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The 50 Best TV Shows of the 2010s

The decade proved that the future of TV lies in its ability to democractize via technological expansion.

Hannibal
Photo: NBC

We will likely look back at the 2010s as a simpler time, when sea levels remained relatively stable, Disney hadn’t decimated the last remaining movie houses, and there were only three networks: Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. Two thousand and nineteen was a watershed year for the expansion of streaming, so it seems like a fitting moment to reflect on the events that led to the Great War.

If the aughts represented a new golden age of television, then the following decade proved that the future of the medium lies in its ability to democractize via technological growth. Event television has replaced appointment television, as the sheer volume of content continues to balloon and more viewers shift to on-demand viewing. Our expectations, too, have evolved as the format bends and morphs to adapt to its new environment, with years-long gaps between ever-shorter seasons and shows once thought dead resurrected like zombies from our salad days.

And yet, humans crave familiarity: Game of Thrones reinvented the viewing party; networks rebooted or revived well-known properties, albeit to varying degrees of success; and we’ve replaced our old cable bill with an à la carte menu of streaming options that add up to more or less the same price. More importantly, as we venture out into the proverbial Wild West, and as the boundaries between TV and film continue to vanish, one thing remains constant: our desire for stories that reflect who we are, what we fear, what we treasure, and what we find side-splittingly funny. But then, even those lines have begun to blur. Sal Cinquemani



Portlandia

50. Portlandia

The array of archetypes portrayed by Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen on Portlandia aren’t impressive in their scope so much as their narrow specificity, each one delicately carving Portland’s milieu into a well-observed sub-niche. Armisen plays multiple variations of the emasculated goof while Brownstein portrays a bevy of self-righteous killjoys with great aplomb. Yet Portlandia is so much greater than the sum of its caricatures. That the show’s humor is entirely derived from its two co-creators gives it a winning constancy, while the improvisational aspect adds an almost surreal element to much of the dialogue. In fact, the bizarre obsession with food (a mixologist crafts a cocktail with rotten banana and eggshells, 911 dispatchers are inundated with calls from beet-eaters) suggests the fever dream of a very hungry hipster. Peter Goldberg



House of Cards

49. House of Cards

House of Cards allowed David Fincher’s seductive aesthetic sway to carry on well beyond the inaugural diptych he helmed, despite TV’s well-noted preference for story over artistic signature, but that’s almost besides the point. The scheming exploits of Kevin Spacey’s silver-tongued congressman-devil provide a galvanic shock of political satire and thrillingly modern melodrama, but the real hook is Robin Wright’s stirring performance as the politician’s better half—and worse half in the show’s botched final season. In the thick of it, this addictive series convincingly depicts a shifting political landscape, wherein an ascending class of strong and brilliant women retools man’s ruthless personal and professional strategies to better advance a contentious, testosterone-weary nation. Chris Cabin

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Jessica Jones

48. Marvel’s Jessica Jones

Marvel’s Jessica Jones breaks so many molds, and with such brio, that it feels almost super-heroic. In immediately denying us Jessica’s (Krysten Ritter) origin story, it keeps her at arm’s length—a masterstroke because the series understands that it’s a story Jessica isn’t ready to give yet, freely and under her own terms. If the violence on Marvel’s Daredevil, no matter how kinetic and operatic in its brushstrokes, is primed to excite, the violence on Jessica Jones seeks to disarm our pleasure centers. And if this violence is so discomforting, it’s because of how hauntingly, stubbornly, necessarily it’s rooted in the traumas that connect the victims of the ominous Kilgrave (David Tennant). The aesthete in me wishes the series exhibited a more uncommon visual style. At the same time, maybe the show’s portrait of abuse, of heroes and villains whose shows of strength and mind control are so recognizably human, wouldn’t exert half the chill that it does it didn’t approach us so unassumingly. Ed Gonzalez



Killing Eve

47. Killing Eve

With Killing Eve—which Phoebe Waller-Bridge adapted from author Luke Jennings’s Villanelle series—she uses the whip-smart voice she employed in Fleabag to explore women whose bad behavior extends beyond the limits of rapacious sexuality and crass humor: specifically, to murderous psychopaths. The series suggests a delightfully demented, considerably more violent spin on Broad City, Insecure, and Fleabag. Those shows are wryly comical and sexually frank, with complex female relationships at their center, and Killing Eve brings us all those attributes in the guise of a crackerjack mystery. The series combines a dry comedy’s affection for the mundane with the slick look and tone of a psychosexual thriller, and the result is something wholly original, suspenseful, and caustically funny. Julia Selinger



Sherlock

46. Sherlock

Sherlock has always shown a keen but loving disregard for its source material. Despite serving up a bevy of classical crime-solving tropes, its fluid aesthetic and modern-day realism eschew the stuffy reverence of countless other re-toolings of Arthur Conan Doyle’s celebrated series. Instead, co-creators Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat have allowed Benedict Cumberbatch to chart his own course as a character who’s become a landmark of fiction. The actor effortlessly owns the role with his ice-cold stares and burly voice, and yet what makes the series such a distinct interpretation is how it envisions the complicated relationship between Sherlock Holmes and his partner, John Watson (Martin Freeman), whose everyman humanity serves as a spiritual contrast to the impenetrable title character’s isolated genius. Ted Pigeon



