This coming Sunday sees what might be one of the biggest event's of the early 2016 TV season — the arrival of HBO’s big new drama “Vinyl.” The show, which focuses on the record industry in the early 1970s and stars Bobby Cannavale, Juno Temple, Ray Romano and more, marks the cable network’s second collaboration with director Martin Scorsese (who produces the show with Mick Jagger, and who directs the two-hour pilot), after “Boardwalk Empire.”
The show was co-created with Terence Winter, who was one of the key writers on “The Sopranos,” which reinvented television drama. Others paved the way for it — “NYPD Blue,” “Homicide: Life On The Street,” and HBO’s first drama series “Oz.” But “The Sopranos” was the one that changed everything, dominating pop culture, drawing huge ratings and massive critical acclaim, and helping to prove that the small screen could be home for truly groundbreaking work that would go on to draw big movie stars and major filmmakers like Scorsese (whose own work was an obvious influence on the show).
And so, with “Vinyl” hitting this week, we set out to rank the 25 best TV drama series that have debuted since “The Sopranos” changed everything when it arrived in January 1999. Anything that debuted after Tony & co. hit screens was eligible, but shows that had already premiered (“The X-Files,” “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” and “Felicity” among the most notable ones) weren’t. Take a look at our list below, and let us know what you think should and shouldn’t have made the cut.
25. “Doctor Who” (2005 - present)
There have been plenty of attempts over the last few decades to revive beloved geek properties, but while TV re-dos of things like “Charlie’s Angels,” “Knight Rider” and “Kolchak” came and went swiftly, “Doctor Who” has run and run since its return in 2005. And rightly so: while it’s sometimes patchy, at its best, it’s as thrilling, heady, funny and moving as sci-fi TV gets. Though reviver Russell T. Davies was in theory picking up where the show had left off in 1989, this very firmly brought the eccentric time-traveler into the 21st century (as well as the 43rd, the 15th, and everywhere in between), playing into modern sensibilities, including more serialized, season-spanning mysteries and mythology, without ever forgetting what made it special to half a generation of kids and adults alike. As is the nature of the show, it’s shifted and mutated since its return from the younger-skewing, slightly campier early days with Christopher Eccleston, to outgoing show-runner Steven Moffat’s sometimes head-scratching time-twisting narratives. And it still occasionally lets budget and formula show the strain. But it’s grown further and further in confidence over time, and when it’s flying — heart-wrenching two-parter “Human Nature” and “The Family Of Blood,” the Carey Mulligan-launching “Blink,” Richard Curtis’ beguiling investigation of depression with “Vincent And The Doctor,” dizzyingly clever Dickens riff “A Christmas Carol,” Neil Gaiman’s fascinating “The Doctor’s Wife,” crowd-pleasing anniversary team-up “The Day Of The Doctor,” bravura Peter Capaldi showcase “Heaven Sent” — it’s as provocative and entertaining as anything else on TV.
24. “In Treatment” (2008-2010)
Even among the varied shows that HBO have aired since “The Sopranos” blew up, “In Treatment” was an anomaly. Based on an Israeli show, “BeTipul,” the drama produced more episodes than almost anything on this list, owing to its unique structure: every week would see five installments airing, each one focused on a patient of a psychiatrist, played by Gabriel Byrne (the fifth actually documenting his own therapy sessions, with Dianne Wiest’s psychiatrist). Far from the elaborate production value of a “Rome” or a “Game Of Thrones,” this was a pure showcase for actors, almost always in a series of two-handers. And while it proved a little too dry for popular tastes (HBO tinkered with the formula before cancelling it after a third season), it’s addictive for anyone who cares about great acting. Byrne had one of the best roles he’s ever had as the troubled, deeply flawed mind-doctor, but his patients were just as strong: breakout roles for Mia Wasikowska and Dane DeHaan, terrific work by veterans like Hope Davis, John Mahoney, Debra Winger, Glynn Turman and Bollywood superstar Irrfan Khan, Blair Underwood as a pilot with a death wish. With writers including Adam Rapp and “Capote” and “Foxcatcher” scribe Dan Futterman, each episode was a taut, textured half-hour playlet setting two fine actors against each other, and for the most part managed to be restrained and low-key, with the show only faltering when it attempted to go into more soapy territory. It’s destined to be a less-remembered series among the HBO canon, but one that should delight people who dig a little deeper and discover it.
