Richard Lowe’s Complete TV Series Rankings
These are honest ratings from someone who has watched a lot of television across a lot of decades. The scale runs from 10+ down to -10000, and every number means something. A show that starts great and collapses gets split ratings. A show that was always mediocre gets a single number. A show that becomes unwatchable gets a zero regardless of how it started, if you can’t finish it, it failed. DNF means Didn’t Finish. The show couldn’t justify the time to complete it.
The standard used here’s simple: does the show trust its audience, commit to consequences, and tell its story without stopping to lecture? The best television on this list does all three. The worst mistakes volume for substance and preaching for drama.
I take television more personally than film. A movie asks me for two hours and a series asks for sixty, so when a show wastes that time on filler or a finale nobody planned, I feel robbed of something I can’t get back. The numbers on this page carry that grudge. They also carry real gratitude for the handful of shows that kept faith with me all the way to their last scene, and there are fewer of those than the networks would like you to think.
My definition of woke: social commentary that’s unnecessary for the plot, or added purely for the sake of the commentary. A show becomes woke when diversity or social issues stop serving the story and start serving an agenda. By that definition, The Wire isn’t woke. The Pitt is.
1. The Shield (2002-2008)
⭐ IMDB: 8.7/10
⚠ Very Upsetting
“A show that absolutely refused to blink.”
Among the greatest television achievements ever made, and one of the few shows that absolutely refused to blink. Vic Mackey is what Walter White was supposed to be, a man who does monstrous things and pays a price that fits the crime. That finale is devastating because the show builds to it every step of the way. No trunk machine-gun salvation, no screaming into freedom. Just consequences closing in from every direction with nowhere to go.
The upsetting part is the point. It’s supposed to cost you something to watch. That’s what separates it from shows that use darkness as aesthetic. The Shield understood that a corrupt cop doesn’t get a redemption arc just because the audience wants one. Vic Mackey survives, but in a living death: chained to a federal desk, stripped of everything that defined him, surrounded by people who despise him.
Colm Meaney as O’Brien was the best pure actor on that show by a significant margin. And the ending opens up a natural continuation that was never made: Vic as a PI using his old skills in a new context, then the inevitable slide into the master criminal role he was always suited for. He’d be better at it than he ever was at being a cop. Which is the darkest possible conclusion to his story, and therefore the right one.
Vic Mackey repels me, and he hooked me in every single episode. The Shield had the nerve to make me complicit in his crimes and then hand me the bill. I measure every crime drama against that finale, and almost all of them come up short.
2. The Expanse (2015-2022) [full review]
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
“So far above everything else it’s in a different category.”
The most scientifically honest science fiction ever put on screen. Zero-gravity physics matter, ships accelerate and decelerate, and the political fracture between Earth, Mars, and the Belt is extrapolated from real human dynamics.
It treats its audience as adults capable of tracking complexity without hand-holding. Seasons one through three are the ceiling for what televised science fiction can accomplish.
Holden as a character works because his idealism is a flaw. It creates problems, people die because of it, and the show doesn’t reward him for it. The Belt dialect, the culture, the physical differences from living in low gravity. The world-building is so thorough it feels like reporting. You believe this is how humanity would fracture given those conditions.
Then Amazon bought it and flushed it down the toilet. They saved it from cancellation at Syfy and then ruined it anyway. Spent the money to rescue the show and didn’t understand what made it worth rescuing. The pacing collapsed, the political complexity got simplified, the budget went to spectacle instead of story. The later seasons look more expensive and feel cheaper. The books apparently sustain the quality throughout. The show doesn’t.
What Amazon did here is worse than any cancellation on this list.
A cancellation is at least a clean death. This kind of waste is inexcusable, because somebody at Amazon liked the show enough to pay for it and nobody there bothered to learn why. The first three seasons still deserve every point of that rating, and I’d recommend them to anyone who claims science fiction on television can’t be smart.
3. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999)
► Read the full review of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999)
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
“The most underrated rating in Trek history.”
Deep Space Nine is the correct take on which Trek series matters most, and it remains one of television’s most underrated achievements.
It did what no other Trek had the nerve to do: sustained serialized conflict, morally compromised heroes, Sisko as a complex lead, and the Dominion War as an actual war with real costs. Roddenberry hated the concept and he was wrong. The episode where Sisko poisons a planet to flush out a Maquis cell is a captain making an ugly call and living with it. That’s not Picard’s show.
Sisko was a great commander. Unfortunately, Avery Brooks had one mode, intensity cranked to maximum. Some scenes he’s magnetic, others he’s chewing scenery so hard you lose the moment.
The baseball scenes give it away. Those quieter character moments that required restraint exposed the limitations fast. Ironically it sometimes worked for Sisko because the character was supposed to be under enormous pressure. But when the script called for nuance, Brooks didn’t have the range.
Colm Meaney as O’Brien was the best pure actor on that show, and given that he also held that title on The Shield, that’s an unusual career distinction. Deep Space Nine understood that the best Trek is about what humans do under impossible circumstances, not about Picard convening a meeting to locate a third option that preserves his conscience.
4. I, Claudius (1976)
► Read the full review of I, Claudius (1976)
⭐ IMDB: 8.7/10
“Made for almost nothing. Still destroys modern prestige drama on pure craft.”
Derek Jacobi carries the entire series on his back, and the Roman senate is a viper pit of the first order. The slow accumulation of horror across decades (poison, assassination, madness, institutional corruption) is handled with a restraint that modern prestige productions with hundred-million-dollar budgets can’t match. Made for almost nothing and it still destroys the competition on pure craft.
