# What is the best TV show of the 21st century?

> Prestige dramas, one-season wonders and shows whose finales people are still arguing about.

*By YPB Team · Published August 4, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-tv-show-of-the-21st-century*

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## Current results (0 votes)

1. **The Simpsons**
   Started in 1989 but has spent far more of its run in this century than the last one.
2. **Breaking Bad**
   A chemistry teacher's five-season transformation into a drug kingpin, the default answer to this question.
3. **The Wire**
   David Simon's Baltimore epic, a season-by-season autopsy of an American city.
4. **The Sopranos**
   The mob drama that opened in 1999 and defined prestige television for everything after.
5. **Mad Men**
   Don Draper's advertising decade, told as a slow study of reinvention and self-deceit.
6. **Game of Thrones**
   Fantasy at unprecedented scale, and the biggest shared TV event of the 2010s.
7. **Succession**
   A media dynasty's children circling their father, written as comedy and played as tragedy.
8. **Better Call Saul**
   The prequel that turned a joke lawyer into one of TV's most complete character studies.
9. **The Office**
   The American mockumentary that reshaped sitcom comedy and never left streaming charts.
10. **Band of Brothers**
   The Spielberg and Hanks miniseries following Easy Company from training to Germany.
11. **Fleabag**
   Two seasons of fourth-wall-breaking grief and comedy from Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
12. **Chernobyl**
   A five-part reconstruction of the 1986 disaster and the lies around it.
13. **Lost**
   The island mystery that invented modern week-to-week internet theorizing.
14. **Atlanta**
   Donald Glover's surreal, genre-hopping portrait of ambition and race in the rap world.
15. **Stranger Things**
   Netflix's 80s-soaked monster saga and its biggest global word-of-mouth hit.

Tags: 2000s, tv shows, comedy, 2010s