23. “Lost” (2004-2010)
There are shows here that were more consistent than “Lost.” Ones where the creators didn’t openly admit to spinning their wheels with the plotting, where the finales didn’t cause uproar from fans, where characters wouldn’t be introduced and then swiftly written out when they turned out to be useless. But you can love something without it being perfect, and for all its flaws, there have been few TV dramas as original, influential, ambitious and, at its best, exciting, just as there have been few that sparked as much discussion. Famously thrown together by Damon Lindelof and J.J. Abrams in just a few weeks (and responsible as much as anything for the latter’s rise in pop culture, despite his relative lack of involvement beyond the pilot), the show could have been a sort of “Gilligan’s Island” for the 21st century, gathering together a diverse group of characters on a desert island. But it never quite went where you expected it too, giving each character dark secrets exposed in a flashback heavy structure, and putting the island at the centre of a mystery that was more “The Prisoner” than “Cast Away,” bringing some far-out genre conceits into the mainstream in a big way. The show was probably one of the last to be hampered by the old network TV model — the writers were visibly strained by the challenges of cranking out 20+ episodes a year, and were open about the network wanting more seasons than they had story for. But as frustrating as it could be, it provided dozens of memorable moments over the years, and proved to be a dizzying puzzle box that changed the form forever.
22. “Terriers” (2010)
It’s pretty hard, it seems, for a cable drama to get cancelled after just one season — the slow-burning success of “Breaking Bad,” which only caught fire in its later years after viewers caught up on Netflix has made networks more willing to give a show an extra year or two to find its feet. So some might take as a bad sign that FX cancelled “Terriers” after its first and only season in 2010 after particularly low viewership. But as anyone who’s ever caught Ted Griffin’s gorgeous, expertly plotted, soulful neo-noir knows that the show belongs in the hall of fame of one-season wonders. Penned by the “Ocean’s Eleven” writer and produced by “The Shield” creator Shawn Ryan, the show followed a pair of San Diego private eyes, recovering alcoholic ex-cop Hank (Donal Logue) and former housebreaker Britt (Michael Raymond-James) who find one small case turning into a sprawling real estate conspiracy. Perhaps the show didn’t take off because it seemed familiar in theory, but in practice it felt as fresh as a daisy, a character-driven crime tale nodding to classic fiction of the genre, Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” and “Chinatown,” but somehow carving out its own groove. Mainly, it was because of its utter love and compassion for its characters (also featuring lovely work from Laura Allen, Kimberly Quinn and Rockmond Dunbar), a collection of small-fry fuck-ups trying to do the right thing and not always succeeding. With quotable, deceptively tight writing and killer direction from, among others, Rian Johnson and John Dahl, it’s maybe the great lost gem of the modern TV drama age.
21. “Six Feet Under” (2001-2005)
If it was “The Sopranos” that kicked the cable drama door open, it was the success two years later of “Six Feet Under” that ensured it wouldn’t be closing any time soon. There were, you could say, some similarities — both shows were essentially family dramas where death was never far from the frame, and had a willingness to go darker than most TV dramas had ever dared. And yet “Six Feet Under” was a very different series, one that started to show the breadth of what HBO would be capable of doing. Created by Alan Ball after his Oscar-winning success with “American Beauty,” it was the story of the Fishers, an extremely dysfunctional family of funeral directors who we meet just as their patriarch (Richard Jenkins) is killed in a car accident (though notably, he sticks around for imagined conversations, as do many of the show’s deceased). It’s a sort of perfection of what Ball was going for with “American Beauty,” a look at the deeply fucked up heart of the American family, but one that, while it goes to shocking, sometimes borderline tasteless territory, always feels earned, thanks to an impeccable cast and writing (including from “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway) that always found the humor and humanity in its situations. As with many of these shows, the plotting became a little soapy towards the end (though the opening deaths never ceased to shock and/or delight), but for all its imperfections, it found a level of profundity that’s rarely been matched by a family drama, and climaxed with a finale that remains something close to a gold standard for how to wrap up a show.
20. “Fargo” (2014 - present)
It should have been an act of madness. For thirty years, every time someone not named Joel or Ethan have tried to make something described as ‘Coenesque,’ it ended in disaster, and yet here was novelist and former “Bones” writer Noah Hawley, attempting to make a basic-cable spin-off of one of the filmmakers’ most beloved films. And somehow it worked brilliantly, and then it worked again even better with last year’s second season. With the first run Hawley built a sort of side-story to the movie (you eventually learn that one character found the money buried by Steve Buscemi’s Carl in the film), nodding, in Alison Tolman’s whip-smart police officer, in Billy Bob Thornton’s Satanic Anton Chigurh-like villain, in Martin Freeman’s Jerry Lundegaard-like ‘nice guy’ with a dark heart, not just to its namesake but to the entire Coen canon, and proved to be a sharply written, darkly funny, appropriately funny successor delving into similar themes. And things really stepped up with the second season, which went back to the 1970s for the tale of a gang war in Fargo that encompasses Patrick Wilson’s State Trooper, and in Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons’ Ed & Peggy an ordinary couple on a “Macbeth”-like path. The second run in particular connected with the same kind of existential soulfulness that elevate the Coens above most of their imitators, creating a host of memorable characters, from Kate Walsh’s vampish widow to Bokeem Woodbine’s garrulous, ambitious mobster. Bring on season three.
