Breaking Bad is the only television series in history with a higher IMDB rating than either The Godfather or Schindler's List as rated by a comparable number of viewers. The 9.5 it carries, backed by 2.6 million votes, is not the product of a devoted niche audience -- it is the consensus verdict of an enormous cross-section of the viewing public. Bryan Cranston's Walter White is the most completely realised character arc in the medium: a man who begins as a victim of circumstance and ends as the architect of his own catastrophe, each step of the transformation so carefully motivated that the audience follows him into positions they know are wrong and remains with him anyway. The writing team understood that the most frightening thing about Walter White is not his violence but his intelligence -- the way he uses the same capacity for problem-solving that made him a brilliant chemist to construct ever more elaborate justifications for what he has become.

Game of Thrones achieved something that may never be replicated: it made a fantasy epic about dragons and medieval politics into the most watched and most discussed television event of a decade. For seven of its eight seasons, it was the most technically ambitious drama ever produced for television -- the Battle of the Bastards remains the finest action sequence in the medium's history. The final season's difficulties are well-documented, but they do not erase what the show built in its first six seasons: a world so fully realised and so relentlessly surprising that the death of any character at any moment felt genuinely possible. Ned Stark's execution in episode nine of season one established a grammar of narrative ruthlessness that every subsequent prestige drama has been in dialogue with. Before GoT, television had a different relationship with its protagonists. After it, nothing was safe.

Before The Sopranos, television dramas had protagonists. After The Sopranos, they had antiheroes. Tony Soprano -- James Gandolfini in a performance that remains the single greatest piece of acting in the history of the medium -- is a man the audience is invited to love and to understand and to excuse, until the accumulation of what he has done makes the love and the understanding feel like the most uncomfortable thing the show has produced. David Chase built a series about therapy and repression that used a New Jersey mob boss as its vehicle for the deepest investigation of American masculinity, American capitalism and American self-deception that popular culture has produced. The final cut to black in the last episode is still the most discussed creative decision in TV history. Chase has never explained it. He does not need to.

The Wire has fewer IMDB votes than Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones because it was never primarily a popular television show -- it was a sociological argument in narrative form, set in Baltimore, about the systemic failure of American institutions: the police department, the drug trade, the school system, the docks, the newspaper. David Simon and his collaborators built each season as a documentary-length investigation of a different failing institution, with the drug dealers and the detectives present throughout as the people the systems grind up and spit out. No show has ever looked at poverty, race and institutional dysfunction with this level of clarity and narrative rigour. The Wire is not entertainment in the conventional sense. It is the closest thing to literature that television has produced.

Better Call Saul was universally expected to be a diminished echo of Breaking Bad. Over six seasons, it became something more formally ambitious: a study of how a person becomes the worst version of themselves through accumulated small compromises, told with a patience and precision that the original series -- already extraordinarily precise -- rarely achieved. Bob Odenkirk's Jimmy McGill / Saul Goodman is one of television's great creations: a man of genuine warmth and intelligence who chooses, repeatedly and specifically, to apply those qualities in wrong directions. Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler is the finest supporting performance in television this decade. The show ended in 2022 with a finale that resolved every question Breaking Bad left open and retroactively recontextualised everything that came before it.

Twin Peaks arrived in 1990 and produced something television had no framework to classify: a soap opera that was also a horror film that was also a comedy about small-town America that was also a David Lynch art project about the presence of evil in domestic spaces. The murder of Laura Palmer is the formal hook, but the show is really about the gap between the surfaces of American life -- the cherry pie, the coffee, the cheerleaders, the homecoming queen -- and the darkness that the surfaces are designed to conceal. Kyle MacLachlan as FBI Agent Dale Cooper is one of television's greatest creations: a man who approaches every experience with genuine delight, who records his observations into a tape recorder for a woman named Diane who never appears on screen, and who is fundamentally unprepared for what he finds under the surface of the most beautiful small town in America. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) is Lynch's masterwork -- eighteen hours of television that dismantles everything the original built and replaces it with something more formally radical than anything else in the medium's history.

