September 3, 2024 5:13AM

The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time

Standout installments of ‘Friends,’ ‘Veep,’ ‘Succession,’ ‘The Sopranos,’ ‘Game of Thrones,’ ‘The Simpsons,’ ‘Black-ish,’ ‘Twilight Zone,’ and more

By ROLLING STONE

The thing that has always distinguished TV storytelling from its big-screen counterpart is the existence of individual episodes. We consume our series — even the ones that we binge — in distinct chunks, and the medium is at its best when it embraces this. The joy of watching an ongoing series comes as much from the separate steps on the journey as it does from the destination, if not more. Few pop-culture experiences are more satisfying than when your favorite show knocks it out of the park with a single chapter, whether it’s an episode that wildly deviates from the series’ norm, or just an incredibly well-executed version of the familiar formula.

Still, that episodic nature makes TV fundamentally inconsistent. The greatest drama ever made, The Sopranos, was occasionally capable of duds like the Columbus Day episode. And even mediocre shows can churn out a single episode at the level of much stronger overall series.

For this Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest episodes of all time, we looked at both the peak installments of classic series, as well as examples of lesser shows that managed to briefly punch way above their weight class. We have episodes from the Fifties all the way through this year. We stuck with narrative dramas and comedies only — so, no news, no reality TV, no sketch comedy, talk shows, etc. In a few cases, there are two-part episodes, but we mostly picked solo entries. And while it’s largely made up of American shows (as watched by our American staff), a handful of international entries made the final cut.

From Rolling Stone US

Our list of classic episodes starts with its most recent entry, from a January 2024 installment of the great FX anthology drama inspired by the work of the Coen brothers. Fargo Season Five dealt with the growing sense of polarization in America, and the debts — both literal and figurative — that everyone feels they’re owed from everyone else. It all culminates in a long, surprising, utterly gorgeous scene where our firecracker of a heroine, Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) finds herself face-to-face with immortal sin-eater Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), who has come for a rematch of their clash in the season premiere. With her husband and daughter in the house with her, Dot declines to fight this terrifying man, and instead explains, patiently and with palpable kindness, that perhaps Ole Munch might prefer a world focused less on resentment and more on love. —Alan Sepinwall

There’s a temptation with these lists to immediately disqualify anything associated with the true monsters like Bill Cosby. But his crimes shouldn’t erase from the history books the wonderful work of everyone else involved in “Theo’s Holiday,” in which the Huxtables get together for an elaborate role-playing exercise to teach Theo (Malcolm Jamal-Warner) a lesson about the economics of life in, as he puts it, “the real world.” All the actors throws themselves into these larger-than-life characters, like Clair (Phylicia Rashad) as a cheery restaurant owner as well as a fast-talking furniture saleslady, or little Rudy (Keshia Knight Pulliam) as a powerful businesswoman. The idea of the whole clan teaming up to both mock Theo and help him out is so intoxicating that even his best friend Cockroach (Carl Anthony Payne II) admits, “I wish they did this kind of stuff at my house!” —A.S.

A show that features an anthropomorphized turd in a Christmas hat and at least one projectile vomit scene per episode, South Park has never been known as highbrow. Yet there are elements of “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” a Season Five episode focused on Cartman’s elaborate revenge plot against a high schooler who scammed him by selling his pubes, that are nothing less than virtuosic. There’s the plot itself, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which culminates (spoiler alert, I guess) with the protagonist forcing a woman to unwittingly eat her own children. There’s the exquisite cameo appearance by Radiohead, the culmination of Scott Tenorman’s debasement. And there’s Cartman’s classic taunt, “Charade you are, Scott Tenorman,” a reference to an obscure track of Pink Floyd’s Animals. Co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have often referred to “Scott Tenorman Must Die” as the apex of Cartman’s villainy, marking the character’s transition from obnoxious troll to next-level sociopath. But really, the episode marks another transition entirely: that of Stone and Parker from poop joke purveyors to dark-comedy masters. —Ej Dickson

Here’s an odd but welcome trend: FX not only has an excellent track record with extremely niche half-hour comedies (some of which you’ll find higher on this list), but many of them manage to weave thoughtful, even dramatic, material about mental health issues into their usual humor. The hip-hop comedy Dave did it with a terrific episode where we learn that Lil Dicky’s hype man GaTa struggles with bipolar disorder. The final Reservation Dogs season revolved around a character who’d spent much of his life institutionalized. And You’re the Worst — a romantic comedy about two selfish, immature people who would be horrified to learn they were the main characters in a romantic comedy — found a new level with an episode revealing that Gretchen (Aya Cash) suffers from clinical depression. Much of “There Is Not Currently a Problem” is fairly comedic: a bottle episode where the gang is stuck together with Gretchen and Jimmy (Chris Geere) because a local marathon has caused a traffic jam in their neighborhood. But this forced closeness comes while Gretchen is trapped in her latest depressive episode, with no choice but to finally reveal her condition to Jimmy — and to admit that she’s less worried that he’ll reject her for it than that he’ll become the latest man convinced he can “fix” her. Cash conveys every bit of the pain and fear Gretchen is experiencing, in a way that enriches the laughter rather than undercutting it. —A.S.

Most episodes of this drama were presented as real-time therapy sessions between Dr. Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) and one of his patients, or Paul visiting his own shrink. Occasionally, though, outsiders found their way into Paul’s office, like Alex Prince, Sr. (Glynn Turman), the father of one of Paul’s patients, seeking answers as to why his son committed suicide. Alex Jr. had spent most of his sessions to that point painting his dad as such a monster, it should have been impossible for any actor to both live up to those stories and not seem like a cartoon. Turman, in one of the best dramatic performances you will ever see on television, somehow did it, channeling both the bogeyman and the grieving father, in a riveting two-hander with Byrne. —A.S.

