ROLLING STONE'S 100 GREATEST SHOWS OF ALL TIME

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Too much to post the image and brief article with each ranked shoe.... I'll post the top five & the bottom five with this link for the complete list... enjoy
The 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time – Rolling Stone

The 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time

A ranking of the most game-changing, side-splitting, tear-jerking, mind-blowing, world-building, genre-busting programs in television history, from the medium’s inception in the early 20th century through the ever-metastasizing era of Peak TV

1- THE SOPRANOS HBO 1999-2007

The winner — and still undisputed champion — from North Caldwell, New Jersey, coming in heavy at 86 medium-transforming episodes filled with whacking, psychiatric analysis, and cunnilingus and fart jokes, it’s The Sopranos! Of course David Chase’s creation topped the list again, because we are still living in the new world of television ushered in by Mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini). As Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) helped Tony better understand himself and his relationships with wife Carmela (Edie Falco), mother Livia (Nancy Marchand), nephew Christopher (Michael Imperioli), and the dangerous idiots in his crew, Chase’s unapologetically dark examination of turn-of-the-century America took a torch to every written and unwritten rule that TV storytelling had been governed by since the days of Gunsmoke. Simplicity and holding the audience’s hand were out, and narrative and moral complexity were in, all the way through a final edit that we still can’t stop—

 

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2- THE SIMPSONS FOX 1989-PRESENT

What is there left to say about the best, longest running, most influential, most acclaimed TV comedy of them all? (Krusty the Clown, before spitting in disgust: “Acclaimed?!?!”) Should we offer loopy quotes at random, like when Abe Simpson had an onion on his belt, which was the style at the time? Should we push back against the bogus sentiment that The Simpsons hasn’t been funny in decades, since even in its 32nd season, it was able to put -together an episode as sharp as the Comic Book Guy-focused Wes Anderson tribute? Talk about Homer Simpson as an avatar of all that is great and terrible about the American male? Marvel at the wide range of tones and subjects it’s made room for, such that the poignant “You are Lisa Simpson” scene from the end of “Lisa’s Substitute” belongs on the same show where Homer went into space with NASA or once asked George Harrison where the Quiet Beatle got his brownie? Hum a few bars of the monorail song? Start ranking all of the guest stars, from Phil Hartman all the way down to the guy from Joe Millionaire? Or should we just admit that after all these years, The Simpsons’ genius speaks for itself?

 

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3- BREAKING BAD AMC 2008-2013

High school teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) tells his students that he likes to think of chemistry as “a study of change,” which conveniently is the major theme of the crime saga built around him. No series before or since has taken better advantage of the medium’s ability to track a character’s journey over a long period of time, while also crafting the kind of memorable individual installments that distinguish TV from movies. Breaking Bad travels step by agonizing step through Walt’s journey from lower-middle-class breadwinner to lord of his own crystal-meth empire, where he’s alternately helped and hurt along the way by former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), criminal lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), calculating kingpin Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), and even his own victimized wife Skyler (Anna Gunn). And the series is only as thrilling and as devastating as it is because it keeps methodically showing you how Walt and the others got from there to here.

 

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4- THE WIRE HBO 2002-08

Whenever you hear a contemporary showrunner refer to their work as “a novel for television” or “a 10-hour movie,” odds are they spent a lot of time watching David Simon and Ed Burns’ drama and mistakenly assumed that it would be easy to copy. It was an urban epic that gradually touched every corner of its fictionalized Baltimore, from cops and drug dealers to middle school students and politicians. The Wire preached that “all the pieces matter,” then put the concept into action, so that the slow pacing and narrative sprawl made all the show’s tragedies — visited upon one of the most amazing casts of characters ever assembled, from ambitious drug dealer Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) down to sweet junkie Bubbles (Andre Royo) and stickup artist Omar Little (Michael Kenneth Williams) — and all of its criticisms of the state of modern America, hit harder each time. Often imitated, never duplicated — not even by Simon on impressive follow-ups like Tremé or The Deuce. As D’Angelo Barksdale (Larry Gilliard Jr.) puts it while using chess as a metaphor for the drug game, “The king stay the king.”