Ramy

45. Ramy

It’s the tension between Ramy’s (Ramy Youssef) secular and spiritual leanings that serves as the thrust of the Hulu series that bears his name, as he considers what kind of person—what kind of Muslim, son, and man—he wants to be. Intensely critical of himself, Ramy recognizes that he’s done much self-mythologizing, mostly in regard to his religious observance, and acutely feels his lapses in judgment, and Ramy derives its soulfulness from the ruins of the myths that Ramy and his family and friends tell themselves and those around them. There’s profound pain to be found amid the rubble. And, maybe, peace. Niv M. Sultan

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Treme

44. Treme

David Simon and Eric Overmeyer’s abbreviated fade-out on post-Katrina New Orleans is tattered yet hopeful, perfect in its soulful imperfections. Decisions in the Big Easy are slowed down by good booze and better boogie, and by the time the Big Chief (Clark Peters) bows out, very little about this intoxicating menagerie of musicians and other truth-seekers has been convincingly settled on. Life’s not tidy in the Treme and the show’s creators let all the bad omens hang out, including the impending birth of Delmond’s (Rob Brown) first child and Janette’s (Kim Dickens) third restaurant opening. Of course, all the trouble made the music sound all the sweeter, as careers begin to congeal and legacies found (temporary) footing amid the city’s riotous buzz. The fat lady is singing for Treme, and she’s belting it out loud, if not for long. Cabin



The Handmaid’s Tale

43. The Handmaid’s Tale

Few television shows can match the commitment of The Handmaid’s Tale to withholding catharsis from audiences. The series, which maintains a visual lyricism that both clashes with and magnifies the brutality on screen, is most heartbreaking during moments of doubt, when Elisabeth Moss’s June appears resigned to her fate. Yet it consistently obscures her true motivation, mining mystery from her submissiveness: Is it genuine, or another tactic? When she’s able to seize, however briefly, the upper hand from her tormentors, the series offers tantalizing glimpses of their chagrin. For a moment, we’re prompted to envision that chagrin morphing into sorrow, shame, maybe even fear. That would spell some kind of catharsis, but until it actually arrives, The Handmaid’s Tale remains intellectually nourishing, easy to admire, and difficult to endure. It’s a beautiful test of stamina, offering only small reprieves from June’s suffering. It embeds us alongside her, and remains dedicated to illustrating how exactly the villains can win. Michael Haigis



High Maintenance

42. High Maintenance

High Maintenance more than made good on its transition from the Internet to HBO. Its intimacy has been retained, and yet the narrative strands have grown more thoughtfully variable and distinct in their reflection of the adult rituals, wild yearning, and long-overdue release that power the denizens of New York City’s boroughs, revealing their neuroses, deep-seated fears, self-delusions, and artful exercises. More than ever, the show’s tapestry of unexpected connections and backstories reach deeper into the quotidian experiences of city life. Cabin



Primal

41. Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal

Genndy Tartakovsky’s work as an animator is most striking for its embrace of silence. Even in the cacophonous realm of children’s cartoons, the Samurai Jack creator favors wordless moments that lean on the flapping of cloth in the wind or the exaggerated sounds of a clenching fist. Adult Swim’s Primal, then, feels like something Tartakovsky has been building to for much of his career, a dialogue-free miniseries following a caveman and his T. rex partner fighting to survive in a violent, unforgiving world. The show’s violence is a reflection of its characters’ existence, a cycle from which there’s no escape. Children are swallowed whole, prey is devoured on the spot, eyeballs are smashed in by rocks, and dino jaws are smeared in vivid red blood. The story of the caveman and T. rex’s survival, in Tartakovsky’s hands, is totally enthralling, as terrible as it is beautiful. Steven Scaife

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Game of Thrones

40. Game of Thrones

The character of Westeros, how its borders are constantly being rewritten by the various clans who live throughout it and jockey for its ultimate power, is the grand focus of Game of Thrones. Menace is constantly brimming, chaos a promise, and while the series didn’t always walk the finest of lines between political theater, soap opera, and gonzo pulp, it eased its typically steely fixation on this dominion’s intricate political machinations by focusing more on how they intersect with emotional and psychological trauma. As tragedies continued to literally and figuratively cleave families and friends apart, dispersing them across the many realms of Westeros, the ardent focus on, say, a dwarf’s defiance against those who wish him dead, or a little girl’s existential resolve to return to wherever there may be a home for her, revealed how the personal is inextricably bound to the political in this fantastical universe. Gonzalez



