The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time

FBI agents Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Mulder (David Duchovny) tangled with plenty of paranormal phenomena on The X-Files. But they never encountered anything as unforgettable as Clyde Bruckman. Peter Boyle plays an eccentric Minnesota insurance salesman with the strange power to foresee how other people will die. He discovered this ability in 1959, when Buddy Holly’s plane crashed. (Although he was a bigger fan of the Big Bopper.) There were different kinds of X-Files adventures — mythology episodes about the alien conspiracy, Monster of the Week thrillers, Scully/Mulder shipper-bait — but fans have a special reverence for the comic gems penned by Darin Morgan. He wrote only four episodes, yet it’s a Velvet Underground-like run of classics, rounded out by “Humbug,” “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” and the underrated “War of the Coprophages.” (“Her name is Bambi?”) He also wrote for the ill-fated reboot. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” is not just his greatest hit but the series’ emotional and dramatic peak, with Boyle winning an Emmy as the cranky loner who joins the agents in their search for a killer. It explores The X-Files’ big themes: death, isolation, wanting to believe. Not to mention a warning to Mulder about the perils of autoerotic asphyxiation. —R.S.

This ensemble comedy about the wacky staff of a New York radio station never got the attention of its Nineties NBC peers like Friends and Seinfeld, but at its best it could trade punches with either of them. “Arcade” is the best example of this, presenting three interlocking stories working in perfect harmony: Lisa (Maura Tierney) decides that she and Dave (Dave Foley) should retake their SATs so she can prove she isn’t getting dumber with age — only she decides to do this right as Beth (Vicky Lewis) has replaced the ancient office sandwich machine with the arcade game that caused an addicted Dave to tank his SATs the first time around, while Bill (Phil Hartman) goes into withdrawal from the sandwich machine’s disgusting food, which even he acknowledges isn’t “conventionally tasty.” A precision comedy machine. —A.S.    

A tour de force for a character who wasn’t even really supposed to be in this show. When Aaron Sorkin conceived of The West Wing, the idea was to do a series about all of the people who serve at the pleasure of the president, but not the president himself. Then they cast Martin Sheen, and all bets were off. Sheen was such an indelible presence onscreen as President Jed Barlet that he became the fulcrum of the series. At the start of the Season Two finale, news is about to break wide that Bartlet has been concealing an incurable degenerative illness, multiple sclerosis, from the American public. Upping the dramatic stakes: Barlet’s indispensable personal secretary, Mrs. Landingham — who also served as his headmaster father’s secretary at the private school young Jed attended, becoming a kind of surrogate older sister — has died in a car crash. Seamlessly interwoven with flashbacks to Jed’s time in school, the episode is a meditation on fathers (of the holy, human, and founding variety), duty, and character. It’s arguably Sorkin at his most Sorkin-y — theatrical, erudite, sentimental — and it all works to stunning effect. The high point is a Bartlet monologue for the ages: After Landigham’s funeral, Bartlet stays behind in the National Cathedral for a mano-a-mano with God. Stalking toward the altar, temper rising, he quotes Graham Greene, excoriates the Lord for a list of recent tragedies, curses him in a torrent of Latin, then lights a cigarette and leaves the stamped-out butt on the floor. Find us a better meeting of dramatist and actor. —M.F.

This series about four teenage friends growing up on a reservation in rural Oklahoma could do wildly different things from one episode to the next, shifting from broad humor to heart-rending drama. And some episodes, like “Mabel,” offer all the series’ flavors in a single half-hour. As the reservation gathers together with Elora Danan (Devery Jacobs) for her grandmother’s deathbed vigil, we get various amusing bits of business about everyone being crammed into this tiny house, but also lots of poignant material about Elora, her grandmother, and her long-dead mom, and about the rituals the community goes through when an elder is about to pass. William Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth), a 19th-century Native spirit, usually appears on the show as comic relief, but here he’s used in a largely serious, powerful role, as he helps Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) realize how much Elora needs an overt act of friendship from him at this sad moment in her life. Every element of the series’ greatness can be found here. —A.S.

When David Milch’s Western drama debuted 20 years ago, the initial reaction was about the abundant profanity, as well as the stark brutality of the series’ depiction of the mining camp in its mythic days as an illegal mining camp in the Dakota territories. In short order, though, it became clear that Milch was telling a story about how communities can form even in the most vile and vicious-seeming places, and how we all ultimately have to take care of one another in order to get more out of life than mere survival. Nowhere is this idea brought beautifully to life more than in the first season finale, when Deadwood barkeep Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), who had been introduced as the remorseless villain of the piece, takes it upon himself to end the suffering of the dying Reverend Smith (Ray McKinnon). Already, we knew that Al’s late brother suffered seizures similar to the ones plaguing this man of the cloth. And by this point, we understand that Al, beneath his avarice and his foul mouth, understands better than anyone around him the necessity of being part of a society. So when Al holds a cloth over the reverend’s face, wraps him in a tight embrace to control his bucking, and gently whispers, “You can go now, brother,” it speaks volumes about this man, and even more about the fundamental message of this astonishing show. —A.S.

