Top 30 TV Shows of the Decade (2010-2019)

A quick word before I get to the list: We live in the age of “Peak TV,” which speaks to both the sheer quantity and quality of television entertainment. Thus, it’s simply impossible to keep up with all of the shows currently airing on television and across the various streaming platforms. So this list is by no means definitive, since there are many significant television shows that I have not seen. Furthermore, I have decided to restrict this best of the decade list to shows that began airing in the 2010s. Therefore, shows like Breaking Bad, and Mad Men are not present on the list because they premiered prior to 2010, even if they reached their greatest popularity during this past decade. As well, shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia aren’t on here, since it debuted five years before this decade started. The fact that it’s my favourite sitcom that aired this decade doesn’t mean I think it’s a show of this decade, so to speak. This strict criterion is not meant to ignore these works, but simply to limit this list to a manageable number. My idiosyncrasies and personal obsessions are on full display on the list. I have paid little heed to popular or critical opinion, and even less to notions of political relevance. Timeliness is important, but it cannot supersede artistic considerations.

1. True Detective (HBO) created by Nic Pizzolatto, 2014-present

The first season of True Detective is the best season of television this century. It’s perhaps the best season of dramatic television ever. Tracing the investigation of detective Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) into a series of killings in Louisiana in the mid-1990s and early-2010s, the series took the detective show playbook and flipped it on its head, investigating more than just a crime, but the very soul of modern man. The second season, starring Colin Farrell, Vince Vaughn, Rachel McAdams, and Taylor Kitsch, was greeted with mixed reviews, but it furthered creator Nic Pizzolatto’s look into dysfunctional manhood as it traced murder and corruption in the Californian mid-lands, like a 21st-century Chinatown. The third season returned to the flashback structure of the first season, delivering a devastating look into dementia and memory through its story of aging police detective, Will Hays (Mahershala Ali), and the one case that defines his career. All three seasons are unconnected by plot, but the unifying line between them is a masterful deployment of murder mystery conventions. This subgenre has taken over television (and podcasts, movies, books, and news entertainment, for that matter). True Detective knows that murder mysteries are addictive, and so it uses that addictive quality to perform a bait and switch: it lures people in with the promise of mysteries showcasing the dysfunction of the world, and then in the process, it reveals the personal dysfunctions that wreak havoc on so many individuals in the modern world, from addiction and infidelity to trauma and men’s propensity to commit violence against others and especially themselves. It hints at the conspiracies and engines of power moving our world, but it never loses the thread of the personal struggles that define the lives of its characters.

The show has also defined dramatic television style and structure like no other. Heavy shadows, long takes (including the one-take action scene), narrow depth-of-focus, elliptical editing structures, voiceover narration, bifurcated timelines—you’ll find these elements in all kinds of serious TV shows now, mostly because True Detective showed them to be powerful weapons in conjuring a pervasive atmosphere of dread. The casting is no less significant and influential. Nic Pizzolatto uses A-list movie stars at the top of their game—the kinds of actors who would usually never consider TV work, even in the midst of the Golden Age. And true-to-form, none of the leads returned to television since working on the show. You had to tune into True Detective to see Oscar winners on the small screen. The ripple effects of casting McConaughey and Harrelson are still being felt across the television industry.

True Detective offers astounding mysteries, which reveal the tangled ways that politics, religion, business, sex, and crime can intersect in the American backwaters. It also offers a perceptive, troubled, and profound look at human weakness and the ways that a person’s private failings can spiral out of control and affect the world around them. That True Detective combines both in such an entertaining, formally astounding, and profound manner is what makes it the show of the decade. We are living in the television landscape that True Detective created, and we’re the better for it.