Bob’s Burgers loves puns, but “Tina-rannosaurus Wrecks” is a groaner of a title even for them. No matter, because the episode so expertly combines many of the series’ hallmarks into one tight, funny, awkward package. Once again, a well-meaning parenting gesture by Bob (H. Jon Benjamin) goes awry, when he lets Tina (Dan Mintz) drive the family station wagon in a nearly empty parking lot, and she somehow crashes into the only other car there. Once again, the Belchers find themselves on the verge of financial calamity, when the other car turns out to belong to Bob’s ruthless rival, Jimmy Pesto (Jay Johnston). Once again, the family gets mixed up in the plans of a lunatic, when insurance adjuster Chase (Bob Odenkirk) forces them to aid him in an insurance fraud scheme in order to get out of the mess with Jimmy. And, once again, Bob’s lovable but terrible children somehow prove surprisingly useful, when Tina uses her brother’s Casio keyboard to get incriminating evidence that frees them from Chase’s clutches. All’s well that ends… not necessarily well, but at least not substantially worse than usual. —A.S.

Today, it seems almost obligatory for cable and streaming shows to devote one or two episodes a season to presenting the POV of a minor character. When future White Lotus creator Mike White did it with his first HBO series, Enlightened, it was still relatively rare. And in this case, the shifts in perspective came as a welcome, even necessary, relief from all the time spent in the head of the show’s fascinating but maddening main character, Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a toxically narcissistic former executive trying to rebuild her life after a nervous breakdown. With “Consider Helen,” White moved the focus to Amy’s mother Helen (played by Dern’s real-life mom, the great Diane Ladd), to present a day in her life, to show what a chore it is to have to deal with such a pathologically needy child, and to make clear that Enlightened itself understood exactly how its audience would respond to Amy. —A.S.

This two-parter, in which Maude (Bea Arthur) is shocked to discover that she’s pregnant again at 47, and has to decide whether she wants to get an abortion, was so ahead of its time, even the original Supreme Court verdict on Roe v. Wade was two months away. Well after Maude decided to end her pregnancy, the rest of television shied away from the subject, often having pregnant characters suffer conveniently-timed miscarriages before they could make up their minds and potentially alienate viewers and sponsors. But “Maude’s Dilemma,” with a teleplay by future Golden Girls creator Susan Harris, ran toward the thorny subject, and handled it with both humor and grace. —A.S.

There are plenty of shows we call dramedies, even though they’re really just half-hour dramas, as well as lots of alleged comedies that aren’t particularly interested in making the audience laugh. The hospital show Scrubs, though, was remarkably comfortable at balancing silliness and sadness throughout its run, especially in “My Screw Up.” Brendan Fraser reprises his role as Ben, wisecracking brother-in-law to John C. McGinley’s bitterly sarcastic Dr. Cox. Ben’s leukemia appeared to be in remission when last we saw him, so there’s room for him to relentlessly tease J.D. (Zach Braff) about having made out with both of Ben’s sisters, as well as a lighthearted subplot where Turk (Donald Faison) tries to convince Carla (Judy Reyes) to take his name when they’re married, in exchange for having a mole she hates removed. But things also get plausibly serious, even before we get to the Sixth Sense-style twist: Ben was the patient whose death earlier in the episode caused a rift between Cox and J.D., and Cox has been in denial about it ever since. Even the revelation that Cox has been imagining conversations with his dead friend is reflective of the show’s juggling of comedy and drama — it’s the dark mirror of how Scrubs generates so much humor from taking us inside the highly-distractible mind of J.D. —A.S.

Even for a series as sophisticated and layered as Watchmen, this episode is an acrobatic feat. In the most dramatic departure from the show’s source material, the 1980s comic of the same name, “This Extraordinary Being” tells the origin story of one of this world’s seminal vigilante superheroes, Hooded Justice (a man lionized in a modern-day TV show-within-the-show that kicks off the episode). Told almost entirely in black and white, it sees our current-day heroine Angela Abar (Regina King) — herself a vigilante who goes by Sister Night, when she’s not working her day job as a cop — sucked into the memories of her grandfather, Will Reeves, after swallowing a bottle of his “nostalgia pills.” Transported to 1930s New York, we watch Will (played as a young man by Jovan Adepo), and sometimes Angela-as-Will, join the NYPD, where he encounters racism so virulent, his fellow cops stage a near-lynching, covering him with a hood and briefly hanging him from a tree as a warning to stand down. The message he takes away, though, is that there is plenty of evil to fight in the world, even in his own precinct. He just has to do it undercover — appropriating for his costume the very hood and noose that had been used to terrorize him. With balletic camerawork, a period soundtrack of big band standards, and visceral performances from King and Adepo, the episode is a sweeping achievement that inverts a fundamental truth of the series’ world — this revered hero that everyone assumed was white is Black — and underscores one about ours: Justice comes at a steep price. —Maria Fontoura

The Golden Girls experienced so many adventures together, as Dorothy (Bea Arthur), Rose (Betty White), Blanche (Rue McClanahan), and Sophia (Estelle Getty) lived together as pals and confidantes. But “Mrs. George Devereaux” is a truly touching treatment of grief and loss. Blanche, the most frivolous of the Girls (and the funniest), opens the door and beholds a strange sight: her late husband George, telling her that he faked his death and now wants her back. The episode explores how all the characters live with their different kinds of grief — and how that grief is what brought them here together in the first place. It has the most emotional resonance of any Golden Girls episode, but it’s also the funniest in terms of pure farcical comedy, as Dorothy gets swept up in a bizarre love triangle with two 1970s heartthrobs, guest stars Sonny Bono and Lyle Waggoner. As usual, Blanche gets the best line, when she confronts Cher’s ex-husband with the command, “Sonny Bono, get off my lanai!” —Rob Sheffield

The absurdist humor that made SpongeBob SquarePants beloved across multiple generations is already at full strength in this early episode. At the end of another shift at the Krusty Krab, a customer calls in to order a pizza to be delivered to his home. Never mind that the restaurant doesn’t make pizzas: Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown) sees a few bucks to be earned, and somehow turns a Krabby Patty burger into a pizza, complete with box, then orders SpongeBob (Tom Kenny) and Squidward (Rodger Bumpass) to take it to its destination. Instead, SpongeBob’s usual difficulty with driving strands the odd couple far from Bikini Bottom, trying various bizarre methods to get home — all of them borrowed from the “pioneers,” like the idea of riding on giant rocks. In the end, we get one last, great punchline: The customer lives right next door to the Krusty Krab, and they could have just walked the pizza over to him. —A.S.