Louie

39. Broad City

With the sole exception of Louie, no other modern series has proven capable of simultaneously finding the wonder, absurdity, and indomitable hassle of living in New York’s five boroughs with such unerring verve and humor as Broad City. The perils of making extra scratch with nanny and babysitting gigs, the lunacy of a nine-to-five at a start-up, and the wide-eyed rapture that comes from discovering and returning to the small stretch of real estate known as St. Marks are all crucial bits of story that are scattered throughout Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobsen’s uproarious series, and that’s not even getting into their dating lives. These loopy, imaginative adventures, however, only thinly veil a distinctly feminine, experienced perspective of what it’s like to be young, ambitious, and dead broke in NYC, and yet somehow, the series never even hints at stressing pathos. New York is an exhausting place to live, work, and mate, but Jacobsen and Glazer look beyond the inherent cynicism that comes with the MetroCard and the Film Forum retrospective pamphlet to see the still potent magic of this place and its people. Cabin



Master of None

38. Master of None

The first season of Master of None focused mainly on food-obsessed metrosexual Dev’s (Aziz Ansari) prototypically millennial attempts to attain a solid footing in his love and work lives, with his stabs at making it in showbiz sometimes complicated by his Indian-American ethnicity. In the second season, Dev’s career and love life more often retreated into the background to make room for other issues—and other points of view. One episode, “New York City, I Love You,” shifted between a series of characters, like doormen and cab drivers, who generally appear only in passing in Dev’s travels through the city, and Dev was just a supporting character in “Thanksgiving,” a delicately told tale of how his friend, Denise (Lena Waithe), came out as gay, first to him and then to her mother and grandmother. Those two standout episodes, plus bits in others like Dev’s decision to out himself as a pork eater to his Muslim parents, transformed Master of None from a very good rom-com about late adolescence in urban America to a rallying cry for the soul of the nation. Elise Nakhnikian



Dear White People

37. Dear White People

The knowingly didactic title of Dear White People is a little misleading. While the show does occasionally address its incisive racial critiques directly to the viewer, the intoxicating quality of Justin Simien’s series comes from a sense of overarching relatability. As with the film that inspired it, Dear White People follows a sprawling cast of college students, united by skin color but individually shaped by distinct experiences. Though the series is about the myriad ways they respond to their overwhelmingly white surroundings, its characterizations are complicated by matters that sometimes don’t have to do with race. Dear White People shows us passionate individuals crafting their own identities, without ever letting us forget that to do so they are wresting that power from the people who’ve historically done it for them. Haigis

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The Haunting of Hill House

36. The Haunting of Hill House

Created, written, and directed by Mike Flanagan, who’s unmatched in his ability to tune audiences into the strain and intensity of characters’ tortured psyches, The Haunting of Hill House is less than an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 gothic horror novel of the same name than an echo of it. The series, at least until its disarmingly hopeful finale, leaves you with a depressing and melancholy impression that there may actually be no escape from whatever it is that’s haunting the Crain family. And there’s a sense that all five of the Crain siblings seem to understand as much, each and every one of them throwing themselves into their work or shrinking into their addictions, sometimes both, as if hoping to discover something to the contrary. It’s as they’re all perpetually standing on a bridge between the real and the ethereal, uncertain of where to go. Gonzalez



Big Mouth

35. Big Mouth

Netflix’s Big Mouth is continued evidence against the dubious argument that P.C. culture has made it impossible for comedians to be edgy. As a subject for an animated sitcom, the sex lives of 13-year-olds constitutes an ethical, political, and cultural minefield—one that the graphic and logorrheic Big Mouth gives the impression of approaching blindfolded and in a headlong rush. But there’s a method to its mania: Even while firing an entire volley of cum jokes at viewers every few seconds, the series covers topics like female masturbation, slut shaming, incel masculinity, biphobia, social media addiction, and the gay teen experience with a heartening frankness that belies its apparent irreverence. Pat Brown



The Deuce

34. The Deuce

The Deuce provides typically revealing insights into elements of ’80s New York City that are underserved even in other texts which seek to lionize the era. The show’s presentation of Times Square entails a kind of shadow history, about everything from cops harassing building owners to the nascent AIDS crisis. The Deuce positions its prostitutes, porn stars, mobsters, and bohemians as dinosaurs, mostly unaware of their looming extinction, from disease, the advent of home video, and the real estate boom. By continuing to confine its totemic New York figures—the mobsters, barmen, and sleaze-balls—to plodding and static storylines, the series demythologizes them, suggesting that the cultural touchstones of New York history were just subjects to the fiscal whims of the city’s influential, faceless money movers. Haigis



Horace and Pete

33. Horace and Pete

Louis C.K. resists the insidious striving for faux-“reality” that governs so much popular art. Horace and Pete is defiantly artificial, calling attention to its own construction, which oxymoronically empowers the series to plumb emotional realms unreached by most television, rendering it vividly real. The wedding of TV-industry formalities with C.K.’s own obsessively verbose parables of tolerance and empathy cumulatively serves to interrogate the “rules” of anticipation and payoff that govern most TV shows, questioning the rules of social life by extension and implication, pinpointing the arbitrariness of much convention, highlighting the control over our own lives that we unquestioningly cede. C.K.’s freedom and confidence as an artist serve as a counterpoint to the constriction felt by his characters. Chuck Bowen

