeople and others in and around the television industry asking them to submit up to 10 choices for the best shows of the 21st century.
Shows could be in any language, and all types of series — scripted, reality, documentary, talk shows, game shows, YouTube, etc. — were eligible. The only requirement was that they debuted on Jan. 1, 2000 or later and contained multiple episodes.
After casting their ballots, voters were given the option to pick which of two randomly selected shows was better in a series of matchups. We combined data from these prompts with the vote tallies to create this list of Top 100 shows, as chosen by our 516 voters.
Streaming service data is provided by JustWatch.
Disney+ had no input into the selection of titles, their ranking or any other editorial decisions.
*Access to these Hulu titles is available via the Disney+ service with a bundle subscription. U.S. residents, 18+ only. Offer valid for eligible subscribers only. Terms apply.