The 21 TV shows that explained the 2010s

In the 2010s, television fell apart.

I don’t mean that literally; there is currently more television than ever before, great heaping gobs of it. TV journalist Liz Shannon Miller has calculated the number of shows making their American debuts in primetime or on a streaming service every year for the past half decade; her tally for 2019 is an astonishing 688, and she’s pretty sure she missed some. It is humanly impossible for any one person — or TV critic — to catch up.

Rather than ushering in a new golden age, or even continuing the old one, the sheer glut of 2010s programming led to entropy. Many great TV shows were still made — and happily, many of them were told from the points-of-view of people of color, women, and LGBTQ people.

But those great TV shows were often harder to find than they would have been in the ‘90s or 2000s. Whatever conversation existed around the best of TV seemed to happen not at water coolers actual or virtual, but in a one-sided dialogue with the self. What did you think of that Netflix drama that debuted in 2015, but you’d only just watched? The only person you could really ask was you.

The streaming revolution held promise when it began with Netflix’s first forays into original programming in 2013, but it quickly became a land rush. Rather than grow more thoughtful and cinematic, television was colonized by the sophomoric trends that have dominated multiplexes for years. Distinctive series were crowded out by remakes, sequels, and adaptations based on familiar pieces of intellectual property. Just one month before the decade came to a close, Disney+ launched not with a full slate of originals, but with a giant catalog of Disney content and a new show set in the Star Wars universe — and so many people subscribed on day one that the service was plagued by technical problems.

And yet there was still plenty of TV to love, and the medium’s centrality to the way we think about American life continued virtually unabated. So in that spirit, here are the 21 television shows that best explain the 2010s. Are they unequivocally the best shows of the 2010s? Not necessarily — though I do love all of them. But they are the shows that best explained this messed-up planet, this messed-up country, or this messed-up medium, beginning at the top with a comedy that zeroed in on America’s horrible heart.

I do not believe any other TV show of the 2010s has quite captured the peculiarly frazzled sense of living through the end times like Comedy Central’s wackadoodle cringe comedy/reality show/bad idea generator Nathan for You.

The series followed comedian Nathan Fielder as he visited a variety of struggling businesses to offer his ideas for how they might improve their fortunes. His ideas were always terrible. He might suggest issuing a too-good-to-be-true coupon redeemable only at the top of a mountain, so customers would have to go on a hike just to use it. Or he might help a moving company scrounge up business by touting its services as a great way for people to get exercise.

Despite the skepticism that Fielder’s elaborate, nonsensical schemes often engendered at the outset, client after client eventually trusted him to try. After all, if there’s any one thing that will help save us, it’s a keen business mind to navigate the wreckage of capitalism. Maybe his ideas were so crazy they just might work! And if nothing else, the client would end up on TV.

What’s fascinating about Nathan for You is that it was never mean to anyone but Fielder. The joke was always on the cocksure certainty of the men who would set fire to something that was working perfectly well and insist it was better for having burned. I might have liked other shows more than Nathan for You this decade, and there might have been better shows. But no show more thoroughly captured America as it really was. It’s the show that best explains the 2010s.

“A sad horse” is maybe not who I would have expected to choose as the decade’s finest antihero when BoJack Horseman began in 2014, but Netflix’s animated tale of a middle-aged anthropomorphic equine with addiction problems and a substantial paunch around his midsection hit all the right beats for a story about a character who’s compelling even though he’s awful. It went above and beyond other, similar shows by showing the detritus and destruction BoJack left in his wake, suggesting that while his healing was all well and good, what mattered was whether the people he’d destroyed could find some sort of healing, too. And that question was extremely difficult to answer — both on BoJack Horseman and in a reality filled with horrible men seeking (and occasionally demanding) redemption. That the series was also wildly funny and visually inventive was a cherry on top. (The final eight episodes of the series arrive in January.)

Extremely few people watched The Leftovers, but it seems like the handful of us who did have all either written lengthy columns extolling its brilliance or created TV shows that lift some of its best ideas wholesale. Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof and writer Tom Perrotta adapted Perrotta’s novel about a world where 2 percent of the population has disappeared in a Rapture-like event to be less about the mystery of where those people went (though the show does eventually offer an answer of sorts), and more about how a society atomizes in the wake of a tragic event. Many of the decade’s best TV shows hovered on the precipice of a world about to plunge into utter despair and hopelessness. But The Leftovers got there first.