Stranger Things completed its run in 2025 with the final season, closing a nine-year arc that had made it Netflix's most successful drama and the show that demonstrated streaming could produce television with the cultural impact previously reserved for network events. The Duffer Brothers understood that nostalgia, deployed with enough structural intelligence, is not a limitation but a delivery mechanism: the 1980s aesthetic, the Spielberg references, the Stephen King atmosphere, the John Carpenter synths, are not pastiche but a precisely calibrated grammar that makes the emotional stakes legible immediately. Eleven's story -- of a child weaponised by institutional cruelty who has to learn what love and belonging mean -- is one of television's most complete arcs.

Succession is a show about extremely wealthy people being cruel to each other in extremely expensive locations, and it is also one of the most piercing examinations of how power corrupts love and how the ultra-rich understand both. Jesse Armstrong and his writers built a comedy of cruelty around the Roy family -- Logan, Kendall, Siobhan, Roman -- that used the specific grammar of a Shakespearean power struggle to dramatise contemporary capitalism's relationship with dynastic wealth. Brian Cox's Logan Roy is the finest villain-patriarch in television history: a man whose love for his children is real and whose contempt for them is also real, and who has never resolved the contradiction. The final episode is one of the great finales in television history, and it is so because it refuses every catharsis the audience has been demanding for four seasons.

Severance arrived in 2022 with a premise -- a corporation that surgically separates its employees' work and personal memories, creating distinct personalities for each -- and executed it with a formal rigour that immediately established it as something genuinely new. The office where the severed workers operate is a visual masterpiece of controlled dread: white corridors, motivational posters, a geography that the characters have mapped entirely from the inside without any access to what lies beyond the walls. Season 2, released in 2025, resolved the cliffhanger of season 1 and deepened the corporate horror in ways that confirmed Severance as the most formally ambitious drama currently in production. Ben Stiller directing with the precision of a Swiss watch. Adam Scott giving the finest dramatic performance of his career.

Sherlock is a British production that became a global event -- the Benedict Cumberbatch-Martin Freeman adaptation of Conan Doyle's detective stories into contemporary London attracted audiences from Japan to Brazil who watched it with the intensity of devotional attention. The show's London is genuinely London: Baker Street, the Diogenes Club, the Baskerville countryside, the South Bank, the rooftop of St Bartholomew's Hospital. Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat understood that Holmes functions as a character across any historical period because his central dynamic -- the brilliant, antisocial detective and the sympathetic, competent ordinary person who translates his genius for the world -- is timeless. The Reichenbach Fall, the second season finale, produced the most discussed single episode of British television since the death of Princess Diana.

The Last of Us adapted a PlayStation video game into a television drama that is, episode by episode, the finest HBO production since The Sopranos. Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin preserved what made the game extraordinary -- the father-daughter surrogate relationship between Joel and Ellie as the emotional engine for a post-apocalyptic story -- and translated it into a medium where the player's agency is removed and replaced by narrative inevitability. The third episode, which tells a standalone love story within the apocalypse, is the finest single episode of television produced in the 2020s. Season 2, released in 2025, departed significantly from the game's second chapter and divided its audience -- but even at its most divisive, The Last of Us operates at a level of craft that most television never reaches.

Friends ended in 2004 and has been watched more hours since its ending than any other television series in history. The Netflix effect -- making the complete run available for the first time to a generation who had not grown up with it -- revealed that the show works independently of its decade: the six characters, the apartment, the coffee shop, the specific dynamic of six people who chose each other as their family in a city that could otherwise be isolating, these are structurally universal. The show is also -- and this matters -- genuinely very funny. Not comfortably funny, not gently amusing, but episodes with genuine comic set pieces (Ross and Rachel on a break, Chandler and the chair, the lottery tickets, the football game) that hold up because they are built from character rather than from circumstances. Friends deserves its audience. It has kept it for thirty years.