The 20 Best TV Series Set in the 1980s

By YPB TeamSep 8

Some of these were filmed while the decade was happening; the rest rebuilt it later out of soundtracks and hairspray. Both kinds count here.

1
Chernobyl
HBO and Sky's five-part account of the April 1986 reactor disaster and the people sent to contain it.
1000pts
2
Freaks and Geeks
The single-season NBC comedy set in a Michigan high school across the 1980-81 school year.
700pts
3
Cheers
The Boston bar sitcom that ran the length of the decade and made its regulars household names.
666pts
4
The Americans
FX's Cold War drama about two KGB officers posing as an ordinary Virginia couple in Reagan-era Washington.
643pts
5
Narcos
Netflix's chronicle of Pablo Escobar's Medellín cartel and the agents hunting him through the 1980s.
577pts
6
Dallas
The CBS oil-dynasty soap whose J.R. Ewing cliffhanger was the decade's biggest television event.
577pts
7
Red Oaks
Amazon's comedy about a college student working the summer of 1985 at a New Jersey country club.
576pts
8
Physical
Apple TV+'s San Diego comedy-drama about a housewife who builds an empire out of aerobics videos.
500pts
9
Miami Vice
The NBC crime series that defined the decade's look while it was still happening, pastel suits and all.
500pts
10
It's a Sin
Russell T Davies's Channel 4 drama following a group of friends in London from 1981 through the AIDS crisis.
409pts
11
This Is England '86
Shane Meadows's Channel 4 continuation of his film, following the same Midlands friends through 1986.
409pts
12
Stranger Things
Netflix's Hawkins, Indiana horror saga, set between 1983 and 1987 and built out of everything the decade watched.
409pts
13
The Goldbergs
ABC's sitcom set in a suburban Pennsylvania household during what it calls nineteen-eighty-something.
409pts
14
Deutschland 83
The German spy series that sends an East German soldier undercover into the West Germany of 1983.
409pts
15
Pose
Ryan Murphy's FX drama opening in the 1987 New York ballroom scene.
409pts
16
Mindhunter
David Fincher's Netflix series about the FBI agents who invented criminal profiling in the late 1970s and 1980s.
300pts
17
GLOW
The Netflix comedy-drama about a women's wrestling promotion scraping together a show in 1985 Los Angeles.
300pts
18
Family Ties
The NBC sitcom that put a Reagan-worshipping teenager in a house of former hippies.
300pts
19
Halt and Catch Fire
AMC's drama about the personal-computer boom, starting in the Texas Silicon Prairie of 1983.
167pts
20
Everybody Hates Chris
The CW sitcom narrated by Chris Rock, set in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant between 1982 and 1987.
167pts