Complete TV Series Rankings

These are honest ratings from someone who has watched a lot of television across a lot of decades. The scale runs from 10+ down to -10000, and every number means something. A show that starts great and collapses gets split ratings. A show that was always mediocre gets a single number. A show that becomes unwatchable gets a zero regardless of how it started — if you can’t finish it, it failed. DNF means Did Not Finish — the show couldn’t earn the time to complete it.

The standard used here is simple: does the show trust its audience, commit to consequences, and tell its story without stopping to lecture? The best television on this list does all three. The worst mistakes volume for substance and preaching for drama.

My definition of woke: social commentary that is unnecessary for the plot, or added purely for the sake of the commentary. A show isn’t woke because it has diversity or touches social issues. It’s woke when those elements stop serving the story and start serving an agenda. By that definition, The Wire isn’t woke. The Pitt is.

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1. The Shield (2002–2008)

“A show that absolutely refused to blink.”

One of the greatest television achievements ever made, and one of the few shows that absolutely refused to blink. Vic Mackey is what Walter White was supposed to be — a man who does monstrous things and pays a price that actually fits the crime. That finale is devastating precisely because it’s earned every step of the way. No trunk machine-gun salvation, no screaming into freedom. Just consequences closing in from every direction with nowhere to go.

The upsetting part is the whole point. It’s supposed to cost you something to watch. That’s what separates it from shows that use darkness as aesthetic. The Shield understood that a corrupt cop doesn’t get a redemption arc just because the audience wants one. Vic Mackey survives, but in a living death — chained to a federal desk, stripped of everything that defined him, surrounded by people who despise him.

Colm Meaney as O’Brien was the best pure actor on that show by a significant margin. And the ending opens up a natural continuation that was never made: Vic as a PI leveraging his old skills in a new context, then the inevitable slide into the master criminal role he was always suited for. He’d be better at it than he ever was at being a cop. Which is the darkest possible conclusion to his story — and therefore the right one.

Writing craft: Shawn Ryan’s scripts never let Vic off the hook. Every moral compromise compounds the previous one in a cause-and-effect chain that runs seven seasons without breaking. The dialogue is blunt and functional — characters say what they mean and mean what they say, which is rare in prestige drama.

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2. The Expanse (2015–2022) [full review]

“So far above everything else it’s in a different category.”

The most scientifically honest science fiction ever put on screen. Zero-gravity physics actually matter, ships accelerate and decelerate, and the political fracture between Earth, Mars, and the Belt is extrapolated from real human dynamics rather than invented from scratch. It treats its audience as adults capable of tracking complexity without hand-holding. Seasons one through three are the ceiling for what televised science fiction can accomplish.

Holden as a character works precisely because his idealism is a flaw, not a virtue. It creates problems, people die because of it, and the show doesn’t reward him for it. The Belt dialect, the culture, the physical differences from living in low gravity — the world-building is so thorough it feels like reporting, not invention. You believe this is how humanity would actually fracture given those conditions.

Then Amazon bought it and flushed it down the toilet. The cruelest irony: they saved it from cancellation at Syfy and then ruined it anyway. Spent the money to rescue the show and didn’t understand what made it worth rescuing. The pacing collapsed, the political complexity got simplified, the budget went to spectacle instead of story. The later seasons look more expensive and feel cheaper. The books apparently sustain the quality throughout. The show does not.

Writing craft: The showrunners adapted a nine-book series by trusting the political architecture of the source material rather than simplifying it for television. World-building is embedded in dialogue and behavior rather than exposition — you learn how the Belt works by watching Belters, not by having it explained. Conflict emerges from structural conditions rather than manufactured villain motivations.

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3. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–1999)

“The most underrated rating in Trek history.”

Deep Space Nine is the correct take on which Trek series matters most, and it remains one of television’s most underrated achievements. It did what no other Trek had the nerve to do — sustained serialized conflict, morally compromised heroes, Sisko as a genuinely complex lead, and the Dominion War as an actual war with real costs. Roddenberry hated the concept and he was wrong. The episode where Sisko poisons a planet to flush out a Maquis cell is a captain making an ugly call and living with it. That’s not Picard’s show.

Sisko was a great commander. Unfortunately, Avery Brooks had one mode — intensity cranked to maximum. Some scenes he’s magnetic, others he’s chewing scenery so hard you lose the moment. The baseball scenes are the tell. Those quieter character moments that required restraint exposed the limitations fast. Ironically it sometimes worked for Sisko because the character was supposed to be under enormous pressure. But when the script called for nuance, Brooks didn’t have the range.

Colm Meaney as O’Brien was the best pure actor on that show — and given that he also held that title on The Shield, that’s a remarkable career distinction. Deep Space Nine understood that the best Trek is about what humans do under impossible circumstances, not about Picard convening a meeting to locate a third option that preserves his conscience.

Writing craft: The writing staff pioneered long-form serialized storytelling for network television a decade before it became standard practice. The Dominion War arc was plotted across multiple seasons with a discipline that modern streaming shows struggle to match. Character flaws were written as permanent features, not temporary obstacles to be resolved by the season finale.

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4. I, Claudius (1976)

“Made for almost nothing. Still destroys modern prestige drama on pure craft.”

Derek Jacobi carries the entire series on his back, and the Roman senate functions as a viper pit of the first order. The slow accumulation of horror across decades — poison, assassination, madness, institutional corruption — is handled with a restraint that modern prestige productions with hundred-million-dollar budgets cannot match. Made for almost nothing and it still destroys the competition on pure craft.

