The 25 Best TV Shows of the 2020s So Far, Ranked

More than halfway through, the 2020s have quietly stacked one of the strongest runs in TV history. The prestige era didn’t end when the big cable dramas wrapped, it just changed address, and the definition of “prestige” got wider: workplace comedies with the nerve of thrillers, sci-fi that earns its weirdness, period epics that feel newly minted.

This is our ranking, and it’s opinion, plainly. Every entry had to be great, and it had to be a show we’d recommend pressing play on again, knowing what it costs in evenings. The method, and the hard floor every pick clears, is at the end of the post.

The list

The snubs, before you ask

The second season of everything you loved; the show that peaked in episode six and coasted; the brilliant thing that aired against a juggernaut and vanished. Lists are a snapshot, not a verdict, and the decade still has three years left to rearrange this one.

How to actually work through this list

Don’t binge the list, schedule it. Pick one entry, add it to a watchlist, and check episodes off as you go; the act of tracking turns a vague “I should watch that” into a plan with a next step. That’s exactly the workflow we built into ScreenAtlas: search the title, tap it onto your shelf, and the app remembers which episode is next, even if life interrupts for a month. New to keeping a log? Our guide to tracking every TV show and movie you watch covers the setup in under a minute.

If you want a shorter queue to start tonight, our what-to-watch-tonight method turns this list into a five-minute decision instead of a scroll.

How we picked

These are editorial picks by the ScreenAtlas team, not a poll of users or an algorithm. A show was eligible if any part of its run aired in 2020 or later, and limited series and anthologies count. As a floor, every pick holds a TMDB audience rating of at least 7.0 from 250 or more votes as of October 2026 (each title links to its TMDB page). The order and the score beside each title are our own editorial judgment out of ten, weighing craft, cultural impact and whether the whole run holds up; they are not TMDB ratings.