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Bored to Death

32. Bored to Death

Bored to Death, the series that enabled the formation of the improbably winning ensemble of Jonathan Schwartzman, Ted Danson, and Zach Galifianakis, started its life as a witty satire of Brooklyn hipsterdom and sexual neurosis couched in the conventions of film noir. While that critique survived, the kinetic energy of its leads gradually transformed Bored to Death into a perfectly pitched, modern screwball comedy. Equal parts Freud and Sturges, the series found its style and Schwartzman, Danson, and Galifianakis established themselves as some of the most nuanced comic actors in the business. Philip Maciak



Chernobyl

31. Chernobyl

Though Chernobyl isn’t without the familiar, awkward elements of docudrama—strained exposition, summary speeches—it successfully drowns out the clanging gears of historical reenactment through the sheer quality of its construction. This is less a miniseries as five-hour movie than episodic television, with new narrative wrinkles introduced each week. It’s unrelentingly grim material—one episode shows the men assigned to kill the irradiated pets that evacuees from the Chernobyl nuclear accident had left behind—as well as totally engrossing, a deadly puzzle solved piece by piece with unorthodox solutions that give way to potentially ruinous complications. In exploring the context around the disaster’s response, Chernobyl finds empathy for the affected as well as outrage for the human failures that led to the explosion—the hubris, greed, the ignorance, and the clear preference for believing nothing is wrong. Scaife



Russian Doll

30. Russian Doll

The premise of Netflix’s Russian Doll, in which Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) keeps dying during her 36th birthday party only to awaken each time at the start of the night, suggests a playfully morbid Escher painting. The fact that the series doesn’t address the specific root of Nadia’s predicament, though, invites a number of interpretations. And by glossing over the precise details of its central mystery, it resists reducing Nadia’s quest to a simplistic morality tale. Without ever suggesting that she must alter herself to meet the expectations of others, Russian Doll maintains an astute understanding of which aspects of Nadia are permanent and which are malleable. It suggests that the parts of her that need changing, like her self-loathing and emotional numbness, relate primarily to her own happiness rather than virtue or goodness. The series seems to make the case that morality is relative, amorphous, and immaterial. Haigis



Legion

29. Legion

Legion is an extremely effective as a plunge into sheer narcissism. To engage with David (Dan Stevens), the show’s protagonist, and its ever-shifting reality, is to experience the sensation of being gaslit firsthand. Creator Noah Hawley has publicly cited David Lynch as an inspiration for the series, and while Legion does possess a Lynchian sense of unmooring suspense, the weirdness can also merely forestall whatever intelligible vision of David’s arc the series is approaching. It occasionally hints at offering elusive truths about David’s nature, but just as often seems to be building toward an opaque conclusion for the character: one in which David, and his fragmented mind, simply might not be understandable in any conventional sense. Still, in its attempt to provide both character study and pure, unhinged abstraction, Legion fashions a visually distinct and uniquely bizarre glimpse into one man’s unknowable mind. Haigis

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Bob’s Burgers

28. Bob’s Burgers

Growing pains and nostalgia for youth continue to provide the grist for Bob’s Burgers’s finest flights of alternately absurd and poignant fancy. The heart of the show’s empathetic regard for family, its devotion to the attachment of parenting, is in the way it perpetually catches the show’s children anarchically teetering on the precipice of adulthood, their parents infiltrating their youthful reveries, often perversely and sans condescension, in order to help the little ones realize their sense of independence. Gonzalez



Parks and Recreation

27. Parks and Recreation

Comedy is timing and Parks and Recreation proved that not all good comedy is whip-fast and frenetically paced. The series doesn’t deal so much in jokes as it does in memorable slogans that perfectly encapsulate character. It’s extremely low on stakes—even for a comedy. In spite of the show’s willingness to embrace change, Parks and Recreation remains deeply aware that repetition is largely what drives viewers to keep coming back for more. Goldberg



The Girlfriend Experience

26. The Girlfriend Experience

Season two of The Girlfriend Experience doubled down on the alternating structure of the first season, in which co-creators Amy Seimetz and Lodge Kerrigan took turns writing and directing episodes that pertained to a single story of prostitution and corporate espionage. Seimetz and Kerrigan each create their own narratives, allowing them to address the self-exploitation of our “gig” culture in vastly differing fashions. Seimetz offers a warm, sensual, and comic story of an urban escort, Bria (Carmen Ejogo), who’s rendered a fish out of water when she’s relocated to New Mexico via Witness Protection. Seimetz’s suggestive sex scenes emphasize the absurdist sensuality of the imagination, with Paul (Harmony Korine) arising as an unforgettable parody of how men are learning to exploit women via pretensions of feminism. Meanwhile, Kerrigan more traditionally continues the aesthetic of the first season, physicalizing political gamesmanship via curt and hard-edged sex scenes that push the line as to what’s permitted on television, with fellatio offered up as an especially memorable conduit of gender resentment. Cumulatively, a sad, experimental, fragmented series grew even more adventurous, blurring an increasingly eroding line between cable television and independent filmmaking. Bowen