The BBC production limitations become invisible within the first episode because the writing and performances are simply that good. When a show can sustain tension entirely through dialogue, character, and consequence, without a single action sequence or special effect, it exposes just how much modern television relies on spectacle as a substitute for story. I, Claudius needs none of it.
I, Claudius embarrasses modern television, and it deserves to. A cast working in cheap BBC sets outplays far richer productions, and the writing is the whole reason. Whenever a streaming show blows its budget on a battle nobody remembers a week later, I think of Jacobi stammering his way through a room full of poisoners and winning.
5. The Twilight Zone (1959-1964)
⭐ IMDB: 9.0/10
“He packed more genuine social commentary into 25 minutes than The Pitt managed in 15 hours.”
Rod Serling was doing social commentary the right way, through allegory and misdirection so you didn’t see the point coming until it landed.
The irony delivered it. You were entertained first and confronted second, the exact inversion of everything wrong with modern prestige television. He did it in 25 minutes with no budget. Some episodes ran 60 minutes in the later seasons with mixed results. The tight 25-minute constraint was part of what made the best ones so surgical.
Not every episode lands. The show is variable across its run, and some entries are self-indulgent even by 1960s standards. But the ceiling is untouchable. When The Twilight Zone hits, and it hits constantly in its best seasons, it achieves something most 10-episode streaming series can’t: a complete story that leaves a mark in under half an hour. The benchmark for how to make a point without making it the point.
6. Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014)
► Read the full review of Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014)
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
“As good as television gets for three seasons.”
Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson, that show was operating at a level most prestige drama never reaches. The period detail, the political machinery, the way organized crime and legitimate power were shown as the same thing. The first three seasons are as good as television gets. The show understood that prohibition-era Atlantic City was a complete moral world where everyone was on the take and the question was only about the size of the cut.
Then the same problem as everything else: compressed, rushed, burned through story that should have taken two more seasons to tell.
The final seasons have the bones of something great visible underneath an execution that clearly knew the end was coming too soon. Criminal waste of a setup that had earned another two full seasons of development. Nucky deserved a conclusion that matched the build. He didn’t get one.
7. Mr. Inbetween (2018-2021)
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
“Criminally underseen.”
Scott Ryan wrote, directed, and starred, and that kind of total creative control shows in every frame. Ray Shoesmith is among the most original characters in crime television: terrifying and human in the same moment, sometimes in the same scene. The comedy lands because it’s real, the violence lands because it’s consequence. The Australian crime drama that most of the world hasn’t seen and that most of the shows on this list can’t touch.
The slight decline across seasons makes sense. The first season had the advantage of introducing a completely original voice with no expectations to manage. By the third season you know the rhythms. Still exceptional television, just slightly less revelatory with each pass.
The ending didn’t work. It wasn’t a good earned death. The whole show was built on Ray being competent, aware, dangerous, a man who survived because he was better at the game than everyone around him. Going out the way he did undercuts that entire characterization. The writers needed an ending and chose sentiment over internal logic. Ray Shoesmith doesn’t get a clean exit. That’s the problem with it.
8. Chernobyl (2019)
⭐ IMDB: 9.4/10
“A masterclass in sustained dread.”
You know the outcome before episode one and it’s still unbearable to watch. The horror isn’t the explosion: it’s the bureaucracy, the denial, the system grinding people up to protect itself. Legasov, Shcherbina, Khomyuk: actual human weight, no Mary Sues, no one gets a clean exit. Craig Mazin understood that the most devastating version of this story isn’t the explosion itself but the cascade of institutional failure that made it inevitable and then made it worse.
The half-point deduction is for pushing a little too hard on Russians-bad as a categorical statement instead of a systemic one.
The show mostly gets it right. The horror is bureaucratic and human, not ethnic. But occasionally it crosses from accurate systemic critique into broad editorializing. The most unsettling truth is that most of these people were just bureaucrats protecting themselves, a universal human failure and not a uniquely Soviet one. The best parts of the show understood that. The weakest moments forgot it.
9. Better Call Saul (2015-2022)
⭐ IMDB: 9.0/10
“The more consistent show creatively. Until Gilligan didn’t know how to stick the landing.”
Better Call Saul is the more consistent creative achievement of the two Breaking Bad shows. The character work is patient, the show builds the moral deterioration over five-plus seasons, and Jimmy McGill’s turn into Saul Goodman never feels rushed or artificial. The show trusted its audience to follow a slow-burn story about a man destroying his own life one compromise at a time, and for most of its run audiences rewarded it for that trust.
After that came the finale stretch. Vince Gilligan apparently didn’t know how to stick the landing a second time. The ending is a common complaint that doesn’t get made enough because the show has a devoted fanbase happy to overlook it. The rating for the body of work is a 9. The finale episodes get their own negative number and drag the memory of what came before. Some shows just can’t close.
Watching Better Call Saul fumble its ending hurt me more than watching a bad show fail. A bad show owes me nothing. This one spent five seasons earning my trust with patient, careful work and then cashed it in during the last stretch. I’d still point anyone to those first five seasons, because very little on television studies a man’s slow collapse this well.
10. Rome (2005-2007)
► Read the full review of Rome (2005-2007)
⭐ IMDB: 8.8/10
“The bones of a 10 show are visible underneath a 5 execution.”
Season one is as good as prestige television gets.