What’s the funniest moment of the funniest Parks and Rec of them all? Is it when the health-obsessed Chris Traeger (Rob Lowe), betrayed by what his body is doing while laid low with the flu, orders his mirrored reflection to stop pooping? Maybe it’s when Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt) tells a co-worker (in a line Pratt improvised), “I typed your symptoms into the thing up here, and it says you could have ‘network connectivity problems.’” Or is it every single thing that Amy Poehler does and says once Leslie Knope gets loaded on flu medicine, including the moment where she believes that the wall and the floor just switched? In an episode where so many of the characters are critically ill, the cast gets to hit comic heights. And Leslie gets to once again demonstrate her superhuman energy levels by gathering her wits together just long enough to deliver a crucial presentation about the town harvest festival. As an awestruck Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) describes after, perfectly summing up his future wife, and Parks in general: “That was a flu-ridden Michael Jordan at the ’97 NBA finals. That was Kirk Gibson hobbling up to the plate and hitting a homer off of Dennis Eckersley. That was… that was Leslie Knope.” —A.S.

This episode, a standout from the series’ initial three-year run, is probably most memorable because of the Charlie Brown running gag referenced in its title: Almost all the Bluths, each faced with aching disappointment, don the cartoon boy’s signature slump as they walk along to Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here” (and it’s hard to miss the dog lying on top of the red doghouse). But the true brilliance lies underneath the Easter eggs, with George (Jeffrey Tambour) Huck Finning his own funeral, allowing each of his children to tap into their ids for a eulogy: Lindsay (Portia de Rossi) uses it to try to win a man; Michael (Jason Bateman) turns it into a touching yet completely empty moment with his own son; and Gob (Will Arnett) uses it to stage the “illusion” of him being buried alive. (Narrator: He is not, in fact, buried alive.) Though the series would later be marred by a mediocre Netflix reboot and allegations of toxic behavior behind the scenes, does this groundbreaking, initially under-appreciated cult series still hold up? It’s as Ann as the nose on plain’s face. —EGP

The new Battlestar Galactica — reimagining the cheesy Seventies sci-fi adventure as a mature War on Terror allegory — debuted as a 2003 miniseries. The premiere of the first regular season made clear that producer Ronald D. Moore and the rest of his team had no interest in shrinking from the intensity, and the moral ambiguity, of this approach. “33” picks up with the Galactica and its ragtag fleet enduring a repetitive nightmare: Every 33 minutes, their Cylon robot enemies appear out of nowhere for yet another attack. There is no respite, no sleep, and seemingly no hope, until Lee Adama (Jamie Bamber) and Kara Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) are sent to destroy a civilian ship that may be transmitting the fleet’s location back to the Cylons. Even the relief of ending the vicious cycle only goes so far, because our heroes aren’t sure how many innocent people they had to kill to accomplish it. “33” declared that this BSG would be very serious, complicated business, and set an incredibly high bar for the show that followed. —A.S.

If this were a Friends episode, its title would be “The One Where Everyone Wants to Bone Everyone Else.” When Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) gets a free trip to a fancy-pants ski lodge, he brings Daphne (Jane Leeves), Niles (David Hyde Pierce), his dad (John Mahoney), and Daphne’s beautiful, if intellectually challenged, friend who thinks the Matterhorn is an instrument. Misdirected horniness of unprecedented levels ensues. There is, of course, stellar wordplay (“Leave it you to put the ‘pig’ back in Pygmalion”), pithy aphorism-quoting (“Faint heart never won fair lady”), and misplaced Frasier confidence (“I should register this dressing gown with the Love Police”). But where every sitcom does misunderstandings, only Frasier required Homeland-level whiteboards to keep up. The final five minutes of room-invading and door-slamming remain a paragon of the show’s genius. —J.N.