Both in its Nineties heyday and its modern reinvention as The Conners, Roseanne had a real knack for blending domestic comedy with candid material about poverty, addiction, sexuality, and more. In this terrific conclusion of a two-part story, Dan (John Goodman) gets hauled off to jail after beating up Fisher, the abusive boyfriend of Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), while Roseanne tends to her sister, and Darlene (Sara Gilbert) gets to briefly relish the sight of her disciplinarian father behind bars. “War and Peace” doesn’t hide from the horror of Jackie’s experience, but even its dark moments are flavored with sass, like when Roseanne warns Fisher, “If you ever come near her again, you’re gonna have to deal with me, and I am way more dangerous than Dan. I got a loose-meat restaurant. I know what to do with the body!” —A.S.

Somehow, the best showcase for Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore as one of TV’s all-time couples is in an episode where Moore is frequently off-camera. A romantic getaway for Rob and Laura goes horribly awry when Laura’s big toe gets stuck in a hotel bathtub faucet, the bathroom door gets locked, and Rob makes the ill-timed decision to draw a fake mustache on his upper lip that he can’t wipe off — leading every hotel worker who arrives to help assuming he’s up to no good. Written by Dick Van Dyke Show creator Carl Reiner, this installment keeps finding new and amusing ways to escalate the sticky situation, and to push the outer edge of the envelope of censorship circa 1965, with a story about the risk of other people seeing Laura naked. By this point in the series’ run, Reiner knew exactly how to use his leading man’s fluency with physical comedy, and how his leading lady’s voice on the other side of that locked door was all that was needed to sell Laura’s dismay at being trapped in such an embarrassing position. —A.S.

What would your ideal afterlife look like? Black Mirror — the British dystopian anthology series with a nihilistic approach to rapidly-developing technology — is known for being a show that doesn’t only answer questions about the future but depicts the worst possible alternative you’ve never even considered. Maybe that’s why, when fans were introduced to the couple at the heart of “San Junipero,” and found the answer of the ideal afterlife to be an Eighties beach town party that never ends, they responded so fondly. Yorkie (Mackenzie Davis) and Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) meet on a night out and quickly fall into a romantic entanglement. But what begins as a love story about two lesbians finding each other in a heaven on earth is quickly revealed to be a virtual reality — one where the elderly and those who have died can be uploaded and then live on forever as their younger selves. The two — both dying in real life — must deal with whether or not the love they’ve found in pixels is enough for both of their forevers. It’s a touching love story that embodies Black Mirror at its very best. —CT Jones

Family is, arguably, everywhere in Sex and the City — from those the core four start with their partners to the ones they marry into (have there ever been more terrifying mothers-in-law than Frances Sternhagen or Anne Meara?) and the one they build just among themselves. But when it comes to the blood relations of Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the show is surprisingly thin, which is what makes “My Motherboard, My Self” stand out so much. It’s not that the other subplots aren’t memorable — the endless physical comedy of Samantha losing her orgasm; Carrie’s Macintosh meltdown and trip to Manhattan 1990s mainstay Tekserve (R.I.P.), where technician Dmitri (a brilliantly dry Aasif Mandvi) rags on her for not “backing up” — but Miranda’s turn here feels different. As she attends her mother’s funeral in Philadelphia (where she is, apparently, from, and where she has, apparently, multiple siblings), we see a more human side of a character who until this point has largely maintained her station as “the analytical one.” (Though it’s notable that the most intimate moment she has in the City of Brotherly Love isn’t with a direct relation, but the fitting room attendant trying to sell her a bra.) While the show has been criticized for celebrating solipsistic behavior, this episode is a prime example of the four women grappling with their ability to be vulnerable. —Elisabeth Garber-Paul

Both stories in the stoner comedy’s most laugh-out-loud installment involve imitation products. In one, Ilana (Ilana Glazer) and her mother Bobbi (Susie Essman) travel into the sewers of Manhattan to obtain counterfeit designer purses. In the other, Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) is shocked when her boyfriend Jeremy (Stephen Schneider) asks her to peg him with a strap-on — a development that so thrills Ilana, she does an upside-down twerk on her friend’s behalf — then has to scramble to find a reasonable facsimile after her dishwasher melts Jeremy’s custom-made dildo. In the end, the replacements prove shoddier than the real thing, but “Knockoffs” is so perfectly constructed, and so memorable, that when the friends met Hillary Clinton in a later episode later, among the first things a flustered Abbi can think to tell her is, “I pegged!” —A.S.

When The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air went on the air in 1990, Will Smith was such an inexperienced actor that he literally mouthed the lines of his co-stars while they spoke. But it didn’t take long for Smith to learn his craft and land roles in dramatic movies like Six Degrees of Separation. That’s why the creative team behind this series knew he was ready for a Season Four episode where Will reunites with his father (played by Ben Vereen) 14 years after he walked out on the family, only to see him leave once again after they reconciled. “I’ll be a better father than he ever was, and I sure as hell don’t need him for that, ’cause ain’t a damn thing he could ever teach me about how to love my kids!” Smith roars, before breaking down in the arms of Uncle Phil. “How come he don’t want me, man?” For anyone who grew up without a father, the moment cut deep. “I shed a tear til this day every time I see this episode,” LeBron James wrote on Instagram in 2015. “This hit home for me growing up and I couldn’t hold my tears in. Til this day they still coming out when this episode come on.” —Andy Greene

The scariest, cleverest episode of the British sci-fi institution Doctor Who features monsters who are elegant in their simplicity: the Weeping Angels, predatory aliens who resemble stone statues of angels, and who can only move when you’re not looking at them. Writer Steven Moffat places these disturbing creatures in service of a story that barely features the Doctor (David Tennant) and his then-companion Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), instead focusing on a young Carey Mulligan as Sally Sparrow, a woman who keeps running afoul of the Weeping Angels. Her only hope of surviving the ordeal comes in the form of a DVD Easter Egg that creates the illusion of the Doctor having a conversation with her, and even the Time Lord himself struggles to adequately explain all the seeming paradoxes contained within Moffat’s tale. “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,” he tells Sally, “but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” Yet it all makes exciting sense by the end. —A.S.