HBO and the BBC spent extraordinary resources building ancient Rome as a living, breathing world: grimy, political, brutal, and entirely believable. The intersection of the great historical figures with the two invented soldier characters (Pullo and Vorenus) gave the epic scope a human anchor. It was clearly mapped as a five-season arc at minimum.
HBO pulled the plug and they had to collapse what was clearly planned across multiple seasons into one final season.
Season two is the classic casualty of cancellation panic. Characters age years between episodes, entire historical periods get a single scene, and you can feel the whiplash throughout. The bones of a 10 show are visible underneath a 5 execution. Criminal waste of the best historical drama set up in television history.
11. The Sopranos (1999-2007)
⭐ IMDB: 9.2/10
“A solid 8, without the last season, which I’ve never seen.”
The 8 is based on the first five seasons.
That’s a purer read on the show’s sustained quality. How most people feel about the finale complicates their relationship with The Sopranos. Rating without that complication captures the body of work on its own terms. The therapy sessions as real character excavation, the mob stuff as backdrop for a portrait of a man who can’t change. Once it locks in, it becomes something else entirely.
From what’s known, the ending gets undeserved hate. The cut to black is the correct ending for that show. Tony’s entire arc was about the impossibility of change and the permanence of who you are. An explicit death scene would have been cathartic resolution. Exactly what Tony Soprano doesn’t deserve and what the show should refuse to give the audience. The ambiguity is the point. The last season is worth finishing.
12. Breaking Bad (2008-2013)
⭐ IMDB: 9.5/10
“Gilligan blinked at the finish line.”
The 7.5 is lower than most would place it, and it’s an honest number.
There are stretches in the middle seasons where the show is marking time between set pieces. The filler is real and it drags the average down. The devotion this show receives from its fanbase means those complaints don’t get made enough, but they’re valid.
The bigger problem is the ending. Walt gets a clean exit.
He dies on his own terms, saves Jesse, takes out the Nazis efficiently, reconciles with his family in his own way. For a show built entirely around the premise that choices have consequences and evil corrupts completely, that ending is unusually tidy. He all but wins. Then there’s the trunk M60 contraption, a James Bond gadget dropped into a crime drama that had worked on realism for five seasons.
And Jesse screaming into freedom felt like wishful thinking after everything that character had been through. Gilligan pulled punches at the finish line. The Shield didn’t. That’s the difference.
13. Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009)
⭐ IMDB: 8.7/10
“The miniseries deserved a show that knew where it was going. It never got one.”
The miniseries set up a hugely promising premise for science fiction television: grounded, bleak, no easy heroes, real existential stakes. Grittier and more politically honest than anything Trek had attempted. The promise was enormous. Then the show proceeded to systematically destroy everything that made it work, episode by episode, season by season, until it arrived at a finale that ranks among the most infamous in television history.
The finale is a writing room that wrote itself into a corner and chose religion over logic as the exit. They had no plan. The mystical hand-waving, the angel reveals, the “this has all happened before” cosmic nonsense, it’s an insult to everyone who invested in those characters. Starbuck’s resolution alone is an insult to everyone who cared about that character. The miniseries deserved a show that knew where it was going. It never got one.
Few finales have left me feeling as cheated as this one. I stuck with Battlestar because the miniseries promised a writers’ room with a plan, and the ending told me there’d never been one. The miniseries is still worth your evening. Stop there and you keep the version of this show that deserved to exist.
14. ER (1994-2009)
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
“The gold standard for medical drama.”
ER especially holds up as the gold standard for medical drama for the first six seasons. Fast, chaotic, real-feeling, and the emotional beats were earned through situation instead of signaling. Carter, Greene, Ross. You watched characters develop under pressure instead of having their psychology explained to you. The discipline: characters talked while moving, while working, while doing three things at once. The conversation happened inside the action.
ER trusted the environment to generate the drama. A busy emergency room is inherently stressful. You don’t need to editorialize on top of it. The show understood that the patient storyline is a complete dramatic unit. You follow it to resolution or it means nothing. When those arcs paid off, they paid off completely. Characters with serious personal dysfunction still locked in when the trauma bay filled. That contrast between personal mess and professional competence made them interesting.
The 7 reflects the full run, and the first six seasons had enough filler episodes to drag the average down from where the peaks would place it. ER at its best is better than a 7. ER as a sustained body of work across six seasons, including the down weeks, sits right there. The medical consultants were on set enforcing the procedural details. That accuracy made everything else believable.
ER is the medical show I’d recommend to every writers’ room working in a hospital setting today.
It never paused the drama to explain how I ought to feel about it. The staff was too busy saving someone, and that busyness told me more about who they were than any monologue could. The 7 is a fair average, and I’d still take its best hours over most prestige dramas.
15. Grey’s Anatomy (2005-present)
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
“It became emasculated.”
Early Gray’s had real tension and the personal drama was messy in ways that felt human.
It got a little woke over time, but nowhere near enough to kill it early on. The bomb episode is among the best hours of network television that decade: Meredith holding the explosive charge in the chest cavity, pure tension, no sermonizing, just situation and stakes. The show knew how to generate drama from its environment when it chose to.
After Derek’s death it became unwatchable. The decline was systematic and deliberate.
The writers killed off, disgraced, or wrote out every competent male character until the show was structurally incapable of telling certain kinds of stories. It didn’t happen by accident. The show became emasculated and ran on fumes and agenda for years afterward. The early seasons deserved a better ending arc. The show that replaced them isn’t the same show.
16. Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005)
► Read the full review of Star Trek: Enterprise (2001-2005)
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
“Once it found its identity, it became a legitimate show.”
