The 25 Best Television Shows Of The Decade

(This article is part of our Best of the Decade series.)

Last week, the /Film team gathered for a surprisingly intense conversation about the best television shows of the past decade. The one rule: the show had to have premiered between 2010 and 2019 (sorry, Breaking Bad and Mad Men). When the smoke cleared, there were 25 shows remaining, along with five battered and bruised runners-up.

Here are the staff's favorite shows of the past 10 years.

Documentary Now! creators Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Seth Myers and Rhys Thomas (who all hail from Saturday Night Live) have given audiences what is essentially a TV series that acts as a cinephiles version of SNL Digital Shorts. Each half-hour episode of the series is dedicated to sending up a specific, acclaimed documentary. Grey Gardens, The Thin Blue Line, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, The Kid Stays in the Picture and many more have been the inspiration for three seasons of hilarious documentary parodies. Fred Armisen and Bill Hader have starred in many of them, as well as guest stars such as John Mulaney, Maya Rudolph, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Jack Black, Michael Keaton, and many more. You don't even have to see the documentary being lampooned to get laughs from this show, but doing so will help you appreciate the craftsmanship and dedication of directors Rhys Thomas and Alex Buono for meticulously recreating the visual style of each film, right down to the cameras and lenses used. All three seasons are on Netflix right now. Give it a whirl. [Ethan Anderton]

Penn and Teller's Fool Us is the anti-reality television competition series. There is no forced drama from pitting competitors up against each other for call-in viewer votes, there are no judges there to berate a bad performance. Instead, it's a showcase for some of the best talent in the world and despite the lack of any manufactured drama, it's one of the most-watched things in the Summer on its network. In fact, I would credit this show for helping to launch the careers of Piff The Magic Dragon and Shin Lim, both of who now have their own Vegas shows. This show also sparked the magic boom of the 2010s, which is why you're seeing so many magic shows popping up on Netflix these days. Even a couple of magicians finally won America's Got Talent. Magic has become cool again.

The premise of Fool Us is simple: magicians from around the world perform in front of the magician duo Penn & Teller for the chance to open for them during their Las Vegas show. If the hosts can't figure out how they pulled off their trick, they get the gig. But even that premise is bait. Sure, Penn & Teller try to guess how the tricks are done with cleverly worded codes, but it's not really a show about that. That might be why people started watching, but that's not why people continue watch. This is a showcase of great artists performing for great artists. Instead of dramatic critique, we get to hear Penn & Teller explain what made the world-class act we just saw performed so great. It is a reality television show that is a celebration of talent and art. It's honestly the show I look forward to watching the most. [Peter Sciretta]

Created by the writer of Ocean's 11 and overseen by the creator of The Shield, Terriers is a 2010 detective series which was terribly marketed and cancelled after just one season. But that season was pretty close to perfect: it's about two hangdog private investigators working in San Diego who are constantly getting their asses handed to them, but refuse to give up once they're onto a scent. Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James have irresistible chemistry, and the show featured a mysterious season-long arc, crisp beach-noir writing from a fantastic group of writers, and stellar direction from people like Rian Johnson and Adam Arkin. If only more people had watched it... [Ben Pearson]

The favorite animated show for college stoners was never so wholesome, or so emotional. Pendleton Ward's Cartoon Network fantasy series Adventure Time starts off with a simple, episodic premise — Finn the Human and Jake the Dog battle evil and get into various hijinks in the fantastical land of Ooo — before unfolding into one of the trippiest, surprisingly profound pieces of children's entertainment. With an abundance of rich characters that are given sometimes-tragic, sometimes-nonsensical backstories, and a complicated mythology that hints at nuclear devastation, Adventure Time slowly revealed itself to be one of the most ambitious children's shows on TV, frequently playing with format and our emotions. [Hoai-Tran Bui]

Veep creator and expert satirist Armando Ianucci has a way with turning raunchy insults into music, and politics into pitch-perfect comedy. That's because Iannucci understands that politics is inherently stupid — the fate of the country in the hands of a bunch of bumbling, well-spoken idiots. I was working at a political news site in D.C. when I first started watching Veep, Ianucci's hysterical series about ambitious vice president Selina Meyer (a sublime Julia-Louis Dreyfus) as she juggles public and private crises and a dysfunctional relationship with the chief executive. I learned from coworkers who worked on the Hill that Veep is the most accurate representation of D.C. ever put to the screen, because there's no truer depiction of our federal government than as a circus run by incompetent politicos who occasionally stumble into success. Though there is admittedly a lot less swearing. [Hoai-Tran Bui]

True crime experienced an explosion in the 2010s, and 2014's The Jinx was among the most compelling entries in the genre. But "compelling" alone wouldn't be good enough to make this list: HBO's limited series about the eccentric Robert Durst carved itself into the pantheon through detailed interviews with its bizarre subject, a true story that's stranger than fiction, and an all-timer, "holy shit" ending that you have to see (or, more accurately, hear) to believe. Unlike many true crime projects which throw up their hands and can't provide answers about the truth, the implications of this finale had real-world consequences and are still being sorted through today. [Ben Pearson]