Throughout his career, J.J. Abrams has struggled with endings, as anyone who sat through The Rise of Skywalker can tell you. Few, though, are better at beginnings, and the pilot episode of his spy drama Alias is so fantastic that it bought years of goodwill from viewers, no matter how nonsensical the plots grew as the show went along. While undercover agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) is in Taiwan being interrogated by a torture expert, we flash back through the events that led her here, starting with her double life as a grad student by day, CIA agent by night. This turns out to be a triple life when Sydney discovers that she’s been tricked into working for a terrorist organization called SD-6, and that her father, Jack (Victor Garber), is secretly her co-worker. Oh, and Sydney’s fiancé gets murdered on the order of SD-6 boss Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin), plus a half-dozen other characters have to be introduced, Sydney has to try on multiple hair colors and accents, and more. Between the fractured timeline and the multiple lies Sydney has to live at once, “Truth Be Told” should be absolute gibberish. But Abrams, in one of his earliest efforts as director as well as writer, keeps everything coherent and thrilling in an episode that made him into a star just as much as it did Jennifer Garner. —A.S.

Most of the time, the Paddy’s Pub gang aim to screw over other people but really just end up screwing themselves, and that’s just what happens in this crude, tangled adventure. When Frank (Danny DeVito) promotes Charlie (Charlie Day) from a sleazy janitor to manager of the bar, he sets in motion a dizzying sequence of events that puts each character’s Achilles’ heels on full display: Mac’s (Rob McElhenny) sensitivity, Frank’s lost youth, Dennis’ (Glenn Howerton) pride, Charlie’s unrequited love, and Dee’s (Kaitlin Olson) conniving impulses. In order to get out of the grunt work Charlie left behind, Dennis goes on a mission to sleep with the unnamed character the Waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), but ends up setting his sights on Mac’s mom (and later Charlie’s) when he finds out Mac banged his mom (and Frank’s ex-wife). Meanwhile, Charlie draws up a plan to finally bang the Waitress; Dennis’ sister Dee isn’t looking for sex, just power, as she plays the henchman to Charlie’s mastermind; and Frank just wants to bang any “young broad” who will give him the time of day. “That doesn’t make any sense,” Mac says to Charlie after encouraging Mac to sleep with Dennis’ mom. Charlie’s response pretty much sums up the entire FX sitcom: “It doesn’t have to.” —Maya Georgi

Hearing main character Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) refuse to get out of bed for fear that she’ll die at work should have been a clue that it wouldn’t be a good week. But viewers were still terrified when the series seemingly tried its hardest to make every main character (plus guest stars Christina Ricci and Kyle Chandler) have near-death experiences in this two-parter, which began airing after Super Bowl XL. Bailey (Chandra Wilson) is in labor at the hospital waiting for her husband, who won’t answer his phone. Derek (Patrick Dempsey) can’t concentrate on saving his patient’s life while the man’s cell keeps going off (put two and two together here). And when a newbie paramedic shoves her hands into the chest cavity of a patient who’s bleeding out, it’s Meredith who learns that what’s currently killing him is unexploded ammunition that could go off at any minute, taking her and the entire O.R. with it. The bomb squad evacuates the floor, but if Derek leaves, Bailey’s husband dies. Meredith steps in for the paramedic, who’s had a panic attack, so now, if Meredith moves, she and Derek and Bailey’s husband die. Richard (James Pickens, Jr.) has a heart attack from the stress of the evacuation. Izzy (Katherine Heigl) and Alex (Justin Chambers) are off hooking up in a closet, which is also life-threatening if you consider Alex’s numerous confirmed STDs. And if Bailey, who is refusing to push without her husband being present, doesn’t give birth, she and the baby will die. It’s an all-in, melodramatic pivot for a series that has since become known for putting its main characters in life-threatening situations. And yet, in the midst of these increasingly heightened stakes, the standout scene remains George’s (T.J. Knight) gentle cajoling that finally convinces Bailey to push — and to name her son after him. “You’re Doctor Bailey,” he says, in a scene that remains one of the most tender of the entire series. “You don’t hide from a fight.” —CTJ

If ever Hannah Horvath was a voice of a generation, this was it. Airing just a few months before the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017, this quiet cri de coeur — in which famous author Chuck Palmer (Matthew Rhys, nimble as ever) confronts Hannah (Lena Dunham) about a blog post she wrote slamming his alleged misconduct with several college girls — deftly taps into every conversation we’re still having about power and consent. Chuck summons Hannah to his stately apartment, where she attempts to explain why taking advantage of his literary stature to hook up with young women is predatory, while he hurls every trick in the Bad Men Bible at her: flattery (“You’re very bright”); faux honesty (“I’m a horny motherfucker with the impulse control of a toddler”); defensiveness (“These girls throw themselves at me!”); casual intimacy (“You’re more to me than just a pretty face”). With astonishing precision and economy, Dunham turns the tables such that by the end of the episode — that is, by the time Chuck and Hannah are lying clothed atop his bed, and he takes out his dick and flops it onto her thigh — Hannah has fallen prey to the very manipulations she was calling out. A hallmark moment in a show that will only age better with time. —M.F.

