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Running Press

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First Edition: October 2021

Published by Running Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Running Press name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

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Cover design by Yerania Sanchez. Interior design by Alex Camlin.

Infographics pages by Yerania Sanchez (here, here, here), Yasmin Tayag (here), Courtney Kawata (here, here, here), and Alex Camlin (here, here, here)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021935013

ISBNs: 978-0-7624-7366-3 (hardcover), 978-0-7624-7365-6 (ebook)

Photo Credits: Here, here, here, here (left), here (left), here (right), here, here, here, here, here (top): Everett Collection. Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (right), here (right), here (left), here, here, here (left), here, here, here, here, here, here (left and bottom right), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (bottom), here, here: Photofest. Here (background), here (background): Getty Images. Here (right): Brian Bowen Smith/SHOWTIME. Copyright © 2017 Showtime Networks Inc. Here: Courtesy of Amazon Studios/Sony Pictures Television. Here (top right), here: Courtesy of Netflix. Here: Christine Ramage/AMC Networks.

E3-20240816-JV-PC-COR

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION
Joel Meares, Editor-in-Chief, Rotten Tomatoes

CLASSICS THAT MADE THE MOLDS (AND THOSE THAT BROKE THEM)

I Love Lucy

Alfred Hitchcock Presents / The Alfred Hitchcock Hour

Perry Mason

The Twilight Zone

Bewitched

Police Squad!

Get Smart

Batman

Columbo

The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Binge Battle: Dallas vs Dynasty

M*A*S*H

Happy Days

Cheers

Murder, She Wrote

Those Were the Days

The Golden Girls

COMMERCIAL BREAK Bingeing Before the Binge

PRIMETIME PROFESSIONALS: PROCEDURALS THAT BROUGHT A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA TO WORK

Hill Street Blues

Miami Vice

L.A. Law

NYPD Blue

ER

Murder One

The Law & Order Case Files

The West Wing

The Wire

House

Justified

Binge Battle: CSI vs NCIS

The Good Wife and The Good Fight

Veronica Mars

Grey’s Anatomy

Rake

Sherlock

Suits

American Crime

American Crime Story

COMMERCIAL BREAK Five Ways HBO Changed TV Forever

TONY, WALT, DON, AND THE ANTIHEROES WE LOVED AND HATED

Oz

The Sopranos

The Shield

Deadwood

Dexter

Mad Men

Breaking Bad

Sons of Anarchy

The Americans

Hero or Antihero?

Nurse Jackie

House of Cards

Hannibal

Orange Is the New Black

Peaky Blinders

Power

Better Call Saul

Ozark

Barry

COMMERCIAL BREAK Know Your Very Special Episodes

THE BIGGEST LOLs: GAME-CHANGING SITCOMS AND THE KINGS AND QUEENS OF CRINGE

Murphy Brown

Seinfeld

Saturday Night Live

Beyond SNL

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

The Larry Sanders Show

Absolutely Fabulous

Friends

Sex and the City

Will & Grace

Spaced

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Scrubs

Arrested Development

Binge Battle: The Thick of It vs Veep

The Comeback

Flight of the Conchords

Community

30 Rock

Modern Family

Parks and Recreation

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Broad City

black-ish

Silicon Valley

Binge Battle: The Office (UK) vs The Office (US)

Catastrophe

Fresh Off the Boat

Master of None

Schitt’s Creek

Superstore

Insecure

Atlanta

Better Things

Fleabag

The Good Place

Ramy

One Day at a Time

What We Do in the Shadows

Pen15

Ted Lasso

COMMERCIAL BREAK The Science of Binge Watching

DRAMAS WE CAN’T. STOP. WATCHING.

Freaks and Geeks

Gilmore Girls

Queer As Folk

Six Feet Under

Desperate Housewives

The L Word

Friday Night Lights

The Tudors

In Treatment

Downton Abbey

Back to School: The Best in Class for TV’s Teen Dramas

Pose

Girls

Scandal

Vikings

Jane the Virgin

Transparent

Binge Battle: Shameless (UK) vs Shameless (US)

Empire

The Crown

This Is Us

Queen Sugar

Underground

Claws

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Succession

Vida

David Makes Man

Euphoria

You

COMMERCIAL BREAK Five Ways Netflix Changed TV Forever

GENRE GROWS UP: NEXT-LEVEL HORROR, HEROES, SCI-FI, AND FANTASY

Doctor Who

The X-Files

Xena: Warrior Princess

Alias

Firefly

Battlestar Galactica

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Supernatural

Pushing Daisies

Fringe

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Choosing the Right Arrowverse Show for You

Misfits

The Walking Dead

Game of Thrones

American Horror Story

Watchmen

The Expanse

Bates Motel

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

The 100

Outlander

The Magicians

Star Trek Starter Kit: Pick Your Starfleet Ship

The Boys

Stranger Things

The Haunting of Hill House

The Handmaid’s Tale

The Terror

The Mandalorian

The Witcher

WandaVision

COMMERCIAL BREAK Know Your TV Superproducers

REAL(ISH) WORLDS: COMPETITIONS AND DOCUSERIES THAT CAPTURED THE ZEITGEIST (AND, YES, STILL HOLD UP)