Enterprise gets an 8 after the first two seasons, and that’s a fair assessment. The first two seasons were identity crisis television. The show clearly didn’t know what it wanted to be and paid the price in wandering, unfocused storytelling.
Once it committed to the Xindi arc in season three and found a real reason to exist as a prequel series, it became something worth watching. The serialized format suited it far better than the episodic approach it started with.
The irony is that Enterprise got canceled just as it found its footing. Season four was the show that the concept always deserved, connecting the dots between the early exploratory era and the formation of the Federation with a care and intelligence that justified the prequel premise. Getting canceled at that point was the franchise equivalent of what happened to Rome, and just as unfortunate.
17. The Moneychangers (1976)
► Read the full review of The Moneychangers (1976)
“A bank succession fight that plays like a war for the soul of the place.”
Arthur Hailey wrote novels about institutions, the hotel, the airport, the car plant, and The Moneychangers turned his bank into a four-part NBC miniseries in December 1976.
Ben Rosselli, president of First Mercantile American Bank, is dying, and two men want his chair. Roscoe Heyward wants the bank to chase profit. Alex Vandervoort wants it to serve the people who keep their money there.
Boris Sagal directed, and it won the Emmy for Outstanding Limited Series. It arrived a month before Roots made the miniseries a national event, and it’s one of the productions that showed the networks what the format could do: a big cast, a real institution, and enough hours to let a corporate fight become a character study.
It’s dated in the way seventies television is dated, all wood paneling and wide lapels. The argument at the center hasn’t dated at all. Who a bank is for is still the question, and Hailey asked it forty years before anybody made a film about 2008. Eight out of ten.
18. The Simpsons (1989-present)
⭐ IMDB: 8.7/10
“The zombie seasons: a show that invented a vocabulary for animated comedy spent twenty-plus years slowly eating its own corpse.”
Seasons two through eight are the gold standard of American animated comedy, and a 7 is honest.
Even in the peak years there were filler episodes marking time between the real classics. The ratio of great to filler was better than almost anything else on television, but it was never zero. The best episodes from that run are legitimate art: dense, layered, rewatchable, working on multiple levels. A 7 represents the sustained average.
Next came the zombie seasons. Homer went from a lovable idiot to a cartoonish sociopath with no recognizable inner life. Characters lost all consistency, stakes became nonexistent, every episode reset to zero. The tragedy is it never ended, so it just kept accumulating damage to the legacy for three decades.
The exception to all of it is Treehouse of Horror. No continuity obligations, no reset button needed, complete creative freedom. The writers could kill anyone, break any rule, go as dark as they wanted. The Shining parody, the Homer clones, the teachers eating the students. Those hold up as standalone comedy pieces entirely independent of the show’s decline. Nightmare Cafeteria is a masterpiece of dark comedy because it takes a real childhood anxiety and literalizes it into cannibalism. The comedy came from a real place. That’s what the later seasons completely lost.
Few shows on this list pain me like The Simpsons. The peak years were so good that every limp modern episode feels like watching an old friend embarrass himself in public, and nobody will let him go home. Treehouse of Horror is the piece I’d save if I could keep only one part of the show.
19. Murderbot (2025-present) [full review]
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
“Diversity baked in, not shoved in your face.”
Based on Martha Wells’ novella series, Murderbot is the Apple TV+ adaptation of a story about a security robot that hacked its own governor module and would really prefer to be left alone to watch its shows. The diversity in Murderbot’s world is irrelevant because Murderbot doesn’t care about any of it. It wants to watch its serials and not deal with humans regardless of what they are. The social architecture of that universe is just the world.
This is the right way to handle representation: bake it into the premise so it disappears into the story. When diversity is essential to the story, it becomes invisible.
When it’s decorative, you can smell it immediately. Murderbot represents the former approach, so it belongs in the same conversation as The Expanse as a model for how science fiction handles the modern world without becoming a lecture about it.
20. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)
► Read the full review of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994)
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
“Picard was a terrible captain. I would not want to serve under him.”
TNG is so up and down it’s hard to land on a single number.
When it hits philosophical territory with real stakes, it’s excellent television. When it’s a bottle episode with holodeck malfunctions, it’s unwatchable. Picard carries the ceiling higher than the floor deserves. The 6-7 range captures that variance. Some episodes would rate a 10, others would rate a zero, and the average lands somewhere in between.
Picard himself is a legitimate command assessment problem. He was a philosopher and diplomat who happened to wear a uniform.
Great in a negotiation, great in a first contact situation, but when things went sideways he was frequently paralyzed, moralistic to the point of inaction, or needed Riker to run the ship. You wouldn’t want to serve under him. Kirk would have been a nightmare for different reasons (reckless, impulsive) but in a real crisis you knew he was going to do something. Picard would convene a meeting.
Sisko is the answer to both. I enjoy TNG when it’s thinking hard, and its best philosophical hours stand up against any Trek. My reservation is everything around them. Too many episodes spend an hour on a malfunction and a speech, and Picard’s committee style of command wears me out long before the problem gets solved.
21. Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-1969)
► Read the full review of Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-1969)
⭐ IMDB: 8.4/10
“Super dated. But the variance is real.”
The dating is real and inescapable. The production values, the acting conventions of the 1960s, the special effects. It all shows. But the original series had something that later Treks took decades to rediscover: real moral ambiguity and a captain who would do something when circumstances demanded it. Kirk was reckless and impulsive, but you never wondered whether he’d act.
