Here are the best 50 shows which television has ever produced, Now you can pick a show and binge watch it because if you haven’t seen any of these shows then you are the luckiest person in the world, You asked why? because you haven’t seen these beautiful shows and now you have something amazing to watch!
1968-78, 1989-2003
The beauty of Columbo, and a huge reason why it continues to be a staple on the afternoon TV schedules, 45 years after its debut, is that it took a different approach. Here was a cop show that wasn’t a whodunit – we know who the killer is from the off. It’s not even a whydunit. It’s a howhegonnagetem, as Columbo slowly, painstakingly pieces together his clues, ready for the big reveal at the end. It was a glorious subversion of everything we’d been conditioned to expect from cop shows. There are few greater joys in television than watching the seemingly absent-minded lieutenant run rings around a snooty killer who underestimated him from the very second they met.
1998-2004
Thanks to the passage of time and two cack-handed movie spin-offs,Sex And The City has come to be seen by many as a silly show about shoes and cocktails. But beneath the layers of Prada hid a series that was smartly written and incredibly brave, even if it did totter across the screen on a pair of immaculately fitted Jimmy Choos. It’s easy to forget now how groundbreaking the adventures of four sexually liberated (okay three, plus Charlotte) Manhattan thirtysomethings were not just for women on TV, but for the treatment of sex on the box. The entire vibrator industry owes Carrie and Co an enormous debt.
2006-2013
Can it really be over? 30 Rock‘s brains trust have since moved on toUnbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, an equally madcap slice of New York-icana, but we still really miss Tina Fey’s NBC-set showcase of sharp-writing, pitch-perfect performances and Frank Rossitano’s trucker hats. NBC head honcho Jack Donaghy was the role Alec Baldwin was born to play (well, that and El Generalissimo), while Fey herself is the frazzled heart of the show around whom all the madness happens. And, boy, is there a lot of madness. Tracy ‘stabbing robot’ Jordan provides a good 74 percent of it.
1972-83
This series based on Robert Altman’s 1970 film managed to last over three times as long as the Korean War it used as backdrop. MASHwas a searing exploration of how the doctors and nurses of the 4077th (a mobile army surgical hospital, hence the title) used humour to get through the atrocities they were faced with on a daily basis. A sterling cast, including Alan Alda, Loretta Swit, Mike Farrell, David Ogden Stiers and Harry Morgan kept this riveting (and hilarious) throughout its 11-year run, meanwhile the commentary on war continued to the very end, when, in the final episode, the unit’s news reporter discusses the growing conflict in Vietnam.
2013-present
The Cold War feels that much chillier in this inventive series, which follows the lives of two Russian sleeper agents who are very much awake in 1980s Washington. Complicated, passionate and thrown together by the Mother Russia, Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) are fascinating creations: driven by patriotism but torn by the pull of their adopted home and the American family they raised as a cover. It can be vicious, it can be touching, but The Americans always delivers, and unlike some of the Jennings’ targets, is set to go out on its own terms with two final seasons to come.
1994-2009
It ran until there wasn’t a single member of the original cast left (at least, until the spectacular reunion finale) but ER amazingly showed little sign of decline throughout its 15-year run. Based on a film script by Michael Crichton, the series evolved into a weekly slice of emergency medicine at Chicago’s county hospital, one that was separated from inferior imitators by smart scripts, great characters and a willingness to shock – Dr. Greene’s bathroom attack, Lucy and Carter vs schizophrenic knife-wielder. The list of cameos, both in front and behind the camera, is as long as your arm and boasted such names as Quentin Tarantino, Kirsten Dunst and Ewan McGregor.
Best Episode: Hell And High Water (Season 2, Episode 7)
1993-1999
The perfect show for binge-watching before the concept existed. In its earliest days, this spin-off to Star Trek: The Next Generation felt like the storytelling was going to by-the-numbers Trek, only on a space station. Flash-forward a couple of seasons, and this is the show that broke the Star Trek mould, filled with flesh-and-blood human beings (even if they were aliens), character arcs that frequently stretched over the course of seasons, groundbreaking storytelling and complex characters. Some complain this station-bound show doesn’t go anywhere, but this is the Trek that went where none had gone before.
2003-
Now the story of a groundbreaking sitcom that very nearly died a quiet, ignominious death at the hands of an indifferent network, before it was saved by an internet streaming site. When it first arrived in 2003,Arrested Development was so fiendishly clever, so densely plotted, so shrewdly ironic, that Fox barely knew what to do with it. Despite Fox’s best efforts to bury the show in strange timeslots, the Bluth family earned an feverishly loyal cult audience, one that eventually conferred upon it a Netflix rebirth. The brain-melting ambition of Season 4 may have been a noble failure for some, but it remains one of the most innovative comedies ever produced.
2011-
The title refers to the Øresund Bridge connecting Sweden and Denmark, with the show focusing on a détente between the two police forces. Like The Killing, its success came from the characters as much as the crimes committed. Front and centre are the leather-trewed, autistic-spectrum Swedish detective Saga Norén and her alternately amused and anguished Danish counterpart Martin Rohde: both outstanding performances from, respectively, Sofia Helin and Kim Bodnia. Bodnia’s absence from the third season was keenly felt.
2014-
A standing embodiment of the advice that you shouldn’t judge ideas before you see them realised, alarm klaxons rang when it was announced that someone was going to make a TV series based on the Coen brothers’ crime classic. But Noah Hawley was incredibly smart in how he used the movie’s faux true crime trappings and small-town settings but wove his own story into them. Bumbling chancers, dangerous crooks and smart lawfolk all made the first season work well, and then everything pivoted for the second, turning the clock back to one of the characters’ earlier days to chronicle mobsters and strange goings-on. A quality cast that has included Martin Freeman,Colin Hanks, Patrick Wilson, Kirsten Dunst, Billy Bob Thornton andBob Odenkirk hasn’t hurt matters, and we can look forward to Ewan McGregor (as twins, no less) in season three.
2009-2015
First conceived as a spin-off of the US Office, Parks & Rec initially struggled to shuffle out of the shadow of its bigger brother. But while the first season wobbled, the second soared and sustained that quality right the way to its emotional finale. Retaining The Office’s ‘workplace mockumentary’ format, it ribbed the pernickety pedantry of small-town politics from the perspective of always-optimistic bureaucrat Leslie Knope, played with sheer brilliance by Amy Poehler, and propped up by a faultless ensemble, perhaps most notable of all being grumpy libertarian alpha male Ron Fucking Swanson (choice quote: “I need five courses for dinner, and each of them will be steak”).