There has been more good television made since 2000 than in the fifty years before it, which makes a list like this both easier and harder. Easier, because the candidates are obvious; harder, because a hundred slots run out fast. This is Find This Movie’s ranking of the best TV shows of the 21st century: dramas, comedies, animation, documentary and limited series, from the United States, the UK, Scandinavia, Germany, Korea, Japan and Australia. Every entry lists the years it ran, where it aired, who made it and how many episodes there are, so you know what you are signing up for before you start.
The one hard rule: the show has to have premiered on or after 1 January 2000. That is why The Sopranos, The West Wing, Freaks and Geeks, Futurama and South Park are not here. They premiered in the 1990s, however much of their run fell in this century. Curb Your Enthusiasm qualifies because its series proper began in October 2000; its 1999 hour-long special is noted in the entry.
How we ranked them
Four things, weighed together. Sustained quality across the whole run, which is why shows that ended badly sit lower than their peak alone would justify. Influence on what came after. Originality, meaning the show did something television had not done before. And rewatchability, the plainest test of all. Critical consensus and awards were a starting point, not the answer; a few entries here never won anything.
Run dates, networks, creators and episode counts were checked against each series’ published records on 21 September 2026. Shows still in production are marked “present”. If you spot something that has changed since, tell us and we will correct it.
The top ten
1. The Wire (2002–2008)
David Simon’s Baltimore is the most complete portrait of an American city ever put on television. Each season adds an institution — the docks, City Hall, the schools, the newspaper — until the drug trade of season one looks like one gear in a machine nobody controls. It never had a hit episode or an Emmy, and it has aged better than anything that beat it.
2. Breaking Bad (2008–2013)
A chemistry teacher becomes a drug lord, and the show never once lets him off the hook. Vince Gilligan built the tightest plot machine of the era: every decision Walter White makes has a cost, and the bill always arrives. ‘Ozymandias’ is still the consensus pick for the best single hour of dramatic television.
3. Mad Men (2007–2015)
Nothing on this list rewards a second viewing more. Matthew Weiner’s 1960s advertising drama looks like a period piece and plays like a novel about identity, work and the lies people sell themselves. Its finale — Don Draper meditating on a cliff, then the Coke ad — is the most argued-over ending of the century.
4. Succession (2018–2023)
Jesse Armstrong’s Roy family are the richest people on television and the least happy. The show’s trick is that it is a savage comedy and a Shakespearean tragedy in the same scene, often the same line. Four seasons, no filler, and an ending that felt inevitable only after it happened.
5. The Leftovers (2014–2017)
Two percent of the world’s population vanishes and the show refuses to explain why. What it explores instead is grief, faith and the stories people tell to keep going. The first season is heavy going; seasons two and three are among the boldest, strangest and most moving television ever made.
Start with: Season 2, episode 1 ‘Axis Mundi’ — if season 1 loses you, skip ahead and come back
6. Deadwood (2004–2006)
David Milch’s western is about how a lawless mining camp talks itself into becoming a town. The profane, near-Shakespearean dialogue is the draw; Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen is the reason to stay. Cancelled after three seasons, it finally got its ending with a 2019 film.
7. Better Call Saul (2015–2022)
The prequel that became its own masterpiece. Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill slides toward Saul Goodman one small compromise at a time, and Rhea Seehorn’s Kim Wexler is the best character the Breaking Bad universe produced. Patient, precise and, in its final stretch, devastating.
8. Fleabag (2016–2019)
Twelve episodes, and not one wasted. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s asides to camera start as a comic device and become the whole point — a woman narrating her life to avoid living it. Season two, with Andrew Scott’s priest, is as close to perfect as half-hour television gets.
9. The Americans (2013–2018)
Two KGB officers pose as a suburban American couple in the 1980s, and the show is really about marriage — what people owe each other, and what they hide. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys anchor a slow-burn spy drama whose final season and parking-garage finale are among the best endings on this list.
10. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
David Lynch and Mark Frost returned 25 years later and made an 18-hour film that refuses every expectation of a revival. It is slow, terrifying, funny and frequently abstract; ‘Part 8’ is a black-and-white origin myth for evil itself. The most uncompromising thing a premium network ever aired.
