Best TV Shows of All Time
Settle it: two at a time →A ranking of the best TV shows of all time, spanning scripted series from the network era through the streaming years and judged on the completed run rather than one strong season. Entries qualify on sustained execution: writing that held across dozens of episodes, performances that defined a decade, and an influence later showrunners had to answer. The top is where prestige drama and the sitcoms that reshaped network comedy compete directly, which is where most of the arguments start.
Ranked by 1 person · 15 items
How the opening order was chosen
The opening order is the order I added the items in. Every ballot moves the ranking from there.
A reasonable ordering weights consistency across a whole run, cultural reach, and how much later television borrowed from it. That pushes The Wire and The Sopranos up, since both changed what a drama could structurally do. The contention is whether a comedy that rebuilt its entire format, like Seinfeld or Cheers, should outrank a drama that perfected an existing one.
Friends is first on the one ballot cast so far.
Global Ranking
NBC's Manhattan six ran ten seasons and 236 episodes (1994-2004), setting an ensemble template that networks chased for the rest of the decade. It won Outstanding Comedy Series once, in 2002, and its finale drew roughly 52 million viewers.
Vince Gilligan built a five-season arc (2008-2013) around a single premise, chemistry teacher to meth kingpin, and ran it with almost no filler. Bryan Cranston won four lead actor Emmys as Walter White, and Aaron Paul took three supporting actor trophies as Jesse Pinkman.
The first cable series to win Outstanding Drama Series, David Chase's mob drama took the category in 2004 and again in 2007. James Gandolfini won three lead actor Emmys as Tony, and the cut-to-black final scene remains the most argued-over ending in the medium.
A prequel to Rogue One from Tony Gilroy, the series ran 24 episodes across two seasons (2022-2025) and told a Star Wars story with no Jedi, no lightsabers and almost no Force. Its first season earned an Outstanding Drama Series nomination on the strength of the Narkina 5 prison arc and Luthen Rael's monologue.
Rod Serling wrote 92 of the 156 episodes across five seasons (1959-1964), using the anthology's science fiction frame to get past network censors on race, war and conformity. Twist endings became the signature, but the strongest half-hours work without them.
Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld ran nine seasons and 180 episodes (1989-1998) on a no-hugging, no-learning rule that barred sentiment and character growth outright. It won Outstanding Comedy Series in 1993, and the 1998 finale drew around 76 million viewers.
Greg Daniels' adaptation of the Gervais and Merchant BBC series won Outstanding Comedy Series in 2006 for its second season, after a short first run that copied the original closely enough to nearly sink it. Steve Carell was nominated six times as Michael Scott and never won.
HBO's Westeros adaptation won 59 Primetime Emmys, more than any other scripted series, including Outstanding Drama Series four times between 2015 and 2019. Peter Dinklage took four supporting actor trophies as Tyrion, and the eight-season run is the clearest case here of a finale damaging a show's standing.
Eleven seasons out of a Boston bar (1982-1993) produced 275 episodes and 28 Primetime Emmys, despite a first year that finished near the bottom of the Nielsen ratings. The Sam and Diane stretch set the will-they-won't-they structure later sitcoms borrowed wholesale.
David Simon's Baltimore chronicle ran five seasons (2002-2008), handing each one to a different institution: the drug trade, the docks, city hall, the schools, the newsroom. It earned just two Primetime Emmy nominations across the entire run, both for writing.
Four straight Outstanding Drama Series wins, 2008 through 2011, made Matthew Weiner's Sterling Cooper drama the first basic cable series to take the category. Jon Hamm was nominated repeatedly as Don Draper before finally winning lead actor in 2015, its last eligible year.
The 4077th spent eleven seasons (1972-1983) on a war that lasted three, closing with a two-and-a-half-hour finale on February 28, 1983 that is still the most-watched scripted episode in American television history. Service comedy gave way to drama as the run went on.
Fox cancelled the Bluth family comedy in 2006 with ratings that never matched its reviews, two years after Mitchell Hurwitz's first season won Outstanding Comedy Series. The density of callbacks and buried running gags rewarded rewatching over first viewing.
Jesse Armstrong's Waystar Royco drama won Outstanding Drama Series three times over four seasons (2018-2023), and its final year added lead actor, lead actress, supporting actor and writing. The joke under the boardroom knife fights was that no Roy child was ever getting the job.
The best stretch of American comedy writing here belongs to its early-to-mid nineties seasons, and the sharpest network comedies that came after are working from moves it invented. The problem is the list judges completed runs, and this run refuses to end. Decades of diminished episodes give Seinfeld, which quit at its peak, the cleaner argument.