The BBC production limitations become invisible within the first episode because the writing and performances are simply that good. When a show can sustain tension entirely through dialogue, character, and consequence — without a single action sequence or special effect — it exposes just how much modern television relies on spectacle as a substitute for story. I, Claudius needs none of it.

Writing craft: Robert Graves’ source novels provided a political architecture so intricate it required no invention — the craft was in selecting which threads to pull. Every courtly conversation is simultaneously a social performance and a survival calculation. The writers trusted that an audience following complex Roman politics would stay engaged without action sequences to punctuate the tension.

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5. The Twilight Zone (1959–1964)

“He packed more genuine social commentary into 25 minutes than The Pitt managed in 15 hours.”

Rod Serling was doing social commentary the right way — through allegory and misdirection so you didn’t see the point coming until it landed. The irony did the work. You were entertained first and confronted second, which is the exact inversion of everything wrong with modern prestige television. He did it in 25 minutes with no budget. Some episodes ran 60 minutes in the later seasons with mixed results — the tight 25-minute constraint was part of what made the best ones so surgical.

Not every episode lands. The show is variable across its run, and some entries are self-indulgent even by 1960s standards. But the ceiling is untouchable. When The Twilight Zone hits — and it hits constantly in its best seasons — it achieves something most 10-episode streaming series cannot: a complete, resonant story that leaves a mark in under half an hour. The benchmark for how to make a point without making it the point.

Writing craft: Serling’s scripts are models of three-act compression — setup, complication, and ironic reversal in under 25 minutes with no wasted material. The social commentary is embedded in the genre premise rather than stated directly, which is why it lands where direct messaging fails. Every episode is a complete short story, and Serling understood that the form demands a final line that reframes everything that preceded it.

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6. Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014)

“As good as television gets for three seasons.”

Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson — that show was operating at a level most prestige drama never reaches. The period authenticity, the political machinery, the way organized crime and legitimate power were shown as the same thing. The first three seasons are as good as television gets. The show understood that prohibition-era Atlantic City wasn’t just a backdrop — it was a complete moral ecosystem where everyone was on the take and the question was only about the size of the cut.

Then the same problem as everything else — compressed, rushed, burned through story that should have taken two more seasons to tell. The final seasons have the bones of something great visible underneath an execution that clearly knew the end was coming too soon. Criminal waste of a setup that had earned another two full seasons of development. Nucky deserved a conclusion that matched the build. He didn’t get one.

Writing craft: Terence Winter and his staff wrote prohibition-era Atlantic City as a system rather than a setting — every character’s motivation connects to the same economic and political machinery. The dialogue is period-accurate without becoming a museum piece, and the show understood that corruption is most interesting when the corrupt man believes he has principles. The season arcs were plotted with novelistic patience that television rarely sustains.

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7. Mr. Inbetween (2018–2021)

“Criminally underseen.”

Scott Ryan wrote, directed, and starred — and that kind of total creative control shows in every frame. Ray Shoesmith is one of the most original characters in crime television: genuinely terrifying and genuinely human in the same moment, sometimes in the same scene. The comedy lands because it’s real, the violence lands because it’s consequence rather than spectacle. The Australian crime drama that most of the world hasn’t seen and that most of the shows on this list can’t touch.

The slight decline across seasons makes sense. The first season had the advantage of introducing a completely original voice with no expectations to manage. By the third season you know the rhythms. Still exceptional television, just slightly less revelatory with each pass.

The ending didn’t work. It wasn’t a good earned death. The whole show was built on Ray being competent, aware, dangerous — a man who survived because he was better at the game than everyone around him. Going out the way he did undercuts that entire characterization. The writers needed an ending and chose sentiment over internal logic. Ray Shoesmith doesn’t get a clean exit. That’s the problem with it.

Writing craft: Scott Ryan’s scripts are deceptively simple — scenes that appear to be domestic comedy reveal themselves as character studies in moral compartmentalization. The show never explains Ray; it demonstrates him through accumulated behavior, trusting the audience to draw their own conclusions. The tonal shifts between violence and mundane humor are executed with a precision that looks effortless and isn’t.

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8. Chernobyl (2019)

“A masterclass in sustained dread.”

You know the outcome before episode one and it’s still unbearable to watch. The horror isn’t the explosion — it’s the bureaucracy, the denial, the system grinding people up to protect itself. Legasov, Shcherbina, Khomyuk — actual human weight, no Mary Sues, no one gets a clean exit. Craig Mazin understood that the most devastating version of this story isn’t the explosion itself but the cascade of institutional failure that made it inevitable and then made it worse.

The half-point deduction is for pushing a little too hard on Russians-bad as a categorical statement rather than a systemic one. The show mostly gets it right — the horror is bureaucratic and human, not ethnic. But occasionally it crosses from accurate systemic critique into broad editorializing. The most unsettling truth is that most of these people were just bureaucrats protecting themselves, which is a universal human failure, not a uniquely Soviet one. The best parts of the show understood that. The weakest moments forgot it.

Writing craft: Craig Mazin structured the miniseries as a procedural investigation rather than a disaster movie — a fundamental choice that changes everything. The writing resists simplifying complex scientific and political systems into heroes and villains. The final episode’s courtroom structure, where the science is delivered as testimony, is one of the most elegant solutions to an exposition problem in recent television.

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9. Better Call Saul (2015–2022)

“The more consistent show creatively — until Gilligan didn’t know how to stick the landing.”

