The Best TV Shows of the 21st Century Didn’t Stay on Screen

A television series is supposed to end when the credits roll. Then you find yourself considering a suit, defending an indefensible character or recommending six seasons to someone who only asked how your weekend was.

Breaking Bad heads the New York Times’ ranking of the 100 best TV shows of the 21st century, ahead of The Wire and Mad Men. The newly completed list brings together the choices of more than 500 actors, showrunners and other figures in television.

It is a vote on the best, not a measurement of the most influential. But the distinction invites a more interesting conversation than whether your favourite has been placed three spots too low: what happens when a television show becomes part of the culture outside the television?

Some of these series supplied new ways to tell a story. Others supplied clothes to covet, characters to argue about and uncomfortable opportunities to recognise ourselves. The most absorbing did several things at once.

The New York Times’ top 10 TV shows of the 21st century

At the top of the New York Times’ list is Breaking Bad, which ran from 2008 to 2013. The Wire (2002–2008) takes second place, followed by Mad Men (2007–2015) in third — three very different accounts of ambition, compromise and the stories people tell themselves.

Succession (2018–2023) comes fourth, with Fleabag (2016–2019) in fifth and Game of Thrones (2011–2019) in sixth. The scale shifts from a corporate dynasty to an intensely personal confession and then to a struggle for kingdoms. Great television, apparently, has no preferred room size.

Comedy claims the next three places: Veep (2012–2019) is seventh, 30 Rock (2006–2013) eighth and Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–2024) ninth. Atlanta (2016–2022) completes the top ten, leaving a list that moves as comfortably between laughter and discomfort as many of the shows themselves.

The Times’ Upshot team organised the voting, with participants invited to nominate up to 10 shows. As Forbes explains in its account of the selection rules, eligibility extended to different languages and formats, rather than scripted English-language drama alone. This was an industry ballot, not a public popularity poll.

Breaking Bad and The Wire: the people behind the crime

The premise of Breaking Bad sounds like a provocation: a chemistry teacher facing cancer turns to making drugs, ostensibly to provide for his family. Bryan Cranston’s Walter White develops into a criminal kingpin. The unnerving pleasure lies in watching the distance grow between his account of himself and the man his actions reveal.

That is a richer invitation than simply asking us to enjoy a villain. It makes sympathy a moving target. At what point does understanding someone cease to feel like an adequate excuse for cheering him on? The suspense concerns the viewer’s loyalties as much as the next confrontation.

The Wire works on a different scale. David Simon’s Baltimore drama looks beyond individual crimes to the relationships between work, money and survival. Its waterfront story, for example, turns the declining prospects of dockworkers into part of the same picture as the city’s illicit economy.

Placed together, the two series offer contrasting ways to understand a damaged world: follow one person’s choices, or widen the frame until those choices become harder to separate from everything around them. Neither approach makes for particularly restful viewing. Both reward attention.

Mad Men and Succession: when the wardrobe escapes the plot

With Mad Men, the seduction is more elegantly dressed. Its 1960s advertising world sells desire while exposing the unhappiness, exclusions and compromises beneath the attractive surface. The viewer is invited to see through the image — and may still find the image rather appealing.

That tension acquired a retail outlet. In 2011, Banana Republic launched a Mad Men-inspired clothing collection developed with the show’s costume designer, Janie Bryant. Here was influence in a form rather more concrete than a critic’s adjective: the costume had become something a customer could buy.

Succession offered another version of that uneasy attraction. Its final season helped fuel the 2023 conversation about “quiet luxury” and understated wealth, as TIME documented: expensive clothes whose status was conveyed through tailoring and restraint rather than a conspicuous logo.

There is a small comedy in the exchange. A drama need not make a way of life attractive for its clothes to look good. You can recoil from a fictional family’s behaviour and still admire the cut of a jacket. Taste, unlike a television plot, is under no obligation to resolve its contradictions.

Also in Style: The Antiguan roots of Emily in Paris actor Lucien Laviscount.

Fleabag, Atlanta and the power of changing the rules

Fleabag brings the audience close enough to become part of the problem. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s protagonist addresses the camera directly, recruiting us into her private running commentary while struggling with grief and self-destructive impulses. The effect is not just intimacy. It is the flattering sensation of being the person who gets the joke.

Then the confidence begins to look less secure. Being allowed into someone’s account of events does not mean being shown everything. The show makes a glance towards the camera feel like a relationship: enjoyable, unreliable and capable of hurting.

Donald Glover’s Atlanta finds freedom elsewhere. Its characters’ attempts to navigate the rap scene and everyday life can slide into the surreal without abandoning their emotional logic. In its Peabody citation, the series was recognised for bringing the ordinary and the fantastical together in its exploration of Black life and culture.

Both series are reminders that originality is not only a matter of introducing a new subject. It can mean altering the terms on which an audience watches: who confides in us, what counts as real, how much explanation a scene owes us.

And scale need not settle the argument. Game of Thrones builds its drama through kingdoms, rival families and struggles for power; Fleabag can build hers through an uncomfortable conversation. Their proximity in the top ten is a useful corrective to the idea that a great television event must always announce itself with an army.

Why The Sopranos is missing from the NYT list

Before anyone starts looking for Tony Soprano, there is an eligibility rule to explain. The Times required a series to debut on or after January 1, 2000. The Sopranos began on January 10, 1999, which made it ineligible, despite much of its run taking place in the following decade.

Forbes contributor Erik Kain criticised that cutoff. Readers may agree or disagree with it, but the distinction matters: the show was excluded by the rules, not rejected by the voters. Even television’s great fictional operators occasionally meet an administrative obstacle they cannot overcome.

The broader point is that every canon has edges. An industry ballot records the judgments of the people who took part; it does not turn taste into a universal fact. Nor can a single number explain why a series matters to a viewer who encountered it at precisely the right moment.

A watchlist, not a verdict

The most rewarding way to use the ranking is neither as homework nor as a test of cultural competence. No one should have to apologise for the gaps in their viewing history. There are, after all, other things to do with a life.

Instead, let the list reopen a few questions. Which story have you been postponing? Which would you see differently now? Is the show you remember as a portrait of someone else beginning to look uncomfortably familiar?

The lasting achievement is not the number beside a title. It is the scene, the character or the feeling that remains available years later — ready to return in a conversation, an argument or, occasionally, the decision to buy a jacket.