What happens when you send a depressed, alcoholic horse to an underwater film festival, where for once in his life he tries to do the right thing and sort of succeeds but mostly fails? Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s BoJack (Will Arnett) is never more his dyspeptic but relatable self than in an episode where he can’t talk, doesn’t speak the language, and isn’t able to get his liquor fix until the end, when he discovers vodka suppositories. “Fish Out of Water” is mostly silent, accompanied only by Jesse Novak’s appropriately dreary electronic score. BoJack tries to apologize to a director for ruining her career, but literally can’t get the words out in water world. He then gets swept up in pack of sardines and stampeded onto a sea bus, and ends up reluctantly helping a male seahorse give birth to a new family. He rescues a baby seahorse from a taffy factory. By the time he gets back to the festival, he’s missed the premiere of his own film, Secretariat, and his heartfelt apology to the director — after earlier glib attempts — is washed away by the ocean. No matter. BoJack has simultaneously accomplished nothing and everything, an epic journey that summarizes the human — neigh, the horse — condition. There are approximately 6,000 sight gags and instances of wordplay in the episode that break the comic bleakness. You could watch only this single episode of this series, and these 25 minutes would still move you to tears. I had the privilege of profiling Waksberg during the editing of this episode. It was like watching Picasso paint in real time. —S.R.

The police drama (newly arrived to streaming) distinguished itself from its peers with how much focus it placed on interrogations of murder suspects, and on the remarkable verbal facility of its cops. “Three Men and Adena” takes the idea to its logical extreme. After spending weeks failing to close the murder of little girl Adena Watson, Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) and Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) make one last run at their chief subject, fruit peddler Risley Tucker (Moses Gunn), understanding that if they can’t get him to confess within a 12-hour window, he goes free and Adena gets no justice. Nearly all of the episode takes place inside the interview room, a.k.a. “The Box,” with the reluctant partners trying every tactic they can think of to get this stubborn old man to fess up to the horrible crime he committed. It’s such a remarkable portrait of this mental battle that, when Braugher years later was playing a very different kind of cop on the sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine, that show did its own episode-length interrogation as a tribute, called, of course, “The Box.”  —A.S.   

The first season of Fleabag was so sublime, it almost made you wish creator and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge had decided to do a one-and-done. (She is British, after all, and they’re fond of that.) Then Season Two opened with a wallop: a family dinner that puts nuclear levels of dysfunction on display, and, more importantly, introduces a new character, the Hot Priest, played by Andrew Scott, who’s set to officiate the wedding of Fleabag’s sister. (It also introduces the Jumpsuit, Fleabag’s chic dinner outfit, which sold out everywhere after this episode aired.) As an absurd farce erupts around them, involving a series of slaps and smacks that result in more than one bloody nose, Fleabag and this very unpriestly-seeming priest — he curses, smokes, drinks, and isn’t even wearing his “little doggie thing” as Fleabag’s stepmom (Olivia Colman) puts it — circle each other with centrifugal force. The chemistry between longtime friends Scott and Waller-Bridge is so hot you could fry an egg on your screen, but its real source is the profound intimacy they seem to cultivate from their first cigarette in the alley behind the restaurant. “This is a love story,” Fleabag declares with a wink in her fourth-wall-breaking style about two minutes into the show. And like all the best love stories, the one that unfolds over this transcendent second season proves to be joyous, pure, complicated, bittersweet, and life-changing. —M.F.

When original M*A*S*H actor McLean Stevenson opted to leave the series to pursue other opportunities (in hindsight, not the wisest career move), his bosses Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds decided to make his departure count. The Korean War dramedy’s third season finale begins with Stevenson’s Henry Blake discovering that he’s earned enough service points to be sent home. What follows for most of the episode is a mix of warmth and silliness, as everyone says goodbye to the 4077th’s commanding officer in their own way. But then comes the final scene, where an ashen Radar (Gary Burghoff) enters the surgical tent to inform his comrades that, “I have a message. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.” It was a potent reminder that, for all the hijinks that Hawkeye (Alan Alda) and friends got up to, war is ultimately serious business that can kill you even when you’re on the verge of making it out alive. Gelbart, who directed, withheld the script pages for this final scene until right before it was filmed, ensuring that his actors would be nearly as shocked by the news as the doctors and nurses they played. —A.S.  

There had been countless depictions of deaths, un-deaths, and other manner of courting the Grim Reaper throughout Buffy’s previous five-and-a-half seasons, ranging from goofy to grotesque. When it came time to say goodbye to one major character, however, the tone was serious — and the impact permanent. “The Body” opens with Buffy coming home to unexpectedly find her mother dead, and from the moment Sarah Michelle Gellar quietly says “Mommy?” viewers are in for one genuinely gutting hour of television. The passing of Joyce Summers (Kristine Sutherland) isn’t the result of angry demons, vengeful vampires, or anything supernatural; she simply succumbs to an aneurysm. And the young woman who’s saved the world countless times finds she’s unable to save the person who means the most to her. Writer-director-showrunner Joss Whedon focuses on the quotidian details of dealing with death, from transporting the body to the coroner report, and the shock and numbness that accompany suddenly realizing that a loved one who’s there one second is gone the next. “I didn’t want any lessons, I didn’t want any catharsis,” Whedon admitted years after the episode aired. “I just wanted to tell a story about grief, in particular its dull eccentricities.” —D.F.