Like Carl Reiner once did with The Dick Van Dyke Show, Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal liked to come up with stories by asking his writers what they’d been up to with their families lately. More often than not, there was a conflict that mapped pretty easily onto the Barone family, like an argument that writer Tucker Cawley had with his wife about who would put away the last suitcase left over from a recent vacation. The fictionalized version of it becomes a cold war of sorts between Ray (Ray Romano) and Debra (Patricia Heaton), even as Marie (Doris Roberts) compares the stalemate to a fight that once almost wrecked her marriage to Frank (Peter Boyle). (This leads to one of the great sitcom lines that makes zero sense out of context and seems absolutely logical in context: “Don’t let a suitcase filled with cheese be your big fork and spoon.”) The whole thing culminates in a slapstick battle between the spouses, demonstrating the impressive physical-comedy chops that Romano and Heaton developed over the series’ run. —A.S.

Some episodes made this list because they do innovative things with episodic structure, or because they have something deep to say about the human condition. This one’s here because Bobby Hill (Pamela Adlon) kicks a bunch of guys in the groin. Well, no. This one’s here because he learns to do this from taking a women’s self-defense class at the Y — at the unwitting urging of Hank (Mike Judge), who just wants his son to learn how to stand up to bullies — and incorporates not only the crotch attacks, but a high-pitched screech of, “THAT’S MY PURSE! I DON’T KNOW YOU!” every time he does it, just like he and his middle-aged, female classmates were taught. Sometimes, you just have to cherish the little things, you know? —A.S.

The struggling women of Insecure can’t even catch a break when they head to Coachella to see Beyoncé headline. Newly unemployed Issa (Rae) needs everything to go perfectly for the group’s last hurrah before Tiffany (Amanda Seales) gives birth, while Molly (Yvonne Orji) is preoccupied with work, and Keli (Natasha Rothwell) just wants to have a good time. The girls (minus Tiffany, or so we thought…) take edibles and pop so much MDMA they are forced to miss Bey, instead finding themselves in a drug-fueled frenzy that makes the chaos and humor feel like they’re seeping through the screen. Keli takes “Beyoncé or bust” too far and pisses herself after getting Tasered by festival security. Tiffany cries in a closet and tells her husband, “It’s our weed, baby” after admitting to “one bite” of a pot brownie. Molly bugs out and types nonsense on her work laptop, while Issa insists the mess of the night is all her fault. For an episode that starts with a silly Thug Yoda appearance and ends with the abrupt, emotionally-charged return of Issa’s ex-boyfriend, Lawrence (Jay Ellis), it packs in one hell of a trip. —M.G.

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Because Game of Thrones presented spectacle on a scale never before seen on television, it’s easy to forget that the series first became beloved when its budget was much smaller and it couldn’t afford to depict massive battles, dragon attacks, or ice zombie hordes. That stuff, when it came with frequency, was icing on the cake that was the deep roster of memorable characters George R.R. Martin had created, who the GoT writers brought to such vivid life. Even in its later, more epic seasons, the show was still most potent when it placed people first and carnage second. “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” takes place the evening before a coalition of heroes from across Westeros will face the Night King and his undead army. It’s almost all talking, as the characters have the kinds of conversations you’d expect when they don’t believe they’ll survive the next day. The most powerful of these is the moment that provides the episode with its title, as Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) realizes that, by the laws of Westeros, he can fulfill the dreams of his old friend Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) and grant her the knighthood she spent her whole life believing her gender disqualified her from achieving. The actual battle with the Night King winds up being the most visually underwhelming episode of the series, but writer Bryan Cogman’s love letter to these characters still resonates years later. —A.S.

TV has a mixed track record with twist endings. For every Twilight Zone, it seems there are a half-dozen disasters like the Dexter season where Edward James Olmos was a ghost, or the Westworld season where Ed Harris and Jimmi Simpson were playing the same character — both ideas that fans sniffed out long before those series’ producers expected them to. But then there is the marvelous conclusion to the first season of the metaphysical comedy The Good Place. For the previous 12 episodes, Eleanor (Kristen Bell) and her friends had struggled to figure out why the seemingly perfect afterlife in which they found themselves had so many obvious flaws. In the end, it’s dum-dum Eleanor who’s the only one smart enough to see through the genial exterior of their host, Michael (Ted Danson), and recognize that, for all their worry of ending up in the Bad Place, “This is the Bad Place!” In hindsight, the idea was clearly seeded; some viewers did guess it in advance, but not so many that it ruined the surprise for everyone else. Rather than undercut everything that happened before, the twist is in keeping with the show’s basic premise about heaven being not all it’s cracked up to be. And it set the series off in new, increasingly wild directions, rather than repeating the same jokes about fro-yo for years on end. —A.S.

This episode, written by author Harlan Ellison, offers one time-travel tragedy to rule them all. When a deliriously ill Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) staggers through a time portal on a mysterious planet, he somehow alters history enough that the Enterprise is no longer in orbit above the away team. It’s up to Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) to follow their friend, winding up in Depression-era New York, where interplanetary lothario Jim Kirk finds himself falling hard for do-gooder Edith Keeler (Joan Collins). Unfortunately, Spock figures out that Edith is a pivot point for the future of humanity, where her life will ironically lead to centuries of pain and misery, while her death will lead to the timeline our heroes know well. Torn between his duty to the galaxy and the desires of his own heart, Kirk allows Edith to be fatally struck by a car, in a tearjerker ending that wound up echoing throughout the future of TV science fiction. —A.S.