19. “The Leftovers” (2014-2016)
If “Lost” was a show hampered to some degree because the answers it would provide could never have satisfied the fans’ speculation about the questions it posed, Damon Lindelof’s second great show was a series that was wholly and utterly unconcerned with answers at all. Based on Tom Perrotta’s novel which imagines the aftermath of a Rapture-like ‘departure,’ it’s a show that probably frustrated those expecting another “Lost”-style mystery box, and in its two seasons to date (with a third and final coming later this year) has never really become beloved by many outside the TV critic community. In part, perhaps, because it’s unlike anything else out there. It’s not quite a supernatural show, it’s certainly not a procedural, it doesn’t even qualify as a soap. In fact, it has a rhythm and tone entirely of its own, a bone-deep melancholy that would feel more European than American, if it wasn’t such a quintessentially American show. It tackles big themes — loss, grief, community, faith, madness, our place in the universe — without ever fitting into a box, and with performances from the likes of Justin Theroux, Carrie Coon, Christopher Eccleston, Regina King and Kevin Carroll that have only grown in stature and power since it aired. Lindelof’s work to date has been unashamedly populist, and yet his finest hour has come with a drama that’s as close as HBO cable drama has come to arthouse cinema. If this is what he can come with unfiltered, we hope someone writes him another check once “The Leftovers” comes to an end, because it’s like nothing else we’ve seen.
18. “The Knick” (2014-2015)
If anyone thought that Steven Soderbergh’s so-called retirement meant we’d be seeing less of his work, they were firmly wrong: thanks to the two seasons of “The Knick” that he directed, we’ve had the equivalent of ten Soderbergh features in a little over a year. And they were brilliant ones, too. On paper, “The Knick,” created by Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, could have been a fairly standard medical drama in period trappings, following as it does the staff of the Knickerbocker Hospital and their pioneering medicine in turn-of-the-20th-century New York. But while it to some extent follows the same doctors and nurses and administrators formula as “Grey’s Anatomy” and “E.R,” the writing swiftly elevated it, the experimental procedures and fly-by-night operations playing up the fragility of life and the glorious madness of physicians more successfully than most. The acting too was across-the-board great, with Clive Owen getting the role of his career as coked-up genius surgeon Thack, Andre Holland doing utterly flawless work as his co-chief-of-surgery Edwards, doomed to be disrespected by men half as talented as him, and Michael Angarano, Eve Hewson, Cara Seymour and more all made their mark. But what made the show stand out more than anything was, of course, the filmmaking. If Soderbergh didn’t reinvent the period drama, he certainly re-invigorated it, reaching a level of effortless brilliance with his filmmaking that makes the show rank among the best stuff he ever did (and always scored by Cliff Martinez’s phenomenal, throbbing electronic score). It’s still unclear if the show will be returning for a third season, but without Soderbergh (he’s moving on whatever happens), it won’t be the same.
17. “The Americans” (2013 - present)
Perpetually somewhat under the radar, and consistently better than most of the competition, “The Americans” doesn’t have the Emmy glory or massive viewership of some, but has been consistently excellent across its three seasons to date, and will likely be rediscovered as time goes on by viewers looking for their next boxset fix. Created by former CIA agent Joe Weisberg, it has a totally irresistible premise: an ordinary Washington D.C. couple (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys) in the 1980s who are in fact deeply embedded KGB agents, and whose fake marriage has started to flicker into real life. Oh, and an FBI agent (Noah Emmerich) tasked with tracking down Soviet moles has just moved in next door. It’s an absolutely crackling spy tale, drawing from Le Carre and other Cold War classics but marching to the beat of its own drum, cunningly getting you to root for ‘the enemy’ even as they do acts as morally shady as any that Walter White or Don Draper might pull. It’s also a great portrait of the 1980s as the world changed and Perestroika started to settle in, nailing the obvious references (the use of some unlikely music cues of the era are absolutely killer — just note the spectacular re-appropriation of Phil Collins in the pilot), but also truly capturing the deeper feel of the time. And it’s a great show about marriage too, the show’s conceit unveiling more universal truths, thanks in part to spectacular performances by its leads. The fourth season starts in March, so if you haven’t watched it yet, you have a month to catch up.