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

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

Twenty-one years after the O.J. Simpson trial surfaced a racial divide that came as news to many white people, America is once again grappling with shocking evidence of that divide. Maybe that’s why this year brought us two excellent serialized tales of the trial, O.J.: Made in America and this case study of how justice can be warped by forces like fame, money, racism, and sexism. The People v. O.J. Simpson uses reenactments of key parts of the trial and behind-the-scenes dramatizations of Simpson (Cuba Gooding Jr.), his “Dream Team” of defense attorneys, and his prosecutors to surface the central irony of his case: A man whose fame granted him special treatment by nearly everyone avoided conviction for a crime he almost certainly committed by claiming to have been framed by police who actually cut him extra slack. Examining those events through the lens of our slightly more progressive time allows us to see some things more clearly, including how shamefully Marcia Clark (Sarah Paulson) and battered wife Nicole Simpson were mistreated. Nakhnikian

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Justified

24. Justified

Justified’s gloriously propulsive final season didn’t quite stick the ultimate landing, ending on a note, somewhat similar to Mad Men’s conclusion, that’s too determined to stuff compellingly unstable characters into staple places. And while we’re carping, Avery Markham’s (Sam Elliott) master plan, after so many episodes’ worth of wonderful, careful buildup, seemed so distressingly small once the dust settled over the entire arc. For all the clout this villain exuded, he simply always hired more goons in the face of escalating warfare with Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) and Boyd (Walton Goggins). But the anticlimax of that revelation indicates the show’s sense of humor and political maturity. The difference between a Boyd, a deadly scrapper, and an Avery, a thug with a patina of class, is understood to be one of luck of the social draw. Bowen



Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

23. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

There are countless songs about people who are “crazy in love,” but only Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was, well, crazy enough to actually live in the reality of such lyrics. Spot-on parodies of artists as diverse as the Spice Girls and R. Kelly help to cushion what’s often very dark material, from alcoholism to abortion. The show also makes everyday heartbreak a little more manageable, as when the memories of a bad breakup are brought to life by a pair of singing ghosts who, after breaking out the old soft shoe, bring a whole new meaning to “tapping that ass.” As in Sondheim’s best musicals, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s quick-witted lyrics manage to seamlessly mash together highbrow literary references with the kitsch of Sweet Valley High, all without ever missing a note. Take it from Rachel Bloom, the show’s creator and star: When life gives you lemons, make a spoof of Lemonade. Aaron Riccio



GLOW

22. GLOW

In Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch’s exhilaratingly bawdy and empathetic GLOW, frustrated actresses are liberated by reveling in male fantasies of whores and housewives, as the series concerns the unresolvable irony of finding freedom by assuming control of one’s own means of social reduction. Set in the 1980s, GLOW follows the formation of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, which embraces wrestling’s propensity for racial and sexual stereotypes. Ruth “Zoya the Destroya” Wilder (Alison Brie) anchors the series, with her moving desperation to confirm her talent as an actor, but the breakout characters are Debbie “Liberty Belle” Eagan (Betty Gilpin), a former soap opera star who realizes that wrestling is just a soap for men, and Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron), a has-been B-movie director who coaches the ladies through their transformations, merging his fantasies with their own. GLOW’s poignancy stems from how Sylvia casually comes to see that he, an alcoholic womanizer on the fringes of the entertainment industry, shares something vital with his objectified performers: a yearning for scrappy grace, and a hustler’s understanding of sensationalism as the manna of American life. Bowen



Silicon Valley

21. Silicon Valley

As he displayed in Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill, as well as in the best portions of Office Space and Idoicracy, Mike Judge has a chameleonic ear for the specificities of varying work cultures. With Silicon Valley, he immediately seized on the infuriatingly hypocritical messiah poses of companies like Google, with their “voluntary” outdoor meetings and insidiously manipulative platitudes that foster free thinking, as long as it’s in sync with the right free thinking. Densely plotted, unsentimental, and matter-of-factly ruthless, Silicon Valley demands that more attention be paid to the presiding overlords of the macro who casually write the micro subtleties of our everyday lives. Bowen

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Succession

20. Succession

HBO’s Succession derives its acerbic satire from envisioning real-world corporate mergers as hostile takeovers performed by bullies and proxy wars waged between families with the wealth of developing nations. The morally bankrupt, mostly bumbling, but never harmless Roy family constitutes a garish caricature of billionaire excess. In season two, as they attempt to stave off their company’s acquisition by absorbing a news competitor, Succession underlines the moral bankruptcy which flows from the Roys’ unfettered avarice, while simultaneously lamenting the poisonous toll such greed can take. Haigis



