Here’s something worth thinking about: with hundreds of scripted shows airing at any given time across cable, broadcast, and every streaming platform known to humankind, how does any single one of them manage to make everyone happy? Television is a vast, clumsy, and almost difficult storytelling machine. Sci-fi lovers and rom-com loyalists barely share a channel. Crime drama fans will sit through three cold-blooded murders before breakfast while their roommate is rewinding a cooking competition for the fourth time. There are period TV dramas, workplace comedies, animated epics, and reality show rabbit holes, and every single one of them has found its little, passionate corner of the internet. It’s hard to get TV’s massive, fractured audience to agree on anything.
However, some TV shows just cut through all of that. Not because they appeal to one specific type of viewer, but because they do what great storytelling has always done: tap into something deeply, embarrassingly human. Some people discover them decades later and immediately regret not watching them sooner. People recommend these series with a sense of urgency, as if the person recommending has their whole aura on the line. Here are 10 TV shows that virtually everyone, everywhere, at some point in time, has watched and said, “Yeah, that’s a masterpiece.”
‘Band of Brothers’ (2001)
War TV tends to either sanitize the story into something palatable or lean so far into brutality that it loses the humanity underneath. Band of Brothers does neither, and it is still the greatest WWII TV show of all time. The 10-part HBO miniseries, produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks off the back of Saving Private Ryan, follows the Easy Company of the 101st Airborne Division through WWII’s European theater, from their early training at Camp Toccoa all the way to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden.
Band of Brothers took $120 million to produce, which, at the time, made it the most expensive TV project ever. It currently holds a 94% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s not the spectacle that earns all those numbers (although the battle sequences are extraordinary), but the intimacy. Each episode opens with real survivors of the Easy Company speaking directly to the camera, quietly reminding you that these were actual people. In a way, it’s a living memorial.
‘M*A*S*H’ (1972 – 1983)
Imagine a comedy set in a war zone. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? However, M*A*S*H pulled it off. Set in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War, it ran on CBS for 11 seasons, which is eight years longer than the actual war lasted. Somehow, for most of that run, it proved that sitcoms could handle serious themes without losing humor. The show uses the Korean conflict as cover to talk about Vietnam and about the human cost of any armed conflict.
M*A*S*H was the first series on television to make dramedy work by effortlessly striding the line between the deadly serious and the completely bonkers. Alan Alda’s Hawkeye Pierce became a new archetype: the disaffected, funny, ultimately broken man who copes with horror through humor. The final episode, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” broke TV records and was the most-watched broadcast in the United States for 27 years before a Super Bowl surpassed its numbers.
‘Cheers’ (1982 – 1993)
It ranked 74th out of 77 shows in its premiere week. It was nearly canceled. And ratings were so dismal that NBC kept it on air mostly because they had nothing else to put in that slot. And then, slowly, Cheers became one of the defining TV shows in the history of American television. Set almost entirely within a single Boston bar, “where everybody knows your name,” the show ran for 11 seasons and left behind a legacy that a shocking number of modern sitcoms still live inside.
Cheers earned a Top-10 Nielsen rating during eight of its 11 seasons and received 29 nominations for Outstanding Comedy Series every single year it aired. It eventually won 28 Primetime Emmy Awards from a record 111 nominations. The writing was unusually sharp, and the ensemble (including Ted Danson, Shelley Long, Kirstie Alley, Kelsey Grammer, Woody Harrelson, and Rhea Perlman), gave the show depth. Beyond laughter and emotion, Cheers gave birth to Frasier, one of the most successful spin-offs ever.
‘Avatar: The Last Airbender’ (2005 – 2008)
Ask anyone who watched Avatar: The Last Airbender as a kid, and they’ll defend it like it’s personal. Ask anyone who came to it as an adult, expecting a cartoon and landing somewhere entirely different, and they’ll tell you they weren’t prepared for how perfect the show is. Avatar: The Last Airbender aired on Nickelodeon for three seasons. It follows a 12-year-old named Aang who wakes from a century-long sleep to find the world at war.
The storytelling is rich, layered, and full of twists. It balances humor, action, and drama in a way that appeals to both children and adults, which is something that few animated series manage. The show was nominated for the Outstanding Animated Program award at the Primetime Emmys in 2007, won the Peabody Award, and has received countless other accolades. Also, the writers don’t shy away from topics like genocide, child abuse, war, and broken families. Instead, they used them to deepen and strengthen the characters. Avatar‘s resurgence on Netflix in 2020 has only made it more popular and more accessible.
‘Breaking Bad’ (2008 – 2013)
Breaking Bad creates suspense. It’s not the will-they-won’t-they of a thriller, but something closer to watching someone sleepwalk toward a cliff and being unable to stop them or look away. Walt cooks meth. Walt gets good at it. Walt gets too good at it. The entire moral weight of the show shifts under your feet so slowly and methodically that by the time you realize you’ve been watching a villain origin story, you’re already five seasons in and implicated.