16. “Borgen” (2011-2013)
This list is still dominated by American shows for the most part, and it’s true that serialized TV drama is still done best, on the whole, here. But the unlikely nation of Denmark have, in recent years, been impressing with a string of utterly addictive shows, tying into the “Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”-aping trend for Scandi-noir. Some of them became more familiar after receiving U.S. remakes — both “The Killing” and “The Bridge” got the English-language treatment, to mixed success — but the best of the bunch remains untouched, and relatively little-seen in the U.S. “Borgen,” created by Adam Price (also, amusingly, a TV chef) and partly written by “The Hunt” and “A War” screenwriter Tobias Lindholm, tracks the rise to power of a left-wing female Prime Minister, played by “The Duke Of Burgundy” star Sidse Babett Knudsen. A political drama of rare nuance and heft, it’s tonally a midpoint between “The West Wing” and “House Of Cards,” but more grounded than either, in part thanks to the charming central turn by Knudsen (and similarly excellent work by rising star Pilou Asbaek and Birgitte Hjort Sřrenson, among others). Those happy with subtitles and political wonks are probably the target audience, but this should be essential viewing for almost anyone — it has an insight not just into Danish politics (though its specificity is utterly winning), but also into a life in politics in general. The show wrapped up in 2013 after three seasons, but it’s on iTunes — get to it before the remake happens (HBO is working on it now).
15. “Justified” (2010-2015)
Though relatively few of the movies made from his work have been good, the late Elmore Leonard did inspire several great ones — “Jackie Brown,” “Out Of Sight” and “Get Shorty” were all based on his novels. TV proved less successful for a long time — there was a not-great “Maximum Bob” show with Beau Bridges, and a decent but short-lived “Out Of Sight” spin-off, “Karen Sisco,” but that was about it. And then came “Justified.” Based on a character who’d appeared in Leonard’s novels “Pronto,” “Riding The Rap” and short story “Fire In The Hole,” Raylan Givens was a resolutely old-school kind of hero in comparison to some other cable drama leads: as embodied by Timothy Olyphant, he was a black-and-white moral-ed, shoot-first-ask-questions-later cowboy of a U.S. Marshall, who ends up back in his Kentucky home as a sort of punishment. And so began six seasons of sprawling crime saga, one that thanks to showrunner Graham Yost and his team, captured Leonard’s featherlight, effortlessly plotted, endlessly quotable style as well as any adaptation ever. Part of the genius was in making Walton Goggins’ criminal adversary Boyd Crowder just as crucial a part of their story as Raylan, with the two’s confrontation barreling along while endless colorful characters crossed the screen too (perhaps most notably Margo Martindale’s crime lord Mags). It’s underrated by many simply because it isn’t as dark and brooding as the competition, but few shows gave us as much pleasure as this one.
14. “Rectify” (2013 - 2016)
There are TV shows — most of them, in fact — that are driven by plot, throwing their characters through the wringer and into seemingly endless iterations of the basic set up. And then there are TV shows — not many — like “Rectify.” Created by actor/writer/director Ray McKinnon (a staple of another show on this list), its premise could be one for a more conventional show: Daniel (Aden Young) returns to his Georgia hometown after nearly two decades on death row for raping and murdering his girlfriend, only to have now been released after conflicting DNA evidence. It’s not a straight-up murder mystery, though: McKinnon has mostly left the question of Daniel’s innocence or guilt obscured, stitching that ambiguity into the very fabric of the series. It’s really more concerned with consequences and fallout than anything else, moving at a meditative, though never dull pace, as it tracks the impact of Daniel’s return on his family, loved ones and adversaries (with Abigail Spencer and J. Smith Cameron among the standouts of the supporting cast). It’s wrenching stuff, but with a resolutely human touch, and directed (by people including David Lowery and Stephen Gyllenhaal) with a dreamlike, atmospheric feel that never makes it feel bleak or austere. Airing on the Sundance Channel, it’s never attracted a particularly large audience - it’s always been an extended version of a Sundance movie rather than a grabby cliffhanger fest. But perhaps parallels with Netflix’s surprise hit “Making A Murderer” will encourage more people to catch up before the fourth and final season this year.