 

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5- FLEABAG BBC/AMAZON 2016-19

Sure, it’s rewarding when a TV show can provide dozens of hours of mirth across many seasons. Sometimes, though, the most satisfying experience comes from series that have a few things to say, say them perfectly, and then shake their heads and walk away before you can follow them into less-interesting story arcs. Never has that short-and-sweet approach been more impeccably executed than with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s tragicomic tour de force, where she played a self-destructive woman so lonely that her healthiest relationships were with her unseen television audience, and with the Hot Priest (Andrew Scott) with whom she fell madly in lust in the second season. And whether she was talking directly to us or not (in TV’s best-ever use of breaking the fourth wall), Waller-Bridge held the audience in the palm of her hand throughout. She made Fleabag as raunchy, as funny, and as sad — sometimes more than one of those at the same time — as she wanted it to be. And then she said goodbye.

 

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96- RICK AND MORTY ADULT SWIM 2013-PRESENT

Rick Sanchez is a mad scientist whose many inventions allow him to go anywhere and do anything, from visiting parallel realities to turning himself into a talking pickle to get out of going to family therapy. The animated Rick and Morty, created by Justin Roiland (who voices the title characters) and Dan Harmon from Community, seems to be similarly without limits — not only in how disgusting and bizarre individual adventures can be, but in how easily the series can toggle from celebrating Rick’s unstoppable brilliance to pointing out what a toxic, emotionally abusive jerk Rick can be to his grandson and everyone else unlucky enough to cross paths with him.

 

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97- THE ODD COUPLE ABC 1970-75

The 1968 film version of Neil Simon’s play about a mismatched pair of divorced middle-aged friends sharing an apartment was a beloved, Oscar-nominated, box office hit. Yet the sitcom adaptation that debuted two years later has arguably left a larger cultural footprint than either the film or the many, many productions of the play. That’s just how divinely paired Tony Randall and Jack Klugman were as, respectively, anal retentive photographer Felix Unger (in many ways, the prototype for Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory) and slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison. The two were so smashing together that their personalities took over not only much of the Odd Couple legacy, but of other series that briefly intersected with it. It’s impossible to think about the classic game show Password, for instance, without first thinking of Felix and Oscar competing together and arguing over Felix’s attempt to use “Aristophanes” as a clue for “bird.” Or to hear anyone else talk about the dangers of assuming without flashing to Felix delivering that lesson in a courtroom.

 

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98- THE GOOD FIGHT CBS ALL ACCESS; PARAMOUNT+ 2021-PRESENT

For seven seasons, The Good Wife was a fine example of how loftier creative ambitions could be smuggled into the formula of a broadcast network procedural drama. When that show ended, creators Robert and Michelle King built a spinoff designed for the lack of restrictions of the streaming universe. Not only could Christine Baranski’s legal grande dame Diane Lockhart now use words she was never allowed to say on Good Wife, but The Good Fight could go to much stranger and more ambitious places in terms of style and substance, as Diane wound up at a predominantly Black law firm and also struggled to accept the surreality of life under President Trump. Some creators benefit from working with some degree of limitation, but unshackling the Kings has unleashed their creative best selves.

 

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99- OZ HBO 1997-2003

Before The Wire, before The Sopranos, there was Oz, the canary in the coal mine for the idea of scripted dramas existing outside the broadcast network ecosystem. Created by St. Elsewhere and Homicide: Life on the Street vet Tom Fontana, Oz took place in a maximum security prison that housed some of the nastiest humans depicted on television, before or since. There was sadistic white supremacist Vern Schillinger (J.K. Simmons), menacing gang leader Simon Adebisi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), the predatory Chris Keller (Chris Meloni), and many more. The world of Oz was so vicious that even the relatively benign prisoners — audience surrogate Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), Black nationalist Kareem Saïd (Eamonn Walker), or third generation inmate Miguel Alvarez (Kirk Acevedo) — would be tempted into heinous deeds over time. Yet in the midst of all the murder, torture, and psychological warfare, Oz was also a thoughtful, deeply experimental drama with a lot to say about the tension between punishing criminals and rehabilitating them, and what confinement does to good men and bad ones.

 

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100- WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS FX 2019-PRESENT

The first of several movie-to-TV projects on this list. This one is a spinoff rather than an adaptation, though, since Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi have appeared on the show in the roles they played in the 2014 vampire rockumentary film. The FX version moves the action from Wellington, New Zealand, to Staten Island and focuses on three traditional vampires — preening warrior king Nandor (Kayvan Novak) and narcissistic, sex-crazed spouses Laszlo (Matt Berry) and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) — who share a house with superhumanly dull “energy vampire” Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) and Nandor’s frustrated human familiar Guillermo (Harvey Guillen). Shadows is unspeakably raunchy, remarkably silly, and diabolical in the way it manages to be stupid and clever within the same breath.