The Best TV Shows of the 2010s
This list exists primarily as a personal record of the shows that I loved the hardest over the past 10 years. This was a decade that belonged to television — one that saw the rise of streaming attract A-list talent to the small screen, leading to a massive boom in series production. With well over 400 scripted series on the air at a given moment, it was obviously no small task to narrow it down, but for me, these are the 25 shows that shaped the decade.
25. One Day at a Time (Netflix/Pop, 2017 — Present)
This seemingly straightforward multi-cam reboot stole the Internet’s heart, and it stole mine, too. When Netflix cancelled the show after its third season, fans rallied behind the #SaveODAAT hashtag so hard that PopTV picked it up for round 4. And that’s a good thing, because no other show on television quite matches its ability to vacillate between tear-jerking to belly-laughing.
24. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (CW, 2015–2019)
Rachel Bloom’s experimental musical comedy hooked me with its flashy premise but reeled me in with its undercurrent of optimism in the face of crushing depression and anxiety. You will laugh, you will cry, you will sing along, and you will definitely want to call your therapist.
23. Killing Eve (BBC America, 2018 — Present)
“Murder, murder, hair,” is how creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge described the show in her 73 Questions with Vogue, and I’d say she’s not far off. While desk-bound at MI5, Eve Polastri develops a twisted fascination with female serial killers, which ends up capturing the attention of Villanelle — a psychopathic killer who’s as stylish as she is deadly. Their mutual obsession grows into quasi-romantic infatuation and puts them on a dangerous collision course that’s an absolute thrill to watch. Killing Eve is edge-of-your-seat entertainment bolstered by razor-sharp dialogue and the undeniable chemistry and talent of Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer.
22. The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (YouTube, 2012–2013)
This vlog-style adaptation of Pride and Prejudice won a Creative Arts Emmy in 2013 for its pitch-perfect reframing of Jane Austen’s classic. Though the love story of Elizabeth Bennet and William Darcy is very much a highlight, it’s the tumultuous relationship between Lizzie and her wild-child sister Lydia that made this show such a stand-out hit. Even though it was a short-form webseries (with episodes running about 6 minutes each), I couldn’t stomach leaving it off this list.
21. Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013–2019)
House of Cards was the show that launched Netflix’s original programming into the awards-contention stratosphere, but Orange is the New Black is, in my opinion, the show that solidified its brand. When I think of what it means to be a Netflix original, I think first and always of OITNB and its provocative, unfiltered, and unflinching depiction of life in a women’s prison. I also credit Orange with shepherding us into our current era of genre ambiguity. Is it a comedy? Is it a drama? The answer is yes (and also whichever makes the most sense come FYC season). The series wasn’t always perfect (see: Poussey Washington), but it was always bold.
20. iZombie (CW, 2015–2019)
In the 1990s, Buffy the Vampire Slayer pioneered the Monster of the Week / Big Bad of the Season format — and in the 2010s, iZombie might be the closest television came to matching both its format and its colorful cocktail of tones. Every week, zombie medical examiner Liv Moore eats the brain of a murder victim and uses memory flashes to solve the whodunnit — all while posing as a psychic detective. The premise sounds like a lot, but co-creators Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars, Party Down) and Diane Ruggiero-Wright more than pulled it off. It’s an incredibly fun genre show sprinkled with pathos and populated by one of the most likable “Scooby Gangs” to grace our screens since Buffy & co. destroyed the Hellmouth.
19. GLOW (Netflix, 2017 — Present)
Listen — this show did not have to be nearly as good as it is. I would have watched it anyway. An ensemble comedy about female wrestlers in the 80s from Orange is the New Black EP Jenji Kohan? That’s an easy sell (though admittedly, I’m in the target demographic). But god, GLOW really does everything. It’s a raunchy feminist comedy. It’s a period drama. It’s got heart and ambition. It’s got stunts! It’s got Betty Gilpin acting her face off in a leotard. What more could you possibly want???
18. Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Fox/NBC, 2013 — Present)
Brooklyn Nine-Nine is on this list because it is very simply the most consistent sitcom on television. There’s not a bad episode. There’s not a weak character. It is, start-to-finish, a perfectly executed and fully realized workplace comedy. It also boasts one of the most diverse and talented casts on television.
(And it also gave us “smort,” “noice,” and “cool cool cool cool cool,” which are now mainstays in the Millennial lexicon, even if you haven’t see the show.)
17. The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix, 2018 — Present)
What was so haunting about The Haunting of Hill House were not the hidden ghosts at the corners of your screen (terrifying) or the jump scares or monsters living under your bed (also terrifying), but the simple idea that you can be haunted by yourself. The ghosts in Hill House were real, but they were not all spirits. Some were memories, some were harbingers of things to come. I will certainly be thinking about little Nell and her Bent Neck Lady for a very, very long time.
16. The End of the Fucking World (Netflix, 2017 — Present)
I didn’t know what I was expecting when I clicked on this 8-episode, half-hour British dark comedy on Netflix. When self-diagnosed psychopath James met self-styled nymphomaniac Alyssa, I was certainly not expecting to fall so completely and deeply in love with both of them. The End of the Fucking World views its nihilism through rose-tinted gas station glasses, taken at gunpoint. It is thrilling to watch, gut-bustingly funny, oozing with style, and infused with so much compassion for its two broken heroes, it is impossible not to root for them in the end.
15. PEN15 (Hulu, 2019 — Present)
Series co-creators and stars Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle (both born in 1987) play themselves as middle schoolers in the early 00s. And while the series’ initial appeal lay in its provocative title and gimmicky premise, by episode 2, I found myself completely forgetting that these actors were decades older than the characters they were playing. They were 13-year-olds Maya Ishii-Peters and Anna Kone, and it was the year 2000.
The series handles everything from AIM chat rooms to racial microagressions with surprising delicacy. Its beauty is in its nostalgia — or its lack-thereof. Unlike other recent-period high school shows like Stranger Things or Everything Sucks, PEN15 doesn’t feel like pastiche or homage. It feels like memory in a penseive, where the shame of being kicked off someone’s buddy list is as real as the day you first felt it, and a sleepover with your best friend is the only solution.
14. Euphoria (HBO, 2019 — Present)
My inner contrarian really didn’t want to like Euphoria. As a connoisseur of teen soaps, I was not convinced that HBO — home of The Sopranos and Game of Thrones — would get it right. I thought it would be all style and no substance. I thought it would be self-indulgent and over the top.. and while it definitely is those things, somehow, it doesn’t matter. Euphoria took everything I love about teen soaps, distilled it, shot it up, and then splattered it like Jackson Pollock on a hundred million dollar canvas. And the result is, dare I say, euphoric.
13. The Magicians (Syfy, 2015 — Present)
The Magicians follows Quentin Coldwater, a suicidally depressed 20-something millennial hipster who discovers, one day, that magic is really real. Like many in our generation, he grew up on a steady diet of fantasy books (in this universe, the Fillory series is a stand-in for both Harry Potter and Narnia). But the harsh realities of adulthood and brain chemistry put him in a hopeless place… that is, until the day he received his invitation to Brakebills University — a Hogwartsian grad school. The irony being that magic in this universe is brutal, costly, and laborious. Every time Quentin finds an escape hatch from his bleak reality (magic is real! Fillory is real!), he is met with something even bleaker. There is no magical solution to life’s hardest problems, and having superpowers only gives you superpowered problems. It’s a bitter but necessary pill to swallow.
It is also incredibly fucking funny.
12. The Good Place (NBC, 2016 — Present)
“What if Sophie’s World were hilarious?” The Good Place answers a question absolutely no one was asking. I can’t imagine any of us was actively seeking out a Mike Schur comedy that doubled as Cliffs Notes for Intro to Philosophy, but boy did he forking deliver.
The Good Place documents the afterlives of four deeply flawed humans, a repentant demon, and an omniscient robot-like being as they try to better themselves and each other before their fates are sealed for eternity. Without fail, each episode both obliterates the premise and raises the stakes from the previous episode. A character may not even remember anything that happened to them the moment before. But somehow, against all odds (and the collective will of heaven and hell), our heroes always find a way to beat the system, just by being human. The Good Place is a phenomenal comedy and a celebration of humanity that both interrogates and celebrates our free will.