Some episodes of Curb can skew so mortifying that they’re hard to watch, but when Larry David successfully balances his signature cringe with quick one-liners, cutting societal criticism, and actual heart, it’s a thing of beauty. “Mister Softee,” which David himself called “one of my all-time favorite episodes,” may be the best example. The plot is too complicated to explain here in full, but highlights include Larry’s obsession with Mister Softee (which we learn, in a rare flashback, originated with some embarrassing sexual experimentation in the back of an ice cream truck as a teen in Brooklyn); a broken passenger seat in his car that causes women to orgasm (“This chair is a fuck machine!” exclaims JB Smoove’s Leon); and an afternoon spent with his new friend Bill Buckner (playing himself), the former MLB journeyman whose critical error cost the Red Sox the 1986 World Series. (Leon also has a great bit discovering that wearing glasses affords him much different treatment as a Black man.) Not only that, Ana Gasteyer guests as Larry’s love interest, Robert Smigel plays his softball captain-slash-car mechanic, and Fred Melamed cameos as Larry’s HIPAA-violating therapist. Still, the climax of the episode is what makes it such a satisfying moment in the long history of the show: When a frantic mother is forced to throw her baby out of a burning building, and the child bounces off the firemen’s life net, Buckner dives to catch it — saving both the baby’s life and Buckner’s own legacy, and proving that David is a bit of a softie himself. “There was a draft where he dropped the baby,” David later said. “That was hilarious, but I couldn’t do it. The other one made me cry a little bit. We had to redeem him.” —EGP

It’s tempting to pick The Americans’ concluding episode, “START,” which brings all its narrative and thematic chickens home to roost as well as any drama finale other than the one we have up in ninth place. But the winner from this series has to be “The Magic of David Copperfield,” which more than any other episode conveys the emotional cost of the double lives Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) lead as deep-cover KGB agents posing as an American couple with two teenage kids — one of whom, Paige (Holly Taylor), is in on their secret and forced to help them with their mission. In this one, everything is going wrong for the Jenningses: Philip has to send his other wife (and the one he cares more for at this point than he does Elizabeth) Martha (Alison Wright) off to the Soviet Union after the FBI learns she’s been helping him. Elizabeth is forced to murder an asset who’s threatening to go to the cops. Paige is fed up with having to spy on the pastor who she’d told the truth about her parents, and gets such a scolding from her mom that it looks like a vein in Keri Russell’s forehead is about to explode. As the family’s weary handler Gabriel (Frank Langella) puts it, “It’s never been this bad. It’s worse every day.”  —A.S.

You may never have watched a single episode of I Love Lucy, but you definitely know the iconic set piece of the landmark show’s second-season opener: Lucy and Ethel frantically cramming chocolates down their shirts and in their mouths as a conveyor belt turns into an endless gauntlet of speeding bon-bons. (The actresses actually spent a day at See’s Candies in L.A., observing how the company’s factory workers produced its treats.) There’s a whole other subplot involving Ricky and Fred trying to do housework — the husbands and wives decide to switch places, so the men cook and clean while the ladies get jobs, yadda yadda yadda — but it’s the pitch-perfect slapstick turns from both Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance, struggling to keep up at their new gig at Kramer’s Kandy Kitchen, that everyone remembers; most folks simply refer to this as “the Chocolate Factory episode.” No word on whether they washed all of that chocolate down with Vitameatavegamin. —D.F.

For most of the Breaking Bad spinoff’s run, viewers wondered exactly when and why Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) would embrace the craven identity of Saul Goodman, and how the show would present that. No one could have expected the way it finally happens here, in an episode that masterfully concludes the pre-Walter White portion of the story. In the wake of the murder of their former boss, and the way their lives keep getting tangled up in drug cartel business, Kim (Rhea Seehorn) realizes that her marriage to Jimmy has grown toxic and keeps hurting people around them. “I love you,” he pleads. “I love you too,” she replies in sad defeat, “but so what?” And as Jimmy watches the love of his life pack up to leave that life, the episode jarringly cuts ahead to Saul Goodman waking up in bed with a sex worker. It was the moment that so many fans had speculated about, yet “Fun and Games” — which also says goodbye to Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), offering some rare personal insight into the Chicken Man along the way — did it in a way no one could have expected. Nor, after everyone had grown so invested in the couple, did anyone seem to want it anymore. A tragedy for the characters, and for the audience. —A.S.