13. “Hannibal” (2013 - 2015)
File “Hannibal” with “Fargo” in the it-never-should-have-worked file. Thomas Harris’ creation Hannibal Lecter was one of the great villains of 20th century fiction (most notably in the Oscar-winning “Silence Of The Lambs”), but has increasingly been de-fanged and over-explained in successive sequels and prequels. Given the sheer weight of TV serial killers, a Hannibal-centric show should have been utterly surplus to requirements. But that wasn’t counting on showrunner Bryan Fuller (and to some extent pilot director David Slade), who turned it into not another procedural, but an experimental psychosexual arthouse horror unlike anything that’s been on TV before or since. Ostensibly a prequel to first Lecter novel “Red Dragon,” telling the tortured history of profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy, revelatory) and the good doctor (Mads Mikkelsen, instantly redefining the role and walking away from the heavy shadow of Anthony Hopkins), and did occasionally dip into case-of-the-week stuff in its early days, albeit gorgeously macabre case-of-the-weeks. But cumulatively, as it became more serialized and riffed not just on ‘Silence’ but on later Harris novels, it became something far more compelling — a love story, a murder show where the psychic weight of taking a life, or surviving an attempt on it, was never forgotten, a Gothic fantasy, a dreamlike giallo. Slipping through the gaps at a time where network TV had no idea what it was doing, it turned the serial killer show into a work of art, and though it was cut short (last year’s third season looks to be the last), we were lucky to have it while it was around.
12. “The Shield” (2002-2008)
“The Shield” did for FX what “The Sopranos” did for HBO: the network’s first original drama series reinvented it as a home for original, often brilliant comedy and drama. The show’s often been overlooked, as one of the first to follow in the wake of Tony & co, but while the white male antihero cable drama feels increasingly played out today, Vic Mackey remains one of the best ever examples. Inspired by the Rampart scandal, Shawn Ryan’s show focused on Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and his anti-gang LAPD strike team, which have established a corrupt and unethical little empire in their attempts to bring down their targets. What seemed like just another cop show turned itself on its head in the pilot, as Mackey murders a fellow officer who’d been asked to inform on him, and across its seven seasons turned into an expansive and thrilling TV version of a Sidney Lumet movie, with Mackey’s unorthodox sense of justice, and his greed, proving to have brutal consequences for them and most of the people they know. One of the first series to draw big movie stars to the small screen (Forest Whitaker and Glenn Close both did season-long arcs to impressive results). The show did hew closer to genre conventions that some of its subsequent competitors, but within those constraints, turned into about as good a cop show as has ever been, the closest thing we’ve had to a small-screen James Ellroy show, a Greek tragedy about a repellent hero that you nevertheless feel for once he’s constrained to his own personal purgatory by the end.
11. “Orange Is The New Black” (2013 - present)
“House Of Cards” put Netflix on the map, but it was “Orange Is The New Black” that was (and so far, has continued to be) their first triumph: a show unlike anything else on TV, one using a high concept set-up to stealthily give voices to the kind of people usually resolutely ignored on television. “Weeds” creator Jenji Kohan adapted Piper Kerman’s memoir into a show (a comedic drama rather than a dramatic comedy, we’d say) that tackles not just crime, punishment, prison and the need for its reform, but also class, race, gender and sexuality in America. And what’s so clever is the way that it’s done it through a sort of trojan horse, using the semi-comedic conceit of a privileged, pretty blonde white lady (Taylor Schilling) being sent to a minimum-security prison for an old drug smuggling charge. Over time, though, Piper has just become part of an expansive ensemble, giving terrific showcases to some familiar faces (the wonderful Kate Mulgrew as Russian mobster Red, or Natasha Lyonne as the quick-witted Nicky), while discovering a whole host of enormously impressive new ones, including Uzo Aduba, Laverne Cox, Danielle Brooks, Selenis Leyva, Yael Stone and Samira Wiley. If its staggering ensemble was all the show had in its arsenal, it’d be one for the history books, but the writing has been tonally assured and compassionate from day one that it becomes a perfect meld of material and performers. Netflix just renewed the show through season seven, causing slight trepidation from those who remember “Weeds,” which went off the boil in later years, but so far, OITNB hasn’t put a foot wrong.
