The 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time

The first of several movie-to-TV projects on this list. This one is a spinoff rather than an adaptation, though, since Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi have appeared on the show in the roles they played in the 2014 vampire rockumentary film. The FX version moves the action from Wellington, New Zealand, to Staten Island and focuses on three traditional vampires — preening warrior king Nandor (Kayvan Novak) and narcissistic, sex-crazed spouses Laszlo (Matt Berry) and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) — who share a house with superhumanly dull “energy vampire” Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) and Nandor’s frustrated human familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillen). Shadows is unspeakably raunchy, remarkably silly, and diabolical in the way it manages to be stupid and clever within the same breath.

Before The Wire, before The Sopranos, there was Oz, the canary in the coal mine for the idea of scripted dramas existing outside the broadcast network ecosystem. Created by St. Elsewhere and Homicide: Life on the Street vet Tom Fontana, Oz took place in a maximum security prison that housed some of the nastiest humans depicted on television, before or since. There was sadistic white supremacist Vern Schillinger (J.K. Simmons), menacing gang leader Simon Adebisi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), the predatory Chris Keller (Chris Meloni), and many more. The world of Oz was so vicious that even the relatively benign prisoners — audience surrogate Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), Black nationalist Kareem Saïd (Eamonn Walker), or third generation inmate Miguel Alvarez (Kirk Acevedo) — would be tempted into heinous deeds over time. Yet in the midst of all the murder, torture, and psychological warfare, Oz was also a thoughtful, deeply experimental drama with a lot to say about the tension between punishing criminals and rehabilitating them, and what confinement does to good men and bad ones.

For seven seasons, The Good Wife was a fine example of how loftier creative ambitions could be smuggled into the formula of a broadcast network procedural drama. When that show ended, creators Robert and Michelle King built a spinoff designed for the lack of restrictions of the streaming universe. Not only could Christine Baranski’s legal grande dame Diane Lockhart now use words she was never allowed to say on Good Wife, but The Good Fight could go to much stranger and more ambitious places in terms of style and substance, as Diane wound up at a predominantly Black law firm and also struggled to accept the surreality of life under President Trump. Some creators benefit from working with some degree of limitation, but unshackling the Kings has unleashed their creative best selves.

The 1968 film version of Neil Simon’s play about a mismatched pair of divorced middle-aged friends sharing an apartment was a beloved, Oscar-nominated, box office hit. Yet the sitcom adaptation that debuted two years later has arguably left a larger cultural footprint than either the film or the many, many productions of the play. That’s just how divinely paired Tony Randall and Jack Klugman were as, respectively, anal retentive photographer Felix Unger (in many ways, the prototype for Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory) and slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison. The two were so smashing together that their personalities took over not only much of the Odd Couple legacy, but of other series that briefly intersected with it. It’s impossible to think about the classic game show Password, for instance, without first thinking of Felix and Oscar competing together and arguing over Felix’s attempt to use “Aristophanes” as a clue for “bird.” Or to hear anyone else talk about the dangers of assuming without flashing to Felix delivering that lesson in a courtroom.

Rick Sanchez is a mad scientist whose many inventions allow him to go anywhere and do anything, from visiting parallel realities to turning himself into a talking pickle to get out of going to family therapy. The animated Rick and Morty, created by Justin Roiland (who voices the title characters) and Dan Harmon from Community, seems to be similarly without limits — not only in how disgusting and bizarre individual adventures can be, but in how easily the series can toggle from celebrating Rick’s unstoppable brilliance to pointing out what a toxic, emotionally abusive jerk Rick can be to his grandson and everyone else unlucky enough to cross paths with him.

The newest show on this list, and the only non-English one, Squid Game is emblematic of the way the streaming era has broken down content borders, so that your new obsession can just as easily be an Israeli drama about an Orthodox Jewish man who falls in love with a widow as it can be the latest Disney+ Marvel series. But beyond what it represents for the TV business, Squid Game — in which a group of financially desperate South Koreans compete in a deadly series of children’s playground contests with a huge winner-takes-all cash prize — is a gripping thriller, a ruthless socioeconomic satire, and a great showcase for actors like Emmy winner Lee Jung-jae.

The red-headed stepchild of the Must-See TV era, NewsRadio seemingly aired on every night of the week but Thursdays, even though the workplace sitcom’s strongest moments should have earned it a place in NBC’s all-star lineup alongside celebrated series like Seinfeld or Friends. Everything was slightly, amusingly off about this show. The creative team decided, for instance, to just let anxious station manager Dave (Dave Foley) and confident reporter Lisa (Maura Tierney) have sex in the second episode instead of stringing out the romantic tension in a manner typical of Nineties comedy. Stories could spin out of the strangest ideas, like arrogant news anchor Bill (Phil Hartman) becoming addicted to the disgusting sandwiches in the office vending machine, or eccentric station owner Jimmy James (Stephen Root) having his memoir translated from English to Japanese and then back into English, so that it was suddenly titled Jimmy James: Macho Business Donkey Wrestler. The fifth and final season, produced after Hartman was murdered, is bumpy, and it can be difficult now to watch scenes with Joe Rogan as the station’s electrician without thinking about who and what Rogan has become. But the series as a whole deserved so much better than it got from a network that never seemed to appreciate what it had in Paul Simms’ creation.

The primetime landscape used to be as dotted with private-eye dramas as it was with cop shows, hospital shows, and Westerns. By far the best and breeziest example of the whole genre starred the preternaturally relaxed James Garner as Jim Rockford, a low-rent detective living in a trailer on a beach in Malibu, working for anyone who will pay his rate of $200 a day plus expenses, and getting punched in the stomach every 10 minutes or so for his smart mouth. In addition to its staggering likability, Rockford also represents a cross-section of TV drama history. One of its creators was Roy Huggins, the man responsible for Fifties and Sixties classics like Maverick (also starring Garner) and The Fugitive. The other was Stephen J. Cannell, who would become one of the first celebrity showrunners on the back of a tidal wave of Seventies and Eighties hits like this, The A-Team, and 21 Jump Street. And within a few seasons, the show began employing writer David Chase, who would go on to create The Sopranos.

The variety show, once one of TV’s most thriving genres, was on its last legs by the mid-Seventies. (The deservedly short-lived variety-show sequel to The Brady Bunch also debuted in 1976.) Jim Henson and friends, though, gave the format one last, glorious burst of life through two choices. The first was to center itself around Kermit the Frog and brand new Muppet creations like inept comedian Fozzie Bear and the egotistical, violent Miss Piggy; simply having the Muppets as the performers gave all the familiar showtunes and comedy bits a feeling of everything old being new again. The second, and more crucial one, was to split the focus between the performances and the chaos backstage, as Kermit attempted to wrangle lunatic Muppets like Gonzo the Great while appeasing celebrity guests like Bernadette Peters and Mark Hamill. The most sensational, celebrational, Muppetational Henson project of them all.

Johnny Carson was the third of six hosts who’ve sat at the Tonight Show desk so far. But with all due respect to Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and now Jimmy Fallon, Johnny’s 30-year tenure stands apart as its own entity. His cool, detached, self-deprecating persona — he was usually funnier in the aftermath of a joke bombing than when delivering the more successful punchlines — made Tonight appointment viewing regardless of NBC’s fortunes in primetime. The period in the early Seventies when the show had just moved from New York to Los Angeles stands out as the platonic ideal of the late-night talk-show format. Frequent A-list guests like Burt Reynolds were so comfortable with Johnny that it began to feel like the audience was eavesdropping on conversations that the participants didn’t know were being filmed. Johnny’s retirement was the beginning of the end of the monoculture, as audiences quickly fractured between Team Dave, Team Jay, and Team Arsenio, when no one had come close to successfully challenging Carson’s own supremacy.

The greatest Boomer nostalgia project of them all, before Boomer nostalgia threatened to overwhelm the entire world. A young Fred Savage played Kevin Arnold, a naive suburban kid running the gauntlet of adolescence at the same moment America was enduring the turbulence of the late Sixties and early Seventies. The Wonder Years was equal parts frothy and sad, bookended by a pilot where Kevin’s longtime friend (and frequent crush) Winnie Cooper (Danica McKellar) learns that her brother Brian died in Vietnam, and a finale where the adult Kevin (the voice of Daniel Stern) tells us that Kevin’s father (Dan Lauria) will die not long after the events of the series. The show’s air of innocence was infectious, and that’s been ably captured by the current reboot (which was for a time produced by Savage, before colleagues at the show accused him of sexual harassment and assault), focusing on a Black family in the South in the same era, with one brief but powerful link to the original.