Transparent

19. Transparent

Creator Jill Soloway’s sun-splotched dramedy, starring Jeffrey Tambor as a trans woman working through the consequences of coming out to her wayward adult children, possesses the faded magic of a home movie. While deftly shifting between past and present, however, Transparent carved out a vision of television’s future—a warm, multilayered, faintly radical portrait of the modern family from an internet-shopping behemoth and an indie writer-director. In other words, it’s a work of unexpected, imperfect alchemy, inviting not merely admiration, but something like love. Matt Brennan



Barry

18. Barry

Surreal flourishes lace Barry, conveying in precise but poignant fashion how its eponymous character’s trauma has caused him to live in a fugue state. But the show’s dark comedy is still largely derived from stark juxtapositions of violence and humor. While the series portrays its underworld as the province of bumbling and affable lords, its directors frame violence with a matter-of-fact sensibility, emphasizing the yawning gap between whimsy and outright danger in Barry’s world. As he strives to bridge the gap between the person he is and the one he wants to be, the show’s central source of pathos is his (and our) dawning understanding that it may not be possible, and that he may not even deserve it. Haigis



Enlightened

17. Enlightened

It’s fitting how Enlightened’s trajectory serendipitously mirrored the journey of its protagonist, Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern). The little series that could until it couldn’t told the story of how one broken woman’s quest for personal rehabilitation increasingly involved those around her, jostling them from their comfort zones. Unfortunately, her surrounding environment, akin to the bulk of HBO’s regular viewership, apparently wasn’t quite as prepared for change as she was. When the second season came to a close, every door was left open for a third, with the show’s characters finally feeling as if they were ready to embrace true reformation. Which is a shame, because the TV landscape needs more shows that push dramatic boundaries not with shock tactics, but with quiet, insightful fury. Mike LeChevallier

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Mindhunter

16. Mindhunter

Mindhunter’s first season distinguished itself from other crime shows by offering an origin story, dramatizing how the F.B.I. forged its Behavioral Science Unit. It reminded audiences that institutions and corresponding notions of reality have to be invented and manipulated, and creator Joe Penhall and co-executive producer David Fincher rhymed this social invention with one of a more personal sort. The show’s second season is both epic and intimate in its sprawl, collapsing dozens of famous crime stories together, revealing the intricate intersections between personal and political neuroses. The season is so stirring for showing how murder mysteries reflect every element of society, and are therefore on certain levels almost inherently unsolvable. To understand an element of human nature is to know how truly little one knows. Bowen



The Knick

15. The Knick

The Knick proves that a filmmaker can take refuge in the roomy, plot-centric realm of television without losing the strengths they bring from their first medium. Steven Soderbergh frequently imparted more information about the characters and the milieu in a succinct, un-showy tracking shot than a routine drama can fit into an hour’s running time. The plot, a collection of soap operas set within a crumbling New York City hospital at the dawn of the 20th century, mattered only as containment; it was the canvas on which Soderbergh rendered his virtuosic brush strokes. The director’s true achievement was to create a historical past that was bracingly alive and rife with inscrutably tactile energies that transcended the deadening, sanitized platitudes with which classroom textbooks insidiously traffic. Bowen



Better Things

14. Better Things

Much of the discussion around Pamela Adlon’s Better Things has, unfortunately, surrounded the ignominious departure of the show’s co-creator, Louis C.K. The series hasn’t merely survived his absence, but actually thrived as a result. The series continues to address her struggles with characteristic frankness: Whether Sam is wrestling to fit into clothes she only recently purchased, or preparing for a colonoscopy (memorably outlined in painstaking detail), Better Things focuses squarely on the impact that routine indignities take on her. But the series is far from a mere lament; it also fixates on the joys and sense of peace—a romantic entanglement with a therapist, a reconciliation with a friend—that she finds even in the midst of enduring life’s hard knocks. The affirming Better Things stares boldly at anxieties as universal as atrophy and regret, and concludes that the daily struggle of life is still worth undertaking. Haigis



Girls

13. Girls

Girls’s friction springs from Lena Dunham’s apparent willingness to try anything: One week, Hannah (Dunham) is a slapstick cartoon straight out of the dumbest of rom-coms, the next she’s a vividly frightened and confused young woman of startling pathos. The show’s biggest surprise was Marnie (Allison Williams), who blossomed from an often mean-spirited, vacuous joke to a universal embodiment of the longing that comes from watching all your young friends “find themselves” while you seemingly await for your life to arrive on the periphery. Dunham’s walking a high-wire, and, like Woody Allen before her, our sense of her character and the persona of her character’s creator have inseparably fused, informing her work with an element of immediacy that was magnified by the show’s unexpected divergence into pure melodrama. Bowen