Meet Angela Chase, a high school sophomore who offers us a look into her life in a mundane suburb of Pittsburgh. She has a major crush on Jordan Catalano (“I just like how he’s always leaning. Against stuff. He leans great”) and is quite possibly the only person in history to be jealous of Anne Frank (“She was stuck in an attic for three years with this guy she really liked”). My So-Called Life premiered 30 years ago, giving teens a much more realistic portrayal of what it’s like to endure the “battlefield” that is high school over primetime soap operas like 90210. And the pilot lays that groundwork perfectly, with Angela (Claire Danes) narrating as she navigates her strained relationship with her mom, outgrows her best friend and abandons her for two cool, kindred spirits, and, yes, watches Jordan (Jared Leto) excel at leaning. A battlefield indeed. —Angie Martoccio

Though Aziz Ansari was star, frequent writer, and occasional director of his series about an actor named Dev trying to find meaning in his life, he periodically turned over episodes from the first two seasons to other characters, demonstrating that their stories had just as much richness as Dev’s, if not more. “Thanksgiving” tracks many years of the holiday, as Dev’s best friend Denise (Lena Waithe, who co-wrote the episode with Ansari) gradually comes out to her family, slowly but surely wearing down the resistance of her mother (Angela Bassett), aunt (Kym Whitley), and grandmother (Venida Evans). Partly inspired by Waithe’s own coming-out story, the warm and knowing episode was such a creative success that when the series finally returned for a third season four years later, it was built entirely around Denise’s marriage, with Dev now a minor figure in what was once his own show. —A.S.

The second season of this sci-fi drama, set in an alternate timeline where the Soviets beat America to the moon, triggering a never-ending space race, is the platonic ideal of the intensely serialized, “10-hour Movie” approach so much of dramatic television has taken in the years since The Wire, and that so few shows actually do well. Everything that happens throughout Season Two, even the parts that seem slow and pointless when you first watch them, have thrilling payoffs in the finale, where Earth seems on the verge of nuclear Armageddon, while American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts wage war on and around the moon. All the earlier subplots matter, like Gordo (Michael Dorman) putting his new devotion to jogging to good use when he and ex-wife Tracy (Sarah Jones) have to run across the lunar surface, clad only in spacesuits jury-rigged out of duct tape, to prevent a nuclear meltdown. —A.S.

This innovative hospital drama pushed the boundaries of its format throughout its run. One episode was set largely in the afterlife. Another told a quartet of stories about the stages of life from birth through death. The most audacious, and satisfying, of these, is the two-part “Time Heals,” which aired over consecutive nights. As St. Eligius prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary, we get glimpses of the hospital across the decades, and see how Dr. Westphall (Ed Flanders), Dr. Craig (William Daniels), and the other senior members of the staff each came to work there. Beyond all the backstory — including a great guest turn by Edward Hermann as Father McCabe, the priest who founded the hospital and helped raise the orphaned Westphall — “Time Heals” impresses because each vignette from the past is presented in the style of movies (or, in some cases, television) of that period: Scenes in the 1930s are in black and white, ones in the Sixties are much more brightly lit, and so on. —A.S.

“You could sense there would never be another show like that again,” The Larry Sanders Show actress Ileana Douglas said of the show’s final scene. “And there hasn’t been.” As Rip Torn, Jeffrey Tambor, and show creator Garry Shandling group-hug in an empty studio, a poignant sadness infuses the acerbic wit that Shandling’s revolutionary series displayed for six seasons. Set around Larry’s final show, the Peabody Award-winning episode features gags that remain timeless: Jim Carrey serenading Larry on-air while excoriating him off-air, Tom Petty telling Clint Black to “quiet down, cowpoke” before getting into a fistfight with Greg Kinnear, and Carol Burnett and Ellen DeGeneres catching Larry in a lie that destroys both the show-within-the-show itself and Larry’s glass-fragile ego. It’s a brilliant ending that balances pathos (“I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do without you,” Larry says to his audience before choking up. “God bless you. You may now flip”) with the series’ trademark send-up of Hollywood phoniness (Torn instinctively telling a bumped Bruno Kirby on the last show that “we’ll have you on another time.”) The show that invented the modern sitcom and stuck the landing perfectly. —Jason Newman

The Netflix prison series is the only show in Emmy history to be reclassified from the comedy categories to the drama ones, in part because its tone was so elusive, even to the people making it. But when Orange wanted to get totally serious, it was incredible, like in this episode set in the aftermath of the shocking death of beloved inmate Poussey at the hands of a guard. As Taystee (Danielle Brooks) and the other women grieve the loss of Poussey, then fume at the realization that the guard will go unpunished while most of them are stuck behind bars for much lesser crimes, their pain and rage boils over into a prison riot that will take up the entire following season. —A.S.

The Andy Griffith Show set the template for broad, light, homespun small-town humor, but the best episode of the long-running 1960s show is as raw as a modern prestige TV feelings-fest. Gifted a slingshot by Don Knots’ iconically bumbling deputy Barney Fife, a young Opie Taylor (played by a nine-year-old Ron Howard) accidentally kills a bird, orphaning its three young offspring. “You gonna give me a whippin’?” Opie asks his father, Sheriff Andy Taylor, played by the show’s star, Andy Griffith. Not this time. Instead, TV’s all-time cool-headed dad simply opens Opie’s window so his boy can listen to the newly motherless baby birds in the tree outside, filling the Mayberry night with their desolate emo chirps. Howard later said the tears he cried in the scene where he kills the bird were real, because he was thinking of his recently deceased dog. The episode doesn’t have any big laughs, a bold move considering it was a season-opener. But by breaking with formula, they made a heartbreaking classic. —Jon Dolan

As the Seventies sitcom’s iconic gospel theme song noted, there was a lot of scratchin’ and survivin’ to do for the Evans family in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects. And the Maude spinoff was so smart in illustrating the many ways the deck was stacked against Florida (Esther Rolle), James (John Amos), and their kids. In “The I.Q. Test,” everyone is shocked when gifted youngest son Michael (Ralph Carter) flunks a school standardized test, until Michael explains that he refused to finish after recognizing that the test is racially biased, with questions geared towards the experience of reasonably well-off white children. The episode nimbly addresses systemic problems in a way that few shows were even thinking about at the time, much less willing to incorporate into their scripts. And it does it while still having some fun with the situation, through the obliviousness of the white test proctor. —A.S.