Better Call Saul is arguably the more consistent creative achievement of the two Breaking Bad shows. The character work is patient, the moral deterioration is earned over five-plus seasons, and Jimmy McGill’s transformation into Saul Goodman never feels rushed or artificial. The show trusted its audience to follow a slow-burn story about a man destroying his own life one compromise at a time, and for most of its run it was rewarded for that trust.

Then the finale stretch happened. Vince Gilligan apparently didn’t know how to stick the landing a second time. The ending is a common complaint that doesn’t get made enough because the show has a devoted fanbase happy to overlook it. The rating for the body of work is a 9. The finale episodes earn their own negative number and drag the memory of what came before. Some shows just cannot close.

Writing craft: The writers committed to showing transformation in real time, which required the patience to let episodes pass without advancing the plot in conventional ways. Jimmy McGill’s slide works because each compromise is written as individually justifiable — the audience understands every decision even while watching the cumulative damage. The parallel Cinnabon timeline created a structural irony that informed every scene in the main narrative.

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10. Rome (2005–2007)

“The bones of a 10 show are visible underneath a 5 execution.”

Season one is as good as prestige television gets. HBO and the BBC spent extraordinary resources building ancient Rome as a living, breathing world — grimy, political, brutal, and entirely believable. The intersection of the great historical figures with the two invented soldier characters (Pullo and Vorenus) gave the epic scope a human anchor. It was clearly mapped as a five-season arc at minimum.

HBO pulled the plug and they had to collapse what was clearly planned across multiple seasons into one final season. Season two is the classic casualty of cancellation panic. Characters age years between episodes, entire historical periods get a single scene, and you can feel the whiplash throughout. The bones of a 10 show are visible underneath a 5 execution. Criminal waste of the best historical drama set up in television history.

Writing craft: Bruno Heller threaded the historical record with invented characters in a way that honored both without subordinating either. Caesar, Antony, and Octavian were written as political operators rather than legends, which made their decisions legible rather than mythological. The choice to filter the epic through Pullo and Vorenus gave the show a human scale that the history alone couldn’t provide.

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11. The Sopranos (1999–2007)

“A solid 8 — without the last season, which I’ve never seen.”

The 8 is based on the first five seasons, which is actually a purer read on the show’s sustained quality. Most people’s relationship with The Sopranos is complicated by how they feel about the finale. Rating without that complication captures the body of work on its own terms. The therapy sessions as genuine character excavation, the mob stuff as backdrop for a portrait of a man who genuinely cannot change — once it locks in, it becomes something else entirely.

The ending, from what’s known, gets undeserved hate. The cut to black is the correct ending for that show. Tony’s entire arc was about the impossibility of change and the permanence of who you are. An explicit death scene would have been cathartic resolution — exactly what Tony Soprano doesn’t deserve and what the show should refuse to give the audience. The ambiguity is the point. The last season is worth finishing.

Writing craft: David Chase’s writers understood that the most interesting question about Tony wasn’t whether he’d be caught but whether he was capable of change — and they were willing to spend six seasons answering no. The therapy sessions functioned as structural devices that let the show examine Tony’s psychology directly while the crime plots examined it indirectly. The writing never sentimentalized the violence or the family dynamics, holding both in the same unflinching frame.

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12. Breaking Bad (2008–2013)

“Gilligan blinked at the finish line.”

The 7.5 is lower than most would place it, and it’s an honest number. There are stretches in the middle seasons where the show is marking time between set pieces. The filler is real and it drags the average down. The devotion this show receives from its fanbase means those complaints don’t get made enough — but they’re valid.

The ending is the bigger problem. Walt gets a clean exit — he dies on his own terms, saves Jesse, takes out the Nazis efficiently, reconciles with his family in his own way. For a show built entirely around the premise that choices have consequences and evil corrupts completely, that ending is remarkably tidy. He essentially wins. Then there’s the trunk M60 contraption — a James Bond gadget dropped into a crime drama that had operated on realism for five seasons. And Jesse screaming into freedom felt like wishful thinking after everything that character had been through. Gilligan pulled punches at the finish line. The Shield didn’t. That’s the difference.

Writing craft: The writers’ room operated on a rigorous cause-and-effect logic for most of the run — every action generated a proportional consequence that fed the next episode. The structure was unusually tight for a broadcast drama, with callbacks and planted details paying off seasons later. The decision to make Walt’s pride the engine of his destruction rather than his circumstances was a craft choice that elevated it above standard crime drama.

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13. Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009)

“The miniseries deserved a show that knew where it was going. It never got one.”

The miniseries set up one of the most promising premises in science fiction television — grounded, bleak, no easy heroes, genuine existential stakes. Grittier and more politically honest than anything Trek had attempted. The promise was enormous. Then the show proceeded to systematically destroy everything that made it work, episode by episode, season by season, until it arrived at one of the most infamous finales in television history.

The finale is a writing room that wrote itself into a corner and chose religion over logic as the exit. They had no plan. The mystical hand-waving, the angel reveals, the “this has all happened before” cosmic nonsense — it’s an insult to everyone who invested in those characters. Starbuck’s resolution alone is an insult to everyone who cared about that specific character. The miniseries deserved a show that knew where it was going. It never got one.