The Real World

Survivor

Jackass

American Idol

Planet Earth

Binge Battle: Queer Eye (2003) vs Queer Eye (2018)

RuPaul’s Drag Race

The Bachelor and The Bachelorette

Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown

The Great British Baking Show

Nathan for You

Choose Your Reality TV Crew

The Jinx

Making a Murderer

Wild Wild Country

The Last Dance

Tiger King

COMMERCIAL BREAK Mini Milestones

ANIMATION THAT DEMANDS TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY

Daria

South Park

Futurama

SpongeBob SquarePants

The Venture Bros.

Batman: The Animated Series

American Dad!

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Robot Chicken

The Clone Wars

Binge Battle: The Simpsons vs Family Guy

The Boondocks

Archer

Adventure Time

Bob’s Burgers

Big Mouth

BoJack Horseman

Tuca and Bertie

Undone

Rick & Morty

COMMERCIAL BREAK From Playing Cards to #Hashtags

MYSTERIES AND MINDF—KS: THE WEIRD, WONDERFUL, AND TOTALLY PERPLEXING

Twin Peaks

Lost

Broadchurch

Top of the Lake

Fargo

The Leftovers

Happy Valley

True Detective

Mr. Robot

Sense8

Happy!

The OA

The Sinner

Counterpart

Killing Eve

Mindhunter

The Outsider

Russian Doll

Homecoming

COMMERCIAL BREAK Thoughts on the Future of TV (From Those Who Make It)

TV GOES GLOBAL: SHOWS THAT CROSSED BORDERS IN THE STREAMING AGE

The Killing (Denmark)

Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories (Japan)

Borgen (Denmark)

Gran Hotel (Spain)

Gomorrah (Italy)

The Bridge (Sweden/Denmark)

Pick Your Border

Money Heist (Spain)

The Returned (France)

Dark (Netherlands)

Deutschland 83, Deutschland 86, Deutschland 89 (Germany)

Babylon Berlin (Germany)

Elite (Spain)

My Brilliant Friend (Italy/USA)

Giri / Haji (Japan/UK)

Kingdom (South Korea)

Want More K-Drama?

GLOSSARY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

DISCOVER MORE

CONTRIBUTORS

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Introduction

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment our era of the “binge-watch” officially dawned. Was it with the advent of the DVR, a once magical-seeming technology that suddenly allowed us to gorge several saved-up episodes in a single endorphin-saturated viewing? Or was it with the arrival of the DVD box set, which shrank the time between cliff-hangers from a week to however long it took you to put in the next disc? Perhaps it began even earlier than that, flickering to life in the form of special double episodes and Saturday morning series marathons.

The very dawn of the binge era may be hard to pin down, but we can point to the precise moment we were officially living in it. Or, at the very least, the precise year.

In 2013, Netflix’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, told GQ magazine that the goal of his company was “to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” It was a bold statement, especially considering that Netflix had only just the year before launched its first original series, Lillyhammer, largely to a collective shrug, and faced huge skepticism about its move from DVD-mailer to online streaming service. But then came House of Cards in February, followed by Orange Is the New Black and the rebooted Arrested Development. Like Lillyhammer, all episodes of those series were available at once. Unlike Lillyhammer, the series were huge hits.

People seemed to take to this idea of “bingeing.” By October of that year, Netflix hit 40 million subscribers, surpassing HBO; today, it has more than 200 million subscribers worldwide.

Another little bit of history was being made in 2013, if we may be so bold. That September, after 15 years of focusing only on movies, we at Rotten Tomatoes began to publish Tomatometer and Audience Scores for TV shows. That meant welcoming some of the best TV journalists in the world into our pool of Tomatometer-approved critics, collecting their Fresh and Rotten reviews, and generating scores for series, seasons, and episodes of television.

In addition to sourcing reviews for every new scripted show released—a huge task, considering that the number of original scripted series on US TV soared past 500 in 2019 alone—our team of review “curators” worked to find reviews for series from as early as the 1940s and ’50s. Today we’re proud to offer the most comprehensive collection of TV criticism available anywhere, one where you can see just how much critics loved the very first season of I Love Lucy—well, liked: Desi and Lucy failed to amuse the The Washington Star—and just how much they hated the very last season of Game of Thrones, Rotten at 55% on the Tomatometer as we go to print.

The move into TV was core to our central mission as a brand, which we’ve worked toward since we first came online back in 1998: to help you discover the best things to watch, period. And with TV and streaming proving with every grizzled antihero and epic space saga to be just as good as anything on the big screen—arguably better—and so much of it now to choose from, we wanted to help potentially overwhelmed viewers sort the amazing from the merely meh, the Fresh from the Rotten.