Rest in peace, Chuckles the Clown — you were truly the pride of Minneapolis’ pancake-makeup community. This minor player had appeared a few times throughout James L. Brooks’ sitcom before Lou Grant (Ed Asner) walks into WJM-TV’s newsroom and informs the staff that the beloved performer suffered an untimely demise: He was dressed as his popular character Peter Peanut while leading a parade “and a rogue elephant tried to shell him.” Everyone cracks jokes at the dead man’s expense, except Mary. He was a human being, she informs her coworkers, and deserves your tears, not your jeers! Then, in the middle of his funeral, Mary does the one thing you’re not supposed to do: She starts uncontrollably laughing. Even by this reliable Seventies comedy’s standards, the episode has a high zinger count — when Ted Baxter (Ted Knight) worries that it could have been him, Murray (Gavin MacLeod) replies, “Somewhere out there is an elephant with your name on it” — yet the way it finds the perfect blend of humor and pathos, somehow turning a humiliating reaction into something recognizably human, is what makes it an all-timer. And Moore trying (and failing) to restrain herself during a truly absurd eulogy, only to burst into sobs at the end, is early cringe-comedy at its best. —D.F.

ER drastically quickened the pace of TV drama, operating less like a hospital show than an action movie, with pounding music, frenetic camerawork, and adrenaline-pumping trauma sequences. The devastating miracle of “Love’s Labor Lost” is in how it manages to simultaneously move at the usual ER speed, yet explore each step of its tragedy — an overconfident Dr. Greene (Anthony Edwards) manages a labor-and-delivery case where everything goes wrong, ending in the death of the mother — in a fashion that feels agonizingly slow. The show would offer crises on a much bigger scale over the years, but this episode brings this small, painful story to such vivid, horrifying life that it still stands above all the mass casualty stories. —A.S.

If you’ve ever declared that we live in the “darkest timeline” or deployed this meme to underscore a WTF reaction, you have this standout episode of Dan Harmon’s sitcom to thank. Troy (Donald Glover) and Abed (Danny Pudi) throw a housewarming party, a roll of the dice creates six alternate realities, and boom — remedial chaos reigns! Some things remain the same no matter what: Jeff (Joel McHale) will always hit his head on a ceiling fan, Pierce (Chevy Chase) will forever brag about the time he had sex in an airplane bathroom with Eartha Kitt, Britta (Gillian Jacobs) will never get to sing the second line of “Roxanne” (assuming she’s not impulsively marrying the pizza delivery guy at the door). Every other aspect is the equivalent of, say, a butterfly flapping its wings in Peru and causing one of the study group to get shot in the leg or set the apartment on fire. Long before Marvel started stacking up timeline variants, this was the go-to example for modern Multiverse-101 stories, and became one of the defining moments of a show willing to mix lowbrow comedy with high-concept intellectual situations. Also, for the record: A Norwegian troll doll is a horrible housewarming gift no matter what timeline you exist in. —D.F.

You are cordially invited to attend the wedding of Connor Roy (Alan Ruck) and Willa Ferreyra (Justine Lupe) — and what’s about to be the single worst day in the history of the Roy family. For three and a half seasons, we watched the media mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox) play King Lear with his kids, drive his corporate toadies into permanent hissy fits and generally act like a raging one-percent terror. Now, the patriarch who’s played God in this HBO show’s world turns out to be all too human. Rather than attend the nuptials of his eldest son, Logan has decided to jet off to Sweden to finalize a deal. The rest of the Roys are in attendance, however, and it’s all bitchiness as usual until Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) receive a call from their brother-in-law, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen). Something’s happened to their father during the flight. Something very bad. Directed by series regular Mark Rylod and written by showrunner Jesse Armstrong, “Connor’s Wedding” quickly cycles through every Kübler-Ross stage of grief, keeping the bulk of the focus not on Logan (we barely see his face as they try to revive him) but on his children as they attempt to deal with the news. Succession has always been an ensemble show, but it’s the next-generation trio at its center — played by Strong, Culkin, and Sarah Snook as Siobhan Roy — who take center stage here, and they deliver easily their best performances of the entire series as they try to take in what’s just happened. An entire history of familial love and abuse is played out in a single, one-sided phone conversation. It’s the most devastating example of the show’s ability to juggle tragedy and absurdity in equal measure, ending in a true moment of grace: Kendall, Roman, and Shiv in a tight embrace, bound together by sorrow, blood, and the realization that both their nurturer and their nightmare no longer walks among them. —D.F.