Sketch comedy shows are a dime a dozen on Comedy Central, but few have penetrated the zeitgeist of pop culture as successfully as Key & Peele. Created by and starring comedians Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key, the series covers a wide swatch of comedic targets, ranging from film parodies to political satire. But what truly makes Key & Peele so special is their unique perspective on society through the eyes of two black men. The show doesn't rely solely on that perspective, but it undoubtedly helps the duo tap into a side of comedy that we haven't seen since Chappelle's Show, and rarely see on television in general (though thankfully, that's been changing more over the years). There's something for everyone in Key & Peele, and so many of their sketches have gone viral online, quite an achievement in this day and age of too much content online. [Ethan Anderton]

There have been countless movies about spies infiltrating a foreign government, but few have ever done so from the perspective of the enemies of the United States of America. FX's original series The Americans follows Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell as two KGB spies in an arranged marriage who are posing as Americans in suburban Washington, D.C., shortly after Ronald Reagan is elected president. They have children, unaware of their parents' true work. And as time goes on, it becomes harder to carry out their job as they become more comfortable with an American lifestyle, especially as this fake marriage slowly starts to feel like a real one. Unlike shows like 24 or Homeland, this is a slow burn, almost like Mad Men meets the Cold War. With incredible writing, riveting performances, and ever-building tension, this series deserved far more attention from Emmy voters throughout its entire run, and it's absolutely one of the most compelling shows of the past 10 years. [Ethan Anderton]

No other show dominated the 2010s more than Game of Thrones. It captivated the globe, became an international phenomenon on the level of something like Star Wars, and gave us multiple unimpeachable seasons of television. The final two seasons suffered in comparison; it really seemed like the showrunners wanted to just be finished with this gargantuan thing, and it's tough to fully blame them after spending a decade of their lives on it. But despite the divisive ending, the highs on this show were out of this world, and established Game of Thrones as one of the premiere properties in all of pop culture. [Ben Pearson]

Natasha Lyonne (Orange is the New Black) got tired of waiting around for Hollywood to present her with something good, so instead she co-created a show that's great. Lyonne owns every frame in which she appears in Russian Doll, swaggering her way through New York City as a foul-mouthed video game designer who suddenly finds herself reliving the same night over and over again. But this drama series puts an innovative twist on the Groundhog Day formula, and results in an emotionally resonant link between two characters which drives the story through to its moving, memorable conclusion. [Ben Pearson]

At first blush, American Vandal seems to have the paper-thin premise of a bad Saturday Night Live sketch. The Netflix mockumentary series follows an intrepid high school AV club as they launch an investigation of the drawing of penises on dozens of cars in the school parking lot. The school immediately zeroes in on the class burnout (Jimmy Tatro), who aspiring documentarian Peter (Tyler Alvarez) believes to be wrongly accused. American Vandal approaches its absurd subject with a somber gravity, resulting in some gut-busting comedy bits that involve long, serious discussions about ball hairs. But in both of its two seasons, American Vandal transcends its overlong SNL sketch premise when it moves from the gut to the heart — delivering a surprisingly authentic and poignant snapshot of high school in the social media age. [Hoai-Tran Bui]

Breaking the fourth wall, at this point, has become an overused storytelling device — with TV shows or movies flagrantly breaking the invisible barrier between audience and the subject often at a whim. But Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's devastatingly caustic and heartbreaking dark comedy based on her acclaimed one-woman play, doesn't just break the fourth wall, but tears down the concept completely. We're not just the voyeurs of Fleabag's portrayal of a woman's wanton self-destruction, but enablers — the imaginary friends that Waller-Bridge's nameless protagonist winks at as she cuts a self-destructive streak through London to cope with her best friend's death. The camera is her crutch as much as it is her friend, and we find ourselves rooting for Fleabag's bad behavior as much as we scoff at her. It's a sharp, funny, and fresh takedown of the oft-glorified flawed female character, and one that turns the camera at ourselves. [Hoai-Tran Bui]

Stranger Things may rely on nostalgia for the 1980s for some of its appeal, but you can't deny that the series has also done an incredible job of creating an ensemble of characters that audiences have come to embrace and love quite a bit in a short period of time. It's not often that a show with only three seasons under its belt is so revered, but the fanbase for this series is massive, and it's one of Netflix's greatest successes. In fact, it might be the first show Netflix produced that proved it could create original programming that didn't rely on niche demographics. It's easy to call Stranger Things a ripoff of countless movies of the 1980s, but since there have been a lot of movies and TV shows that have tried to lean on nostalgia far less successfully, this series deserves a of credit for pulling off what it has so far. [Ethan Anderton]

Let's just get it out there: Hannibal isn't just the best horror television show of the decade, but possibly the best horror television show all time. Too short-lived to ever disappoint and too ambitious to ever not surprise us, Bryan Fuller's reinvention of the iconic literary and film villain was bloody treat throughout its three seasons, shifting genres and tone like a ballerina gracefully sliding across a gore-soaked stage. I remember the viscera, and how the show pushed the boundaries of what violence can look like on television. I remember the characters, brought to life by an ensemble of actors so damn good at bringing truth and honesty to absurdity. I remember the bravery, the show's trust in the audience to keep up as it laid its traps and waited to spring them. What an experience this was. [Jacob Hall]

I always know I'm in good hands when I sit down to watch a Michael Schur show. The Office veteran, who created Parks and Recreation and co-created Brooklyn Nine-Nine, has a real love and respect for his characters, and below the genre trappings of any project he works on, there's always a resonant message about putting love and kindness into the world. The Good Place is his most ambitious show yet, and it's a miracle that any half-hour network comedy can be this dense, this funny, and this emotional all at the same time. It is – no hyperbole – one of TV's greatest shows from any genre. [Ben Pearson]