2. Twin Peaks: The Return (Showtime) created by David Lynch & Mark Frost, 2017

Twin Peaks: The Return is unlike anything else ever released on television, and that includes the first two seasons of Twin Peaks. The Return is not, in fact, the long-awaited third season: its tone is so distinct from the first two seasons, and at the same time David Lynch’s own filmmaking interests changed so much over the intervening 25 years that it couldn’t possibly continue the specific mash-up of Americana soap opera and experimental nightmare that made the original series so wonderful. But it does continue many of the same narrative and thematic threads introduced in the original series and show us what could be extrapolated out 25 years later. Through its formalistic approach and bizarre tone, it charts the ways that human beings experience both tenderness and brutality, pain and absurdity, hope and despair in equal-measure and surprising forms. It’s elusive, but it captures the emotional tenor of our recursive existence in the postmodern world. It’s haunting, horrifying, and formally-inventive in a way that no other television series has ever been, largely because it is primarily a work of art, and not entertainment—a rarity in 21st-century television.

3. BoJack Horseman (Netflix) created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, 2014-2020

Over the course of its six seasons, BoJack Horseman illustrates the self-destructive impulses of the modern narcissist. It traces how one (horse)man, Will Arnett’s BoJack Horseman, achieves great (and accidental) success and then pitters away the opportunities of that success by burning down his personal life through addiction, abuse, and egotistical self-delusion. But it doesn’t stop there. It also shows how that same (horse)man can put his life back together by taking responsibility for his past and holding onto his bonds with the people around him. Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s animated dramedy is hilarious for its constant visual invention, satirical look at Hollywood, and never-ending animal puns, but it’s the self-deprecating, heart-on-sleeve look at 21st century postmodern humanity that make it so special. I’m not convinced that BoJack Horseman will age as well as other shows on this list, but that doesn’t matter, as no show has so captured the ordinary absurdity and sorrow of living in the 21st century. The show presents contemporary life like no other television show, animated or otherwise.

4. Atlanta (FX) created by Donald Glover, 2016-present

This is what diverse storytelling should look like: bold, sardonic, and completely specific to its context. You could make a show similar to Atlanta while focusing on a different city and a different ethnic subculture, but you could not make this show, since so much of the humour and irony of Donald Glover’s comedy series is specific to being black in Atlanta, Georgia in the 21st century. Glover’s show has disparate influences, from cartoons like Adventure Time to Twin Peaks to rap culture minutiae, but it does not copy any one show and it does not play as the sum of its influences. It’s too personal and too idiosyncratic to be anything but Glover’s comedic statement on what life looks, sounds, and, most importantly, feels like to him. It’s riveting to see the world through his eyes for 30 or so minutes a week.

5. Hannibal (NBC) created by Bryan Fuller, 2013-2015

Hannibal is a Baroque melodrama masquerading as a horror series. Adapting the works of Thomas Harris, which have served as source material for films by Michael Mann, Jonathan Demme, and Ridley Scott, among others, Bryan Fuller charts his own course, leaning into the melodramatic context and the psychosexual subtext. Instead of indulging in the luridness of the material, he elevates it to operatic levels and uses it to muse on notions of aesthetics, morality, and consciousness. All the while, he makes a profoundly disturbing argument for murder as satanic art, a truly demonic perversion embodied by the dapper, terrifying Hannibal Lector (Mads Mikkelsen giving the definitive performance in the role). Hannibal is formally astounding, with a lush, bloody palette unseen on any other network television show, but it’s the performances by its co-leads, Mikkelson and Hugh Dancy as Will Graham, that make it so remarkable. The palpable charge between them, whether romantic, platonic, or simply aesthetic, is invigorating, and serves as the atmospheric blueprint for this serial killer-thriller like no other.

