Last week, the New York Times published what it deemed “The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century.” While cinematic phenomena, from 2009’s Avatar to 2023’s “Barbenheimer” and this year’s blockbuster Odyssey, occasionally flare up and captivate the culture, television has been the steadier force shaping popular entertainment over the past two decades. The rise of streaming, movie stars migrating to the small screen, and increasingly lavish production budgets turned television into the place where some of the era’s most ambitious storytelling unfolds.
A product of industry polling that included such stars as Bryan Cranston and Jason Bateman, the New York Times’s full ranking is too dense to dissect in detail, but it contains a slew of glaring omissions, fallacies, and errors (and some serviceable picks) that warrant highlighting. I have seen 12 of its top 20 and roughly 60 of the 100. Some placements I cannot fairly judge. Others are difficult to leave alone.
The list first suffers from the same problem that afflicts Rolling Stone’s music rankings, where Miles Davis, Led Zeppelin, and Beyoncé somehow end up competing on one great sonic scoreboard. How does one meaningfully rank The Great British Baking Show, Breaking Bad, and 30 Rock along the same axis? Comedy, drama, reality television, and miniseries ask radically different things from their audiences. Separate lists would have yielded more meaningful comparisons. Such is life.
On to the rankings.
There is plenty here I agree with. Dunham’s Girls deserves its lofty No. 13 placement, Arrested Development at No. 12 remains one of television’s great modern sitcom achievements, and Curb Your Enthusiasm at No. 9 is about as close as television gets to crawling directly inside Larry David’s brain, from which we have inherited such contemporary touchstones as the statute of limitations on Happy New Year wishes and countless other Davidisms governing social dynamics. I take greater issue with the American Office reaching No. 11 while Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s wittier, sharper British original sits at No. 16.
Then there is I May Destroy You at No. 18, a placement I find baffling. Michaela Coel takes the subject of sexual assault and forces it through the woke lens of racial grievance, framing its central trauma around a black woman sexually assaulted by a white British man. The construction feels so ideologically curated that, unless you traffic in its worldview, its predetermined narrative becomes numbingly flat. A subject as psychologically complicated as sexual assault deserves more than characters seemingly arranged to validate a thesis about race, sex, and power. At No. 18, the New York Times places the show above Chernobyl, one of the most unflinching repudiations of communism ever put to screen. I found the former closer to agitprop dressed in the aesthetics of prestige television.
The larger question is whether Breaking Bad really is the greatest television series of the past quarter-century. A high-school chemistry teacher turned meth cook turned drug kingpin makes for terrific television, and Vince Gilligan engineered suspense and cliffhangers potent enough to keep viewers returning like bona fide meth addicts. Yet its character work never reaches the depth of Mad Men (a show that also established a far richer aesthetic), which the New York Times places at No. 3. Don Draper is a more elusive and compelling creation than Walter White, and Mad Men unfolds like great literature, patiently tracing how ambition, desire, and self-deception reshape its characters over the course of years. Even Better Call Saul, stranded down at No. 27, eventually developed greater emotional complexity than its progenitor.
The Wire at No. 2 is easier to defend. Few series have offered such a panoramic account of American street crime, policing, politics, schools, and institutional decay. And Band of Brothers, somehow marooned at No. 28, remains among the strongest pieces of World War II filmmaking ever made. Its placement below the inconsistent Black Mirror is especially strange. That anthology has produced a few unassailable highs (notably the “White Christmas” episode) but has otherwise too often been hampered by its own pretensions.
The most glaring omission, as National Review’s Dan McLaughlin also highlighted, is 24. Few television shows are so inseparable from the historical moment that produced them. Premiering in November 2001, the series captured the heart and nerve of post-9/11 America much as Dunham’s Girls, a decade later, deftly tapped into the post-recession anxieties and rhythms of urbanite millennials.
The formula occasionally yielded absurdities, but what television thriller hasn’t? House M.D., which itself made the New York Times‘s list, once featured its deranged diagnostician cutting tumors out of his own leg in his bathroom. Compared with that, the absurdities on 24 were practically plausible terrorist antics. Los Angeles seemed perpetually minutes away from catastrophe (those scheming jihadis would weep with joy at what today’s Democrats have wrought), CTU was teeming with traitors, and Jack Bauer survived enough calamities to make Hemingway look soft.
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More importantly, its absence leaves a conspicuous hole in the list’s account of post-9/11 culture. 24 was so compelling precisely because it offered simple answers to profound debates. Can we justify torturing terrorists to save thousands of American lives? Bauer spared us the sanctimonious moralizing. To quote then-candidate Obama, “Yes, we can.”
A list this sprawling is supposed to provoke arguments, and the New York Times has certainly succeeded there. But a canon should also preserve the works that changed how television was made, watched, and discussed. Whatever one thinks of Jack Bauer’s methods, an account of 21st-century television that leaves 24 out has excised one of the medium’s defining chapters.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.