Writing craft: Ronald D. Moore’s reimagining used the premise to interrogate post-9/11 questions about terrorism, torture, and identity with a directness that network drama couldn’t attempt. The writing in the first two seasons was disciplined about consequences — decisions had weight and characters were held accountable. The later collapse is a writing room failure: they established mysteries they had no answers for and eventually substituted mysticism for resolution.

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14. ER (1994–2009)

“The gold standard for medical drama.”

ER especially holds up as the gold standard for medical drama for the first six seasons. Fast, chaotic, authentic-feeling, and the emotional beats were earned through situation rather than signaling. Carter, Greene, Ross — you actually watched characters develop under pressure rather than having their psychology explained to you. The key discipline: characters talked while moving, while working, while doing three things at once. The conversation happened inside the action, not instead of it.

ER trusted the environment to generate the drama. A busy emergency room is inherently stressful — you don’t need to editorialize on top of it. The show understood that the patient storyline is a complete dramatic unit. You follow it to resolution or it means nothing. When those arcs paid off, they paid off completely. Characters with serious personal dysfunction still locked in when the trauma bay filled. That contrast between personal mess and professional competence was what made them interesting.

The 7 reflects the full run, and the first six seasons had enough filler episodes to drag the average down from where the peaks would place it. ER at its best is better than a 7. ER as a sustained body of work across six seasons, including the down weeks, sits right there. The medical consultants were on set enforcing the procedural details. That authenticity made everything else believable.

Writing craft: John Wells and the rotating writing staff mastered the ensemble procedural — multiple simultaneous storylines at different stages of development, converging and diverging within a single episode. The show understood that the emergency room format generates natural dramatic irony because the audience and the characters often know different things about the same patient. Dialogue was written to be delivered in motion, which is a specific technical discipline that most television writing ignores.

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15. Grey’s Anatomy (2005–present)

“It became emasculated.”

Early Grey’s had genuine tension and the personal drama was messy in ways that felt human rather than curated. It got a little woke over time, but nowhere near enough to kill it early on. The bomb episode is one of the best hours of network television that decade — Meredith holding the explosive charge in the chest cavity, pure tension, no sermonizing, just situation and stakes. The show knew how to generate drama from its environment when it chose to.

After Derek’s death it became unwatchable. The decline was systematic and deliberate — every competent male character either died, was disgraced, or was written out until the show was structurally incapable of telling certain kinds of stories. It didn’t happen by accident. The show became emasculated and ran on fumes and agenda for years afterward. The early seasons deserved a better ending arc. The show that replaced them isn’t the same show.

Writing craft: Shonda Rhimes built the early seasons on a specific structural engine: professional crisis mirroring personal crisis in the same episode, with the medical case functioning as a metaphor for the character’s emotional situation. The voiceover narration was used sparingly enough in the early seasons to feel like genuine reflection rather than explanation. The decline came when the writing prioritized shock events over character logic, and the metaphorical structure calcified into formula.

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16. Star Trek: Enterprise (2001–2005)

“Once it found its identity, it became a legitimate show.”

Enterprise gets an 8 after the first two seasons, and that’s a fair assessment. The first two seasons were identity crisis television — the show clearly didn’t know what it wanted to be and paid the price in wandering, unfocused storytelling. Once it committed to the Xindi arc in season three and found a genuine reason to exist as a prequel series, it became something worth watching. The serialized format suited it far better than the episodic approach it started with.

The irony is that Enterprise got cancelled just as it found its footing. Season four was the show that the concept always deserved, connecting the dots between the early exploratory era and the formation of the Federation with a care and intelligence that justified the prequel premise. Getting cancelled at that point was the franchise equivalent of what happened to Rome — and just as unfortunate.

Writing craft: Manny Coto’s arrival as showrunner fundamentally changed the approach from standalone episodes to serialized storytelling with long-term consequences. The Xindi arc required maintaining narrative momentum across an entire season rather than resetting weekly, which suited the format far better. The season four episodes that connected Enterprise to established Trek continuity were the best-researched writing the franchise had produced in decades.

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17. The Simpsons (1989–present)

“The zombie seasons: a show that invented a vocabulary for animated comedy spent twenty-plus years slowly eating its own corpse.”

Seasons two through eight are the gold standard of American animated comedy, and a 7 is honest — even in the peak years there were filler episodes marking time between the genuine classics. The ratio of great to filler was better than almost anything else on television, but it was never zero. The best episodes from that run are legitimate art — dense, layered, rewatchable, working on multiple levels simultaneously. A 7 represents the sustained average, not the ceiling.

Then the zombie seasons. Homer went from a specific kind of lovable idiot to a cartoonish sociopath with no recognizable inner life. Characters lost all consistency, stakes became nonexistent, every episode reset to zero. The tragedy is it never ended, so it just kept accumulating damage to the legacy for three decades.

The exception to all of it is Treehouse of Horror. No continuity obligations, no reset button needed, complete creative freedom. The writers could kill anyone, break any rule, go as dark as they wanted. The Shining parody, the Homer clones, the teachers eating the students — those hold up as standalone comedy pieces entirely independent of the show’s decline. Nightmare Cafeteria is a masterpiece of dark comedy because it takes a real childhood anxiety and literalizes it into cannibalism. The comedy came from a real place. That’s what the later seasons completely lost.

Writing craft: The peak-era writers’ room operated at a density of jokes per minute that has never been matched in animation. The craft was layered — surface jokes, adult references, and structural comedy all operating simultaneously within the same scene. The emotional beats in the best episodes were earned rather than manufactured, which is why they still land thirty years later while the later seasons’ attempted heart feels hollow.