The range from 6 to 10 reflects the same problem as TNG. The show is wildly inconsistent. Some episodes are ahead of their time in what they were willing to address and how they addressed it. Others are so much a product of their era that they don’t survive the trip. The best TOS episodes land in a different place than the worst ones, and there’s no honest single number that covers both.
22. Rookie Blue (2010-2015)
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
“Fluffy and stupid. Mindless entertainment, which is sometimes exactly what you want.”
The Canadian police procedural got a 6.5 fair and square as competent mindless entertainment. It’s fluffy, it’s not realistic, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than it is. A show that knows it’s fluffy and delivers consistently on those terms is more honest than a show like The Pitt that thinks it’s deep and isn’t.
Not everything needs to be The Sopranos. Sometimes you want to watch something that moves at a reasonable pace, has likeable enough characters, and doesn’t require you to think. Rookie Blue fills that space competently. The 6.5 reflects exactly what it is: better than mediocre, short of good, and entirely watchable for what it offers.
23. The Rookie (2018-present)
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
“Nolan turned into a Mary Sue and it became unwatchable.”
The first two seasons deserved their 6.5 as enjoyable but mindless entertainment, same category as Rookie Blue, different execution. Nathan Fillion as the middle-aged rookie had a premise with real comedic and dramatic potential, and the early seasons let Nolan make mistakes and face real consequences. That’s the whole appeal of a competent procedural: watching professionals work through real difficulty.
The Mary Sue problem ruined it. Once Nolan became infallible (always right, always wins, everyone eventually comes around to his view) the tension evaporated completely. A show that becomes unwatchable is worth less than one that was never good to begin with. At least bad shows don’t waste the goodwill you built up over two seasons. First two seasons 6.5, after that 0. That’s the accurate accounting.
24. NCIS (2003-present)
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
“Gibbs held it together. Without that anchor, it’s just inventory.”
The first few seasons deserved their 6.5 as solid procedural television. NCIS had a clear identity: the forensic focus, the investigative unit, Gibbs as a credible and idiosyncratic lead character. The team dynamic worked. The show knew what it was and delivered competently on that identity for several seasons before franchise disease set in.
Gibbs held the show together as a legitimate center.
Without that anchor, the later seasons and every spinoff are just inventory, characters filling procedural slots without the personality or chemistry that made the original work. A 0 for anything after the show loses its identity is accurate. The spinoffs didn’t deserve the name they borrowed.
25. CSI: Las Vegas (2000-2015)
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
“Once the template got xeroxed across different cities with interchangeable casts, it became a factory product.”
The original CSI had a distinct identity that made it work: the forensic focus, the Las Vegas atmosphere, and Grissom as an odd lead character. William Petersen’s Grissom was an entomologist who cared more about evidence than people, and that eccentricity gave the show a flavor that distinguished it from every other crime procedural on television. The 6.5 for the early seasons is well-earned.
Once that template got xeroxed repeatedly across Miami and New York with interchangeable casts, it became a factory product.
The Miami spinoff is especially egregious. David Caruso’s dramatic sunglasses removal became a punchline for good reason. Spinoffs that dilute the original concept don’t deserve the name they borrowed. Everything after the original’s prime gets a 0.
26. Hotel (1983-1988)
► Read the full review of Hotel (1983-1988)
“Spelling’s Love Boat, docked on Nob Hill.”
Aaron Spelling took Arthur Hailey’s 1965 novel, moved it from New Orleans to San Francisco, and ran it on ABC for five seasons and about a hundred and fifteen episodes. The St. Gregory is the anchor, the staff are the regulars, and every week a new set of guests checks in with a problem that gets solved before checkout.
It’s the Spelling formula at full strength: glossy sets, guest stars from every decade of Hollywood, romance, a little danger, and a staff that behaves like a family. The Love Boat and Dynasty were better shows, and Hotel never tried to beat them. It’s comfortable television, built to be watched on a Wednesday night and forgotten by Thursday, and it did that job for five years.
I rate it a six. It delivers exactly what it promises and nothing more, and there’s real craftsmanship in that. If you want to see how an anthology show hides inside a workplace drama, this is the clean example. I have mixed feelings about Hotel. I respect a formula that ran five years without falling apart, and I’d never sit anyone down and insist they watch it. It’s pleasant company for an evening, and that’s as far as my enthusiasm goes.
27. House M.D. (2004-2012)
⭐ IMDB: 8.7/10
“The formula was visible from episode two. Olivia Wilde is a 10+.”
House M.D. scores a 5 overall because Hugh Laurie was magnetic enough to sustain a formula that was visible from the second episode longer than the concept deserved. Eventually the case-of-the-week structure collapsed under its own repetition and the personal drama got increasingly contrived. The show peaked early and spent its later seasons trying to recapture what it had in seasons two and three.
The real standout is Olivia Wilde as Thirteen. The Huntington’s arc gave her actual story weight and she made the most of every scene. The show gave her material that let her be more than decoration. She was also in Cowboys and Aliens. That makes the top 50 films list without apology. Thirteen gets her own 10+ rating separate from the show’s overall 5.
28. Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-1974)
⭐ IMDB: 8.8/10
“Super dated. That’s the right way to rate it.”
Monty Python was never consistent, that’s just the truth. Some sketches are untouchable comedy architecture that still gets a laugh fifty years later. Others were self-indulgent even in 1970. The dead parrot, the Spanish Inquisition, the Ministry of Silly Walks, timeless mechanical perfection. Other episodes are absurdism for its own sake that goes nowhere and expects credit for being weird.
