It’s extremely rare for a TV show to have a perfect run, with no weak seasons — even on a network as reliable as HBO. It’s tough enough to be great once, let alone every single year. A lot of the most renowned and acclaimed HBO shows are miniseries (Chernobyl, Band of Brothers, Mare of Easttown, etc.), because there’s only one season, so they only have to get it right once. It might’ve been a different story if, just one year later, the makers of Band of Brothers had to do it all over again in season 2.
Most HBO shows — even the very best — have at least one bad season under their belt. The Last of Us stumbled in its second season, The White Lotus stumbled in its third season, and Silicon Valley was never quite as hilarious after Erlich Bachman left the cast. True Detective has been up and down since its less-than-stellar second season. Game of Thrones went downhill after the writers ran out of books to adapt. Curb Your Enthusiasm had a couple of weak seasons when it came back from hiatus.
But there are a small handful of HBO shows that ran for a few seasons and managed to maintain the consistency of a Chernobyl or a Band of Brothers. Flawless HBO masterpieces like The Sopranos and The Wire never had a bad season, or even a weak episode (except for The Sopranos’ ham-fisted Columbus Day episode, but that wasn’t bad enough to tank the whole season).
The Righteous Gemstones
Danny McBride began his HBO career with Eastbound & Down, which was hysterically funny but arguably went on for one season too long, and continued with Vice Principals, a two-season limited series. But it wasn’t until his third show, The Righteous Gemstones, that he finally perfected it.
The Righteous Gemstones hit the ground running with a hilarious first season, then only got better as it went on. The fourth and final season was arguably the show’s best, and just left us wanting more.
Boardwalk Empire
After cutting his teeth in The Sopranos’ writers’ room, Terence Winter teamed up with Martin Scorsese to create his own mafia drama. Set in Atlantic City during the Prohibition era, Boardwalk Empire is just as captivating as The Sopranos, but with the added benefit of gorgeous historical costumes and production design.
Boardwalk Empire had one of the most star-studded casts on television, led by Steve Buscemi. It wasn’t quite as groundbreaking as The Sopranos, but it was just as compelling from beginning to end.
The Leftovers
It’s no wonder that Damon Lindelof made every season of The Leftovers count, because he fought for every single one. HBO tried to cancel the show before season 3, but Lindelof managed to convince them to greenlight a final season where he could give the series a proper ending.
Despite being forced to wrap up so soon, Lindelof stuck the landing with The Leftovers’ series finale. Unlike his last supernatural mystery, Lost, he was able to satisfy fans with the answers this time around.
Barry
Bill Hader’s tale of a hitman who wants to become an actor sounded gimmicky and one-note when it was first announced. But when it arrived on the airwaves of HBO, Barry turned out to be one of the greatest TV masterpieces of the 21st century.
It’s a really funny comedy, as you’d expect from Hader, but it’s also a Breaking Bad-level character study of a cold-blooded killer, and a David Lynchian psychological thriller. Barry’s four-season run got darker and darker as it went on, but it never lost the magic.
Deadwood
After reinventing gangster shows with The Sopranos and reinventing cop shows with The Wire, HBO reinvented the TV western with Deadwood. Based on real historical events, Deadwood follows the titular territory’s transformation from a small encampment to a thriving, full-blown town.
Deadwood ran for three seasons, and showrunner David Milch spun gold every time at the bat. The cast is a nice mix of lovable fictional characters and legendary historical figures. You’ll learn about the history of the Old West, but you’ll also get a rollicking revisionist western.
The Larry Sanders Show
While Curb Your Enthusiasm had a couple of dud seasons along the way, its predecessor, The Larry Sanders Show, was perfect from start to finish. Larry Sanders originated all the stylistic tricks that set Curb apart: loose dialogue, single-camera shooting, celebrities playing self-parodies to blur the line between fiction and reality.
Garry Shandling brought a lot more depth and nuance than you usually see in a sitcom to his portrayal of a neurotic talk show host. The Larry Sanders Show is every bit the probing character study that The Sopranos is, and it still holds up today.
Succession
Succession told its modern-day King Lear story across four seasons. The first three seasons painted a harrowing portrait of an affluent but deeply dysfunctional family, and then the fourth really felt like a climactic culmination of that saga.
Season 4 takes place across the most hectic week in Waystar Royco’s history, and it builds to an appropriately bittersweet series finale. Succession is a rare show that feels like a complete, unified vision.
The Sopranos
The Sopranos was such a game-changing, revolutionary TV series that the writers were bound to make a few missteps. David Chase and his writers created the template for the Golden Age of Television — and that meant breaking a few eggs, like letting Michael Imperioli write a ham-fisted episode about race or dedicating two whole episodes to Tony’s coma dreams.
Some seasons of The Sopranos are weaker than others (the show peaked in season 2), but it remained a brilliant, groundbreaking masterpiece up to the very end. Even at its worst, The Sopranos still beats most TV shows at their best.
Six Feet Under
The format of Six Feet Under might sound a little limiting — every episode begins with an untimely death, then follows the funeral parlor’s efforts to give them the perfect sendoff — but Alan Ball used that morbid premise for a powerful, poignant exploration of our mortality. After the sudden death of their patriarch, the Fishers come together to keep his funeral business afloat, and end up reconnecting in really beautiful ways.
Six Feet Under is a moving portrait of a dysfunctional family. While the series is built around death, it’s really a celebration of all the things that make life worth living.
The Wire
The Wire reinvented itself in every season. Each of its five seasons feels like a different show, tackling a different corner of the city of Baltimore. The Wire, as a whole, deconstructs the broken institutions keeping cities like Baltimore mired in crime, corruption, and class inequality, but each season focuses on one institution in particular: the illegal drug trade, the docks, the local government, the public schools, and, last but not least, the media.
Every season is a masterpiece in its own way, with its own compelling cast of characters and its own masterful social commentary. Some seasons are stronger than others — seasons 1, 3, and 4 all rank among the greatest seasons of television ever produced, while seasons 2 and 5 have a couple of forgivable flaws — but even the most contrived episode of The Wire is more realistic and engaging and profound than every other cop show on television.
This story originally appeared on Screenrant