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Better Call Saul

12. Better Call Saul

After four seasons, Better Call Saul has more than established itself as a devious inversion of the series that originated it. Audiences once took pleasure in seeing Walter White break bad, traveling down his predetermined—and over-quoted—path of going from Mr. Chips to Scarface. There’s comparatively little pleasure in Jimmy McGill’s equally predetermined descent into the shoes of criminal lawyer Saul Goodman. For what fun montages and schemes may crop up along the way (the Free Will Baptist Church con is an all-timer), there’s a real dread in knowing how he ends up. The series has simply been too good at showing his heart, at giving a glimpse of the man who might have been; we don’t want to let go. Scaife



Survivor

11. Survivor

Initially viewed by some as part a fad of reality competition shows in the early aughts, the enduring social experiment that is Survivor will celebrate its 20th anniversary this year. And while the series at times betrays its age with an overreliance on fan favorites, C-list celebrity contestants, and gimmicks designed to goose its format, the show’s fundamentals remain stronger than ever. Even as it enters its third decade, Survivor continues to reflect the times in powerful, poignant, and often socially constructive ways. The show’s 39th season was marked by the castaways’ nimble and thoughtful navigation of race and gender politics, which was juxtaposed with other contestants’—and, crucially, the producers’—clumsy reaction to a case of sexual misconduct. Yes, it’s thrilling to watch people who deserve it see their lives changed with a million dollar check, but it’s the lives that are altered from this social petri dish of an experience that continue to make Survivor one of the most consistently compelling shows on TV. Cinquemani



Twin Peaks: The Return

10. Twin Peaks: The Return

In 1990, Twin Peaks tossed a Molotov cocktail into TV land, inventing modern prestige programming in the process. Twenty-seven years later, Twin Peaks: The Return detonated the now numbing consistency of such television. The Return is pure poetry conceived by David Lynch and Mark Frost on an epic scale, about how America has betrayed an image of community that was reflected by the lurid daydreams of the original Twin Peaks. The Return’s incomprehensible murder mystery houses hundreds of anecdotes, set in multiple dimensions and timelines, pertaining to the dashed dreams of lost souls who’re finding it difficult to live in the conservative small-town fantasy of Twin Peaks, as the reality of diminished opportunity and isolation encroaches. Story is less important than aching, supple tonality, which Lynch, who directed every episode, orchestrates with the finesse of a macabre, humanist maestro. Iconic Agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is split into multiple incarnations, searching for personal and social unity. In one of the most haunting finales in television, Cooper finds a way to go home again, inadvertently unearthing the disenfranchised America that retreats to reboots as a means of remembering a vision of a past that never existed. Bowen



The Leftovers

9. The Leftovers

Brutal. Bleak. Depressing. Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s stunning vision of a world peering into the abyss of the Sudden Departure, in which two percent of the population inexplicably vanishes, thoroughly deserves each of these adjectives. They’re high praise, for The Leftovers emerged, haltingly, as television’s most honest depiction of individual and collective grief. Indeed, though allusions to the spiritual shadow the series throughout, in the form of prophets and pogroms, Rapture and religious conviction, the horror of The Leftovers is ultimately existential: The residents of picturesque Mapleton, New York confront despair in distinct, often mercurial ways but all share in the fear of meaninglessness itself. Brennan

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BoJack Horseman

8. BoJack Horseman

More than any other of modern television’s prestige offerings, BoJack Horseman is at once edifying and infantile. It tosses out literary witticisms with ease and dots its assiduously composed backgrounds with visual and linguistic larks that will have you reaching for the pause button. And yet, for all its trenchant banter and adroit wordplay, it’s the Netflix series’s painful earnestness that makes it brilliant—the way it uses fantasy to address reality and its many barbarities, the unescapable consequences of selfishness, the collateral damage of self-destruction, the corrosive effects of mental illness. It’s a serious show, but not self-serious. Greg Cwik



Louie

7. Louie

Despite being critically acclaimed throughout its entire five-season run, Louis C.K.’s form-shattering Louie doesn’t appear on almost any other publication’s list of the best TV of the decade. Which is a shame, as the series essentially invented the auteur sitcom, lacing a typical “day in the life of a comedian” template, a la Seinfeld, with an obsessiveness that recalls the films of Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman. The series is aesthetically striking, with jittery handheld camera that suggests a crime show and a narrative structure that mutates from season to season. It began with episodes composed of a few separate vignettes, suggesting the arbitrariness of day-to-day life, only to grow into multiple-episode arcs that suggested feature films, and then return to vignettes that offered fragments of memory and hallucination. For being so caustically, mercilessly funny, Louie is highly attuned to emotional sickness. C.K.’s on-screen surrogate infamously almost rapes a friend, played by real-life collaborator Pamela Adlon, and many of the character’s lovers are either fantasy archetypes or women who are viscerally understood to be in the throes of disappointment and despair. Madness, needfulness, and sensuality explode from C.K.’s imagery, as he lingers on the homeless people of NYC, the intoxication of Miami nightlife, and the terror of Afghanistan, among other milieus. What emerges is a portrait of a self-absorbed man trying to transcend his own demons for the sake of an empathy that has thus far eluded C.K. Bowen