11–20
11. Six Feet Under (2001–2005)
Alan Ball’s drama about a family-run funeral home opens every episode with a death and spends the rest of the hour on the living. Its final montage, flashing forward through every character’s death, is routinely named the best series finale ever made — and it earns the title.
12. Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–2024)
Larry David playing a version of Larry David, improvising his way into social catastrophe for twelve seasons across 24 years. The show turned pettiness into an art form and gave television its most consistent cringe engine. The Seinfeld reunion season alone would justify its place here.
An hour-long HBO special aired in October 1999; the series proper ran twelve seasons from 2000 to 2024.
13. Arrested Development (2003–2006, 2013–2019)
The Bluths were the densest comedy on network television: running gags planted seasons ahead, jokes hidden in the background, a narrator who argues with the cast. Fox cancelled it after three seasons. The Netflix revival is uneven, but the original run remains the sitcom other sitcom writers study.
14. 30 Rock (2006–2013)
Tina Fey’s backstage comedy had the highest joke rate of any show of its decade and a cast — Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy above all — capable of landing every one of them. It is also a sharp, self-implicating satire of the network that aired it.
15. The Office (US version) (2005–2013)
It started as a remake and became the most-streamed show in America. Greg Daniels softened the British original into something warmer without losing the discomfort, and Steve Carell’s Michael Scott is one of the great comic performances. The Jim and Pam years remain the template for workplace sitcoms.
16. The Office (UK original) (2001–2003)
Fourteen episodes that invented the mockumentary sitcom as we know it. Ricky Gervais’s David Brent is a boss who wants to be loved and cannot stop making it impossible; the show’s cruelty is matched only by the grace of its Christmas-special ending.
17. Atlanta (2016–2022)
Donald Glover’s show about a rapper and his cousin-manager kept refusing to be the show you expected. Some episodes are hangout comedy; others are horror, satire or standalone short films (‘Teddy Perkins’). No series of the 2010s took bigger formal risks, and few landed as many.
18. Game of Thrones (2011–2019)
For most of its run this was the biggest and best-made show on Earth — a fantasy epic with real political intelligence, staged on a scale television had never attempted. The rushed final season cost it a higher place here, not a place.
19. Lost (2004–2010)
A plane crash, an island, a hatch — and a mystery box that hooked 20 million viewers a week. The mythology frustrated as many people as it thrilled, but Lost’s real engine was its flashback structure and its characters, and its influence on serialized network drama is impossible to overstate.
20. Friday Night Lights (2006–2011)
A show about Texas high-school football that is really about marriage, class and small-town decency. Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton’s Coach and Tami Taylor are the most convincing married couple television has produced. Clear eyes, full hearts.
21–30
21. Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009)
Ronald D. Moore reimagined a campy 1970s space opera as a post-9/11 drama about survival, terrorism, religion and what makes someone human. The Cylons look like us now, and that is the whole point. The miniseries and first two seasons are as good as genre television gets.
22. Parks and Recreation (2009–2015)
It found its footing in season two and became the warmest comedy of its era: a small-town government office populated by people who, against every sitcom instinct, genuinely like each other. Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope is the rare optimist who is also funny.
Start with: Season 2, episode 1 — season 1 is six episodes of the show finding itself
23. Veep (2012–2019)
Armando Iannucci brought the profane machine-gun insults of The Thick of It to Washington, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus won six consecutive Emmys as a vice president with no principles and no luck. The funniest political show ever made, and by the end an unsettlingly accurate one.
24. The Thick of It (2005–2012)
Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker, a Downing Street enforcer who swears like a poet, is the character of the century in British comedy. The show’s handheld, half-improvised chaos captured how government actually works — panic, spin and nobody reading the briefing.
25. Peep Show (2003–2015)
Shot entirely from its characters’ points of view, with their thoughts on the soundtrack, Peep Show made two of the most pathetic men in sitcom history — Mark and Jeremy — impossible to look away from. Nine series and it never dropped in quality. Co-written by Succession’s Jesse Armstrong.