11. The 100 (CW, 2014 — Present)
The first two seasons of The 100 were so jaw-droppingly excellent, that even though I stopped watching halfway through season 3, it still ranks high on my list of the best shows of the decade. It is one of the smartest and most sophisticated political dramas of all time. Yes, you read that right. A dystopian sci-fi drama on The CW about a bunch of criminal teens from space sent to inhabit an uninhabitable post-apocalyptic earth is one of the smartest political dramas of all time. It’s also easily one of the most casually feminist, funniest, most shocking and relentlessly brutal shows I’ve ever watched. The Hunger Games walked so The 100 could gallop.
10. Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–2019)
Game of Thrones is a behemoth. I’m not going to try to distill its many triumphs into a single paragraph (and if you’re reading this now and still haven’t watched the show, I doubt I’m going to be the one to convince you). GoT encompasses nearly every genre and pulls most of them off simultaneously and with total ease. And even though its final season cast a long shadow on its legacy, those first few seasons will go down in history as some of the finest hours of content ever produced.
9. American Vandal (Netflix, 2017–2018)
Like everyone else tuning into the first episode of American Vandal, when I first met Dylan Maxwell, I thought, “yeah, he definitely drew the dicks.” The beauty of American Vandal is in how it forces the viewer into the role of participant. We are students at Hanover High. We are judging Dylan Maxwell on his seeming lack of intelligence, on his childish behavior, on the way he acts and talks, and on who he hangs out with. We know exactly who Dylan is, and we’ve decided he’s guilty without having seen any of the evidence. What unfolds over 8 episodes is a masterclass in defying expectations, one that forces us to examine our own biases and to empathize with characters we would ordinarily overlook. And with characters so fully realized, it’s hard to believe that these are not real teenagers, this is not actually a documentary, and nobody really drew the dicks.
8. Shameless (Showtime, 2011 — Present)
Much like The Office before it, Shameless took a British format and turned it into something quintessentially American. Having grown up in a large, lower-middle-class Irish-Catholic family, I’m familiar with the concept of insults and blow-out arguments as love language. But Shameless doesn’t merely give us dysfunction. It drags us into the depths of chaos and poverty and despair and shows us that there is, occasionally, a little light at the bottom. There’s a refreshing frankness and even levity to the way it takes on Big Issues (like class, addiction, race, gentrification, mental health, sexuality and gender) that never feels like pandering. Which is one of the many reasons this show has been going on for nine years — and counting.
7. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon, 2017 — Present)
I think that any woman in a creative field, or even any competitive field, will find a lot of themselves in Midge Maisel. She is so distinctly her own person, and yet there’s something universal about her desire to be understood — and to be paid to do the thing she’s good at doing. In Midge’s case, that’s stand-up comedy. And yeah, she’s fucking great.
The show’s central theme is simple, but salient: just because men are doing it doesn’t mean it’s good, and just because women are doing it doesn’t mean it’s worthless.
6. Bunheads (ABC Family, 2012 — 2013)
Everyone’s got a cancelled-too-soon, die-hard favorite one-season-wonder that they’ll be ranting about until they’re underground. For me, that show is Bunheads. After Gilmore Girls, but before breaking awards-season records with Mrs. Maisel, Amy Sherman-Palladino gave us 18 perfect episodes about a ballet school in California, which suffered and eventually died at the hands of a tone-deaf marketing campaign. How could you fuck-up Sutton Foster and Kelly Bishop, sandwiched between breathtaking dance numbers and Sherman-Palladino dialogue? How???