At the point “Atomic Shakespeare” rolled around in the third season of Moonlighting, the private detective comedy had already established two things: 1) that the onscreen chemistry of co-stars Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd was as scorching as any couple — even an unconsummated one like this — ever put on television; and 2) that the show’s writers didn’t feel in any way bound by the conventions of genre or era, as they had already done a black-and-white film noir tribute, as well as put Willis’ David into a musical number helmed by Singin’ in the Rain director Stanley Donen. So it felt wholly natural to translate the familiar David and Maddie dynamic back to Shakespearean times, with a postmodern retelling of The Taming of the Shrew, with Willis and Shepherd playing David and Maddie-flavored versions of Petrucchio and Kate, and that at various points features ninjas, a horse wearing sunglasses, and wannabe blues singer Willis wailing on the classic rock hit “Good Lovin’.” The episode even gets away with rewriting the Bard: Instead of Kate submitting to Petrucchio’s insistence that the sun is in fact the moon, as a way of humoring her new husband, she instead stands her ground and gets him to admit that, “My wife hath called it: ’Tis the sun, and not the moon at all!” —A.S.

By the time we reach the Season One finale of the satirical workplace thriller Severance, the employees of the macrodata refinement department of Lumon Industries have reached their boiling point. Part of a cohort who volunteered for a surgical procedure that separates their work selves, called “Innies,” from their personal selves, called “Outies,” they all live bifurcated lives, where one half has no clue what the other half does. But now, the Innies, sure they’re getting the short end of the deal, are fed up. With the help of Dylan (Zach Cherry), who hacks into a control room, Helly (Britt Lower), Mark (Adam Scott), and Irving (John Turturro) find a way to inhabit their Outie personas — and, as a result, learn all kinds of things about themselves that they aren’t fully prepared to know. Mark faces his wife’s death in a car accident. Irving tries to reignite his workplace romance with Burt (Christopher Walken), who retired his Innie self. And Helly is shocked to discover she’s descended from the family that championed Lumon’s severance procedure. A master class in building and maintaining tension, the episode reaches a heart-racing crescendo before an abrupt, cliffhanger ending. Premiering two years after the pandemic, as many employees returned to the office with shifted priorities and revamped notions of “work-life balance,” the Dan Erickson-created, Ben Stiller-directed series captures something essential about our modern malaise. But as the mirror maze of this episode shows, completely severing work and home may not be the fix we think it would. —Kalia Richardson

In this cult comedy, Andy Daly plays Forrest MacNeil, a pompous fool who has committed himself to the self-destructive task of undergoing and reviewing whatever life experiences his viewers ask him to. Installments prior to this one saw Forrest becoming addicted to cocaine, acting racist, and trying to make a sex tape. But the true folly of the exercise doesn’t hit until the third episode, where two different binge-eating assignments are wrapped around Forrest having to divorce his wife, without even being allowed to explain to her why he’s doing it. It’s a classic case of a joke building and building, until we get a traumatized Forrest declaring to his awful audience, “Perhaps I simply understood, from the darkest corner of my soul, that these pancakes couldn’t kill me, because I was already dead.” —A.S.

When this spy thriller about domestic terrorism ended its first season without brainwashed double agent Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) going through with a planned suicide bombing, it felt like a failure of nerve from the creators of a show that would have been best served as a one-and-done. But the first half of Season Two, featuring an ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Brody and CIA analyst Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), was excellent, and led to the series’ single-best episode, where Brody gets arrested and Carrie is given a limited window to interrogate him in the hopes of turning him into an asset. Danes and Lewis put on a mesmerizing acting duet, so potent it’s easy to ignore a silly subplot about Brody’s daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor) and her boyfriend Finn (a young Timothée Chalamet) getting into a hit-and-run incident. It was largely downhill for Homeland from here, at least until the producers were finally willing to kill off Brody for real, but that takes nothing from “Q&A.” —A.S.

Long before cable and streaming dramas began to experiment with fractured timelines, there was the final season of this wildly underrated series about the staff of a U.S. Army hospital base during the Vietnam War. Episodes bounced back and forth between events at various points in the war and in the lives of nurse Colleen McMurphy (Dana Delany) and her surviving colleagues throughout the Seventies and Eighties. Much of the series finale takes place in 1988, as recovering alcoholic McMurphy warily attends a China Beach reunion event, then joins her pals in an impromptu (and incredibly poignant) visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. But “Hello Goodbye” also takes us back to China Beach one last time, to show us McMurphy caring for a dying soldier she knows she can’t save, as a closing reminder of the costs of war, whether or not you fight in them. —A.S.

All in the Family, the parent show of The Jeffersons, had already done a story about the Ku Klux Klan four years prior to the KKK-themed “Sorry, Wrong Meeting.” But the very nature of the spinoff and its leading man made the latter episode feel anything like a rehash. A racist neighbor decides that he can’t tolerate the presence of Black tenants like George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) and hosts a Klan rally to drive this undesirable element out of the building. But he invites the supremely WASPy Tom Willis (Franklin Cover), not realizing that Tom is best friends with George. Tom mistakenly assumes that the meeting will be about a recent spate of break-ins, and later suggests George attend with him. It’s a perfect set-up for both comedy and drama, as an oblivious George enters and cheers on what he thinks is rhetoric aimed solely at low-class criminals, rather than an upstanding businessman like himself, while the meeting’s vile host is shocked by his presence. But then some earlier business about CPR training leads to a great, dramatic climax: This spectacle agitates the Klan leader into a heart attack, and George turns out to be the only one in the room capable of saving the life of someone who thinks of him as less than human. —A.S.