26. Community (2009–2015)
A community-college study group became Dan Harmon’s laboratory for every genre television has: paintball westerns, stop-motion Christmas, a bottle episode, a clip show of clips that never aired. Erratic behind the scenes, brilliant on it.
27. BoJack Horseman (2014–2020)
An animated comedy about a washed-up sitcom horse that became the most honest show on television about depression, addiction and the damage self-pitying people do. The animal puns never stop; neither does the ache. ‘Free Churro’ is a 25-minute eulogy monologue, and it works.
28. Halt and Catch Fire (2014–2017)
It began as a Mad Men imitation about 1980s PC clones and became something rarer: a show about four people who keep failing, forgiving each other and building the next thing. Mackenzie Davis and Kerry Bishé’s partnership is its heart. Low ratings, devoted following.
Start with: Season 2 is where it becomes great; season 1 is worth it for context
29. The Good Place (2016–2020)
A network sitcom that taught moral philosophy and pulled off one of the best twists in television at the end of its first season. Michael Schur kept reinventing the premise every year, and the finale is a genuinely serious answer to the question of what a good life is for.
30. Watchmen (2019)
Damon Lindelof’s sequel to the comic opens with the 1921 Tulsa massacre and never lets American history off the hook. Regina King leads a nine-episode limited series that is a superhero story, a detective story and a reckoning at once. ‘This Extraordinary Being’ is one of the decade’s great episodes.
31–40
31. Chernobyl (2019)
Five episodes on the 1986 nuclear disaster, told as a procedural about lies — the cost of every one. Craig Mazin’s script and Jared Harris’s exhausted scientist made a decades-old catastrophe feel urgent, and the show’s closing line about the price of untruth has outlived it.
32. The Bear (2022–present)
A fine-dining chef takes over his dead brother’s Chicago sandwich shop. The kitchen scenes are the most stressful television of the 2020s, and the quieter episodes — ‘Forks’, ‘Fishes’, ‘Napkins’ — are among the best. Later seasons divided critics; the highs remain enormous.
33. Severance (2022–present)
Employees surgically split their work selves from their home selves, and neither half knows what the other does. Dan Erickson’s premise is high-concept science fiction; the execution — Ben Stiller’s direction, Adam Scott’s double performance — is a corporate horror story about who owns your time.
34. Reservation Dogs (2021–2023)
Four Indigenous teenagers in rural Oklahoma plan to run away to California, and the show becomes a portrait of an entire community — elders, aunties, spirits, a comically useless Deer Lady. Sterlin Harjo’s series is funny, grieving and the first of its kind on American television. It ended exactly when it meant to.
35. Enlightened (2011–2013)
Laura Dern plays a woman who has a breakdown, goes to a retreat and returns to her corporate job determined to change the world, mostly by annoying everyone. Mike White’s two-season series was ignored on release and is now seen as a precursor to everything from Fleabag to The White Lotus.
36. Rectify (2013–2016)
A man released after nineteen years on death row comes home to a small Georgia town that never decided whether he was guilty. Ray McKinnon’s drama moves at the pace of grace itself, and Aden Young’s performance — a man relearning how to exist — is one of the quietest and finest on this list.
37. Justified (2010–2015)
Elmore Leonard’s US marshal Raylan Givens returns to Harlan County, Kentucky, and spends six seasons in a slow duel with his childhood friend turned outlaw Boyd Crowder. The dialogue crackles, the villains are memorable, and Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins are perfectly matched.
38. The Shield (2002–2008)
Vic Mackey, a corrupt Los Angeles cop, shoots a fellow officer in the pilot and spends seven seasons trying to outrun it. Shawn Ryan’s series put FX on the map and gave television one of its first true antiheroes. The finale is as bleak and right as any ever aired.
39. Black Mirror (2011–present)
Charlie Brooker’s anthology about technology and the people it breaks became a genre unto itself. The hit rate is uneven, as with any anthology, but ‘San Junipero’, ‘White Christmas’, ‘USS Callister’ and ‘The Entire History of You’ are stand-alone classics.
