Best TV shows of the 2000s

Breaking Bad▲ Rising

A mild-mannered chemistry teacher cooks up a meth empire and, somewhere between the bathtub acid scene and 'I am the one who knocks,' the show quietly rewired what television villainy could look like. Vince Gilligan's Mr. Chips-to-Scarface pitch became the gold standard for the antihero slow-burn, turning Walter White's ego into the most compelling trainwreck of the decade.},

Premiered: 2008Seasons: 5IMDb: 9.5/10

added by IJRin 11 rankings

The Office▲ Rising

Michael Scott's cringe-comedy reign turned a failing paper company into a mockumentary institution, and 'That's what she said' became shorthand for a whole vocabulary of workplace humiliation. It Americanized the talking-head format so thoroughly that half the sitcoms after it owe it rent.

Premiered: 2005Seasons: 9IMDb: 9/10

added by IJRin 9 rankings

Planet Earth▲ Rising

The snow leopard hunt and the walking with elephants and the sheer, staggering scope of a snowball fight of ice-cave crystals — Planet Earth made nature documentary feel like science fiction, all courtesy of gyro-stabilized cameras nobody had used this way before. It didn't just raise the bar for wildlife filmmaking; it made 'shot on Earth' feel like a flex.

Premiered: 2006Seasons: 1IMDb: 9.4/10

added by IJRin 3 rankings

Avatar: The Last Airbender▲ Rising

A kids' cartoon that somehow delivered genocide, occupation, and a redemption arc for Zuko more layered than most adult prestige dramas managed. Aang's journey through the four nations proved animation could carry genuine moral weight, and it built the fandom template later shows only dreamed of inheriting.

Premiered: 2005Seasons: 3IMDb: 9.3/10

added by IJRin 6 rankings

The Wire▲ Rising

David Simon's Baltimore sprawl treated drug corners, docks, schools, and city hall as one broken organism, refusing every crime-show shortcut in favor of patient, novelistic rot. 'You come at the king, you best not miss' distilled a show that critics still call the best ever made, even though America barely watched it live.

Premiered: 2002Seasons: 5IMDb: 9.3/10

added by IJRin 12 rankings

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood▲ Rising

A do-over that finally adapted Hiromu Arakawa's manga properly, and in doing so delivered one of anime's tightest, most emotionally devastating arcs — the Elric brothers' quest for their bodies collapsing into a genocidal conspiracy about the nature of sacrifice itself. Pride's true form and the Promised Day finale remain a masterclass in payoff after payoff.

Premiered: 2009Seasons: 1IMDb: 9.1/10

added by IJRin 5 rankings

Death Note▲ Rising

A god-complex teenager gets a notebook that kills anyone whose name he writes in it, and the ensuing chess match between Light Yagami and the sugar-fueled detective L turned anime into a genuine cat-and-mouse thriller. Its 'potato chip' scene alone is proof that a show can make eating snacks the tensest thing on television.

Premiered: 2006Seasons: 1IMDb: 8.9/10

added by IJRin 4 rankings

Band of Brothers▲ Rising

Spielberg and Hanks dropped viewers into Normandy hedgerows and Bastogne foxholes with a you-are-there brutality that made prior war epics look sanitized. Easy Company's ten-episode march became the definitive miniseries case study, proving prestige TV could shoulder cinematic scale and moral weight in equal measure.

Premiered: 2001Seasons: 1IMDb: 9.4/10

added by IJRin 4 rankings

Mad Men▲ Rising

Don Draper's Lucky Strike pitch in the pilot announced a show obsessed with surface and rot beneath it, using Sterling Cooper's boardrooms to autopsy the American Dream one cigarette at a time. The falling-man title sequence became as iconic as the show's slow-motion collapse of a man built entirely out of lies.

Premiered: 2007Seasons: 7IMDb: 8.7/10

added by IJRin 7 rankings

House▲ Rising

Hugh Laurie's misanthropic diagnostician solved medical mysteries by insulting everyone in the room, turning 'everybody lies' into a procedural mantra that made House both insufferable and magnetic. It gave the medical drama its own Sherlock Holmes and made limping genius a whole character archetype.