For a show that specializes in absurdist, nonsensical humor, creator Jemaine Clement and company take it next-level with “On the Run.” The episode plucks pompous vampire Laszlo (Matt Berry, who in July finally got an Emmy nomination for his work on this show) out of Staten Island, where he lives with four roommates — his undead wife Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Prosch), 760-year-old Nandor (Kayvan Novak), and Nandor’s familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) — and relocates him to small-town Pennsylvania, where he’s hoping to escape an old friend (Mark Hamill) who’s come to collect on a nearly two-century-old debt of unpaid rent. A stranger in a strange land, Laszlo goes undercover as a “regular human bartender” named Jackie Daytona and, naturally, becomes an avid supporter of the local girls’ volleyball team. His disguise of dark-wash jeans and a toothpick is enough to fool his pursuer… until a mirror (and the removal of the toothpick from his mouth) exposes his true identity. Fully withdrawn from the show’s usual despondent setting, “On the Run” humorously plays Laszlo’s macabre nature against his desire to help 14-year-old girls make it to their state championship. What more could you want from a small-town, salt-of-the-earth bloodsucker? —CTJ

When a train derailment near the school forces the relocation of a crucial playoff game, Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler), seeking a neutral battleground, opts for the most retro possible site: a cow pasture that turns into a swampy mess after a downpour starts during the contest. While everyone else thinks the coach has lost his mind by eschewing a modern facility, he sees it as a back-to-basics location that will allow himself, his players, and the Dillon High School fans to reconnect with the pure essence of the sport, rather than all of the usual cynical distractions. In the same way, “Mud Bowl” provides the most concentrated blast of emotions that this most heart-tugging of all dramas ever provided: the joy of seeing the Panthers have fun and play well despite the weather conditions, and the horror of Tyra (Adrianne Palicki) barely fighting off a rapist while skipping the game to study. —A.S.

Pamela Adlon’s stunning, semi-autobiographical comedy-drama about Sam Fox, a single mom-slash-actress raising three daughters, is packed with installments that feel worthy of being called the best, but “Batceñera” brilliantly captures what makes this underrated gem of a show so special. It opens with a surprise: Frankie (Hannah Alligood), Sam’s headstrong middle daughter, perfectly reenacting a Jerry Lewis bit from Who’s Minding the Store? set to composer Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter.” The heart of the episode is the blending of a bat mitzvah and a quinceañera for 15-year-old Frankie and her friend Reinita, respectively. The episode has everything: carnitas and knishes, a replica of Frida Kahlo’s suit, an all-female mariachi band, great needle-drops, poignant mother-daughter exchanges with each girl, Sam’s ex finally feeling a bit of proper shame for not being there for his kids, and much, much more. It’s a batceañera you never want to end. —Lisa Tozzi

For fans of The Honeymooners, it’s impossible to choose an all-time favorite episode, but like Jackie Gleason himself, “The Man From Space” is one of the greats. Originally airing on New Year’s Eve 1955, it pit Gleason’s blustering Ralph Kramden against his dimwitted pal o’ mine Ed Norton (Art Carney) in the Raccoon Lodge costume contest. Norton rents his outfit — a foppish French getup that’s supposed to evoke the engineer who built the sewers of Paris — while Ralph aims to prove he can do better by making a costume out of everyday items: a flashlight, the ice-box door, a kitchen pot as a helmet. His vision is “the man from space,” but neither his long-suffering wife Alice (Audrey Meadows) nor Norton take it that way. When the live audience finally sees Ralph emerge in all his resplendent glory, their reaction is unhinged, even as pieces of his spacesuit unexpectedly fall to the floor, teeing up a classic Gleason ad lib: “Let me have that,” he barks at Alice, “that’s my denaturizer.” The final scene at the costume party, with Norton barging in from his shift in the sewer in a gas mask, is one for the ages. —Joseph Hudak

Alan Ball’s HBO drama usually kicked off its episodes with a grisly and/or highly ironic death. For the series finale, however, the showrunner opted for something a little different: He’d begin the last chapter of the Fisher family and their associates not with a life being snuffed out, but with a birth — and then he’d end the show not with one death, but a dozen. Having spent the bulk of its swan song tying up all of its loose narrative ends, Six Feet Under then shows us how every one of its surviving main characters would eventually shuffle off this mortal coil: Matriarch Ruth Fisher will die of old age with her family around her; Federico has a heart attack on a cruise ship; David’s security-guard husband Keith is murdered during a robbery, etc. Set to the Sia song “Breathe,” this justly praised montage doubles as a full-frontal assault on your tear ducts. It saves Claire’s passing for last, and before she takes her last breath at age 102, we see evidence of friends, loved ones, professional accolades, and personal memories all around her. For a series so devoted to sudden death, it goes out with a tribute to a long life well-lived. —David Fear

As rumpled homicide detective Lt. Columbo, Peter Falk was so superhumanly charming that he could have onscreen chemistry with a doorknob. But the iconic mystery series was at its best whenever Falk had a strong foil. This episode, with the dogged cop trying to prove a famous orchestra conductor murdered his mistress, has a home-field advantage in this regard, as the bad guy is played by Falk’s close friend and frequent collaborator John Cassavetes. Beyond the actors’ ease around one another, the dynamic crackles because the Columbo formula depends on the killers being too arrogant to assume this mumbling schnook could possibly outsmart them — and Cassavetes had a gift for playing smug and irritated. —A.S.

The best Friends moments come from full-ensemble episodes (Season Three’s “The One Where No One’s Ready,” Season Seven’s “The One With Monica’s Thunder”) where all six buds join forces and create a killing floor of comedy. The result is always a propulsive 22 minutes that doesn’t have a single dull moment, and “The One Where Everybody Finds Out” is this dynamic at its best. Secret’s out: Everyone has found out about Monica and Chandler’s relationship (OK, maybe Ross is a little late), and the gang play a game of chicken, one-upping each other to see who cracks first. Phoebe’s line, “They don’t know that we know they know we know!” embodies everything great about this episode, and the wit and wordplay that make the series a classic. No surprise it was nominated for three Emmys. —A.M.

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