40. Mr. Robot (2015–2019)
A paranoid hacker drama with an unreliable narrator, shot with off-centre framing that made the whole world feel wrong. Sam Esmail’s series stumbled in its second season and then recovered completely; the final two seasons include a near-silent episode and a single-take heist that rank with the era’s best.
41–50
41. Fargo (2014–present)
Noah Hawley’s anthology takes the Coen brothers’ film as a starting point and builds a new Midwestern crime story each season. Season one (Billy Bob Thornton) and season two (the 1979 Sioux Falls massacre) are the peak; season five with Juno Temple was a strong return.
42. True Detective (2014–present)
The first season — Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson across seventeen years of a Louisiana case, with that six-minute tracking shot — reset expectations for what a crime drama could look like. Later seasons varied wildly; Night Country (2024) brought it back.
43. Hannibal (2013–2015)
That NBC aired this at all remains astonishing: a lush, operatic, deeply strange series in which Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal Lecter courts Hugh Dancy’s profiler through murder tableaux staged like art installations. Bryan Fuller made the most beautiful horror show on television.
44. Orange Is the New Black (2013–2019)
Netflix’s first true original hit used a privileged white inmate as a way into a women’s prison and then, brilliantly, handed the show to everyone else. Its ensemble was the most diverse on television, and its later seasons became a direct indictment of the for-profit prison system.
45. Stranger Things (2016–2025)
The Duffer brothers’ 1980s pastiche — Spielberg, King, Carpenter, Dungeons & Dragons — became the defining streaming phenomenon of its decade. The kids grew up, the seasons grew longer, and the show remained the rare blockbuster that people watch together.
Related on Find This Movie: Stranger Things season 1 retro VHS demastered edition Netflix
46. The Crown (2016–2023)
Peter Morgan’s six-season history of Elizabeth II’s reign recast the cast every two seasons and never lost its footing. Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton each made the Queen a different woman; the Diana years are the most watched, but the early seasons are the best.
47. Squid Game (2021–2025)
Hwang Dong-hyuk’s survival drama — indebted contestants play children’s games to the death for a fortune — became Netflix’s most-watched series ever and a global shorthand for inequality. The first season is a self-contained masterpiece; the two that followed closed the story in 2025.
48. Ted Lasso (2020–present)
An American football coach takes over an English soccer club he knows nothing about, and the joke turns out to be a show about kindness under pressure. It arrived in 2020 when people needed exactly that. The Emmy-sweeping first two seasons are the core; a fourth season was ordered in 2025.
49. I May Destroy You (2020)
Michaela Coel wrote, co-directed and starred in a twelve-episode series about a writer piecing together the night she was assaulted. It is about consent, memory and friendship, and it is often very funny. The final episode, which plays out three possible endings, is a genuine work of art.
50. Station Eleven (2021–2022)
A pandemic wipes out most of humanity; twenty years later a travelling Shakespeare troupe tours the Great Lakes. Patrick Somerville’s adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel arrived during a real pandemic and, improbably, was the most hopeful show of that year. ‘Because survival is insufficient.’
51–60
51. The Underground Railroad (2021)
Barry Jenkins adapted Colson Whitehead’s novel — in which the railroad is a literal train beneath the American South — into ten hours of the most beautiful and unflinching images on this list. Thuso Mbedu’s Cora carries it. Difficult, essential, and directed like nothing else on television.
52. Andor (2022–2025)
Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars prequel has almost no Jedi and no lightsabers; it is a series about how ordinary people become revolutionaries, told with the texture of a 1970s political thriller. The prison arc, the Aldhani heist and the Ghorman massacre are as serious as the franchise has ever been.
Related on Find This Movie: Andor Popularity Explained Worldwide
53. Shōgun (2024–present)
A shipwrecked English pilot lands in 1600 Japan and becomes a pawn in Lord Toranaga’s game for power. Most of the dialogue is in Japanese, the production is immaculate, and Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai won Emmys in a record eighteen-award sweep. Two further seasons are in development.
54. The White Lotus (2021–present)
Mike White’s anthology drops rich guests into a luxury resort — Hawaii, Sicily, Thailand — and lets their entitlement curdle over a week. Each season opens with a body. Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya, across the first two seasons, is the character people will still be quoting in twenty years.