Which is where this book, The Ultimate Binge Guide, comes in. Think of it as eight years’ work, covering seven decades of television, so you can choose something to watch in minutes. Of course, we’d encourage you to stick with it a little longer than that, and to return when the credits roll on the final episode of the latest great binge you discovered within. Because we haven’t just assembled what we consider the 296 most binge-worthy shows of all time, we’ve dug into what makes them so compulsively watchable, widely beloved, and, in some cases, criminally underrated.

In these pages you’ll learn about the shows that shaped TV as we know it today: series that established formulas and series that bent them brilliantly to their will; showrunners who brought a cinematic quality and new ways of telling stories to the small screen; formidable fresh talents who turned genres on their heads; and shows whose cultural impact was so mammoth they changed the way we think and talk. (For the record, I’m a Miranda… and I think I know a tad more than Jon Snow.)

Each had to clear a high bar for entry: they had to be not just good, they had to be Can’t stop watching, Screw it I’m calling it an all-nighter, Where did my weekend just go? binges.

We organized the book into 10 chapters that focus both on specific genres and eras of TV and streaming. You will find an epic section on comedy—seriously, it’s huge—and a chapter devoted to sophisticated sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and superhero TV. There’s a collection of the antihero-driven series, developed as cable networks and streamers chased HBO’s Sopranos success, and a tribute to animated shows that respected—and challenged—their audiences, no matter how old they were.

We write a lot about some shows. Want to know why It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is the longest-running sitcom on American TV? We’ve got a couple of pages on that. And we write much less about others, because, well, hasn’t everything already been said about the show about nothing? (OK, we find a teensy bit more to say.) And we feature several “binge battles” along the way, settling the score on some heated, not-quite-settled TV debates, like which version of The Office is better—the UK’s or America’s?—by Tomatometer, Audience Score, and other categories.

While this guide is no academic history of TV as technology or art form—we’re fans at Rotten Tomatoes, not professors—our chapters do trace evolutions in small-screen storytelling and tap into many of the defining moments that led us to the binge era. Crucially, they also chart the change in the diversity of the faces we see on our TV screens, and the backgrounds of those in the writers’ rooms and sitting in the directors’ chairs. That change has not been dramatic enough, but it has enriched the quality and range of stories being told on TV more than any technological development.

To help you follow the path from some of the earliest network classics of chapter 1 to our final chapter on foreign-language series now accessible across the planet, we’ve peppered the book with infographics, essays, and even a comic strip, all of which illustrate the evolution of TV technology, fandom, and our viewing habits. We even have a few pages on how Netflix did exactly what Mr. Sarandos said it would back in 2013—and then some—changing TV forever.

Just as there are a few boxes to check before you start a good binge—got your snacks ready and a good excuse for coming in late tomorrow?—there are a few things to note before diving into our Ultimate Binge Guide. The first is that at Rotten Tomatoes, we have Tomatometer and Audience Scores for TV shows at the series, season, and episode level. The Tomatometer score you see with each entry in this book is the overall series Tomatometer score—which averages out a show’s season scores—unless otherwise noted. Ditto for the Audience Scores. If there isn’t a score for a show, it just means not enough Tomatometer-approved critics have reviewed the title to generate one, or not enough users have left a rating for the Audience Score. (Confused? Or just want more details on how our scores work and definitions of some of the Rotten Tomatoes and TV industry terms used in this book? Check out our glossary here.)

The second thing to note is that things change. That applies to our scores, which shift as new reviews and ratings are added. So if you notice that a score in this book is different from what you see on our site, it’s because more reviews were added to that title since we went to print. And it also applies to where you can watch certain shows. Each entry in this book includes the original network, cable station, or streaming service on which the series first aired—with the original overseas network noted if applicable. But with rights issues and streamers scrambling to buy up popular series, be sure to check out rottentomatoes.com for the most current info on where to access something you want to watch.

You might want to go to the website anyway. Or follow us on our social channels. Or, hey, check us out on your TV—we have our own streaming channel, too, and we think you’ll find it pretty Fresh. Our dedication to covering television and streaming has only expanded since 2013. Along with guides to the best-rated shows on every streaming service out there—as well as hidden gems to discover on them—we produce handy, bite-sized video binge guides and oral histories of some of your favorite series, and go deep on the creative process of the showrunners behind some of the most groundbreaking new shows being produced.

Also, the website is where you’ll find my favorite thing to read—and the thing that, frankly, Rotten Tomatoes wouldn’t exist without: reviews. Behind every score you read in this book is a battalion of written and spoken reviews from professional critics and fans alike, all packed with thoughtful insights to help you choose what to watch and add meaningful context to the thing you are watching.

The story told in these pages brings us to 2021, but the evolution is ongoing. Technology is constantly changing, new voices are telling new types of stories, and the line between TV and cinema is blurrier than ever.

These are exciting times and we’re glad to be bingeing through them with you.

—Joel Meares Editor-in-Chief, Rotten Tomatoes