There had been other mystery dramas before Twin Peaks — other murder procedurals, other small towns with big secrets on small screens. But David Lynch brought a certain discomfort and strangeness to the genre, making this possibly the weirdest show ever to hit network television — and by teaming up with former Hill Street Blues writer Mike Frost, it was grounded in reality enough to become an instant hit. When the body of popular teen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) washes up on the shores of Twin Peaks, a Pacific Northwest logging town five miles south of the Canadian border, FBI Agent Cooper (Kyle McLaughlin, fresh off Lynch’s Blue Velvet) is called in to investigate. Strangely funny dialogue, surrealist dream sequences, and a town full of cartoonish characters ensue. While it went on to spawn a prequel film and a 2017 reboot, it was this first double-length episode that pulled audiences into the uncomfortable, absurdist world and made Lynch’s signature twisted reality just a little more accessible. —EGP

In which a common enemy makes unlikely allies, and the HBO show loses one of its key characters. For most of this drama’s third season, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) had been angling to transition from Baltimore’s most valuable street player to legit businessman and property developer (“We ain’t gotta dream no more, man,” he tells his partner Avon Barksdale, played by Wood Harris, as they stand on the roof deck of Avon’s upscale waterfront condo). He soon finds out that, in terms of shady criminal enterprises, the drug trade has nothing on backroom politics and the real estate game. Meanwhile, Omar (Michael K. Williams) and killer-for-hire Brother Mouzone (Michael Potts) team up to take Bell down, eventually cornering him in one of his own buildings. He may have been done with his gangster past, but it wasn’t quite through with him yet. Co-written by showrunner David Simon and the great George Pelecanos, “Middle Ground” gave Bell a proper, if bitterly ironic farewell. As for the British actor who brought Bell to life, Elba had come into The Wire a virtual unknown and, thanks to his portrayal of its most complicated antagonist, exited a genuine star. —D.F.

A summer afternoon on Maple Street: barbecues, ice cream trucks, porch swings, children playing, adults adulting. But all of that is disrupted when a shadow, a blaring noise, and a beam of light quickly pass across the street, and suburban paradise descends into paranoid chaos. Was it a meteor, or should they listen to the comic-book-obsessed kid, who believes aliens have arrived according to a story he read? Soon enough, the neighbors are suspicious, calling out any habit or behavior they suddenly deem outside the norm: Maybe you’re the alien. The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street aired in March 1960, a Season One stunner that showed audiences Rod Serling wasn’t afraid to confront McCarthyism head-on or lead viewers deep into the unknown. As for valuable takeaways, make sure to have a good explanation when your car randomly starts, OK? —A.M.

Donald Glover’s FX series loved nothing more than adding surreal absurdism to its explorations of fame, success, race, class and the ongoing hallucinatory trip that is life in modern America. (Big up the invisible car!) This stand-alone episode about the quest of Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) to procure a vintage piano, however, is like a straight-up horror movie in miniature — part Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and part waking nightmare that’s hard to shake off. It’s not where our stoner tour guide is picking up the musical instrument that’s so spooky, though the Confederate flag trucker hat he finds at a gas station suggests he’s not exactly in 100 percent friendly territory. It’s who he’s purchasing it from: a creepy, possibly skin-bleached recluse named Teddy Perkins, brother of a once-famous musician, Benny, who may or may not be real. Director Hiro Murai admitted he borrowed a lot from The Shining here, and the sepulchral set feels less like Teddy’s dream of an at-home museum dedicated to great fathers (among whom he cites the Jackson family’s problematic patriarch, Joe, to “the father who drops off Emilio Estevez at the beginning of The Breakfast Club”) and more like a mausoleum. Glover himself plays the host, under prosthetics and a perverse amount of pancake make-up; by all accounts, he went full Method and stayed in character the entire time on set, with the credits listing “Teddy Perkins as himself.” The pale skin and cleft chin invited comparisons to Michael Jackson, yet you can see an entire music industry’s worth of curdled dreams, broken spirits, and madness in the Perkins brothers. Bonus points for the best needle-drop in the show’s history as well: Stevie Wonders’ “Evil,” a song filled with rhetorical questions that feels like it was written just for Teddy.  —D.F.

Consequences, consequences, consequences. Everywhere you look in the series finale of the trailblazing basic-cable drama, characters — particularly crooked cop Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and the surviving members of his strike team, Shane (Walton Goggins), and Ronnie (David Rees Snell) — are forced to reckon with the terrible things they did since The Shield began. For six seasons, viewers had wondered whether Vic would die, go to prison, or somehow get away with everything. Among the brilliant aspects of “Family Meeting” is how Shield creator Shawn Ryan is able to mix and match those familiar outcomes among the strike teamers in unexpected, often utterly devastating ways. (Good luck getting over the terrible decision Shane makes here, and the way Goggins plays the scene where the episode’s title is uttered.) Even Vic’s fate is much knottier than anyone could have expected. These kinds of intensely serialized dramas often struggle to wrap things up in satisfying fashion, but The Shield did it perfectly, making it the best drama finale of them all. —A.S.