The dating is real but selective. The purely physical and logical comedy holds up regardless of when you watch it. The British cultural references and some of the political satire have calcified into museum pieces. A single rating covering the whole run is dishonest. Some episodes are legitimately among the greatest half-hours of comedy ever made. Others are a waste of thirty minutes. Treat them accordingly.
29. Sons of Anarchy (2008-2014)
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
“Boring.”
Didn’t make it past episode three. The concept, Hamlet in a biker gang, sounds more interesting than it plays in the opening stretch. The show takes a while to find its momentum and if it doesn’t grab you early there’s no convincing reason to push through. Boring is the complete verdict. Sometimes that’s all there’s to say.
30. The Pitt (2025-present) [S1 review] [S2 review]
⭐ IMDB: 8.8/10
“More accurate than I first credited. Less honest than its defenders pretend.”
The Pitt is the medical drama that’s generated the largest gap between critic consensus and the assessment of working professionals across multiple disciplines. Noah Wyle is excellent and carries scenes the writing wouldn’t otherwise sustain. The mass casualty episodes in Season 1 generated real tension. The Langdon diversion plot was researched carefully, the planted clue (an over-tight pill bottle cap that triggers the investigation) is the kind of compulsive tell real diverters develop.
Season 2 gets the higher rating because UC San Diego physicians who study these events for a living endorse the cyberattack arc’s depiction of patient-care impact, and working physicians have broadly praised the depiction of physician suicidal ideation as accurate to the lived experience of emergency medicine.
What survives the research is that the show is selective about which institutional rules it depicts accurately. HIPAA gets treated as strict when strictness produces drama (Robby refusing to let a friend film a parkour patient who was already filming voluntarily) and lax when laxness produces drama (clinicians speculating diagnoses in front of ICE agents during the immigration episode). The AI subplot claims 98% accuracy for clinical generative AI when peer-reviewed research puts the range at 50-60% for diagnostic tasks.
The mandatory reporting plotline in Season 1 Episode 7 got Pennsylvania law wrong on national television. The show has a hospital social worker say “there’s nothing to report unless we have proof,” when state law requires reporting on reasonable suspicion. Working social workers pushed back publicly.
The preaching critique is widely acknowledged across the political spectrum, including by the show’s defenders. TIME’s Judy Berman, defending the show, wrote that it is “largely preaching to the progressive-pilled.” The Los Angeles Review of Books called the show’s “checklist-style, homiletic approach to teachable moments” parodic, comparing one exchange to “the kind of dialogue you might expect from a corporate training video.” A healthcare worker writing under the name Hatereon coined “The Woke White Savior” as the show’s new trope.
The Season 2 ICE episode holds a 9.1/10 IMDB rating, the highest of the season, despite generating mass viewer drop-off threats. That’s the polarization signal. The show is being engineered for an in-group audience and the response data confirms the strategy is working as designed.
31. Black Mirror (2011-present)
⭐ IMDB: 8.7/10
“More like a great concept with occasional great execution.”
The premiere episode, the one with the pig, either breaks you immediately or perversely hooks you with the sheer audacity. It broke me. Black Mirror’s problem is inconsistency by design, it’s an anthology, so there’s no connective tissue to carry you through the weak entries. When it works, it’s unsettling. When it misses, it’s pretentious tech anxiety with no real insight.
The hit rate is too low to call it a great show. One or two episodes work at the level the concept promises.
The rest vary from mediocre to embarrassing. The overall −1 is accurate for the run as a whole. A great concept with occasional great execution isn’t the same as a great show, it’s a proof of concept that never fully delivered on its own premise.
32. The Boys (2019-present)
⭐ IMDB: 8.7/10
“Five seasons in. Watchable, mediocre, and noticeably thinner than the clips suggest.”
Five seasons later, The Boys lands at a 5.
The clips remain the best part of the experience, superhero satire at maximum intensity with no obligation to sustain a narrative. Pure punch delivery. The full episodes drown in their own excess. The satire is so relentless and so loud it stops being commentary and becomes wallpaper. Subtlety is nonexistent, every scene is pitched at eleven, and after a while the shock value stops shocking. You’re just numb.
The deepest irony: a show satirizing bloated superhero franchises has the exact same problem as bloated superhero franchises, it mistakes volume for substance. Watching three minutes of clips delivers the bulk of the experience. Watching five seasons delivers the same experience slowly enough that you notice how thin it’s underneath the spectacle. The 5 is the real middle, better than initial harshness suggested, far from good television.
33. Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001)
► Read the full review of Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001)
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
“Reset button television. Nothing ever mattered because they needed to be lost again next week.”
The premise had potential that Janeway’s writing never fulfilled. A Federation crew stranded seventy thousand light-years from home with a Maquis crew who should have been enemies, that’s a real conflict engine.
The show reset it immediately and pretended everyone got along just fine. That’s also the show’s fundamental creative failure in miniature. Nothing ever mattered because they needed to be lost again next week.
Then Seven of Nine arrived and the show briefly remembered what tension felt like. The Borg episodes worked because the stakes were real, the collective represented a real threat and Seven’s presence on the ship created friction. When the craft is working, the character holds the show together. When it isn’t, everything else falls apart again. The −1 is the right rating for the run as a whole. The exceptions are worth watching.
Voyager frustrates me more than a flat-out bad show because the premise was sitting right there.
Two crews who should’ve been at each other’s throats, stranded with no way home, and the writers hit the reset button every week. Seven of Nine proves they could’ve done better. Nobody forced them to waste the other seasons.