FX’s spy drama about two married KGB agents living in 1980s Washington, DC, and posing as normal American citizens began its life as a critical cause célèbre, eked out a six-season run despite extremely low ratings, and then unexpectedly became a minor hit thanks to the power of streaming and the fact that “Russians infiltrate the US” went from feeling like a throwback plot to feeling incredibly timely and relevant. But the show’s producers never wanted to make much of any geopolitical echoes. The Americans wasn’t a show about the Cold War, not really. It was about the impossible series of compromises that is any human relationship, and especially a marriage.

This low-rated, four-season favorite of mine told some of the most effective emotional stories of the entire decade in any medium, in a way that reflected other storytelling trends. The closer the 2010s came to their end, the more it seemed as if the single most potent idea driving more and more dramas was human connection, and Halt and Catch Fire — about a group of tech pioneers in the ’80s and ’90s — had the power to transport viewers back to a world where computers could unite people rather than divide them, where the internet held promise and not destruction. The show’s most beautiful optimism was that we might be able to return to that world someday.

TV seemed to discover in the 2010s that women can be unlikeable, too, and it offered layered, complicated portrayals of such women in numerous shows across the decade (several of the others also appear on this list). For my money, the single best example was the two-season dramedy Enlightened, in which Laura Dern gave perhaps the finest TV performance of the decade as Amy Jellicoe, a woman wronged by her corporate masters who sets out to take revenge on them and then maybe kinda sorta becomes a better person in the process. Enlightened was a very different kind of antihero story, and creator Mike White’s beautiful empathy for absolutely every one of his characters made for a uniquely affecting show.

Many of the best dramas of the 2010s were defined by their sprawl. They would begin with one isolated story — a well-off white woman goes to prison for a crime she committed long ago, let’s say — and then grow to encompass more and more stories, characters, and themes, until they seemed to be about absolutely everything. Perhaps the foremost example of that tendency was Orange Is the New Black, a series that really did start off as the relatively narrow tale of a well-off white woman going to prison, and by the time it ended was essentially about everybody in the entire world. (I’m only barely exaggerating.) It faltered, because any show with that level of ambition would. But goodness, when it was on, it was on.

The decade’s finest coming-of-age story was this long-running animated series about a boy, his dog, and the magical post-apocalyptic world they’re growing up in together. Adventure Time is the rare show on this list that ran for essentially the entire decade, beginning in 2010 and ending in 2018. And over the course of its run, it found ways to tell stories about the difficult emotional territory of the tween and teen years while also making plenty of room for inventive flights of fancy. There’s never been anything else quite like it in TV history, before or since.

Donald Glover pushed the “comedy series that doubles as a collection of short films” format to new heights with Atlanta, set in a version of the city that’s just a little bit off-kilter. The series was all too happy to dabble in surrealism and dream logic, and it used those qualities to cast a hazy spell over viewers before snapping them back to attention with a portrayal of the inescapable nature of racism for black Americans. All that and it was absolutely hilarious. (A third and fourth season are currently filming.)

No decade is complete without a good-natured comedy that runs season after season after season, consistent to a fault. It’s all too easy to forget about Bob’s Burgers because it’s essentially a well-oiled machine, but it’s just as good in 2019 as it was when it debuted in 2011 — no easy feat. The Belcher family remains one of the most enjoyable groups to hang out with in all of television, and the show’s storytelling continues to push itself, even after 10 seasons on the air. (The show continues to air on Sunday nights. It will hopefully remain parked there for the foreseeable future.)

Throughout the decade, with production budgets rising even as digital filmmaking lowered the price of making so-called “cinematic” TV, more and more shows went for broke on looking distinctive af. Perhaps no show fits that description better than Bryan Fuller’s pulpy take on the Hannibal Lecter mythos. The cat-fucks-mouse game between detective Will Graham and serial killer Hannibal was delectably written, but what put the series over the top were its delirious visuals and love of tastefully appointed gore.

Has Amazon’s acclaimed British import been perhaps a tiny bit overpraised at this point? I would argue yes — but that’s only because the show really is good enough to justify having so many plaudits heaped upon it. Fleabag’s caustic and funny portrayal of a woman who only stops hating herself long enough to aim invective at the other people in her life (and maybe even at those of us in the audience) made for a cult favorite in season one, then inverted itself to become a rom-com in season two. The show catapulted writer and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge to stardom, and justifiably so.

