RETRO Recommends the Best of the Best: TV Shows, Vol. 4
In this Retro series, a longtime professional art critic and a former professor of digital culture ranks the best television programs of this century—from network to cable and web series to streaming.
{Note: Listings are alphabetical by category. While all these cultural artifacts are worthwhile, tastes can and will vary—so caveat lector, cave videntium, and caveat emptor. That said, if I listed a work here, you can rest assured that I do earnestly consider it to be fantastic and say so without any inducement whatsoever from any party. These opinions are mine and mine alone. Works that appear with a star (⭐) are regarded as “the best of the best of the best.”}
Introduction
For years I was a professional reviewer of television shows, films, graphic novels, video games, poetry collections and more at Indiewire and The Huffington Post.
Then I entered academia, where I began teaching courses on these and other genres and media. While none of this means my opinion is more valuable than anyone else’s, I mention my background—which you can read more about here—to give you a sense of where I’m coming from with the recommendations in this series, and moreover of the professional consideration behind them. I suspect that, if you try some of my picks out, you’ll start to get a good sense of my preferred aesthetics and poetics. And if these match yours, well, you might just find some new gems below.
Ground Rules: Television Shows
(1) Most shows have stronger and weaker seasons, but I have not included any shows with seasons I consider not worth watching at all. It’s one reason why The Simpsons is not listed here—because so many seasons of it are, sadly, disposable. Of course, it’s also fair to note that under this rule Sons of Anarchy, Billions, and The OA just barely made the lists below, even as Prison Break, Heroes, Hanna, and The Last Man on Earth didn’t make the list at all. And some shows are uneven at the episode level, like Who Is America or Little Britain or other sketch comedies; these likewise do not appear here. I realize this seems to penalize long-running shows, but I look at it this way: the point of lists like this is to answer the question, “Would you recommend this show?” If the answer is, “Yes, but only six seasons of twenty,” that’s too conditional a response to consider it an answer in the affirmative. By comparison, a program with four seasons, three of which are well worth watching and the fourth of which is decent, is one you can recommend happily. We all know, in any case, that early Simpsons is classic TV.
(2) With a list like this one there has to be, and here there is, a temporal cutoff point. If I even open this list up to the last century, it swells markedly, with the addition of acknowledged classics such as Seinfeld, Friends, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Freaks and Geeks, Quantum Leap, Frasier, Twin Peaks, and The Wonder Years among others far older like All in the Family and a contingent of borderline calls like Cheers, Taxi, Family Ties, Golden Girls, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, NewsRadio, and Picket Fences. And of course the older a show is, the better the chance the intervening years have made selecting it problematic. Consider, for instance, The Cosby Show or (to a lesser degree) Roseanne.
(3) There are many artworks that you can enjoy without feeling comfortable putting them on lists like this. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is an example. I was even briefly sucked into Poldark and Outlander, though in my defense, so were many souls. But as the primary goal of these lists is to distinguish transient pleasure from lasting value, my avowed guilty pleasures have been almost entirely avoided here.
Happy reading—and even more so, happy disagreeing! I invite your comments below!
Key
🔷 = New to the list
🔶 = Recently reevaluated
⭐ = Best of the best
⬜️ = Showtime
🟥 = Netflix
🟧 = Peacock
🟨 = Disney Plus
🟩 = Hulu
🟦 = Amazon Prime
🟪 = HBO Max
🟫 = Paramount Plus
⬛️ = Apple TV
🔲 = AMC+
❌ = Currently unavailable in the United States
{Note: Many shows can be watched on multiple streaming platforms. To the best of my ability, I have listed the platform on which a show first appeared as its “home” platform.}
Television Shows
Animated and Puppetry
🔰 | 🟩 | Archer ⭐
🔰 | 🟫 | Avatar: The Last Airbender 🔷
🔰 | 🟥 | Bee and PuppyCat
🔰 | 🟥 | Big Mouth
🔰 | 🟩 | Bob’s Burgers ⭐
🔰 | 🟥 | BoJack Horseman ⭐
🔰 | 🟥 | The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
🔰 | 🟩 | Family Guy
🔰 | 🟩 | Futurama
🔰 | 🟥 | Love, Death & Robots 🔷
🔰 | 🟥 | The Midnight Gospel
🔰 | 🟪 | Rick & Morty ⭐
🔰 | 🟩 | Solar Opposites
🔰 | 🟪 | South Park ⭐
🔰 | 🟫 | Star Trek: Lower Decks 🔷
Comedy
🔰 | 🟧 | 30 Rock ⭐
🔰 | 🟥 | Arrested Development
🔰 | 🟧 | Brooklyn Nine-Nine
🔰 | 🟥 | Chapelle’s Show
🔰 | 🟫 | The Colbert Report
🔰 | 🟥 | Community ⭐
🔰 | 🟪 | Crashing ⭐ 🔷
🔰 | 🟪 | Curb Your Enthusiasm 🔷
🔰 | 🟪 | Da Ali G Show 🔷
🔰 | 🟫 | The Daily Show
🔰 | 🟪 | Extras ⭐
🔰 | 🟪 | Flight of the Conchords
🔰 | 🟥 | I Think You Should Leave
🔰 | 🟫 | Inside Amy Schumer
🔰 | 🟩 | It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
🔰 | 🟥 | John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch
🔰 | 🟩 | Key & Peele ⭐
🔰 | 🟩 | Letterkenny
🔰 | 🟩 | The Mindy Project
🔰 | 🟩 | Modern Family 🔷
🔰 | 🟥 | The New Girl ⭐
🔰 | 🟩 | The Office (UK)
🔰 | 🟧 | The Office (US) ⭐
🔰 | 🟧 | Parks & Recreation
🔰 | 🔲 | Portlandia
🔰 | 🟪 | The Rehearsal
🔰 | 🟩 | Scrubs
🔰 | 🟪 | Silicon Valley
🔰 | 🟥 | Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
🔰 | 🟪 | Veep ⭐
🔰 | 🟩 | What We Do in the Shadows
🔰 | 🟩 | Workaholics