10. “The Good Wife” (2009-2016)
CBS announced this week that “The Good Wife” will come to an end at the end of the its current seventh season, and there’s an argument to be made that with it goes the era of network TV drama as a thing of quality. “The Sopranos” hastened that demise, showing writers and filmmakers the creative freedom that cable allowed them, but “The Good Wife” was a sort of last gasp of greatness from one of the big four before they succumbed to endless reboots and shows where the devil solves a different murder every week. Created by Robert and Michelle King, the show was a legal drama with a difference, in that focused on Alicia Florick (Julianna Marguiles), the wife of a disgraced Chicago politician forced to return to the law when he was charged with corruption. It was to some extent a procedural — there was normally a case of the week, but one that was simply smarter, better written and better acted than anything else in the genre, with the Kings using the framework to dig into Chicago politics, technology and the surveillance society in a topical, witty way. But it also had a broader aim, a serialized tale of a woman finding out a new identity for itself, and subtly making Alicia as much anti-hero as hero. Marguiles was the best in a cast that was close to impeccable (few shows have utilized their guest stars as well, with Michael J. Fox, Carrie Preston, Dylan Baker and Mike Colter among those who made their characters shine off the page), and it was directed with a subtle experimentation that belied its network origins. The quality’s dipped slightly in the final two seasons, but when the end comes in May, we’ll miss it like hell regardless.
9. “Friday Night Lights” (2006-2011)
A common complaint is that Hollywood ignores the heartland of America, focusing only on the coasts and ignoring the so-called flyover states unless they’re showing criminals or small-town hicks. “Friday Night Lights” serves as a pretty compelling argument that you can be rewarded for telling a story set somewhere other than New York and L.A, with a wide-reaching, ambitious drama of small town life. Buzz Bissinger’s non-fiction book “Friday Night Lights” had previously been adapted into Peter Berg’s excellent movie, and lightning struck twice when Berg returned to helm the pilot for the NBC series version, focused on the Panthers, the high school football team of Dillon, Texas, and their new coach Eric Taylor (the brilliant Kyle Chandler), long with his wife Tami (the equally brilliant Connie Britton). In an era of irony and quote marks, there was something winningly sincere about the show (showrun by Jason Katims), with the show never sentimentalizing or sugarcoating its subject matters, never looking down at its characters, but also never valorizing them either. It was great at small-town politics, at portraying a marriage, and yes, at the sports (though you don’t need to be a football fan to enjoy the show, not even remotely). There were missteps along the way — Season Two got very shaky, particularly in a murder-related plotline that went soapy where the show had so often managed to avoid that — but as a whole, it’s an achievement that ranks with its source material as one of the best possible portraits of a football team and the community around it .
8. ‘Battlestar Galactica” (2003-2009)
With respect to its fans, the original 1978 “Battlestar Galactica” didn’t age that well — a fitfully interesting, somewhat cheap “Star Wars” cash-in that survived in the pop culture mostly thanks to the sheer stamina of fans. So you could have been forgiven for thinking that its 2000s-era reboot would be eminently skippable, particularly given that it aired at a time where most TV, particularly genre TV, was kind of rubbish. But in the hands of ex-“Star Trek” writer Ronald D. Moore, it became unmissable even for the genre-averse, a brutal, fiercely political space show with an influence on the genre that’s still being felt today. The premise was roughly the same: a robot race, the Cylons, have decimated humanity, and the survivors, led by Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos) must flee through space in the hope of finding a safe home. The execution couldn’t have been more different, though: this was sci-fi for a post 9/11, war-on-terror age, focused on difficult moral choices and with heroes with multiple shades of grey (finding sympathy on James Callis’ treacherous Baltar, a man responsible for genocide, while Mary McDonnell’s President Roslin was as much despot as heroine), up to and including the point of having the heroes deploy suicide bombers. Though mostly absent of big names, the cast proved more than capable (with Katee Sackoff’s Starbuck becoming an instant icon), and the show consistently managed to feel cinematic even on a relatively meager budget. Some of its dips into mysticism didn’t work as well as some of the others, but it was otherwise an utterly gripping show that set a high bar for similar reinventions.
7. “Top Of The Lake” (2013)
Given that she’s one of our best working filmmakers, hopes were certainly high for Jane Campion’s “Top Of The Lake,” a co-production between the BBC and the Sundance Channel. And those hopes were matched, with Campion, co-writer Gerald Lee (working with her for the first time since Campion’s debut “Sweetie”) and co-director Garth Davis turning out a gorgeously textured, utterly rich mystery with real substance. The show landed at a time when the crime-in-a-small-town set-up was seemingly everywhere thanks to “The Killing” and “Broadchurch,” among others. But the show used its central case — of Detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss, with an impressive Southern Hemisphere accent) investigating the pregnancy and disappearance of a 12-year-old girl in her hometown in New Zealand — as a jumping off point into something thematically rigorous and still utterly gripping. The central mystery was never massively the point — though its resolution utterly satisfying — with Campion and co instead using it as a framework to tell the story of women, and the terrible things that men do to them, a look at systematic misogyny and abuse in a very masculine culture. Gorgeously directed (photographer Adam Arkapaw went on to shoot the first season of “True Detective”), sensitively written and with three immense performances at its center in Moss, Peter Mullan’s extraordinary clan leader Matt Mitcham, and Holly Hunter as cult leader GJ, it was everything you could want from a show like this. There’s been a bit of a break in between, but filming begins shortly on a second season with Nicole Kidman joining in, and there isn’t any kind of small-screen entertainment we’re looking forward to more.