34. Star Trek: New Shows (2017-present)
► Read the full review of Star Trek: Discovery (2017-2024)
► Read the full review of Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023)
► Read the full review of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (2026)
► Read the full review of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022-)
► Read the full review of Star Trek: Lower Decks (2020-2024)
► Read the full review of Star Trek: Prodigy (2021-2024)
⭐ IMDB: 6.5-7.3/10
“Active insults to the franchise. Academy lowered the floor by an order of magnitude.”
Discovery, Picard (seasons 2-3), Starfleet Academy, and the rest of the modern Trek output range from actively insulting to merely mediocre. They’re nostalgia strip-mining dressed up as progressive storytelling, with no understanding of what made any of the original material work. The new shows use the character names, the ship designs, and the iconography as props while showing zero comprehension of the philosophical and narrative structures that gave those things their meaning.
Picard season two used to be the single worst thing produced under the Star Trek name. Then Starfleet Academy arrived and lowered the floor by an order of magnitude. Academy is one of the worst television series ever made in the history of the medium. A candidate for the worst series ever produced anywhere by anyone.
The franchise that gave us Deep Space Nine’s Dominion War and The Original Series’ moral confrontations now produces a young-adult drama set in a CGI dorm room with characters that show nothing recognizable as Starfleet competence, purpose, or values. The −10 to −1 range is generous for the rest. Academy gets its own number: −10,000.
Discovery’s first two seasons aren’t worth the time it takes to watch them at any speed. Academy isn’t worth the time it takes to open the streaming app.
35. Law & Order Franchise (1990-2010 / various spin-offs)
⭐ IMDB: 7.7-8.0/10
“The mothership stayed watchable for 20 seasons. The reboot doesn’t count.”
The original Law & Order ran 20 seasons from 1990 to 2010 and remained watchable from the first episode to the last. Dick Wolf’s structural innovation was the two-halves format (detectives investigate the first half, prosecutors prosecute the second half) which gave the show two complete dramatic engines per episode. Jerry Orbach’s Lennie Briscoe and Sam Waterston’s Jack McCoy are the most iconic faces of the run, but the cast rotated significantly across two decades and the format held regardless.
That’s the test of a well-designed show: it survives the cast changes. The 2022 NBC revival is a separate matter, not the same show, doesn’t count in the rating. The 8+ is for the original 1990-2010 run.
Criminal Intent (2001-2011) is the franchise’s most interesting failure. Vincent D’Onofrio’s Detective Robert Goren is a brilliant, eccentric profiler with Sherlock Holmes affinities, partnered with Kathryn Erbe’s Alex Eames. The first four seasons are excellent, 9/10 work, with D’Onofrio’s brooding, intense performance holding the show together. Then the workload nearly destroyed him. He passed out twice on set in 2004.
Season 5 split the cast: D’Onofrio and Erbe alternating with Chris Noth’s Mike Logan, who’d transferred over from the original. That worked.
Then D’Onofrio departed in season 9, replaced by Jeff Goldblum’s Detective Zack Nichols.
Goldblum is a quirky eccentric in the Monk lineage, not a brooding interrogator in the Goren lineage, and the show collapsed because the format wasn’t sturdy enough to absorb the swap. D’Onofrio returned for the final eight-episode season 10 in 2011 but the show never recovered the original chemistry. The 9-to-4 range reflects the rise and fall of a show that worked entirely because of one actor’s performance.
SVU (1999-present) is well-made television that’s tough to watch because of the subject matter. Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson and Christopher Meloni’s Elliot Stabler were the heart of the original years and the show became the longest-running American primetime live-action drama in part because Hargitay’s commitment to the character never wavered. A 5 reflects competent execution wrapped around content that limits rewatchability. The procedural rhythm wasn’t designed to carry the moral weight of the cases it processes week after week, and twenty-plus seasons of that wear shows in the writing.
It’s a show people watch out of habit and quit when the cumulative weight finally lands.
Three different lessons from one franchise about how format interacts with content and casting.
36. Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974)
► Read the full review of Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974)
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
“The animation is atrocious. The writing holds up anyway.”
Twenty-two half-hour episodes on NBC Saturday mornings, four years after the original series was canceled, with almost the entire original cast voicing their own characters. The Filmation animation is indefensible and there’s no point pretending otherwise.
Filmation minimizes movement and reuses cels systematically, and characters stand still and talk in front of painted backgrounds. Go past that and the scripts are the reason it survives.
D.C. Fontana was story editor and associate producer.
That explains everything. She had been one of the two most important writers on the original series and arrived here with the authority to commission properly, so she hired from the same population: Larry Niven, David Gerrold, Samuel Peeples and Stephen Kandel. That’s the identical decision that produced the best of the 1966 show, and it’s audible in the first two minutes of every good episode.
Larry Niven adapted his own Known Space story “The Soft Weapon” into an episode.
That imported the Kzinti into Star Trek wholesale. “The Slaver Weapon” has no Kirk in it at all, follows Spock, Sulu and Uhura on a shuttle, and the plot is a real puzzle about an artifact with settings nobody understands. The Kzinti then sat unused for forty-six years until Picard mentioned them.
“Yesteryear” is the best of it and Fontana wrote it herself. Spock has been erased from history because his younger self died on Vulcan, so he returns as an adult under a false name to save himself as a boy, meets his own father as a stranger, and has to authorize the death of his own injured pet. Mark Lenard returned to voice Sarek. That’s a real piece of writing about what a culture costs a child, on NBC on a Saturday morning in 1973.