55. Hacks (2021–2026)
A legendary Las Vegas comedian and a cancelled Gen-Z writer are forced to work together, and the show becomes a study of two women who need each other and cannot admit it. Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance is a career-capping role; the show won the comedy series Emmy twice and closed its story in May 2026 after five seasons.
56. Barry (2018–2023)
A hitman takes an acting class and wants to be good — at acting, and as a person — and Bill Hader’s series slowly reveals that he cannot be. It began as a dark comedy and ended as something close to tragedy, with Hader directing several of the most inventive episodes on television (‘ronny/lily’, ‘710N’).
57. What We Do in the Shadows (2019–2024)
Four vampires and one energy-vampire share a house on Staten Island. The mockumentary spun off Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s film into six seasons of the silliest, most quotable comedy of its era, with Matt Berry’s Laszlo delivering every line like an oration.
58. Schitt’s Creek (2015–2020)
A bankrupt rich family moves into the small town they once bought as a joke. Dan and Eugene Levy’s Canadian sitcom built slowly toward a final season that swept every comedy Emmy. Catherine O’Hara’s Moira Rose, vocabulary and wigs included, is a creation for the ages.
59. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005–present)
The longest-running live-action sitcom in American history is about five of the worst people ever written, and it has never softened them. Its best episodes — ‘The Nightman Cometh’, ‘Charlie Work’, ‘The Gang Gets Analyzed’ — are as tightly built as any prestige drama.
60. Girls (2012–2017)
Lena Dunham’s series about four twenty-somethings in Brooklyn was argued over for its entire run and has quietly become one of the most influential comedies of the century. Its standalone episodes — ‘One Man’s Trash’, ‘American Bitch’ — are short films in their own right.
61–70
61. Insecure (2016–2021)
Issa Rae turned her web series into a five-season portrait of Black friendship, work and dating in Los Angeles, with the best soundtrack on television and a South L.A. rarely shown this warmly. Issa and Molly’s friendship, not any romance, is the show’s spine.
62. Gilmore Girls (2000–2007)
A mother and daughter in a Connecticut town where everyone talks too fast. Amy Sherman-Palladino’s scripts ran long because the dialogue was the show, and the Stars Hollow ensemble became one of television’s great comfort worlds. Its autumn rewatch status is earned.
63. Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005–2008)
A children’s cartoon that told a complete, three-season story about war, genocide and redemption without ever talking down to its audience. Zuko’s arc is among the best character journeys in any medium. Sixty-one episodes, no filler that matters, and a finale that delivers everything.
64. Adventure Time (2010–2018)
It looked like a silly show about a boy and his stretchy dog, and it turned into a post-apocalyptic epic about memory, love and growing up. The Ice King’s backstory and the Marceline episodes made adults cry. Nearly 300 episodes across a decade, and it built a whole generation of animators.
65. Bluey (2018–present)
Seven-minute episodes about an Australian cattle-dog family became the most-streamed show in the United States in 2024. It is a show about play, and it is secretly a show about being a parent — ‘Sleepytime’, ‘Baby Race’ and ‘The Sign’ are as emotionally precise as anything on this list.
66. Planet Earth (2006)
The BBC Natural History Unit’s eleven-part series was the first nature documentary shot in high definition, and it reset the bar for what the form could look like. Its successors — Planet Earth II, Blue Planet II, Planet Earth III — are all extraordinary; this is where they came from.
67. O.J.: Made in America (2016)
Ezra Edelman’s nearly eight-hour documentary uses the O.J. Simpson story to tell the story of race and Los Angeles across fifty years. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature — after which the rules were changed to stop multi-part series competing — and it remains the definitive account.
68. Downton Abbey (2010–2015)
Julian Fellowes’s upstairs-downstairs drama became the most popular British export of its decade and a genuine American phenomenon. Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess supplied the lines; the Crawleys and their servants supplied a decade of comfort viewing that spawned three films.
69. Wolf Hall (2015 and 2024)
Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell, lit almost entirely by candles, is the great performance in British period drama of this century. Peter Kosminsky’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy waited nine years for its second half, The Mirror and the Light, which arrived in 2024 and was worth it.