6. “The West Wing” (1999-2006)
He’s won an Oscar, worked with the biggest names around and become one of the few writers that’s a a true household name, but Aaron Sorkin will forever be best known as the man who made politics into thrilling television with “The West Wing.” Debuting just a few months after “The Sopranos,” as a more traditional network drama on NBC, and in many ways couldn’t be more different — whereas the HBO drama was violent, sweary, sex-filled, a dark look at the American family and dream, Sorkin’s show was a blast of almost Capra-esque optimism and celebration of American values, in its examination of the staff of firmly liberal leader-of-the-free-world Jeb Bartlett (Martin Sheen). Loosely spinning off Sorkin’s script for “The American President,” the show was an unapologetic fantasia (and became even more so once George W. Bush was elected prison at the beginning of its second season), but one with a feel for real-world politics. Bartlett and his staff were smarter, nicer and funnier than any actual staffer, but were pure pleasure to watch, as Sorkin explored the issues of the day without becoming preachy, and inspired a generation of politics geeks and future leaders in the process. Things got a little rocky for a while once Sorkin left the show, but even its worst season (the fifth) has one of the best episodes (the Glenn Close/William Fichtner one), it smartly retooled itself in the final days into an election storyline that eerily predicted the Obama/McCain 2008 election, and proved remarkably consistent for a show that produced over 150 episodes of television.
5. “Game Of Thrones” (2011 - present)
Unless it ends with a gigantic Westeros-is-a-snowglobe-sized screwing of the pooch (and it does still have at least three seasons to go), “Game Of Thrones” will likely be remembered as one of the crowning achievements of television. It’s not just that it’s raised the game as far as production values go, regularly delivering movie-quality action sequences and effects, and creating a world that’s fascinated people in the way that George Lucas or Tolkien did. But David Benioff and D.B Weiss’ adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s book series manages to transcend its genre foundations and become not just a great fantasy show (arguably the first), but a great drama period. It’s an world-class feat of adaptation, with Benioff, Weiss and their staff making Martin’s multi-character, globe-spanning epic accessible, witty and exciting, parceling out the plot twists pretty well across the fifty episodes to date, and making it remarkably easy to keep track of who’s murdering, fucking or betraying who. They’ve also cast the living hell out of it: no show in recent memory, perhaps ever, has launched as many actors, from the great Peter Dinklage and Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau to total newcomers like Emilia Clarke and Maisie Williams, to stardom so rapidly, and it feels like the show has never put a foot wrong with its actors. And while some might dismiss as sex and dragons, it’s a show that has as much to say about human nature as anything else on the air.
4. “Breaking Bad” (2008-2013)
It’s a remarkably bleak premise for a TV show. A high-school chemistry teacher in New Mexico is diagnosed with terminal cancer and decides to cook crystal meth to support his family. It’s the kind of logline you can imagine driving the most depressing, poorly-attended movie at an international film festival. But credit to Vince Gilligan that “Breaking Bad” proved to be a riot, a slow-burning phenomenon that was never less than utterly entertaining even as it went to unfathomably dark places. The former “X-Files” writer was turned down by almost everyone in town, initially offered the lead role to John Cusack, and planned to kill off lead Walter White’s pupil-turned-accomplice Jesse after the first season. But the show somehow came together at AMC with Bryan Cranston, an actor mostly known for comedy, in the lead role, and it was clear from the off that it was something striking and original, a vividly colored, darkly funny utterly gripping crime tale. And over time, it morphed into something else, as Cranston’s Walter became less hapless everyman over his head, and more ruthless kingpin, darkening faster and faster until he became a poisonous cloud infecting everything he touched. Pulpier than some of the shows above it, but just as well executed, its success (which came only in later seasons, when ratings exploded) helped just as much as “The Sopranos” to change the idea of what could and couldn’t become TV shows.