In the 1973-74 TV season, CBS rolled out arguably the greatest night of TV programming ever, with a five-show Saturday comedy lineup — All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Carol Burnett Show — that was all killer, no filler. Spoilers: All five shows are on this list, starting with the sketch series that would bring the evening to an uproarious close. Carol Burnett had been a variety-show and sitcom staple for most of the Sixties, most famously in her collaborations with pal Julie Andrews, but her talents weren’t fully unleashed until she was given her own series where she could parody movies (like the famous Gone With the Wind spoof featuring a dress with a curtain rod sticking out) or TV (the recurring fake soap opera “As the Stomach Turns”), try on accents, sing, and even expertly play the straight woman for co-stars like Vicky Lawrence, Harvey Korman, and Tim Conway. The comic energy of the show was so strong that it soon became as beloved for the moments where the actors would crack each other up mid-sketch as for the scenes that went off without anyone breaking character. At the end of each episode, Burnett would tug on her ear — a secret signal to her beloved grandmother that also told her audience to be thankful they had just spent three hours watching some of the best small-screen comedy shows ever made.

In the years leading up to this dramatization of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, Peter Morgan had written a number of films (most notably 2006’s The Queen) about the royal family and/or British prime ministers. With The Crown, Morgan got to dive deep into his favorite subjects, casting multiple actresses (Claire Foy, then Olivia Colman, and soon Imelda Staunton) to play Elizabeth at various ages, and depicting her complicated relationships with various prime ministers (especially Foy opposite John Lithgow’s Winston Churchill, and Colman opposite Gillian Anderson’s Margaret Thatcher). Morgan also mined rich dramatic terrain in the many times where Her Royal Highness felt she had to put the best interests of the monarchy ahead of the best needs of her husband Philip (Matt Smith, then Tobias Menzies, and soon Jonathan Pryce), her sister Margaret (Vanessa Kirby, Helena Bonham Carter, Lesley Manville), and her son Charles (played in recent seasons by Josh O’Connor, with Dominic West about to take over), among others. The Crown walks a narrow tightrope — made perhaps even narrower in the aftermath of the real Queen Elizabeth’s recent passing — between criticizing the very nature of royalty and feeling great sympathy for the people living within the family’s tight strictures.

Thirty Helens agree: With apologies to Barenaked Ladies, this sketch-comedy Gen X touchstone was the best thing to come out of Canada in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Mark McKinney, and Scott Thompson shared a gift for wringing enormous laughs out of premises that sound utterly incoherent on the page. A bitter man who sits in a folding chair on the sidewalk and pretends to crush the heads of people in the distance? A lonely, sex-obsessed half-chicken woman? A man whose refusal to shave his vacation beard threatens to ruin his life? None of this should be funny. Somehow, all of it is, including this year’s revival that lodged Seventies novelty hit “Brand-New Key” into the heads of everyone lucky enough to watch it.

Being the straight man in a comedy can be a thankless role. Bob Newhart, though, built an entire career out of making audiences laugh as the one sane man in an insane world. His first and best sitcom vehicle (though his Eighties hit Newhart had its charms) didn’t take that concept quite literally, but it was close. Newhart played Dr. Bob Hartley, a Chicago psychologist with a roster of eccentric patients, a sarcastic but loving wife in Suzanne Pleshette’s Emily, and a life overall that seemed designed to take Bob out of his very tiny comfort zone. Smart, sophisticated, and damned funny.

The first show to suggest the streaming era could make room for the kinds of characters and stories that TV had no place for, even in those heady post-Sopranos years on cable. Orange started with Taylor Schilling’s annoying, entitled Piper being sent to federal prison, where she was initially terrified by all the Black, brown, and/or lower-class women she met there. Quickly, though, the Jenji Kohan-created series opened the eyes of both Piper and the audience to the fact that her fellow inmates — mentally ill Suzanne (Uzo Aduba), trans hairdresser Sophia (Laverne Cox), wisecracking addict Nikki (Natasha Lyonne), maternal Gloria (Selenis Levya), justice-seeking Taystee (Danielle Brooks), and many more — were complicated human beings with interesting stories of their own. (Most of them, frankly, much more interesting than Piper’s, but even the writers seemed to understand that.) Orange took big creative swings that didn’t always connect, but had plenty of incredible moments, and opened up vast new possibilities for TV as a whole.