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18. Murderbot (2025–present) [full review]

“Diversity baked in — not shoved in your face.”

Based on Martha Wells’ novella series, Murderbot is the Apple TV+ adaptation of a story about a security robot that hacked its own governor module and would really prefer to be left alone to watch its shows. The diversity in Murderbot’s world is irrelevant because Murderbot doesn’t care about any of it — it wants to watch its serials and not deal with humans regardless of what they are. The social architecture of that universe is just the world, not the lesson.

This is the right way to handle representation: bake it into the premise so it disappears into the story. When diversity is load-bearing, it becomes invisible. When it’s decorative, you can smell it immediately. Murderbot represents the former approach, which is why it belongs in the same conversation as The Expanse as a model for how science fiction handles the modern world without becoming a lecture about it.

Writing craft: The adaptation translated Wells’ first-person novella voice into visual storytelling without losing the character’s sardonic interior monologue. The scripts balance action sequences with genuine character interiority in a way that respects the source material’s core concern: what it means to be a person when you didn’t ask to be one. Social commentary stays embedded in the premise rather than surfacing as dialogue.

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19. Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994)

“Picard was a terrible captain. I would not want to serve under him.”

TNG is so up and down it’s hard to land on a single number. When it hits philosophical territory with genuine stakes, it’s excellent television. When it’s a bottle episode with holodeck malfunctions, it’s unwatchable. Picard carries the ceiling higher than the floor deserves. The 6–7 range captures that variance honestly — some episodes would rate a 10, others would rate a zero, and the average lands somewhere in between.

Picard himself is a legitimate command assessment problem. He was a philosopher and diplomat who happened to wear a uniform. Great in a negotiation, great in a first contact situation, but when things went sideways he was frequently paralyzed, moralistic to the point of inaction, or needed Riker to actually run the ship. You would not want to serve under him. Kirk would have been a nightmare for different reasons — reckless, impulsive — but in a genuine crisis you knew he was going to do something. Picard would convene a meeting. Sisko is the answer to both.

Writing craft: Michael Piller’s influence on the writing staff in seasons three through five produced the show’s best work — philosophical premises executed with enough character specificity to generate genuine drama. The best episodes treat the Enterprise as a vehicle for ethical thought experiments rather than action delivery. The structural weakness is a reset button that guaranteed no permanent consequences and therefore no real stakes.

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20. Star Trek: The Original Series (1966–1969)

“Super dated — but the variance is real.”

The dating is real and inescapable. The production values, the acting conventions of the 1960s, the special effects — it all shows. But the original series had something that subsequent Treks took decades to rediscover: genuine moral ambiguity and a captain who would actually do something when circumstances demanded it. Kirk was reckless and impulsive, but you never wondered whether he’d act.

The range from 6 to 10 reflects the same problem as TNG — the show is wildly inconsistent. Some episodes are genuinely ahead of their time in what they were willing to address and how they addressed it. Others are so much a product of their era that they don’t survive the trip. The best TOS episodes land in a different place than the worst ones, and there’s no honest single number that covers both.

Writing craft: Roddenberry’s original premise required writers to use science fiction as a vehicle for social commentary that couldn’t be addressed directly on 1960s network television — race, war, power, filtered through genre displacement. The best episodes use that indirection to land points with a directness that contemporary drama couldn’t attempt. The variable quality reflects a writing staff that understood the concept to very different degrees.

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21. Rookie Blue (2010–2015)

“Fluffy and stupid. Mindless entertainment — which is sometimes exactly what you want.”

The Canadian police procedural earned a 6.5 fair and square as competent mindless entertainment. It’s fluffy, it’s not particularly realistic, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than it is. A show that knows it’s fluffy and delivers consistently on those terms is more honest than a show like The Pitt that thinks it’s profound and isn’t.

Not everything needs to be The Sopranos. Sometimes you want to watch something that moves at a reasonable pace, has likeable enough characters, and doesn’t require you to think. Rookie Blue fills that space competently. The 6.5 reflects exactly what it is — better than mediocre, short of genuinely good, and entirely watchable for what it offers.

Writing craft: The show understood its lane and stayed in it — character-driven procedural with enough ongoing personal drama to keep viewers returning. The writing didn’t overreach. Stakes were kept at a human scale, the ensemble was given roughly equal weight, and episodes resolved cleanly. That kind of disciplined modesty is harder than it looks and more valuable than ambitious shows that collapse under their own weight.

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22. The Rookie (2018–present)

“Nolan turned into a Mary Sue and it became unwatchable.”

The first two seasons earned their 6.5 as enjoyable but mindless entertainment — same category as Rookie Blue, different execution. Nathan Fillion as the middle-aged rookie had a premise with genuine comedic and dramatic potential, and the early seasons let Nolan actually make mistakes and face real consequences. That’s the whole appeal of a competent procedural: watching professionals navigate genuine difficulty.

The Mary Sue problem ruined it. Once Nolan became infallible — always right, always wins, everyone eventually comes around to his view — the tension evaporated completely. A show that becomes unwatchable is worth less than one that was never good to begin with. At least bad shows don’t waste the goodwill you built up over two seasons. First two seasons 6.5, after that 0. That’s the honest accounting.

Writing craft: The first two seasons benefited from a premise that built in structural humility — the main character was genuinely the least qualified person in every room, which forced the writing to generate drama from competence gaps and learning curves. Once the writers abandoned that premise and made Nolan exceptional rather than aspiring, they removed the engine that made the show work. A clear example of how a character’s limitations can be more dramatically useful than their strengths.