70. Happy Valley (2014–2023)
Sarah Lancashire’s Sergeant Catherine Cawood, a West Yorkshire police officer raising the grandson born of her daughter’s rape, is the best character British crime drama has produced. Sally Wainwright’s three series are compact, brutal and humane, and the 2023 ending was flawless.
71–80
71. Slow Horses (2022–present)
MI5’s rejects work out of a grubby building under Gary Oldman’s flatulent, brilliant Jackson Lamb. The Mick Herron adaptations arrive as tight six-episode seasons, roughly one a year, and are the most reliably entertaining spy show on television — funny, propulsive and never bloated.
72. The Bridge (2011–2018)
A body is found on the exact border of the Øresund Bridge, and Swedish and Danish detectives have to work the case together. Sofia Helin’s Saga Norén, blunt to the point of comedy, is one of the great television detectives, and the show launched a wave of Nordic noir remakes.
73. Borgen (2010–2013 and 2022)
A centrist politician unexpectedly becomes Denmark’s first female prime minister, and the show follows what power costs her at home. Sidse Babett Knudsen’s Birgitte Nyborg made coalition politics gripping; the 2022 Netflix revival sent her back in as a harder, more compromised foreign minister.
74. Dark (2017–2020)
A missing child in a German town sets off a time-travel mystery spanning several generations and, eventually, several worlds. Netflix’s first German original is the most rigorously plotted science-fiction show of the streaming era, and it actually sticks its ending. Keep the family tree handy.
75. The Expanse (2015–2022)
Hard science fiction with real physics and real politics: Earth, Mars and the asteroid-belt colonies on the edge of war. Cancelled by Syfy after three seasons and rescued by Amazon, it ran six and became the best space series since Battlestar Galactica.
76. Band of Brothers (2001)
Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks followed Easy Company from training through D-Day, Bastogne and the end of the war in Europe. The ten-part miniseries set the production standard for everything HBO made afterward, and its veterans’ interviews at the top of each episode are the truest thing in it.
77. Angels in America (2003)
Mike Nichols filmed Tony Kushner’s two-part play about AIDS, Reagan’s America and faith with Al Pacino as Roy Cohn, Meryl Streep in four roles and Emma Thompson as the Angel. Six hours, eleven Emmys, and still the most ambitious thing HBO has produced in the miniseries form.
78. The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story (2016)
Ryan Murphy’s ten-episode reconstruction of the 1995 trial won nine Emmys and made Sarah Paulson’s Marcia Clark, Sterling K. Brown’s Christopher Darden and Courtney B. Vance’s Johnnie Cochran feel like people rather than headlines. ‘Marcia, Marcia, Marcia’ is a landmark episode.
79. When They See Us (2019)
Ava DuVernay’s four-part dramatization of the Central Park Five case follows the boys from the night of the arrests through the exonerations decades later. Jharrel Jerome won an Emmy for playing Korey Wise as a teenager and an adult. It is hard to watch and impossible to forget.
80. The Night Of (2016)
A Pakistani-American college student wakes up next to a dead woman and is fed into the New York criminal-justice system. Richard Price and Steven Zaillian’s eight-part series is a procedural about process itself, with Riz Ahmed and John Turturro (and his eczema) at its centre.
81–90
81. The Queen’s Gambit (2020)
An orphaned chess prodigy fights addiction and the Soviet grandmasters of the 1960s. Anya Taylor-Joy’s Beth Harmon became a lockdown-era phenomenon, chess-set sales spiked worldwide, and Scott Frank’s seven-episode adaptation won the Emmy for limited series. It is also just an extremely satisfying story.
82. Beef (2023–present)
A road-rage incident between a struggling contractor and a wealthy entrepreneur escalates into a mutual campaign of destruction. Steven Yeun and Ali Wong both won Emmys for Lee Sung Jin’s ten-episode first season, which is about anger, shame and the exhaustion of pretending to be fine.