Premiered: 2004Seasons: 8IMDb: 8.7/10

added by IJRin 4 rankings

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia▲ Rising

The Gang's descent into moral rot — Kitten Mittens, the Nightman, McPoyle milk — built the most gleefully irredeemable ensemble in sitcom history and refused every note of sentimentality its peers relied on. It proved comedy could go full scorched-earth and still run for decades.

Premiered: 2005Seasons: 16IMDb: 8.8/10

added by IJRin 9 rankings

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Larry David playing a fictionalized version of himself, improvising his way into social disasters of his own making, turned petty grievance into an art form ('the chat n' cut,' anyone?). It's the show that made toxic self-absorption funny long before that became a whole comedic genre.

Premiered: 2000Seasons: 12IMDb: 8.8/10

added by IJRin 6 rankings

Battlestar Galactica

A ragtag human fleet fleeing genocidal robots became, improbably, the decade's sharpest allegory for post-9/11 anxiety, torture, and religious fanaticism. 'All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again' turned space opera into genuine philosophical dread.

Premiered: 2004Seasons: 4IMDb: 8.7/10

added by IJRin 3 rankings

Parks and Recreation▼ Falling

Leslie Knope's relentless, waffle-fueled optimism in the face of Pawnee's bureaucratic absurdity turned government-office comedy into something genuinely warmhearted, a rare sitcom that believed in its characters instead of mocking them. Ron Swanson's meat-and-libertarianism shtick alone justified the show's cult following.

Premiered: 2009Seasons: 7IMDb: 8.6/10

added by IJRin 11 rankings

Deadwood

David Milch's foul-mouthed, Shakespearean frontier town made every other Western look like a coloring book, with Al Swearengen's razor-tongued monologues turning a mud-caked saloon into the decade's best-written room. It's the show prestige TV still hasn't fully caught up to.

Premiered: 2004Seasons: 3IMDb: 8.6/10

added by IJRin 7 rankings

Scrubs

J.D.'s fantasy-sequence daydreams turned hospital comedy into something stranger and sweeter than the genre usually allowed, sneaking real grief in between the slapstick. 'Guy Love' and the My Screwup gut-punch proved a show could be goofy and devastating in the same season.

Premiered: 2001Seasons: 9IMDb: 8.4/10

added by IJRin 10 rankings

Arrested Development▼ Falling

The Bluth family's fraudulent banana stand and endless callbacks ('I've made a huge mistake') built a joke-density that demanded rewatching before rewatching was even a habit. It got canceled too soon and became the patron saint of shows too smart for their own ratings.

Premiered: 2003Seasons: 5IMDb: 8.7/10

added by IJRin 5 rankings

The Shield▼ Falling

Vic Mackey beating a confession out of a suspect in the pilot's opening minutes, then executing his own partner before the hour was up, announced a cop show willing to make its hero irredeemable from frame one. It's the dirty-badge blueprint that made antihero television as dark as it eventually got.

Premiered: 2002Seasons: 7IMDb: 8.7/10

added by IJRin 5 rankings

30 Rock▼ Falling

Tina Fey's joke-per-second assault on network television, starring Tracy Jordan's unhinged non-sequiturs and Jack Donaghy's corporate gospel, made absurdism into a machine gun. 'Live every week like it's Shark Week' captures a show that never once slowed down to explain itself.

Premiered: 2006Seasons: 7IMDb: 8.3/10

added by IJRin 9 rankings

The Office (UK)▼ Falling

Ricky Gervais's David Brent invented the modern cringe-comedy boss, a man so desperate to be liked that watching him became genuinely painful — and only twelve episodes were needed to do it. Every mockumentary sitcom that followed, including its own American remake, is standing on Slough's shoulders.

Premiered: 2001Seasons: 2IMDb: 8.5/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings