The 15 Best TV Series of the 2020s So Far, Ranked by Ambition

The 2020s were supposed to be the decade television collapsed under its own volume. Instead the ceiling went up. Streaming money reached Seoul, Tokyo and Madrid, prestige drama stopped being a purely American export, and the best half-hour comedies started doing things the hour-long dramas could not.

We ranked these on ambition and execution rather than viewing figures, which is why a Korean survival thriller and a Japanese period epic sit alongside the shows that swept the Emmys. None of the surprises are at the top; they start a few places down, and that is where this list earns its arguments.

1. Succession

Succession turned corporate manoeuvring into Jacobean tragedy and handed it the funniest dialogue on television. Jesse Armstrong’s media dynasty spent its run circling one question — who inherits — and answered it with a final season so controlled it shamed every drama that fumbled its ending. Nothing this decade was better at making you laugh at people you were also watching destroy each other.

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2. Shogun

Shogun is a historical epic told largely in Japanese, with Japanese producers and a Japanese cast, and it swept the Emmys anyway. Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo adapted James Clavell’s novel as something to be understood rather than exoticised, and in doing so they ended the tired argument about whether English-language audiences will read subtitles. They will, when the work is this good.

3. The Bear

The Bear made anxiety into a rhythm. Christopher Storer’s Chicago kitchen drama runs on overlapping shouts and near-misses, then stops dead for a single-take episode — “Review,” the seventh of its first season — that stands as the most technically audacious half-hour of the decade. It is also, quietly, a show about grief wearing the costume of a workplace comedy.

4. Squid Game

Squid Game is the most-watched thing Netflix has ever released, and far angrier about debt and class than its bright playground aesthetic let on. Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote every episode himself, and the fury underneath the pastel sets is what separated it from the disposable imitations that chased it. It rearranged what a worldwide phenomenon is allowed to look like, and where it is allowed to come from.

5. Severance

Severance has the cleanest formal idea on television: split the self at the office door and let the two halves negotiate across a line neither can cross. Dan Erickson’s workplace thriller uses that premise to say something genuinely unsettling about how we survive the jobs we hate, and Ben Stiller’s direction makes corporate beige feel like a crime scene.

6. I May Destroy You

Michaela Coel wrote, co-directed and starred in I May Destroy You, the decade’s hardest and most honest piece of television about consent. She refused every easy resolution the form offered her, holding the story in a state of unresolved reckoning that a lesser drama would have tidied away by the finale. Nothing about it is comfortable, and that is the achievement.

7. The Rehearsal

Nathan Fielder built full-scale replicas of real bars and homes so that people could rehearse the hardest conversations of their lives, then let the experiment metastasise until he was the one losing control on camera. The Rehearsal is part comedy, part social experiment and part confession, and nothing else on television is attempting what it does.

8. Pachinko

Pachinko follows four generations of one Korean family across Korea, Japan and the United States, told in three languages and cut between timelines with a patience almost no modern series risks. Soo Hugh’s adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s novel is the most beautifully made family saga on television, and the rare epic that earns its scale through intimacy rather than spectacle.

9. Better Call Saul

Better Call Saul was a prequel nobody asked for that ended up outclassing its celebrated parent in composition, patience and restraint. Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould turned the slow corruption of a small-time lawyer into something closer to tragedy than crime drama, and its final seasons — which landed inside this decade — are the finest work anyone involved has done.

10. Fleishman Is in Trouble

Fleishman Is in Trouble spends seven episodes trapped inside one man’s grievance before quietly handing the story to the woman he has spent the whole time describing. Taffy Brodesser-Akner adapted her own novel, and the pivot from his version to hers is the best structural trick of the decade — a reminder that whose perspective we are trapped in was always the point.

11. Reservation Dogs

Sterlin Harjo’s Reservation Dogs is an Oklahoma comedy written and directed almost entirely by Indigenous creators, and it is funnier and stranger than its modest reputation ever caught up with. Made with Taika Waititi, it moves from teenage grief to slapstick to genuine mysticism without a seam showing, and it never once explains itself to an outsider’s gaze.

12. The White Lotus

The White Lotus turned the luxury resort holiday into an annual class autopsy. Mike White proved that an anthology can build a durable brand without recycling a single cast member, resetting the location, the guests and the corpse each season while keeping the same acid read on money and the people who have too much of it.

13. Mare of Easttown

Mare of Easttown is a murder mystery that cared far more about its town than its body. The whodunit is almost incidental to the portrait of a fraying Pennsylvania community, and Brad Ingelsby’s scripts gave Kate Winslet a role with no vanity in it whatsoever — a middle-aged detective allowed to be tired, wrong and unglamorous.

14. Baby Reindeer

Richard Gadd adapted his own experience of being stalked and assaulted into Baby Reindeer, seven episodes that refuse to make him sympathetic. It sits in the discomfort television usually engineers away, implicating its own narrator at every turn, and it became a genuine cultural argument precisely because it would not resolve into a clean story of victim and villain.

15. Slow Horses

Slow Horses is the most reliably excellent show on television and the least showy about it: a spy series about failure, staffed by the intelligence service’s rejects. Gary Oldman plays the least glamorous man in London, and the series’ refusal to glamorise anything — the espionage, the office, its own hero — is exactly why it keeps landing. Every season is as good as the last.

Plenty just missed. Andor gave Star Wars an adult political spine; Beef turned a road-rage incident into a study of despair; The Last of Us proved a video-game adaptation could carry real dramatic weight; Hacks kept getting sharper; Ripley reframed a familiar story in luminous black and white; and The Diplomat made procedural talk genuinely tense. Any of them would headline a weaker decade.

The point of a list like this is not to settle anything. The strongest television of the 2020s has come from more places, in more languages and in stranger shapes than the decade’s doom-mongers predicted, and the volume everyone feared turned out to raise the ceiling rather than bury it. The decade is only half over. Argue with the order — that is what it is for.

Tags: drama, television, TV series, streaming, Slow Horses, The Bear, Squid Game, Succession, Better Call Saul, Severance

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