The 2010s were a fantastic decade for women taking the reins of their own productions. From 2012 to 2017, Lena Dunham’s Girls polarized the TV-discussing corner of the internet with its forthright storytelling about young women at their worst. Were we supposed to love these women? Hate them? Both? It didn’t matter. And in the second half of the decade, Pamela Adlon offered a different take on American womanhood — that of someone nearing 50 and trying to navigate the twin pressures of a career and motherhood. By making shows that so perfectly reflected their voices, Dunham and Adlon showed how the TV boys club could be improved by opening its doors just a bit to include women. And I could easily recognize series like HBO’s Insecure or Amazon’s One Mississippi in this space, too. (A fourth season of Better Things is in production.)

One of the decade’s wildest rides, Mr. Robot was also one of the most prescient shows to emerge from the sheer glut that was peak TV. Ostensibly about a hacker who seemed to nearly possess computer superpowers, the show broadened to become a story about the effect of capitalism’s collapse on the human spirit, about the need for connection, and about jerking the rug out from under the audience. I adored the way it seemed aware that it was a TV show being watched by very real people, making it a weird companion piece to Fleabag. (The series finale airs on Sunday, December 22.)

The best TV storytelling in the 2010s was sometimes intimate and sometimes maximalist, tossing new ideas at the wall with unchecked glee. Syfy’s The Magicians tried to be both, often in the same line of dialogue, and the result was one of the decade’s highlights. The story of a bunch of depressed twentysomethings who discover they’re great at magic, the series took Lev Grossman’s novel series of the same name and transformed it into heart-wrenching and off-the-wall TV. (Season five debuts in January 2020.)

Honestly, flip a coin in this slot between these two endlessly ambitious series that take wild storytelling chances but don’t always hit the mark. Where the better-known The Good Place keeps expanding outward to encompass the entire universe in its tale of people in the afterlife questioning our moral order, Superstore’s gloss on The Office as a workplace comedy set in a big-box store setting keeps collapsing inward, revealing new depths to its characters and finding new ways to make topics like immigration and unionization funny but also meaningful. (The Good Place wraps up in January. Superstore continues to run on NBC.)

What limited data we have on Netflix viewership suggests that few watched this brilliant little family comedy — the likely reason it was canceled after three seasons. (Pop TV later granted the show a reprieve; its fourth season will air on the cable network in 2020.) But One Day at a Time was the best example of a TV series using the political turmoil of the 2010s to elicit laughs and tears in equal measure, and it boasts one of TV’s best ensemble casts.

The 2010s were a sorry decade for the broadcast network drama. Outside of CBS’s The Good Wife (which began at the tail end of the 2000s and ended in 2016), the format barely maintained a pulse. Thank goodness, then, for this warm-hearted family drama about a loud, fractious family of mostly economically comfortable, mostly white folks who tried to solve every problem with love. It worked surprisingly well surprisingly often; Parenthood’s best seasons (roughly its second through fourth) are beautifully effective kitchen-sink drama.

By far the biggest new idea in TV drama in the 2010s was the anthology series, where each season functioned as a standalone miniseries that told a new story, sometimes with some of the same cast members and sometimes without. The best one was Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story, which offered a triumphant spin on the O.J. Simpson trial in 2016 and a more somber (but just as good) take on the death of Gianni Versace in 2018. By their very nature, anthologies are hit and miss, but so far, American Crime Story is all hit. (A third season — focusing on the Clinton impeachment — will air in 2020.)

Both a triumph and a warning sign, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed dystopian novel, in which fertile women are forced into sexual slavery, began with a pilot that looked like nothing else on TV, and an urgent sense of a world spinning off its axis into oblivion. In later episodes, it simultaneously got better and more difficult to watch, and it’s not clear where the show can possibly go from where its third season ended. But I’ll be watching it. (Season four is in production.)

If you’re making a list of TV shows that explain the 2010s, well, the fantasy epic Game of Thrones belongs on it. No show was bigger. In terms of sheer volume, no show was more shouted about, positively or negatively. And no show left as massive a mark on the TV landscape. It was so big the medium will be chasing it for decades to come. (If nothing else, every network now believes it can mint a gigantic hit by adapting a property popular in another medium, as HBO did with George R.R. Martin’s books.)

But Game of Thrones was also frequently clunky and silly, and the longer it ran, the more it became evident that nobody involved knew how to deliver on the promise of the show’s early seasons. Perhaps Game of Thrones best describes television in the 2010s because the medium as a whole showed so much promise at the start, then gradually seemed to run out of gas.

The 21 shows listed alphabetically below might have easily outpaced any of the above on a more traditional “best TV” list, but didn’t capture the 2010s quite as well. Still, they are all well worth checking out.