The Canon, Argued
There is no objective list. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What follows is an editor's case, argued from decades of watching, rewatching, and occasionally revising opinions under pressure from people who were right. These are the series that earned their place, the ones that changed the conversation, and a handful that the conversation still owes a proper apology.
The undeniable heavyweights
Series so thoroughly discussed that they reshaped how critics and audiences talk about television
The Wire is not overrated. Everything else is underrated.
Every few years someone writes a piece suggesting The Wire is overrated, that it rewards the kind of people who want to feel smart about watching TV. They are wrong. What David Simon built across five seasons is closer to a sociological text than a crime drama, and the fact that it was largely ignored by the Emmys while it aired is one of the most embarrassing sustained failures in awards history. Season four, the one set almost entirely inside a public school, is a long-form tragedy with no peer in the medium. If you have not watched it, that is the place to start.
The critical darlings
Series that won the argument with reviewers first, audiences later or never
Halt and Catch Fire is the great snub of the streaming era
Halt and Catch Fire spent four seasons getting quietly, relentlessly better while almost nobody watched. By its final run it was one of the most emotionally precise dramas on American television: a show about ambition and friendship and the personal cost of building things, set against the rise of the personal computer. It won nothing significant. AMC barely promoted it. The people who found it tend to describe it the way people describe a song they heard once on the radio that they have never been able to track down. It deserves to be named alongside The Americans and Succession in any serious conversation about the prestige era.
Genre at its highest
Science fiction, horror, crime, and fantasy that refused to be filed under just genre
Fifty years of the form, a few turning points
- 1972All in the Family peaks, proving sitcoms can do serious politics All in the Family
- 1981Hill Street Blues invents the serialised ensemble drama Hill Street Blues
- 1990Twin Peaks makes television surreal and gets away with it Twin Peaks
- 1994ER establishes the modern network prestige format ER
- 1999The Sopranos arrives and nothing is the same after The Sopranos
- 2002The Wire begins its five-season case against American institutions The Wire
- 2007Mad Men and Breaking Bad debut the same year Mad Men
- 2013Netflix drops House of Cards all at once, inventing binge culture as we know it House of Cards
- 2019Succession begins its run to the top of the critical pile Succession
- 2021I May Destroy You settles every argument about what the form can tackle I May Destroy You
The Leftovers is the best show of the 2010s. Yes, really.
Season one of The Leftovers is difficult. Not bad, but demanding in a way that drove people away. Then it moved to Texas, loosened up, and produced two of the most formally adventurous seasons in American television history: one episode built as a detective noir, another structured around a Simon and Garfunkel song. It is a show about grief that is funnier and stranger and more alive than most comedies. Damon Lindelof made something here that has no real peers. The finale is the best series finale since Six Feet Under, and that is not a close race.
The crowd favorites
Widely loved, widely watched, and widely earned
Overlooked at the time
Series that aired to modest audiences and generous posterity
The series that endure are not always the ones that were celebrated. Sometimes the camera just keeps rolling long after the room has cleared out.CrossBinge editors
The bold formal swings
Series that tried something structurally or stylistically that had no obvious precedent
Game of Thrones seasons one through four are still some of the best television ever made
The ending is bad. This is not a controversial position. But the revisionism that has turned Game of Thrones into a punchline has done real damage to the first half of the series, which remains remarkable: dense political drama, genuine surprise, a willingness to kill anyone at any time that television had never really attempted at that scale. The Red Wedding is still one of the most viscerally effective single hours ever produced for the medium. Write whatever you want about season eight. The first four seasons earned their place in any canon.
International television the English-speaking world caught up with late
Series that proved the best television was never exclusively American
What makes a series earn its place
Longevity matters, but not in the way people usually mean it. Some of the best series on this list ran two or three seasons; some wore out their welcome long before the finale. What actually holds up is consistency of vision: a series that knew what it was from the first episode and stayed true to it, or one that evolved in ways that felt earned rather than reactive. The shows that get written out of the canon are usually the ones that made a noise when they arrived and then turned out to have been mostly noise. The ones that stay are the ones you return to and find were actually about something.