Just know that no amount of Maisel Emmy-wins can fill the Bunheads-shaped hole in my soul. #Justice4Bunheads
5. BoJack Horseman (Netflix, 2014 — Present)
If existential dread were a Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Bean, it would taste like BoJack Horseman. Not that BoJack isn’t funny — it’s hysterical, which is good, because it’s a comedy, and comedy should be funny. But even at its wackiest, there’s something dark churning beneath the surface of BoJack Horseman, ready to swallow us whole. It’s an episode about sexual assault punctuated with animal puns. It’s missing lyrics from Alanis Morisette’s ironically unironic “Ironic.” It’s a show that pokes fun at everybody, but never punches down. BoJack looks at life under the Hollywood microscope with equal parts cynicism and tenderness, and nothing will ever quite be like it again.
4. Fleabag (BBC/Amazon, 2016–2019)
In just twelve bitterly funny 30-minute episodes, Phoebe Waller-Bridge has rightfully cracked her way into the pantheon of contemporary creative geniuses. What she has given us in Fleabag — and particularly in its second season — is a literary classic. If Phoebe Waller-Bridge had been born 100 years earlier, we’d be teaching her works in schools like Austen or Wharton. Maybe that sounds like hyperbole, but I swear I’ve got a stack of essays on guinea pigs and foxes worthy of a 9th grade English class.
3. The Americans (FX, 2013–2018)
Six perfect seasons, and then they stuck the landing. That’s all.
The Americans tells the story of two Russian spies living as Philip and Elizabeth Jenkins, raising two oblivious children in the Washington, D.C. suburbs near the end of the Cold War. What starts off as a sexy but intelligent spy thriller becomes a complex family drama that never offers clear answers to any of the moral or political questions it raises. Start to finish, you’re not going to find a more flawless program. The stakes couldn’t be higher, the performances couldn’t be more powerful, and the subject matter (unfortunately) couldn’t be more relevant.
2. Parks and Recreation (NBC, 2009–2015)
Parks and Rec is easily one of the most rewatchable series ever made. It is chicken soup for the soul. It is 5000 candles in the wind. Leslie Knope’s litany of positive attributes — like her unfailing determination, her work-ethic, and her belief in herself, the people she loves, and the town she calls home — are simply infectious. It’s just not possible to watch Parks and not feel like you, too, are capable of great things. It is also funnier and smarter than just about anything else ever made.
1. The Good Wife (CBS, 2009–2016) & The Good Fight (CBS All-Access, 2017 — Present)
I’m not gonna say it any better than The New Yorker:
“I don’t think it’s possible for a television show to be any better than the courtroom drama The Good Wife, on CBS. It’s not simply that, scene to scene, the series is entertaining and intelligent […] The Good Wife has become profound.”
If you’re wondering how a legal procedural on Les Moonves’ CBS managed to squeeze its way to the top of a decade of television ruled by streaming giants and premium cable, I urge you to take a closer look. The kind of storytelling others have done with 10-episode orders and colossal budgets, The Good Wife did with 22 on basic cable. It’s also as funny as any of the comedies on this list, as layered as the most prestigious drama, as sharp, as soapy, as cinematic, as weird, and as groundbreaking. Simply put, anything you can do, The Good Wife did better — and in 4-inch heels.
And though Alicia Florrick’s story ended in 2016, Diane Lockhart’s equally excellent spin-off The Good Fight is still kicking over on CBS All-Access, which is almost reason enough to pay for CBS All-Access. The Good Fight does basically everything The Good Wife did, but they get to say the word “fuck,” and all of its righteous fury is directly squarely at the Trump administration. It is at once cathartic and frustrating, leaving you with an urge to take the titular fight directly to the top of the political ladder.
These two shows together amount to nothing short of masterpiece, and in our current political climate, they are downright necessary.
The Honorable Mentions
If you’re wondering why ____ didn’t make the list, the answer is simply either that I didn’t watch it or that I liked these other shows a little bit more. But to give you an idea of where my head is at, here are some other shows I loved that didn’t make the cut:
- Agent Carter
- Big Little Lies
- Black Mirror
- The Bold Type
- Broad City
- Don’t Trust the B — in Apt. 23
- Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce
- The Handmaid’s Tale
- Hannibal
- Jessica Jones
- Outlander
- Unbelievable
- Unreal
- Veep
- You
- You’re the Worst