The saga of Walter White was certified by Guinness World Records as the most critically acclaimed TV show of all time. It holds a 96% average rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with 100% scores for both its third and fourth seasons. Bryan Cranston won four Outstanding Actor Emmys, setting a record. Every season of Breaking Bad was better than the last. Even fans defend the show’s lowest-rated episode, “Fly,” as a profound character study.
‘Succession’ (2018 – 2023)
Power is ugly, but Succession makes it weirdly addictive to watch. HBO’s modern saga follows the Roy family, a media dynasty run by a dying patriarch and circled by his catastrophically damaged children. The show manages to be a savage satire, a genuine family drama, and one of the funniest shows on TV all at once. Logan Roy barking orders; Roman making offensive jokes to cover the fact that he’s terrified; Kendall oscillating between self-destruction and delusion; and Shiv slowly revealing that she learned from the best.
Succession maintained universal acclaim across all four of its seasons. It averaged a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and placed 10th in BBC Culture’s ranking of the 100 greatest TV series of the 21st century. The dialogue alone justifies the legacy. So many lines from the show entered the cultural conversation the same way Seinfeld catchphrases did in the ‘90s. However, these are darker and more barbed. Succession also sticks the landing. In the end, it’s not a show about who wins. It’s about watching everyone lose, one by one.
‘The Sopranos’ (1999 – 2007)
Before The Sopranos, you watched TV. After The Sopranos, you invested in it. David Chase’s HBO crime drama is about New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano, a man simultaneously navigating panic attacks, therapy sessions, and ordering hits. The show essentially invented a template that the next two decades of prestige drama would spend trying to replicate. Mad Men, Ozark, and The Wire arej just a few.
Critics and journalists frequently call The Sopranos the greatest TV show ever made, with one Boston Globe television critic arguing it was the first series that genuinely made people willing to pay for cable just to see one show. It paved the way for every complex, morally compromised protagonist that followed, and it established that we could empathize with dangerous, irredeemable people. And that finale? Still debated and still dissected. Few shows have managed to feel this psychologically rich while staying this rewatchable.
‘Seinfeld’ (1989 – 1998)
A show about nothing. That phrase is repeated so often it’s lost most of its meaning, but it’s also true. Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David built nine seasons of network television out of parking spots, soup lines, bad dates, and what happens when you accidentally double-dip at a party. The show had no lesson. No growth arcs. No moral dilemmas. The characters were petty, neurotic, self-absorbed, and completely hilarious, and we collectively gathered around them every Thursday night for a decade.
Seinfeld was voted the Greatest Show of All Time by TV Guide in 2002. Seinfeld coined phrases like, “yada yada yada,” “Festivus,” “master of your domain,” and “No soup for you,” which have become so embedded in the American lexicon that many people use them without knowing where they came from. Additionally, Seinfeld didn’t soften its characters to make them easier to like. It trusted the viewers to find funny people funny even when (or especially when) they were being terrible.
‘The Golden Girls’ (1985 – 1992)
Picture the year 1985. Now picture a network sitcom about four women in their 50s and 60s, living together in Miami, dating, fighting, eating cheesecake at midnight, and talking frankly about sex, death, loneliness, and aging. It was a bold concept. The network took the gamble, viewers showed up in staggering numbers, and TV has never recovered from the intelligence of that premise.
The Golden Girls, a groundbreaking sitcom, received 65 Emmy nominations and won 11, with all four lead actresses, Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty, earning an Emmy for their performances. The show tackled homelessness, assisted suicide, undocumented immigration, and LGBTQ rights with a sensitivity and directness that several dramas of the era didn’t even attempt. It has now turned 40, all four of its stars have passed, and it is still streaming, still referenced, and still beloved.
‘Friends’ (1994 – 2004)
Some TV shows are great. Some are cultural monuments. And then there’s Friends, which is neither of those things, and yet both of them. It’s a show that essentially became the wallpaper of the ‘90s and never stopped being relevant. Six people, one coffee shop, and a very nice apartment no one could actually afford, turned into 10 seasons of jokes, heartbreak, and terrible timing.
The first episode drew 22 million viewers. The finale, a decade later, drew 52 million viewers, making it the third most-watched TV series finale in TV history at the time. In 2018, the show accounted for 4% of all Netflix views globally, despite being a decades-old network sitcom with no ongoing storyline. It basically introduced the concept of being “friend-zoned” into everyday conversation and gave the world the idea that your friends could be your family. Friends directly inspired How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, and essentially the entire hangout-sitcom genre that followed. There are valid critiques about the dated humor on Friends and the lack of diversity, but nothing changes the sheer, stubborn fact that Friends made the whole world feel like they were part of the group.
So… are we actually agreeing, or just being polite? Drop your take in the comments below.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