83. Chappelle’s Show (2003–2006)
Two and a half seasons of sketch comedy that changed how television talked about race — the racial draft, Clayton Bigsby, ‘Charlie Murphy’s True Hollywood Stories’. Dave Chappelle walked away from a $50 million deal mid-production, which is why there is so little of it and why it still matters so much.
84. Nathan for You (2013–2017)
Nathan Fielder offers real small businesses absurd marketing ideas — Dumb Starbucks, a poo-flavoured frozen yoghurt, a gas station with a rebate at the top of a mountain — and plays it completely straight. The two-hour finale, ‘Finding Frances’, is one of the strangest and most moving hours in the form.
85. The Rehearsal (2022–present)
Fielder builds full-scale replicas of real places so people can rehearse difficult conversations, and the show spirals into questions about performance, parenthood and whether he is a person at all. Season two, about airline cockpit communication, ended with him flying a real Boeing 737. Nobody else makes television like this.
86. Abbott Elementary (2021–present)
Quinta Brunson’s mockumentary about an underfunded Philadelphia public school revived the network sitcom when everyone had written it off. It is warm without being soft, sharp about education policy, and Sheryl Lee Ralph and Janelle James are two of the best supporting performers on television.
87. The Pitt (2025–present)
Fifteen episodes, one fifteen-hour emergency-room shift in real time. Noah Wyle returned to the medical drama and the show won the Emmy for drama series in its first year — the rare new series to feel instantly essential. It made hospital television feel dangerous again.
88. Adolescence (2025)
A 13-year-old boy is arrested for the murder of a classmate, and each of the four episodes is a single unbroken take. Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne’s series about online misogyny and a family coming apart became the most-discussed British drama in years and prompted a national debate in the UK.
89. Baby Reindeer (2024)
Richard Gadd adapted his own stage show about being stalked — and, in the shattering fourth episode, about the earlier abuse that shaped how he responded. Seven episodes, a surprise global hit, and a rare piece of television that implicates its own narrator.
90. The Last of Us (2023–present)
The best video-game adaptation ever made, because it treats the game as a script rather than a brand. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey cross a fungal-apocalypse America, and the standalone third episode with Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett is a self-contained love story that could stand beside anything here.
91–100
91. Normal People (2020)
Sally Rooney’s novel about Connell and Marianne, on and off from school in Sligo through Trinity College, became a twelve-episode series of unusual intimacy. Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones both broke out from it. Half-hour episodes, almost no plot, and it is impossible to stop.
92. Derry Girls (2018–2022)
Four girls and one English boy at a Catholic school in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, with the Troubles as a background that keeps intruding. Lisa McGee’s sitcom is fast, filthy and specific, and its final episode — set around the Good Friday Agreement vote — is a small masterpiece.
93. Catastrophe (2015–2019)
An American and an Irishwoman have a week-long fling in London, she gets pregnant, and they decide to try. Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney wrote and played the most honest married couple in comedy across four short series. Carrie Fisher’s final screen role was as his mother.
94. Detectorists (2014–2022)
Two men walk fields in Essex with metal detectors, looking for gold and finding ring-pulls. Mackenzie Crook’s gentle, perfectly observed comedy is about friendship, patience and the English landscape, and its theme song alone can make grown people weep.
95. Party Down (2009–2010 and 2023)
A Los Angeles catering crew of failed actors and writers works a different event each episode. Cancelled after two low-rated seasons, it became a cult classic on DVD and returned thirteen years later with the cast — Adam Scott, Ken Marino, Jane Lynch — intact and the jokes just as sharp.
96. Samurai Jack (2001–2004 and 2017)
Genndy Tartakovsky’s samurai, flung into a dystopian future by the demon Aku, spent four seasons of near-wordless, widescreen action trying to get home. Cancelled without an ending, it returned on Adult Swim in 2017 for a darker fifth season that finally finished the story.
97. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (2009–2010)
Two brothers try to restore the bodies they lost in a forbidden alchemical ritual, and the story expands into a conspiracy at the heart of their nation. The faithful second adaptation of Hiromu Arakawa’s manga is the most consistently top-rated anime series of the century — sixty-four episodes, one complete story, no wasted arc.