3. “Mad Men” (2007-2015)
Most of the drama shows of the golden age of TV, at least the ones that followed in the wake of Tony Soprano & co, have been rooted in the crime genre. From hits like “Breaking Bad” to flops like “Low Winter Sun,” gangsters, drugs and criminality have generally figured somewhere in the subject matter. “Mad Men” was something different, a show without the pulp roots of many of its competitors, a workplace soap that drew from “The Swimmer,” Richard Ford and Philip Roth as much as anything else. And the result was a beguiling work of art, a show that refused to play by the rules that television had established for the most part, a collection of literary short stories as much as it was an ongoing serial. Following the employees of Sterling Cooper, a Madison Avenue ad agency across the 1960s, and in particular Don Draper, the charming, handsome rising executive who is an entirely self-made man (as an early episode revealed), Matthew Weiner’s show felt, perhaps more than any show here, like the Great American Novel in TV form, setting itself at the very heart of capitalism and showing the ways in which the nation, and the world, changed across a decade. It never cared about shocking you with its narrative twists, or giving you any satisfying answers: it created a beautifully realized-world, then filled it with characters that contained more than enough multitudes that, after seven seasons, you were still being surprised by them. TV, in other words, that felt better than TV.
2. “Deadwood” (2004-2006)
It’s possible, likely even, that HBO considered “Deadwood” a failure. The most expensive thing the network had produced up to that point, with an expansive cast and a costly period setting, it never took off in the way “The Sopranos” did with audiences, and was cancelled after three seasons, with creator David Milch denied the chance to wrap up the story. But given that people still talk about it a decade on, and given that it looks like a movie reunion is finally in the works, they may think differently about it. And they should, because “Deadwood” makes an argument for being the greatest thing they’ve ever produced. Set in the South Dakota camp of the title, as it moves from becoming a lawless settlement to a town that’s part of the United States, it was an enormous novelistic Western that brought in real-life characters (including household names like Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok) and wove a story about the birth of a nation around them. Written by Milch and co with a profane lyricism (no character, bar perhaps Malcolm Tucker, has sworn as beautifully as Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen), and populated with every great undersung character actor you could ever want, it took on the settings of the Old West but broke free of the generic tropes. The language was heightened, certainly, but it felt like the frontier as it was, not as it was idealized by John Ford and co. “Deadwood” was poetry in serialized episodes, and we dearly hope we get one more for the road.
1. “The Wire” (2002-2008)
We believe that movies can do basically anything, but perhaps what they can’t do, outside of the work of Frederick Wiseman, is tackle a place with the kind of depth and breadth and detail that “The Wire” did with Baltimore. It’s become a cliche to compare the show to Charles Dickens, but the comparison was always an apt one: David Simon and his team used a seemingly endless collection of vividly drawn characters to draw a portrait of a place and a time, namely Baltimore at the start of the 21st century, and the socio-political upheavals, injustices, and human lives that it contained. The series begins with a simple enough premise, a police wiretap investigation into local drugs kingpin Avon Barksdale, but told from both sides. But with each season, the show expanded its scope: to the city’s docks and union workers, to the City Hall politics, to the education system, and to its press. It worked as a crime story, with some twists and turns as good as anything in the genre, and masters of the form like George Pelecanos, Richard Price and Dennis Lehane writing episodes. But it worked as something bigger too, a microcosm of humanity and the greed, desperation, joy, heartbreaks and excitements they go through, drawn with journalistic authenticity by the writers, and painted with texture and multitudes by its extraordinary cast. It’s possible that we’ll get a TV show with the same ambition and scope as “The Wire” again — “Game Of Thrones” has, if anything, a larger cast of characters. But it feels less likely that we’ll see the like of its fire, its humanism or its compassion again.
This being the second golden age of TV, there’s more that we could have included, obviously. There are a few comedy-drama shows that just lean too heavily on the comedy angle to be included — “Transparent,” “Freaks & Geeks,” “Looking” and “Girls” foremost among them. We were very close to including “Sherlock,” “Black Mirror,” “Damages,” “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific” too.
Shows like “Alias,” “24,” “Homeland,” “Fringe,” “Veronica Mars,” “This Is England,” “Angel,” “Men Of A Certain Age,” “Dead Like Me,” “Wonderfalls,” “Firefly,” “The L Word,” “Carnivale,” “House,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal,” “Big Love,” “Weeds,” “Tell Me You Love Me,” “Generation Kill,” “John Adams,” “The Killing,” the original “Life On Mars,” “Southland,” “Spartacus,” “Les Revenants,” “Treme,” “Rubicon,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “House Of Cards,” “Masters Of Sex,” “True Detective,” “Halt & Catch Fire,” “Utopia” and “Jane The Virgin,” “State Of Play,” “Rome,” “Luther” and “The Fades” were all on our long-list, while it’s a little too early to tell on “Empire,” “Mr. Robot” and a few others that are newly arrived.
And sorry fans of “Dexter,” “The Walking Dead” and “Sons Of Anarchy” — they were never really in contention.
Originally Posted by fernandito
I love that added touch.
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