# The 20 Best TV Series Set in the 1980s

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

*By YPB Team · Published September 8, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-20-best-tv-series-set-in-the-1980s*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

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

Tags: streaming, 80s, tv shows, period