It was the first Star Trek to win an Emmy, and the award has a direct production consequence. The first season ran sixteen episodes to poor ratings, because it wasn’t drawing enough children, and it should have ended there. The Emmy is why Filmation added six more. Roddenberry then dismissed the whole series from canon, reportedly over the twenty-foot Spock clone left alive in Walter Koenig’s episode, and the exile lasted until after his death.
The animation is weak, and that’s the reservation behind my 7.
The writing is why it’s worth your time. Fontana hired people who respected these characters, and “Yesteryear” treats a child’s grief with more care than most live-action Trek ever managed. If you can live with the stiff cels, the scripts will pay you back.
Star Trek at its most disposable gave the franchise the holodeck, Kirk’s middle name and the canonical account of Spock’s childhood, and spent two decades formally not counting.
Additional Series Worth Knowing
Game of Thrones (2011-2019)
Game of Thrones, the most-watched fantasy series ever made, spent six seasons redefining what prestige television could do with the fantasy genre. Ruthless, unpredictable, and willing to kill major characters in service of the story. Then the showrunners ran out of George R.R. Martin’s source material and the final two seasons became a collapse that ranks among the most debated in television history. The political complexity dissolved, characters made inexplicable decisions, and a decade of careful worldbuilding was resolved in a finale that satisfied almost no one.
Season 1-6 belong in the elite tier. Seasons 7-8 are a cautionary tale.
Person of Interest (2011-2016)
A procedural that started as a conventional crime show and evolved into one of television’s most thoughtful meditations on artificial intelligence, surveillance, and what it means to be human. Michael Emerson and Jim Caviezel anchored a series that kept finding new layers to its premise each season. The show became ambitious about its AI storyline years before the topic saturated every other conversation. Cancellation compressed the final season, but the show handled the ending with more grace than most shows get. Criminally underrated relative to its actual quality.
The Blacklist (2013-2023)
James Spader as Raymond Reddington is one of television’s great eccentric performances: theatrical, dangerous, and entertaining to watch regardless of what the plot is doing around him. The show ran ten seasons on the strength of that performance and a premise that kept finding new ways to generate cases. The mythology around Reddington’s true identity became increasingly convoluted in the later seasons and the show lost its way several times, but Spader’s commitment to the character never wavered. Watch for him. Treat the plot as window dressing.
Yellowstone (2018-2024)
Taylor Sheridan’s modern western about a Montana ranching dynasty fighting to hold its land against developers, politicians, and a neighboring reservation generated a massive audience on a cable network that most people had forgotten existed. Kevin Costner’s John Dutton is a patriarch who holds his world together through a combination of ruthlessness, tradition, and sheer stubborn will. The show has the landscape, the moral complexity, and the willingness to let bad things happen to good people. Slow in places, but the payoffs are earned when they come.
1883 (2021-2022)
The Yellowstone prequel following the Dutton family’s original westward journey in a wagon train from Texas toward Montana. Sam Elliott as Shea Brennan holds the show together with a performance that makes every frame he’s in count. The series doesn’t romanticize the frontier: disease, violence, and the sheer brutality of the journey are shown with a honesty that most Western properties avoid. A limited series that used its episode count efficiently and reached a conclusion that justified everything that preceded it.
1923 (2022-present)
Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren as the next generation of Duttons holding the ranch together through Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the particular cruelties of early federal Indian boarding school policy. Two extraordinary actors in a period production that benefits from their combined authority. The show handles the historical darkness of the era with directness. Ford especially seems reinvigorated in a role that asks him to be authoritative, vulnerable, and sometimes frightening, often in the same scene.
Landman (2024-present)
Taylor Sheridan’s West Texas oil-industry drama featuring Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, a landman and crisis executive at M-Tex Oil. Season 1 is well produced with strong technical work and the kind of regional texture Sheridan does well. Thornton’s performance is good, he commits completely, and the Golden Globe nomination for the role was earned. The problem is the same one afflicting most modern series: there’s no one to root for. Tommy Norris is a complete asshole. Cooper Norris (Jacob Lofland), his son, is a horrible person.
Rebecca Falcone (Kayla Wallace), the lawyer, is a typical girl boss. Ainsley Norris (Michelle Randolph), the daughter, is a pretty-girl-fluff stereotype. A workplace drama needs at least one anchor character whose moral compass the audience can use as a reference point. Landman doesn’t have that anchor. The 5 reflects competent production wasted on characters who haven’t justified the time they’re given.
Lucifer (2016-2021)
The Devil retires to Los Angeles and becomes a police consultant. Tom Ellis commits completely to the performance: charming, dangerous, funny, and surprisingly emotionally available when the show asks him to be. The procedural cases are the least interesting part of any given episode. The mythology around Lucifer’s relationship with God, his mother, his celestial siblings, and the nature of evil keeps it moving. Netflix rescued the show after Fox canceled it and gave it a proper ending. A case where the premise sounds impossible and the execution works.
What Did I Get Wrong?
Every rating here’s defensible and some of them will make people angry. That’s fine. If you think Breaking Bad deserves better than a 7.5 or The Pitt deserves its 8.8 IMDB rating, the comments are below. Bring arguments.
The shows at the top of this page share one trait: they respected my time all the way to the last episode. The ones at the bottom treated my attention as a crop to harvest, and television like that is a waste of an evening. I’d trade every minute I gave Starfleet Academy for one more season of The Shield without a second thought.