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23. NCIS (2003–present)

“Gibbs held it together. Without that anchor, it’s just inventory.”

The first few seasons earned their 6.5 as solid procedural television. NCIS had a clear identity — the forensic focus, the specific investigative unit, Gibbs as a credible and idiosyncratic lead character. The team dynamic worked. The show knew what it was and delivered competently on that identity for several seasons before franchise disease set in.

Gibbs held the whole thing together as a legitimate center. Without that anchor, the later seasons and every spinoff are just inventory — characters filling procedural slots without the personality or chemistry that made the original work. A 0 for anything after the show loses its identity is accurate. The spinoffs didn’t earn the name they borrowed.

Writing craft: Donald Bellisario’s original template used an unconventional ensemble dynamic — an authority figure whose methods were questionable surrounded by specialists who deferred to him anyway — which created low-level tension in every scene regardless of the case. The early writing trusted that character friction could carry episodes where the mystery was routine. The later seasons and spinoffs replicated the surface format without understanding that the team dynamic was the actual show.

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24. CSI: Las Vegas (2000–2015)

“Once the template got xeroxed across different cities with interchangeable casts, it became a factory product.”

The original CSI had a specific identity that made it work: the forensic focus, the Las Vegas atmosphere, and Grissom as a genuinely odd lead character. William Petersen’s Grissom was an entomologist who cared more about evidence than people, and that eccentricity gave the show a flavor that distinguished it from every other crime procedural on television. The 6.5 for the early seasons is well-earned.

Once that template got xeroxed repeatedly across Miami and New York with interchangeable casts, it became a factory product. The Miami spinoff is particularly egregious — David Caruso’s dramatic sunglasses removal became a punchline for good reason. Spinoffs that dilute the original concept don’t earn the name they borrowed. Everything after the original’s prime gets a 0.

Writing craft: The original CSI succeeded because it built its storytelling around physical evidence rather than witness testimony, which forced writers to generate drama from objects and forensic processes rather than interrogation scenes. Grissom’s eccentricity was a deliberate writing choice that kept the lead character from becoming a standard TV detective. The franchise’s collapse demonstrates that a distinctive narrative methodology doesn’t transfer automatically — it has to be rebuilt from the premise up in each new iteration.

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25. House M.D. (2004–2012)

“The formula was visible from episode two. Olivia Wilde is a 10+.”

House M.D. scores a 5 overall because Hugh Laurie was magnetic enough to sustain a formula that was visible from the second episode longer than the concept deserved. Eventually the case-of-the-week structure collapsed under its own repetition and the personal drama got increasingly contrived. The show peaked early and spent its later seasons trying to recapture what it had in seasons two and three.

The genuine standout is Olivia Wilde as Thirteen — the Huntington’s arc gave her actual story weight and she made the most of every scene. The show gave her material that let her be more than decoration. She was also in Cowboys and Aliens, which makes the top 50 films list without apology. Thirteen gets her own 10+ rating separate from the show’s overall 5.

Writing craft: David Shore’s core structural innovation was using the medical mystery as a Socratic dialogue — House proposes theories, the team challenges them, the patient’s condition refutes the diagnosis, repeat. It’s a rigorous intellectual format that generated drama from logic rather than emotion. The problem is that the formula became transparent by the third season, and the writers’ attempts to inject emotional weight through House’s personal life didn’t compensate for a procedural structure that had stopped surprising anyone.

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26. Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–1974)

“Super dated. That’s the right way to rate it.”

Monty Python was never consistent — that’s just the truth. Some sketches are untouchable comedy architecture that still lands fifty years later. Others were self-indulgent even in 1970. The dead parrot, the Spanish Inquisition, the Ministry of Silly Walks — timeless mechanical perfection. Other episodes are absurdism for its own sake that goes nowhere and expects credit for being weird.

The dating is real but selective. The purely physical and logical comedy holds up regardless of when you watch it. The specifically British cultural references and some of the political satire have calcified into museum pieces. A single rating covering the whole run is dishonest. Some episodes are legitimately among the greatest half-hours of comedy ever made. Others are a waste of thirty minutes. Treat them accordingly.

Writing craft: The troupe’s fundamental innovation was treating comedy sketches as logical systems rather than setups — take an absurd premise and follow its internal rules to their conclusion without flinching. The dead parrot works because it never breaks its own logic. The Ministry of Silly Walks works because it applies bureaucratic seriousness to something inherently ridiculous. The sketches that don’t hold up are the ones that abandoned the internal logic and relied on surrealism as a substitute for rigor.

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27. Sons of Anarchy (2008–2014)

“Boring.”

Didn’t make it past episode three. The concept — Hamlet in a biker gang — sounds more interesting than it plays in the opening stretch. The show takes a while to find its momentum and if it doesn’t grab you early there’s no compelling reason to push through. Boring is the complete verdict. Sometimes that’s all there is to say.

Writing craft: Kurt Sutter’s Hamlet framework was an ambitious structural premise — the prince who can’t decide whether to dismantle the corrupt kingdom he’s set to inherit. The concept required patience from both writers and audience to establish the political dynamics of the club before the central conflict could develop. That slow build is a legitimate craft choice, but it’s also a risk: shows that can’t establish their premise in the first three episodes lose the audience they need for the payoff.

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28. The Pitt (2025–present) [S1 review] [S2 review]

“More accurate than I first credited. Less honest than its defenders pretend.”