Why would anyone want to do this? Who would find it in any way a smart or useful idea to take Fargo, an Oscar winner for Best Picture, and perhaps the most beloved movie of one of the most idiosyncratic filmmaking teams of all time in Joel and Ethan Coen, and attempt to turn it into a TV show? Somehow, though, it’s worked. The masterstroke of Noah Hawley’s ongoing anthology is that it is not a remake or reboot of the film, but a kind of Coen Brothers remix, set in the same fictional universe as the adventures of pregnant Minnesota cop Marge Gunderson, and filled with allusions to other Coen films, but telling its own stories. There are characters meant to evoke the Coens, most notably Allison Tolman’s dogged investigator Molly Solverson in the first season, and actors like Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Stuhlbarg who have appeared in one or more Coen film. Mostly, though, what Hawley has managed to do (particularly in the first two seasons) has been to bottle some of the spirit of those movies while letting the TV series ultimately feel like its own offbeat thing, as well as a fabulous showcase for actors like Tolman, Patrick Wilson, Kirsten Dunst, Ted Danson, Bokeem Woodbine, Carrie Coon, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, David Thewlis, Glynn Turman, and more.

Steve Coogan has been playing Alan Partridge — an obnoxious, socially incompetent, insecure radio and TV presenter in complete denial of just how minor his celebrity is — for over 30 years, on the radio, on television, in films, podcasts, and even live stage shows. It’s not hard to understand why the English actor has made this the role of his lifetime, especially when you watch I’m Alan Partridge. In the wake of ruining his career and personal life at the end of his previous series (the talk-show parody Knowing Me, Knowing You), Alan retreats to a spartan existence as a local radio host manning the graveyard shift, living in a small hotel whose employees quickly grow tired of his special requests and desperate attempts to get to know them better, and struggling to make his way back to the BBC. Coogan and collaborators like Armando Iannucci (future creator of Veep) did not shy away from how difficult it was to be in the company of their title character, though they periodically gave glimpses of the great entertainer Alan believed himself to be, like his attempt to act out the entire opening sequence of The Spy Who Loved Me.

What is dead may never die, but for the most part, the TV titles that have been resurrected over the last several years have tended to belong to big hits that still had currency with contemporary viewers. So why is Starz in 2023 bringing back Party Down, a show whose audience in a given week could be written with only five digits, and that got no awards love to speak of in its two-season run? Does a comedy about cater-waiters frustrated that their bigger Hollywood dreams aren’t coming true really have the same cachet as, say, The X-Files or Will & Grace? But Party Down was just that great in its short existence — a wry, witty, well-crafted, and frequently filthy piece of entertainment, with a wonderful comic bond among an ensemble led by Adam Scott — that if the majority of the people involved the first time are willing to reunite for more misadventures, then it’s worth trying. Are we having fun yet?  

For decades, the record for the longest-running live-action sitcom of all time was held by The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, an aggressively wholesome sitcom that debuted in the early Fifties and starred a real-life family playing idealized versions of themselves. That record was finally broken a few years back by Always Sunny, a grubby, uncouth, deceptively brilliant comedy that is such a stylistic and philosophical departure from Ozzie & Harriet in every way that the Nelson family would likely all faint at the sight of it. Sunny stars Rob McElhenney (who also created it), Glenn Howerton, Charlie Day, and Kaitlin Olson as four self-involved idiots who keep colliding with hot-button topics in the news, with financing and interference from Danny DeVito as Howerton and Olson’s grotesque father. Where most classic sitcoms are gasping for air by the time they hit their third or fourth season, Sunny has proved so improbably durable that it wouldn’t be a shock to eventually get to an episode called “The Gang Is Eligible to Join AARP.”

This and fellow HBO miniseries epic From the Earth to the Moon aren’t exactly Tom Hanks-produced spinoffs of his Nineties classics Saving Private Ryan and Apollo 13, respectively. But both suggest that Hanks realized those films only scratched the surface of their subject matters, and that television was the best place to go for a deeper dive. Based on the nonfiction book by Stephen Ambrose, Band follows a single company of airborne infantrymen in World War II, from the innocent days of training camp to the violent chaos of D-Day to the brutal endurance challenge of the Battle of the Bulge all the way to victory in the European theater of the war. And though many of the faces change as soldiers die and naive replacements arrive, the whole 10-hour journey is grounded by the presence of a young Damian Lewis as Easy Company’s humble and reassuring leader, Dick Winters. In 2001, it was the most expensive limited series ever made, and there is plenty of spectacle to be found as Winters’ men fight their way through France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany. But the parts that linger all these years later are the small human ones depicting the physical and psychological wounds Easy Company endured along the way to peacetime.