The Americans

6. The Americans

How quickly things change. The fifth season of The Americans ended with Elizabeth (Keri Russell) tacitly accepting that she’s bought the fantasy of the American capitalist dream. Flash-forward a year to the morally uneasy finale of the series and Elizabeth looks out of over a Russian skyline and utters, “We’ll get used to it.” We may never know if she actually believes that to be true. More certain is that, some 20 minutes into the episode, The Americans pulled off its greatest coup. Inside a parking garage, the world collapsing around them, Elizabeth and Philip (Matthew Rhys) are confronted by Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), and for the next 10 minutes Philip pulls a perfect high-wire act that puts the Jennings’ almost eight-year-long gaslighting of their neighbor into dazzlingly broad context. Philip’s bravura, a brilliantly controlled articulation of everything that was real and less than real about his friendship to Stan, is at once stinging and vulnerable—and the perfect distillation of everything that made The Americans one of the greatest modern-day television shows. Gonzalez



Fleabag

5. Fleabag

Fleabag’s messiness is what makes it feel so authentic. The show’s thematic questions are broad, its history is spooned out over time instead of at the most convenient expositional moments, and its characters are at once detailed and vague enough to suggest lives being lived, regardless of whether or not they’re lived on camera. Even the smallest roles are ascribed idiosyncrasies that allude to actual personhood, to say nothing of the depth and understanding displayed through the show’s main characters. With those characters and their histories now mostly clear to the audience, season two moves along a somewhat less bold, more conventional path compared to last season, which constantly doubled back by recontextualizing and reexamining itself. Despite this more straightforward approach, though, the series still boasts creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s unmistakable voice and her witty, resonant characterizations. Scaife

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Breaking Bad

4. Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad went down with guns a blazin’, and while it may not have stuck the landing, too forcefully striving as it did to sentimentally redeem Bryan Cranston’s Walter White, its final stretch of eight breathlessly constructed episodes corroborated that Vince Gilligan’s great American tragedy would belong to the ages. In the desert standoff been money-hungry crooks, in Skyler (Anna Gunn) not so reluctantly allowing herself to play the Lady Macbeth to her drugpin husband and recommend Jesse’s (Aaron Paul) murder, and in a poolside hug between father and son (RJ Mitte) that caps a conversation impossibly and depressingly layered with deceit, this great series continued to articulate, and with unnerving clarity, empathy, and flashes of dark humor, how our brutally exclusionary American dream makes monsters out of the men and the women who chase after it. Gonzalez



Mad Men

3. Mad Men

Cool tomcat and longtime shape-shifter Don Draper (Jon Hamm) may have found yet another way to adapt in the final scene of this elegant series, but he spent most of the final season sidelined as people he once eclipsed without even trying—like his long-suffering colleagues Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) and Joan (Christina Hendricks), and his freethinking wife, Megan (Jessica Paré)—began to come into their own. As the series completed the arc it had been slowly building for eight years, Mad Men left us with an indelible portrait of the root-deep changes that shook up American culture in the 1950s and ’60s, both for better, as in the emergence of feminism and civil rights, and worse, as exemplified by the increasing cynicism and sophistication of the pitches the gang at Sterling Cooper developed to sell America to itself. Nakhnikian



Atlanta

2. Atlanta

Like Twin Peaks: The Return, there’s a sense that anything can happen in Atlanta, as comedy mingles with violence and transcendence with a liquidity that feels simultaneously spontaneous and preordained. The most uncomfortable moments of the show’s first season, such as the killing of a gun-running Uber driver, are the rule in Robbin’ Season rather than the exception. The first season’s lighter, frothier moments—the ones that kept it more or less tethered to the formula of a modern, upscale single-camera TV comedy for erudite young liberals—are pared away in the second season. The characters are chillier and more aloof, defensive, and hostile. Part of this new discomfort stems from what is murkily implied to have occurred in the characters’ lives. We’re made intensely aware of our limitations as spectators. Bowen



Hannibal

1. Hannibal

In the third and final season of Hannibal, creator Bryan Fuller and his talented team resolutely doubled down on the show’s figurative agency, embracing atmospheric dread and sensuality as the ultimate signposts of human character. This amazing horror soap opera will haunt mainstream television in the same fashion with which Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) lingers over his symbolic lover and rotating bête noire, Will (Hugh Dancy), casting a pall over the medium that’s really a dare. Like David Lynch before him, Fuller shined a light over TV’s capacity for eccentric, expressionist, follow-thy-master poignancy. Television is often compared to the novel, in an over-compensating effort to elevate its reputation. What if it were to emulate a short story or poetry collection, in which every tale, or every stanza, is unique yet cumulatively webbed together by their creator’s obsessive, reaching curiosity? Bowen

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