Back in April, THR‘s team of intrepid film critics got together and ranked the 50 best films of the 21st century so far, delivering a list that was fascinating, head-scratching and packed with cinematic greatness. Like all well-conceived lists, it offered room for enthusiastic agreement and virulent disagreement — as well as a guarantee that any title you had yet to see was surely worth checking out.
That list began with an important question: “Why now?” Their conclusive answer: “Why not?”
That makes it even easier for us to justify our own stab at the same project: Why rank the best TV shows of the past 24 years — which isn’t even a quarter of a century — right now? Because the film critics did it first and it looked like a lot of fun!
It was not fun.
OK, that’s not exactly accurate. Debating great TV is always fun. But the past 24 years have been a television boomtown (not to be confused with the NBC drama Boomtown, which didn’t receive much consideration, though its first season was excellent). Whether you call it a golden age (or platinum, or your metal of choice), expand the boundaries of John Landgraf’s “Peak TV” well beyond its actual definition or just employ the #TooMuchTV hashtag, there’s little doubt that the television landscape on Dec. 31, 1999, has almost no resemblance to what the kids are watching on their iWatches today. (That, incidentally, is a different problem. “The kids” are watching their content on YouTube and TikTok, and they probably don’t even know what an “NBC” is, much less a Boomtown.)
There were 600 original scripted shows airing on broadcast, cable and streaming in 2022 alone. That it was already hard enough to list the 50 best shows of last year is a luxury problem. We’re living through the greatest era of television content ever, and that’s fantastic, but it makes listing very challenging. It’s likely that we excluded at least five of…
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