This miniseries adaptation of Alex Haley’s bestselling novel, inspired by stories of slavery that had been passed down through his family for generations, arrived on television at the exact right time. This was 1977, the days when TV was still a mass medium, and half the country saw some or all of the story of Mandinka warrior Kunta Kinte (played by LeVar Burton as a young man, John Amos as a middle-aged one) being abducted from his homeland and forced into a life of bondage and servitude. And it was at a moment with just enough distance from the peak of the Civil Rights Movement that viewers were prepared to grapple with the ugliness of America’s original sin. (Arguably, many more were prepared in 1977 than would be now.) The whole thing is extraordinary, but the part etched in the memory of everyone who’s seen it is this second chapter, which begins with a violent failed revolt on the ship bringing Kunta and his fellow captives across the Middle Passage, transitions into the utterly banal evil of a slave auction, and ends with Kunta being graphically whipped, over and over again, for escaping from the plantation — and, just as importantly to his captors, for refusing to accept the name “Toby” that they have insisted he adopt. The rage and pain in the eyes of Burton, and in the eyes of Lou Gossett Jr. (playing Fiddler, an older, American-born slave), is as indelible an image as has ever crossed a television screen. —A.S.

The first-season finale of the beloved sitcom brought the long-simmering romantic tension between ex-jock bartender Sam Malone (Ted Danson) and pretentious waitress Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) to a full, wonderful boil. After resisting Sam’s advances for a year, Diane has begun to date Sam’s more successful brother, Derek (George Ball), but Sam continues to hold out hope that he’s the Malone sibling she really desires. Even after Diane confirms his suspicions, everything between them has to turn into an argument, leading to an iconic exchange that every will-they-or-won’t-they rom-com has been chasing ever since: Diane tells an infuriated Sam, “You disgust me. I hate you.” He asks, “Are you as turned on as I am?” “More!” she exclaims, and they kiss as the studio audience explodes at this long-awaited climax. —A.S.

Honestly, “The Suitcase” might have made the list even if the rest of it was forgettable outside of the moment where Don Draper (Jon Hamm) screams at Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), who’s looking for a little gratitude for a job well done, “THAT’S WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR!” Fortunately, the whole thing is amazing, and among the best examples of the emotional impact of ongoing episodic television. As Don and Peggy work an all-nighter for a Samsonite suitcase pitch, they get to hash out their latest conflicts with one another, and reveal parts of themselves that they had previously hidden. Viewers who had watched the 45 previous hours of Mad Men got this rewarding acknowledgment of the way the relationship had evolved, as Peggy went from Don’s meek secretary to his eager protégé to his frustrated peer. But if you were to show “The Suitcase” to a Mad Men newcomer who didn’t know the backstory between them, or their respective complicated histories with Duck Phillips (Mark Moses), who briefly intrudes on them, they would still be able to appreciate the nuanced character work of the hour, and the awe-inspiring performances by Hamm and Moss. —A.S.

Larry David believed in this episode so much that he planned to quit if NBC didn’t let them air it — but much to his surprise, even then network heads saw just how groundbreaking it would be. Indeed, after 18.5 million people — 20 percent of American televisions at the time — tuned in to watch in November 1992, Seinfeld went from a scrappy sitcom about a group of narcissistic New Yorkers to the show that everyone, no matter your demographic, had to keep up with. The premise — which had been hanging out in David’s notebook since he participated in a real-life “contest” in the 1980s, but figured would never pass the censors — was simple: After George’s mother (Estelle Harris, introduced in this episode) catches him in flagrante with himself, takes a fall, and is laid up in the hospital, George swears off the habit indefinitely. Jerry doesn’t believe he can do it and turns the challenge into a bet. Then Elaine and Kramer get in on the fun. Suddenly, reasons to be horny greet the gang at every turn: the hot nudist across the street that Kramer can’t take his eyes off of; the virgin (Frasier’s Jane Leeves) who Jerry’s dating; the girl-on-girl sponge baths George spies in his mother’s shared hospital room; John F. Kennedy Jr. flirting (offscreen) with Elaine in an aerobics class. Every part of it is spot-on, from David’s Emmy-winning script to Jerry’s rendition of “The Wheels on the Bus,” Kramer’s quick caving (“That was one of the biggest laughs we ever got,” David said), and Elaine’s wistful imagining of her new married name (“Elaine Benes-Kennedy Junior,” she practically whispers, after admitting she’s out of the race). But the best part is that by leaving the word “masturbation” entirely out of its 23 minutes, the show gifted us the best sexual euphemism to come out of the series’ nine seasons: “master of your domain.” —EGP

If this isn’t the single most influential television episode ever made, it’s near the top of a very short list. As Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) takes his teenage daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) on a tour of colleges in Maine, he’s surprised to recognize Febby Petrulio (Tony Ray Rossi), a former Family associate who turned rat and went into witness protection. Tony’s decision to stalk and murder Febby, solely for the satisfaction of doing it, was a line that no TV protagonist had ever crossed before — the idea scared even the executives at HBO! In its aftermath, the audience’s continued affection for Tony emboldened not only The Sopranos, but all of the dramas it inspired over the past 25 years. Beyond that groundbreaking moment, “College” is incredible. The Tony-Meadow plot captures the tension between the two lives Tony leads — about which Meadow confronts him for the first time here — as well as any other Sopranos installment does. And the B-story, where Carmela (Edie Falco) spends a memorable, tempting night with Father Phil (Paul Schulze), is practically a stage play, forcing Carmela to articulate her qualms about her husband’s profession in a way she almost never allows herself to afterwards. —A.S.