98. Mindhunter (2017–2019)
Two FBI agents and a psychologist interview imprisoned serial killers in the late 1970s and invent criminal profiling. David Fincher directed the key episodes and set the tone: quiet rooms, long conversations, and Cameron Britton’s Ed Kemper as the most unsettling interviewee in television. Two seasons, then Fincher moved on.
99. Russian Doll (2019–2022)
Natasha Lyonne dies at her own birthday party and wakes up at the same party, again and again. Co-created with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland, the first season turns a Groundhog Day premise into a story about trauma and letting someone help you. Season two swaps loops for time travel on the 6 train.
100. Pachinko (2022–present)
Four generations of a Korean family, from Japanese-occupied Busan in the 1910s to Osaka and Tokyo in 1989, told in Korean, Japanese and English. Soo Hugh’s adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s novel is the most ambitious immigrant epic on television, and Youn Yuh-jung and Minha Kim play the same woman fifty years apart.
Honourable mentions: the last cuts
These were on the shortlist and did not make the hundred. Several would be on a different editor’s list, and a few were left out only because a similar show ranked higher.
- Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014, HBO)
- Treme (2010–2013, HBO)
- The Knick (2014–2015, Cinemax)
- Big Little Lies (2017–2019, HBO)
- Mare of Easttown (2021, HBO)
- Top of the Lake (2013–2017, SundanceTV / BBC Two)
- Veronica Mars (2004–2007 and 2019, UPN / The CW / Hulu)
- Gravity Falls (2012–2016, Disney Channel / Disney XD)
- Rick and Morty (2013–present, Adult Swim)
- The Jinx (2015 and 2024, HBO)
- The Last Dance (2020, ESPN / Netflix)
- Line of Duty (2012–2021, BBC)
- Broadchurch (2013–2017, ITV)
- Homeland (2011–2020, Showtime)
- The Good Wife (2009–2016, CBS)
- House (2004–2012, Fox)
- 24 (2001–2010 and 2014, Fox)
- Scrubs (2001–2010, NBC / ABC)
- Modern Family (2009–2020, ABC)
- Malcolm in the Middle (2000–2006, Fox)
- Killing Eve (2018–2022, BBC America)
- The Boys (2019–present, Amazon Prime Video)
- Arcane (2021–2024, Netflix)
- The Handmaid’s Tale (2017–2025, Hulu)
- Silicon Valley (2014–2019, HBO)
- Industry (2020–present, HBO / BBC)
- Ozark (2017–2022, Netflix)
- Brooklyn Nine-Nine (2013–2021, Fox / NBC)
- Firefly (2002, Fox)
- Flight of the Conchords (2007–2009, HBO)
- The Comeback (2005 and 2014, HBO)
- Attack on Titan (2013–2023, MBS / NHK General)
- Sherlock (2010–2017, BBC One)
- Money Heist (2017–2021, Antena 3 / Netflix)
- Sharp Objects (2018, HBO)
Frequently asked questions
What counts as a 21st-century TV show?
For this list, a series that premiered on or after 1 January 2000. Shows that began in the 1990s and ran into the 2000s, such as The Sopranos and The West Wing, are excluded regardless of when they ended.
What is the best TV show of the 21st century?
Our pick is The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008), followed by Breaking Bad and Mad Men. The Wire never won a major award while it aired, but its five-season portrait of Baltimore has aged better than anything that beat it.
Are limited series and documentaries included?
Yes. Miniseries such as Chernobyl, Band of Brothers and Watchmen, and documentaries such as Planet Earth and O.J.: Made in America, are ranked alongside multi-season shows. Each entry states its format and episode count.
How often is this list updated?
The run dates, networks and episode counts were last checked on 21 September 2026. Shows still airing are marked “present”, and the ranking is revisited when a series ends or a new one clearly belongs.
Where can I watch these shows?
Availability changes by country and by month, so this page does not list streaming services. Use our Where to Watch finder to check the current service for any title.
Can’t remember the name of a show or film? Describe a scene to the Scene Finder, or check the current streaming service with the Where to Watch finder. More rankings live in Reviews & Rankings and TV Shows.