The Pitt is the medical drama that has generated the largest gap between critic consensus and the assessment of working professionals across multiple disciplines. Noah Wyle is genuinely excellent and carries scenes the writing wouldn’t otherwise sustain. The mass casualty episodes in Season 1 generated real tension. The Langdon diversion plot was researched carefully — the planted clue (an over-tight pill bottle cap that triggers the investigation) is the kind of compulsive tell real diverters develop. Season 2 earns the higher rating because the cyberattack arc’s depiction of patient-care impact is endorsed by UC San Diego physicians who study these events for a living, and the depiction of physician suicidal ideation has been broadly praised by working physicians as accurate to the lived experience of emergency medicine.

What survives the research is that the show is selective about which institutional rules it depicts honestly. HIPAA gets treated as strict when strictness produces drama (Robby refusing to let a friend film a parkour patient who was already filming voluntarily) and lax when laxness produces drama (clinicians speculating diagnoses in front of ICE agents during the immigration episode). The AI subplot claims 98% accuracy for clinical generative AI when peer-reviewed research puts the real range at 50–60% for diagnostic tasks. The mandatory reporting plotline in Season 1 Episode 7 got Pennsylvania law wrong on national television — the show has a hospital social worker say “there’s nothing to report unless we have proof,” when state law actually requires reporting on reasonable suspicion. Working social workers pushed back publicly.

The preaching critique is widely acknowledged across the political spectrum, including by the show’s defenders. TIME’s Judy Berman, defending the show, wrote that it is “largely preaching to the progressive-pilled.” The Los Angeles Review of Books called the show’s “checklist-style, homiletic approach to teachable moments” parodic, comparing one exchange to “the kind of dialogue you might expect from a corporate training video.” A healthcare worker writing under the name Hatereon coined “The Woke White Savior” as the show’s new trope. The Season 2 ICE episode holds a 9.1/10 IMDB rating, the highest of the season, despite generating mass viewer drop-off threats. That’s the polarization signal. The show is being engineered for an in-group audience and the response data confirms the strategy is working as designed.

Writing craft: The real-time format was an interesting structural constraint that the writers exploited unevenly. Real-time storytelling creates natural dramatic pressure — everything that happens has to happen within a defined window — which should make every scene feel urgent. The Pitt periodically abandoned that urgency for emotional conversations and social commentary, which defeats the purpose of the format. The technical research was thorough; the structural discipline was selective. The writers consistently chose the version of any institutional rule that produced the scene they wanted, which is the writers’ room habit the entire critique reduces to.

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29. Black Mirror (2011–present)

“More like a great concept with occasional great execution.”

The premiere episode — the one with the pig — either breaks you immediately or perversely hooks you with the sheer audacity. It broke me. Black Mirror’s problem is inconsistency by design — it’s an anthology, so there’s no connective tissue to carry you through the weak entries. When it lands, it’s genuinely unsettling. When it misses, it’s pretentious tech anxiety with no real insight.

The hit rate is too low to call it a great show. One or two episodes work at the level the concept promises. The rest vary from mediocre to embarrassing. The overall −1 is accurate for the run as a whole. A great concept with occasional great execution is not the same as a great show — it’s a proof of concept that never fully delivered on its own premise.

Writing craft: Charlie Brooker’s best episodes work because the speculative technology is a specific amplifier of an existing human flaw rather than a generic threat. The strongest entries identify one thing technology might do to one aspect of human psychology and follow it to its logical extreme. The weakest episodes mistake a disturbing image or concept for a complete story. The anthology format is both the show’s greatest asset — no bad episode contaminates the next one — and its greatest weakness, since there’s no accumulated investment to carry you through the failures.

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30. The Boys (2019–present)

“Five seasons in. Watchable, mediocre, and noticeably thinner than the clips suggest.”

Five seasons later, The Boys lands at a 5. The clips remain the best part of the experience — superhero satire at maximum intensity with no obligation to sustain a narrative. Pure punch delivery. The full episodes drown in their own excess. The satire is so relentless and so loud it stops being commentary and becomes wallpaper. Subtlety is nonexistent, every scene is pitched at eleven, and after a while the shock value stops shocking. You’re just numb.

The deepest irony: a show satirizing bloated superhero franchises has the exact same problem as bloated superhero franchises — it mistakes volume for substance. Watching three minutes of clips delivers the bulk of the experience. Watching five seasons delivers the same experience slowly enough that you notice how thin it actually is underneath the spectacle. The 5 is the honest middle — better than initial harshness suggested, far from genuinely good television.

Writing craft: Eric Kripke’s adaptation understood that satire requires a target worth satirizing and a perspective worth defending — the early seasons had both. The structural problem is that sustained satire at maximum volume has nowhere to escalate. Each season had to be louder and more extreme than the last to maintain the same shock effect, which is the same arms race that afflicts the genre it’s mocking. Effective satire requires restraint. The Boys ran out of it.

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31. Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001)

“Reset button television — nothing ever mattered because they needed to be lost again next week.”

The premise had potential that Janeway’s writing never fulfilled. A Federation crew stranded seventy thousand light-years from home with a Maquis crew who should have been enemies — that’s a genuine conflict engine. The show reset it immediately and pretended everyone got along just fine, which is also the show’s fundamental creative failure in miniature. Nothing ever mattered because they needed to be lost again next week.