The Leftovers, set in the aftermath of a Rapture-esque event where a random two percent of the world’s population vanishes without explanation, was in its first season a powerful but at times oppressive story about grief, faith, loneliness, and madness. By its second, it was still about all of those difficult themes, but it managed to grapple with them in far more audacious, at times shockingly fun ways. Never was that combination of sorrow and absurdity more potent than in this episode, where Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) swallows a lethal dose of poison to push out the dark voice inside his head, and wakes up in a fancy hotel to find that he’s an international assassin tasked with killing the president of the United States. Is this another hallucination? The afterlife? The place where the Suddenly Departed went? “International Assassin” never feels the need to explain, because it understands that the emotional catharsis Kevin gets out of this bizarre scenario is all that he, and the audience, requires. The episode is so stylish, so unexpected, so funny, and so devastating, that we’re picking it even though it’s one of the few Leftovers episodes to not feature Carrie Coon’s staggering performance as Nora Durst. —A.S.  

The funniest episode of the greatest sitcom in television history, animated or otherwise, manages to cram in references to everything from The Godfather Part II and Tim Burton’s Batman to Yellow Submarine, Citizen Kane, Moby Dick, Get Smart, Buster Brown, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas across a mere 22 minutes. It’s about Homer trying to negotiate a new union contract from Mr. Burns that will allow the nuclear plant employees to keep their dental plan while Lisa adjusts to the cheap braces she’s forced to wear. But that’s just the backdrop for an astonishing series of rapid-fire gags that have been endlessly quoted and memed over the past 30 years. (“Dental plan/Lisa needs braces…”; “So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time…”; “Why must you turn my office into a house of lies?”) Our favorite moment comes when Mr. Burns shows off a room with a thousand monkeys typing on a thousand typewriters, thinking they’ll eventually write the greatest novel known to man. “It was the best of times, it was the — ‘blurst’ of times?!” he reads from one of them, unimpressed that the simian came close to the opening of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. “You stupid monkey!” The episode was written by Jay Kogen and Wallace Wolodarsky, who worked that season alongside Conan O’Brien, George Meyer, John Swartzwelder, and Jon Vitti in what’s now seen as one of the greatest writing rooms of all time. They churned out all-time classics that season like “Marge vs. the Monorail,” “A Streetcar Named Marge,” “Krusty Gets Kancelled,” and “Whacking Day,” but none pack in as many laughs pers second as “Last Exit to Springfield.” —A.G.

The power of dramatic television, fully realized. The medium’s biggest advantage over film is the sheer amount of time we get to spend with characters and their stories, episode after episode, year after year. Many of the episodes on this list hit as hard as they do because of how well we know the players and the conflicts by that point. None are as devastating, or as painstakingly set up, as “Ozymandias,” the hour in which every terrible thing Walter White (Bryan Cranston) has done over five-plus seasons finally blows up in his face. Uncle Jack (Michael Bowen) and his gang of neo-Nazis murder Hank (Dean Norris) and steal Walt’s money. Skyler (Anna Gunn) and Flynn (RJ Mitte) refuse to go on the run with Walt, and when he sees the terror in their eyes at the monster he’s become — sees the cold, cruel truth of his situation, rather than the lie he’s been telling himself about how he’s done all these terrible things for his family — he kidnaps baby Holly and drives off. Even a long-dormant storyline — would Jesse (Aaron Paul) find out that Walt was responsible for Jane’s death, and if so, how? — gets an incredible payoff when Walt casually tells Jesse about it, solely to twist the knife before leaving his former partner to be killed (or so he thinks) by Jack’s goons. “Ozymandias” (written by Moira Walley-Beckett and directed by Rian Johnson) tops our list not only because of how well it builds on what came before, but for how perfect it is as an individual hour of storytelling, packed with one indelible moment after another: Hank telling Walt that Jack made up his mind to kill him 10 minutes ago; Walt’s errant pants from the series premiere resurfacing at their owner’s lowest moment; a bereft Skyler howling in the street after Walt steals her daughter; and so many more. The GOAT. —A.S.