Part of the shock of Bob Odenkirk’s work on Better Call Saul was that he was so well known for comedy — and particularly for the sort of askew alt comedy that he and David Cross made for four epically weird seasons. Mr. Show was a series about commitment, even if the characters in each sketch tended to commit to the worst possible ideas, like Cross hosting a pre-taped call-in show where viewers are constantly asking about the previous week’s subject, or Odenkirk playing a mob boss who believes, with homicidal conviction, that 24 is the highest number. And from time to time — like Cross auditioning for an acting job with a monologue about auditioning for an acting job — those seemingly awful choices pay off beautifully for all involved.

As we cast our votes, we couldn’t help but wonder: Should we penalize the turn-of-the-century sensation for the sins of its movie spinoffs, and especially of its misguided sequel series …And Just Like That? But Sex and the City isn’t the only hit show in TV history — or even the only one on this list — to suffer from misconceived follow-up projects. (Netflix seasons of Arrested Development, we are looking at you.) And the original run (especially after Michael Patrick King replaced Darren Star as showrunner following the first season) did more than just set fashion trends or inspire countless games of “Are you a Charlotte or a Samantha?” It was a witty and smart look at four women at a particular moment in their lives, and a particular period in New York (even if its cross-section was almost exclusively white and straight) that was as much about the challenges of maintaining friendships as it was about figuring out the right romantic partner. Whatever mistakes came later, Sex and the City itself still deserves to walk proudly in its tallest pair of Manolo Blahniks.

On All in the Family, the arrogant George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) and his patient wife Louise (Isabel Sanford) lived in a blue-collar Queens neighborhood right next door to Archie and Edith Bunker. Hemsley was so instantly electric opposite both Sanford and Family star Carroll O’Connor that George and “Weezy” quickly graduated to their own sitcom. Even better for George, he got to move far away from Archie, to a dee-luxe apartment in the sky of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The spinoff broke new TV ground by making George and Weezy’s best friends the interracial couple of Tom (Franklin Cover) and Helen (Roxie Roker). And, like its parent series, it could get serious about race relations and other current events, such as in an episode where George accidentally attends a KKK recruitment meeting, or a flashback to George’s struggle to get a loan from a prejudiced banker, to open his first dry cleaning store. Mostly, though, the series was a relentless laugh machine, trusting that any combination of Hemsley, Sanford, and Marla Gibbs (as the Jeffersons’ brassy maid Florence) would make comedy magic together.

“You make me pull, I put you down.” Those eight words represent the pithy yet lethal code by which Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) —a U.S. Marshal reluctantly reassigned to the Kentucky field office close to the Harlan County community he had hoped to escape forever — lives his violent yet extremely entertaining life. Throughout Graham Yost’s adaptation of a character featured in several Elmore Leonard novels, Raylan would find ways to make himself judge, jury, and executioner by maneuvering bad guys into situations where his deadly use of force against them would be, well… you see the title of the show here, right? Olyphant’s wisecracking yet vulnerable performance commanded the screen, even as Yost and the other writers threw an army of colorful bad guys at him — Walton Goggins’ fast-talking explosives expert Boyd Crowder above all others. A rollicking ride from start to finish, by which point we all felt like we had dug coal together with Raylan and Boyd.

As Cheers was nearing the end of one of the most successful runs any sitcom has ever had, Kelsey Grammer’s arrogant shrink Frasier likely wouldn’t have been the betting favorite to lead a potential spinoff. But the fact that Frasier never really fit in at the bar made him the perfect candidate in the end. (What would a Norm-centric show have been about if he wasn’t sitting on his stool next to Cliff?) Instead, Frasier returned to his Seattle home to become a minor local celebrity as a radio call-in show host, to help care for his estranged and ailing father Martin (John Mahoney), and to reconnect with his even more repressed brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce), with help along the way from his producer Rob (Peri Gilpin) and Martin’s nurse Daphne (Jane Leeves). It was such a potent mix of characters, actors, and comic muses — more farcical and given to wordplay than Frasier’s adventures back in Boston — that Grammer wound up playing the role for 11 more seasons (after nine on Cheers). Not bad, Dr. Crane.