Best TV shows of the 2020s

The Last Dance▲ Rising

Jordan lighting a cigar at 2am, still furious about slights three decades old, was the moment we realized this wasn't hagiography but a competitive psychopath finally explaining himself. It kicked off the sports-doc gold rush and proved ESPN could produce a cultural event, not just content, arriving right as quarantine turned the entire country into a captive audience with nothing else to argue about on Twitter.

Premiered: 2020Seasons: 1IMDb: 9/10

added by IJRin 4 rankings

Severance▲ Rising

The elevator ding that splits Mark Scout into two people who've never met, one who suffers and one who doesn't know why, is the decade's best pure sci-fi premise executed without a single wasted scare quote. Ben Stiller's icy corporate nightmare turned office ennui into existential horror, and the two-year wait between seasons only proved how badly people needed to know what the goats meant.

Premiered: 2022Seasons: 2IMDb: 8.7/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

Ted Lasso▲ Rising

"Be curious, not judgmental" hit like a warm blanket in the darkest weeks of 2020, and a mustachioed American teaching English football how to believe in itself became the pandemic's unlikely balm. It got messier and more self-serious as it chased Emmys into later seasons, but that first year's mix of dart-throwing zingers and genuine emotional intelligence reset what comedy could look like when it wasn't just mean.

Premiered: 2020Seasons: 3IMDb: 8.8/10

added by IJRin 6 rankings

The Last of Us▲ Rising

Bill and Frank's episode-long detour turned a zombie video game adaptation into one of the most devastating hours of television this decade, proving Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann understood that the fungus was never the point. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey's surrogate-family ache carried the rest, finally making 'video game adaptation' stop sounding like an insult.

Premiered: 2023Seasons: 2IMDb: 8.7/10

added by IJRin 13 rankings

Andor▲ Rising

Tony Gilroy took a franchise built on scrappy underdogs having fun and instead delivered a patient, furious treatise on what it actually costs to build a rebellion, culminating in Nemik's manifesto and Andor's prison-break arc as some of the best hours Star Wars has ever produced. It's the rare prequel that makes the thing it's a prequel to feel smaller, and the argument for its inclusion is simply that no other blockbuster IP show dared to be this slow, this political, or this good.

Premiered: 2022Seasons: 2IMDb: 8.6/10

added by IJRin 4 rankings

The Queen's Gambit

Anya Taylor-Joy staring down a chessboard like it owed her money made competitive chess feel as glamorous and dangerous as a heist, and the show became an actual chess-set sales phenomenon during lockdown boredom. Beth Harmon's addiction-and-genius arc gave Netflix its biggest scripted limited series ever, proving prestige can still mean mainstream.

Premiered: 2020Seasons: 1IMDb: 8.5/10

added by IJRin 7 rankings

Slow Horses▲ Rising

Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb farting his way through MI5 bureaucracy while quietly being the smartest man in every room turned spy fiction back into something wry, mean, and human-scaled after a decade of Bourne-style self-seriousness. Each season's efficient eight-episode sprint made it the connoisseur's spy show, the one people recommend in a hushed, slightly smug voice.

Premiered: 2022Seasons: 4IMDb: 8.2/10

added by IJRin 5 rankings

House of the Dragon▼ Falling

The Dance of the Dragons finally gave Westeros back its teeth, with Rhaenyra and Alicent's fractured sisterhood curdling into civil war and Aemond losing an eye in a moment that rippled across an entire series. It's the show that had to prove dragons and politics could coexist without the ending that broke fandom trust in the first place, and mostly it has.

Premiered: 2022Seasons: 2IMDb: 8.4/10

added by IJRin 6 rankings

The Bear▼ Falling

Carmy screaming through a walk-in freezer while the kitchen burns down around him captured grief and trauma disguised as a workplace comedy, and "Fishes" turned a Christmas dinner into one of the most anxiety-inducing single episodes ever aired. It reinvented the food show as a study of inherited pain and made every line cook in America feel finally, painfully seen.

Premiered: 2022Seasons: 4IMDb: 8.5/10

added by IJRin 10 rankings

Squid Game▼ Falling

The green-tracksuited mass execution during a children's game of Red Light, Green Light became an instant global signifier, turning a scrappy Korean production into Netflix's most-watched show ever and cementing 2021 as the year subtitles stopped being a barrier. Its class-rage fable about debt and desperation landed everywhere because everyone, in some currency, recognized the marbles game.

Premiered: 2021Seasons: 3IMDb: 8/10

added by IJRin 7 rankings

WandaVision▼ Falling

Watching Wanda Maximoff process unbearable grief by trapping a suburb inside decades of sitcom pastiche was Marvel's boldest formal experiment, and "It's been days" became a meme precisely because the sitcom-perfect facade cracking into raw sorrow hit so unexpectedly hard. It kicked off the MCU's Disney+ era and, for one shining moment, made superhero television feel genuinely strange again.

Premiered: 2021Seasons: 1IMDb: 7.9/10

added by IJRin 3 rankings