6. Gravity Falls (Disney) created by Alex Hirsch, 2012-2016

Gravity Falls is one of the best children’s television shows ever made. For one, it never condescends to its child viewers, trusting them to follow the elaborate mysteries and indulge in the atmospheric storytelling, which is rare for children’s shows. It does have dense references to The Simpsons, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files, but it never shortchanges the storytelling to entertain older viewers, which is to its benefit. It’s also beautifully animated, with an attention to detail that does not exist in most animated series. Most importantly, it’s attuned to childhood emotions, and specifically the insecurity, impulsiveness, and goofiness that defines the pre-teen years. Gravity Falls is effortlessly entertaining in its blend of humour, mystery, and family drama, but the thing that I keep coming back to is how much it cares about the experiences of children. There’s nothing cynical about its approach or its storytelling. Coming from Disney, that’s nothing short of a miracle.

7. Justified (FX) created by Graham Yost, 2010-2015

Justified’s Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) says that bourbon goes down easy and tastes like sunshine. His comment applies just as easily to the show itself. It’s as effortlessly appealing as the best works of Elmore Leonard, who created Raylan in his crime novel Pronto, and it delights in Leonard’s greatest strength as a writer: dialogue. Whether the dialogue is terse or florid, delivered through gritted teeth by Olyphant, the coolest man on TV, or spouted out like gospel preaching by Walton Goggins as Raylan’s arch-rival, Boyd Crowder, it sounds just right. Justified never tries too hard to be serious, and that’s what makes it so appealing. Like the best crime fiction, it hooks you with a punchy opening and keeps you invested all the way through to the end so that you’re amazed the time has flown by. But it’s not fluff. Inside its easy going crime storytelling is a nuanced look at class, family, and the way that our hometowns and early friendships define us. Most significantly, few television shows have offered as sustained an investigation of manhood over the course of its entire run.

8. Key & Peele (Comedy Central) created by Keegan-Michael Key & Jordan Peele, 2012-2015

Although it only lasted for five short seasons, Key & Peele is the only sketch comedy show of the past decade that remains funny years after its run. Its sketches often reference the pop-culture and political climate of the period in which it was made—most notably through President Obama’s anger translator, Luther, played with seething rage by Keegan-Michael Key—but the humour of its sketches are not entirely reliant on topicality (unlike, say, 90 percent of the material on SNL). Instead, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele mine the absurdity of race, class, and masculinity in the 21st century, with the occasional downright bizarre idea thrown in for good measure. Few, if any, sketch shows have a better ratio of good to bad sketches, and none have the formal exactness of Key & Peele, where each sketch nails the style of whatever genre it is spoofing. We should put Key & Peele alongside Mr. Show and Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the sketch comedy pantheon. It’s that good.

9. Louie (FX) created by Louis C.K., 2010-2015

Although every single progressive TV critic will try to convince you that they never liked Louie all that much to begin with after news broke of Louis C.K.’s sexual improprieties in the fall of 2017, Louis C.K.’s personal failings do not change the fact that his confessional television show, Louie, remains an exceptional work. Louie redefines how television comedies work. It’s interspersed with stand-up bits like the early seasons of Seinfeld and has the sort of self-deprecating middle-class observational humour of that show and the films of Woody Allen, but it’s also frequently absurd and often picaresque. Louie doesn’t conform to conventional story structure and its jokes often exist in the limbo between cringe comedy and pathos. It’s frequently funny, but the thing that remains with me is the show’s stunning honesty (which may be hypocritical coming from a man who lied about his misdeeds for as long as Louis C.K. did). Say what you will about Louis C.K. as a person, but this show remains a hallmark of television comedy, and no amount of retconning can change that fact.

10. Game of Thrones (HBO) created by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, 2011-2019

This big-budget adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is the blockbuster series of the decade. It’s basically a Hollywood tentpole on the small screen, with its stunning special effects, elaborate costume and set work, and all-star cast of British thespians populating the fantastic world of Westeros. There were ups and downs along the way (Theon Greyjoy’s endless torture subplot, anyone?) and the ending was admittedly truncated, but where Game of Thrones shined the greatest was in its ability to command attention in a time period of a million distractions. As well, in an age where television shows and movies are aimed at subcultures and every streaming service serves its own niche audiences, Game of Thrones had the audacity to try to become the hit of the decade. It will perhaps be the last artifact of genuine monoculture, where most of us watched the same show and marvelled at and discussed the same twists at the same time. And the scale is something never matched on television. Episodes like “Blackwater,” “Hardhome,” and “The Long Night” outdo most movies released in theatres in terms of theatrics and scale. I’ll never argue that Game of Thrones was seamless storytelling, but it was stunning and breathless and intriguing in a manner very few shows ever achieve. It obsessed us and that’s something worth celebrating.

11. Halt and Catch Fire (AMC) created by Christopher Cantwell & Christopher C. Rogers, 2014-2017

What started as a drama that tried to be Mad Men in the 1980s turned into one of television’s most perceptive looks at the intersection of life and work. Each season shifts the perspective just enough to offer new commentary on the rise of computers in the 1980s and early 1990s, without losing the thread of the core characters along the way. It’s quietly one of the most feminist shows of the decade as its charts the growth and empowerment of two brilliant, but fundamentally different, developers played by Mackenzie Davis and Kerry Bishé, but even as it shifts its focus to the lives of its women in a male industry, it never shrinks the humanity of its male leads, Lee Pace, Scoot McNairy, and Toby Huss, or views their struggles as less than fascinating. It’s one of the few prestige dramas to make you care about the lives of its characters and invest in their growth without manipulating you to do so. It’s stylish and has a wonderful score by Paul Haslinger, but it’s not showy and never tries too hard to impress you. It’s a human series about the rise of technology and it’s the kind of show I’m so glad I gave a second chance to.

12. Better Call Saul (AMC) created by Vince Gilligan & Peter Gould, 2015-present

A Breaking Bad spinoff shouldn’t be this good, and yet, Better Call Saul is. In many ways, it follows a similar trajectory to Breaking Bad, charting how a good man becomes a bad man, but more than its predecessor, it focuses on the little details and slows down the pace to observe every minute change in its protagonist’s morality. It is the ultimate television slowburn, with entire scenes playing out without dialogue and later seasons trusting you enough to pay attention to small moments in earlier ones. It never condescends to the viewer and provides a fantastic showcase for its actors without indulging in the usual acting theatrics. Perhaps most impressively, it proves that the comedian Bob Odenkirk is a fabulous actor. Better Call Saul is very different than Breaking Bad, but it’s every bit as meaningful, and that’s no small miracle.

13. Mindhunter (Netflix) created by Joe Penhall, 2017-2019

David Fincher and Joe Penhall’s collaboration showcases a formal control that is impressive in this auteur-driven age of television drama. Every frame, camera movement, performance, song choice, cut to black is meticulous to a level that’s almost inconceivable. It helps that this formal exactness matches the material, as the obsessiveness of the style perfectly weds with the obsessiveness of the characters. Mindhunter charts the growth of criminal profiling as it follows the FBI special agents (Jonathan Groff and Holt McCraney) that coined the phrase “serial killer” and developed the FBI’s behavioural science unit. Most episodes are framed around an interview with a notorious serial killer, which makes you think that the show is merely another lurid true crime tale, but Mindhunter never reduces the killers and their crimes to pulp thrills. Instead, it views them as profoundly human and connects their moral failings back to the flaws of its central protagonists, forcing us to acknowledge that every human is capable of monstrous evil. There’s little comfort in such an artistic statement, but boy is the honesty inspired and unconventional for television entertainment.

14. The Leftovers (HBO) created by Damon Lindelof, 2014-2017

If Lost didn’t already make it obvious, The Leftovers leaves little doubt that trauma and collective loss are the hallmarks of the work of Damon Lindelof. The television auteur creates a fascinating, emotionally-wrenching depiction of guilt and trauma in The Leftovers, which follows a few residents of a small town after a baffling, miraculous event makes two percent of the world population disappear. There’s no logical answer to the central mystery of The Leftovers, which frustrates the viewer and the characters alike. But instead of trying to satisfy that lack of understanding, Lindelof leans into it to prove something essential about human existence: we can never know the absolute truth of the meaning of our lives. We can think we know and we can trust in powers greater than us to provide us with that truth, but we can never emotionally bridge the gap between our corporeal existence and the great unknown. Doubt will always linger. In this way, The Leftovers is more sermon than television show, but I’m glad that HBO gave an artist as idiosyncratic as Lindelof the money to spend three seasons telling such a sermon on the small screen.

15. Mr. Robot (USA) created by Sam Esmail, 2015-2019

Apart from True Detective, Mr. Robot is the most stylistically innovative show of the past decade. Its oddball framing ignores most of the rules of traditional Hollywood filmmaking, placing characters on the edges of frames, crossing the 180-degree axis during cuts, and providing enormous amounts of negative space above characters in frames. It disorients and isolates the characters visually in order to capture the fragmented, confused reality of its protagonist, Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek). Just as impressive as its formal innovation is its political acuity. By charting the growth of a political revolution (inspired by Occupy and Anonymous), Mr. Robot grasps the dysfunction of late capitalism in a way that most television shows don’t even want to acknowledge, let alone devote hours of screen time to. The show’s political consciousness makes it resonate all the more.

16. Who Is America? (Showtime) created by Sacha Baron Cohen, 2018

This is what real satire looks like. Sacha Baron Cohen revisits the performative trickery that he mastered in The Ali G Show and uses it to bait Americans across all political spectrums into showing their true feelings about their political rivals. Who Is America? does not use new tactics to get across its truths; once again Baron Cohen simply uses grotesque disguises to cause Americans to let their guards down. But the sheer range of the show’s targets, from progressive activists to callous celebrities to phony artists to Republican and Democratic politicians to ordinary bigots of all stripes, shows that Baron Cohen isn’t interested in preaching to the choir or indulging in “clapter,” but in revealing the moral rot at the heart of American culture. Who Is America? asks the question of what defines America. The answer it gives is not pretty and anything but comforting.

17. Fargo (FX) created by Noah Hawley, 2014-present

Noah Hawley’s small screen adaptation (or spinoff) of Joel and Ethan Coen’s seminal 1996 crime film is another of the unlikely successes of the past decade. It captures the tonal specificity of the Coens’ work and draws on more than Fargo for its storytelling and stylistic references, so it’s not pure imitation. But the way that Hawley mimics the Coens to delve deeper into the incongruous reality of crime, morality, and the meaning of existence in small town America is so effective that it almost doesn’t matter that he’s copying them so much. Each season has a different focus and time period and new characters to be entertained by, but the deadpan tone and moral inquisitiveness is present in each season, making the show the rare consistent anthology series.

18. New Girl (Fox) created by Elizabeth Meriwether, 2011-2018

New Girl is the best traditional sitcom of the decade. There’s nothing innovative about the concept—a quirky young woman (Zooey Deschanel) moves into a loft apartment with three guys (Jake Johnson, Max Greenfield, Lamorne Morris)—but it’s in the specific details of the performances and the character interactions that the show shines. For one, each character is not simply a kooky type, but a fleshed out and wonderfully performed individual with a level of idiosyncratic detail that is uncommon for primetime storytelling. Furthermore, the characters in New Girl are flawed people, but not bad people, and the writers never manufacture conflict by forcing the characters to do things that are unbecoming. All of this is a testament to the strong writing and the belief that characters can be funny without being malicious. Again, none of this is particularly original, but if New Girl proves anything, it’s that there’s plenty of comedic juice left in the traditional sitcom format.

