The Decade That Elevated Television

The argument that television has surpassed cinema as the dominant storytelling form of our era is no longer controversial. It is, at this point, a description of something that has already happened. The past decade produced television drama of such ambition, craft, and emotional depth that it has permanently shifted what audiences expect from the medium and what writers, directors, and performers aspire to create within it.

This is not a comprehensive list. It is a selective argument for the shows that represent the decade's highest achievements across different modes of drama: the exploration of power, the transformation of workplace storytelling, the refinement of psychological tension, and the recovery of neglected histories.

"The novel gave us interiority. Cinema gave us spectacle. Television, at its best, gives us both, and the time to make us care about the people caught between them."

Dramas About Power and Collapse

Succession (HBO, 2018-2023)

Succession is the defining drama of the decade. Its subject (the Roy family's internecine war over control of a global media empire) could have been a straightforward satire. Instead, creator Jesse Armstrong and his writers room produced something stranger and more affecting: a tragedy about people so damaged by wealth and power that genuine human connection has become impossible for them, and yet who reach for it constantly. Brian Cox's Logan Roy is one of the great television characters. The final season ranks with the best final seasons in the medium's history.

Chernobyl (HBO, 2019)

Craig Mazin's five-part miniseries about the 1986 nuclear disaster is a masterpiece of controlled dramatic tension. It functions simultaneously as historical reconstruction, institutional critique, and moral fable. The central question (what is the cost of lies?) resonates far beyond its Soviet setting. Jared Harris's performance as Valery Legasov is one of the decade's finest, and Johan Renck's direction creates dread through accumulation rather than conventional horror technique.

The Workplace Reimagined

The Bear (FX, 2022-present)

The Bear arrived in 2022 as a genuine revelation. Its setting (a Chicago beef sandwich shop) is unglamorous by design, but the series uses it to explore grief, family dysfunction, professional obsession, and the specific madness of the restaurant industry with a formal daring that no previous workplace drama had attempted. The second season's single-episode "Fishes," set at a catastrophic family Christmas dinner, is among the best hours of television produced in the decade.

The Americans (FX, 2013-2018)

The Americans is the most criminally underappreciated drama of the decade. Its premise (two KGB sleeper agents living as a married couple in suburban Washington, D.C. during the Reagan era) sounds like a thriller. What the series became over six seasons is something closer to a profound examination of identity, marriage, ideology, and what it costs to live a life that is fundamentally a performance. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys gave career-defining performances that were consistently undersupplied with awards attention.

Genre-Bending Excellence

Severance (Apple TV+, 2022-present)

Severance imagines a world in which a surgical procedure can separate an employee's work consciousness from their personal consciousness, creating two distinct identities sharing one body. Creator Dan Erickson and director Ben Stiller use this premise to examine workplace alienation, corporate culture, identity, and memory with the precision of the best speculative fiction. The visual design (all fluorescent corridors and mid-century corporate furniture) creates a world that feels both familiar and deeply wrong.

Fleabag (BBC/Amazon, 2016-2019)

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's two-season masterpiece redefined the relationship between television character and audience through its use of direct address. Fleabag's asides to camera create an intimacy that feels almost illicit: we know more about her than she knows about herself. The second season, built around a romance with a Catholic priest, achieves something rare in comedy-drama: it is genuinely funny and genuinely heartbreaking in the same moments.

Yellowjackets (Showtime, 2021-present)

Yellowjackets is the decade's most ambitious structural experiment in mainstream television. It intercuts between a 1996 timeline (a girls' soccer team surviving in the wilderness after a plane crash) and a present-day timeline (the survivors as adults, hiding the truth of what happened). The dual timeline generates tension across multiple axes simultaneously, and the ensemble cast (led by Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, and Tawny Cypress) is one of the finest assembled for any drama series.

Hidden Gems That Deserve More Credit

Mindhunter (Netflix, 2017-2019)

David Fincher's procedural about the FBI's early criminal profiling program is methodical, cold, and riveting. Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany as agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench give layered performances in a show that is interested less in solving crimes than in understanding the psychology of those who commit them. Netflix cancelled it after two seasons; the unresolved story remains one of streaming's great losses.

Better Call Saul (AMC, 2015-2022)

The Breaking Bad prequel had no business being as good as it turned out to be. Over six seasons, it became something its predecessor wasn't: a genuine tragedy about a man who could have chosen differently at every turn and consistently didn't. Bob Odenkirk's performance as Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman is one of the great arc performances in television history, and the final season's integration of the Breaking Bad timeline manages the near-impossible task of adding meaning to a story the audience already knew.

Pose (FX, 2018-2021)

Ryan Murphy's drama about the Black and Latino LGBTQ ballroom culture of late 1980s New York is the decade's most important act of television representation. The series cast the largest number of transgender actors in series regular and recurring roles in television history, and it told stories that had been absent from American television entirely. MJ Rodriguez's performance as Blanca is historically significant and emotionally unforgettable.