Then Seven of Nine arrived and the show briefly remembered what tension felt like. The Borg episodes worked because the stakes were real — the collective represented a genuine threat and Seven’s presence on the ship created actual friction. When the craft is working, the character carries it. When it isn’t, everything else falls apart again. The −1 is the honest rating for the run as a whole. The exceptions are worth watching specifically.

Writing craft: Voyager’s core writing failure was an unwillingness to commit to its own premise. A ship stranded seventy thousand light-years from home with limited resources and a crew that shouldn’t trust each other is a premise with enormous dramatic potential — and the writers reset it every week rather than building on it. The best serialized television accumulates consequence. Voyager spent seven seasons refusing to let anything matter beyond the episode it happened in.

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32. Star Trek: New Shows (2017–present)

“Active insults to the franchise. Academy lowered the floor by an order of magnitude.”

Discovery, Picard (seasons 2–3), Starfleet Academy, and the rest of the modern Trek output range from actively insulting to merely mediocre. They are nostalgia strip-mining dressed up as progressive storytelling, with no understanding of what made any of the original material work. The new shows use the character names, the ship designs, and the iconography as props while demonstrating zero comprehension of the philosophical and narrative frameworks that gave those things their meaning.

Picard season two used to be the single worst thing produced under the Star Trek name. Then Starfleet Academy arrived and lowered the floor by an order of magnitude. Academy is not merely one of the worst Trek shows. It is one of the worst television series ever made in the history of the medium — a candidate for the worst series ever produced anywhere by anyone. The franchise that gave us Deep Space Nine’s Dominion War and The Original Series’ moral confrontations now produces a young-adult drama set in a CGI dorm room with characters that demonstrate nothing recognizable as Starfleet competence, purpose, or values. The −10 to −1 range is generous for the rest. Academy gets its own number: −10,000. Discovery’s first two seasons are not worth the time it takes to watch them at any speed. Academy is not worth the time it takes to open the streaming app.

Writing craft: The new shows demonstrate what happens when a writing staff mistakes the iconography of a franchise for its substance. Discovery and Picard use the ship names, character names, and visual design of beloved properties while ignoring the philosophical and narrative frameworks that gave those things meaning. The serialized mystery-box format — plant questions, delay answers, substitute emotional manipulation for earned resolution — is particularly destructive applied to Trek because the original shows derived their power from clarity of premise, not deliberate obscurity.

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33. Law & Order Franchise (1990–2010 / various spin-offs)

“The mothership stayed watchable for 20 seasons. The reboot doesn’t count.”

The original Law & Order ran 20 seasons from 1990 to 2010 and remained watchable from the first episode to the last. Dick Wolf’s structural innovation was the two-halves format — detectives investigate the first half, prosecutors prosecute the second half — which gave the show two complete dramatic engines per episode. Jerry Orbach’s Lennie Briscoe and Sam Waterston’s Jack McCoy are the most iconic faces of the run, but the cast rotated significantly across two decades and the format held regardless. That’s the test of a well-designed show: it survives the cast changes. The 2022 NBC revival is a separate matter — not the same show, doesn’t count in the rating. The 8+ is for the original 1990–2010 run.

Criminal Intent (2001–2011) is the franchise’s most interesting failure. Vincent D’Onofrio’s Detective Robert Goren is a brilliant, eccentric profiler with Sherlock Holmes affinities, partnered with Kathryn Erbe’s Alex Eames. The first four seasons are excellent — 9/10 work — with D’Onofrio’s brooding, intense performance carrying the show. Then the workload nearly destroyed him. He passed out twice on set in 2004. Season 5 split the cast: D’Onofrio and Erbe alternating with Chris Noth’s Mike Logan, who’d transferred over from the original. That worked. Then D’Onofrio departed in season 9, replaced by Jeff Goldblum’s Detective Zack Nichols. Goldblum is a quirky eccentric in the Monk lineage, not a brooding interrogator in the Goren lineage, and the show collapsed because the format wasn’t sturdy enough to absorb the swap. D’Onofrio returned for the final eight-episode season 10 in 2011 but the show never recovered the original chemistry. The 9-to-4 range reflects the rise and fall of a show that worked entirely because of one specific actor’s performance.

SVU (1999–present) is well-made television that’s tough to watch because of the subject matter. Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson and Christopher Meloni’s Elliot Stabler anchored the original years and the show became the longest-running American primetime live-action drama in part because Hargitay’s commitment to the character never wavered. A 5 reflects competent execution wrapped around content that limits rewatchability. The procedural rhythm wasn’t designed to carry the moral weight of the cases it processes week after week, and twenty-plus seasons of that wear shows in the writing. It’s a show people watch out of habit and quit when the cumulative weight finally lands.

Writing craft: The Dick Wolf model — rotating cast, episodic structure, ripped-from-the-headlines plots — was an industrial approach to television production that succeeded because the format was sturdier than any individual cast configuration. The original Law & Order proves the model works at scale across two decades. Criminal Intent demonstrates the failure mode: when a single performance becomes load-bearing in a Wolf show, losing that performer collapses the structure. SVU shows what happens when subject matter is so heavy that the procedural rhythm has to carry weight it wasn’t designed to bear. Three different lessons from one franchise about how format interacts with content and casting.

Additional Series Worth Knowing

What Did I Get Wrong?

Every rating here is defensible and some of them will make people angry. That’s fine. If you think Breaking Bad deserves better than a 7.5 or The Pitt deserves its 8.8 IMDB rating, the comments are below. Bring arguments, not feelings.