19. Chernobyl (HBO) created by Craig Mazin, 2019

Chernobyl is exceptionally clear historical storytelling. Like another entry on this list, The Looming Tower, it shows how and why world-changing events happened and the seismic changes left in their wake. Its focus rarely shifts from the people at the centre of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster in 1986, particularly the scientists and politicians tasked with cleaning up the mess (Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgard, Emily Watson), but that singular focus doesn’t boil down the disaster to a merely personal tragedy. Instead, the show uses the various perspectives of the characters to capture the ways that political influence, and specifically political dissembling, can not only ruin lives but undermine the integrity of nations. The show highlights the abuses of power and the ways that authorities bully and lie to those in their charge, but it also depicts the decency and heroism of ordinary individuals who rise to the challenge to save others, even if it plays into the machinations of the powerful. In its own subtle way, Chernobyl shows how goodness in the face of wrongdoing is the greatest act of subversion.

20. Narcos (Netflix) 2015-2017 & Narcos: Mexico (Netflix) created by Chris Brancato, Carlos Bernard & Doug Miro, 2018-present

This entry is a bit of a cheat, but there’s no discernable difference between the two shows aside from branding. Narcos takes its storytelling inspiration from Scarface and the works of Martin Scorsese as it charts the rise of Pablo Escobar (Wagner Moura) and the Cali Cartel in Colombia and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo (Diego Luna) and the Guadalajara Cartel in Mexico. It indulges in the lavishness of its central gangsters while dissecting their operations through expositional voiceover that gives us a personal view into their world. But the show also frames the success of Pablo and Felix as almost-inspirational examples of business acumen, which indicts the whole enterprise of western capitalism in the process. Add to this the constant presence of corrupt American law enforcement and numerous reminders that the drug wars are a result of America’s endless appetite for drugs and you’ve got a damning portrait of the world as it exists right now.

21. Silicon Valley (HBO) created by Mike Judge, John Altschuler & Dave Krinsky, 2014-2019

When Silicon Valley premiered in 2014, many critics described it as The Social Network mixed with Mike Judge’s Office Space. However reductive that description is, there’s a ring of truth in it, mostly in the Social Network comparison in how the show charts the making of the world we live in today by focusing on four designers and entrepreneurs (Thomas Middleditch, Kumail Nanjiani, Martin Starr, Zach Woods) trying to make it big in the tech industry. The combination of cringe comedy and obscene crassness gives the show its trademark humour, but it’s most notable for showing how the rising tech industry empowers a specific brand of idiotic male egotism and allows profoundly foolish, idealistic, damaging individuals to shape our world.

22. The Looming Tower (Hulu) created by Dan Futterman, Alex Gibney & Lawrence Wright, 2018

The Looming Tower was largely ignored during its release in 2018, but this little-seen dramatic adaptation of Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work traces the rise of Al Qaeda and the steps leading to 9/11 with a stunning clarity and precision that is almost unheard of in American media entertainment. The show is largely a sober chain of cause-and-effect, leading from the US Embassy bombing in Nairobi to that fateful day in September of 2001. Buried within the investigative framework is an illuminating story of rekindled faith in the form of Ali Soufan (Tahar Rahim), the Muslim American FBI agent who was instrumental in tracking Al Qaeda in the years before and after 9/11.

23. House of Cards (Netflix) created by Beau Willimon, 2013-2018

The legacy of House of Cards may forever be entwined with the downfall of Kevin Spacey in the wake of #MeToo, but let’s not forget how stunning this show was at its heights. Essentially pitched as a soured, blackened version of The West Wing, House of Cards charts the rise (followed by abrupt erasure) of Senator Frank Underwood (Spacey), a Democratic Whip who blackmails, kills, and manipulates his way to the Oval Office. The icy dynamic between Frank and his equally conniving wife, Claire (Robin Wright), is electric, as is the (once) novel method of premiering each 13-episode season in its entirety, to be binged at will. Once upon a time, its method of delivery and gorgeously cold aesthetic (largely courtesy of director and producer David Fincher) made House of Cards the most addictive show on television.

24. Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Fox/NBC) created by Dan Goor & Michael Schur, 2013-present

Brooklyn Nine-Nine is possibly the last good sitcom on network television. It does what all conventional sitcoms ought to do, which is create a relationship between likeable television characters and viewers that replicates the affection between friends in real life. The entire cast is excellent, without a weak link among them, but special attention has to be paid to Andre Braugher, who mines every single convention of the stoical police captain for maximum comedic effect. Not every episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine is memorable, but few are mediocre.

25. Barry (HBO) created by Alec Berg & Bill Hader, 2018-present

Barry epitomizes the high-concept half-hour program in its seriocomic tale of a hitman (Bill Hader) who wants to leave crime behind to become an actor in Hollywood. The examination of a morally-flawed individual seeking redemption shares a lot of similarities with BoJack Horseman (another classic of seriocomic storytelling), but where BoJack has a lot of fun with the absurdities of Hollywood and fame, Barry digs into the therapeutic aspect of acting and the broken dreams of people looking at success from the outside in. It’s genuinely touching and often shocking, in addition to being very fun in its blend of violence and deadpan humour.

26. Westworld (HBO) created by Jonathan Nolan & Lisa Joy, 2016-present

Westworld is overly complicated and seemingly inspired by the most confounding elements of Lost, but creators Jonathan Nolan (brother of Christopher Nolan) and Lisa Joy deeply understand the conventions and structures of modern television storytelling. They take advantage of our assumptions about how stories are told to pick apart our basic understandings of heroes and villains and reality itself. They also use this unbalancing act to delve into the time-honoured science-fiction question of whether a machine can be made like man, with a pretty resounding answer in the affirmative.

27. Rick and Morty (Adult Swim) created by Justin Roiland & Dan Harmon, 2013-present

Few television shows have the level of cult following that Rick and Morty does. The delightfully bonkers animated program follows the mad inventor Rick Sanchez and his weak-willed grandson, Morty (both voiced by Justin Roiland), on a variety of science-fiction adventures. Sure, the show is a touch pandering, as it essentially praises its geeky audience for being smart for liking a raunchy comedy, but let’s not overlook the fact that the show is both intricately written and often incredibly, absurdly funny. If only it had prettier animation, but the juvenile style is likely a part of the crass joke.

28. The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix) created by Mike Flanagan, 2018

One of the only successful small screen horror shows, The Haunting of Hill House uses deep focus and long takes to scare its audience. Adapting and updating Shirley Jackson’s classic novel, Mike Flanagan makes a horror series that views the trauma suffered by its characters as every bit as horrifying as the supernatural terrors that haunt their mansion home. The Haunting of Hill House is deeply scary, but most surprisingly, it’s also emotionally moving in ways most horror movies and television shows don’t even attempt to be.

29. Show Me a Hero (HBO) created by David Simon, 2015

A case study in the moral defeat of a good person and a primer on housing politics and gentrification as it explores the rise and fall of Yonkers, New York mayor, Nick Wasicsko (Oscar Isaac), in the late 1980s and early 1990s, who sparked a political crisis when he supported the construction of low-income housing in white neighbourhoods. Leave it to David Simon to demonstrate the political failures of white grievance and mealy-mouthed liberalism.

30. The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story (FX) created by Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, 2016

One half of the “Summer of O.J.” that took over 2016 (the other half being Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America), The People v. O.J. Simpson is a madcap melodrama that uses big-name Hollywood celebrities (Cuba Gooding Jr., John Travolta, David Schwimmer, Sarah Paulson, Sterling K. Brown) to play big-name crime and justice celebrities. It has a campy quality to it, but The People v. O.J. Simpson is more than a rollicking case of playacting. In its heightened tone and oscillating focus between the the prosecution and the defense, the show captures the truths about how our obsession with celebrity and scandal dominate the American justice system. We turn even the most horrifying crimes into another form of entertainment.

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