Best tv series of all time lists are everywhere, and almost none of them agree with each other — but a handful of shows keep appearing on nearly every serious ranking, across critics’ polls, audience votes, and two decades of “greatest ever” debate. This is DubaiPress’s own attempt at a definitive answer: a global, genre-agnostic top 10 built on ratings, cultural impact, and staying power, not a single week’s trending chart or one critic’s personal taste.
If you’re looking for something more specific — the best Arabic series, the best K-dramas, or what’s worth watching on a particular streaming platform — this page also works as a hub linking out to DubaiPress’s genre and platform guides, listed near the bottom. This particular ranking deliberately stays universal rather than genre-specific, so you won’t find sitcoms, anime, mini-series, or region-specific picks here; those each get, or will get, their own dedicated ranking elsewhere on the site.
Key takeaways
- This ranking of the best tv series of all time weighs three factors roughly equally: aggregate ratings, cultural impact beyond the show itself, and whether a series’ reputation has actually held up over time.
- Breaking Bad and The Wire top most critics’ all-time lists for a reason: both are frequently credited as the moment prestige television matched or surpassed cinema in ambition, and both still rank near the very top of IMDb’s own all-time chart years after ending.
- This list intentionally excludes sitcoms, anime, limited/mini-series, and region-specific dramas (Arabic, Turkish, Korean) — each of those has its own dedicated best-of guide, linked further down this page where one already exists.
- Five honorable mentions (11–15) follow the top 10 for anyone whose personal ranking runs deeper than ten shows, plus a full FAQ addressing the shows this list deliberately left out.
Ranking Criteria
Any serious ranking of the best TV series of all time needs clear criteria rather than gut feeling. This list uses three roughly equal factors: ratings, cultural impact, and longevity. Ratings considered aggregate critic and audience scores from IMDb’s own Top 250 TV chart, Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. Cultural impact looked at whether a series influenced television, entered everyday language, or remained widely referenced, supported by Rotten Tomatoes’ fan-voted retrospective. Longevity focused on whether a show’s reputation has remained strong over time rather than depending on short-term hype.
Shows that are usually classified as sitcoms, anime, limited series, or region-specific dramas were deliberately left off this specific list, even where they’d otherwise clear every one of the three bars above — not because they’re lesser television, but because each of those categories gets, or is intended to eventually get, a dedicated and deeper ranking of its own elsewhere on this site rather than a token appearance squeezed into a universal list.
The Top 10 Best TV Series of All Time
In order, the ten shows that came closest to clearing all three of the criteria above at once:
1. Breaking Bad
A high-school chemistry teacher’s slow transformation into a feared drug kingpin remains the reference point for “prestige TV” nearly two decades after it premiered. Its writing, character arcs and visual language influenced almost every prestige drama that followed it, and it’s routinely ranked at or near the very top of critics’ all-time lists as well as IMDb’s own user-voted chart, where it has held one of the highest ratings of any television series ever recorded.
2. The Wire
Baltimore’s drug trade, police force, schools, docks and city hall, all treated with the same patient, journalistic depth across five seasons. It was never a ratings hit during its original run and never won a major award while it aired, but its reputation has only grown in the years since — it’s now widely considered by critics to be the single most influential piece of American television ever made, a claim that’s aged remarkably well given how many later shows borrowed its structure.
3. The Sopranos
The show that arguably started the entire prestige-TV era single-handedly. Tony Soprano’s therapy sessions and mob business rewired what a television drama was allowed to be about — morally compromised, psychologically interior, unresolved — and its famously ambiguous ending is still argued over online more than 15 years after it aired.
4. Game of Thrones
For most of its eight-season run, the single biggest cultural phenomenon on television anywhere in the world, turning a fantasy epic into genuine mainstream event viewing across dozens of countries simultaneously. Its final season remains one of the most divisive in TV history, but its first six seasons in particular are still routinely cited as some of the most ambitious, expensive, and technically accomplished television ever produced.
5. Better Call Saul
A rare prequel that’s frequently argued to be as good as, or genuinely better than, the show it spun off from — an almost unheard-of feat for a prequel series. Its slow-burn character work tracing Jimmy McGill’s transformation into Saul Goodman earned some of the strongest critical scores of any series on this entire list, and a devoted following that grew steadily rather than shrinking as it went on.
6. The Crown
A lavishly produced dramatization of the British royal family across seven decades, notable for recasting its entire ensemble cast every two seasons to track the passage of time — an unusual structural gamble that paid off in sustained critical acclaim across all six seasons rather than the usual mid-run fatigue long-running dramas tend to suffer.
7. Succession
A media dynasty’s boardroom and family power struggles, played simultaneously as Shakespearean tragedy and pitch-black comedy. Its dialogue became a genuine internet phenomenon in its own right, spawning endless quote-tweets and memes, and it swept award ceremonies across its entire four-season run, ending on its own terms rather than being cancelled or dragged out.
8. Stranger Things
A love letter to 1980s genre cinema that became one of the most-watched series in Netflix’s entire history, credited with reviving mainstream interest in synth soundtracks, retro aesthetics and small-town supernatural mysteries all at once. It’s also one of the very few shows on this list still airing new seasons as of writing, which makes its inclusion here a bet that its legacy holds regardless of how the ending lands.
9. Mad Men
A meticulous, obsessively researched recreation of 1960s Madison Avenue advertising, prized for its visual precision and slow, novelistic pacing rather than plot twists or cliffhangers. It’s frequently credited with proving that even a streaming-era audience would sit patiently with a genuinely slow-burn character drama, paving the way for a wave of similarly patient prestige dramas afterward.
10. Lost
A plane crash on a mysterious island turned into one of the most-discussed puzzle-box shows ever made, generating message-board theorizing on a scale that predates most of what we’d now recognize as “online fandom.” Its widely debated ending remains one of the most argued-about in television history — and the fact that people are still arguing about it years later is itself a kind of longevity most shows never achieve.
Honorable Mentions (11–15)
Five more shows that came close enough to the top 10 that leaving them off entirely felt wrong:
- Fargo — an anthology crime series that reinvents its entire cast, setting and time period each season while somehow keeping the same dark, absurdist tone running underneath all of them.
- Twin Peaks — the surreal small-town mystery series that arguably invented the modern “prestige drama built around a central mystery” template decades before that became a recognizable genre in its own right.
- The X-Files — the conspiracy procedural that helped define 1990s genre television, ran for nine original seasons, and still has a devoted following watching and rewatching it today.
- House — the medical-mystery format built almost entirely around a single central performance, syndicated relentlessly and still rewatched for years after the show itself ended.
- Battlestar Galactica — a science-fiction reboot taken seriously enough by critics and academics alike to be cited in genuine academic and even military discussions of the political and ethical themes it explored.
Best by Category
Prefer something more specific than an all-time, all-genre ranking? These guides go deeper into individual genres and regions than a universal top 10 ever could:
- Best Arabic Series to Watch in 2026
- Best Turkish Series to Watch in 2026
- Best Anime Series to Watch in 2026
- The 10 Best Sitcoms of All Time
- Best Thriller Series to Watch Right Now
- Best Mini-Series to Watch — guide not yet published on DubaiPress.
- Best KDramas to Watch
Best by Platform
Looking for what’s actually worth watching on one specific streaming service rather than across all of them? These platform guides are the place to start:
- Best Series on Netflix Right Now — guide not yet published on DubaiPress (a separate “Best Movies on Netflix Right Now” guide exists, but covers films, not series).
- Best Shows on HBO Max
- Best Series on Apple TV+ — guide not yet published on DubaiPress.
- Best Series on Amazon Prime Video — guide not yet published on DubaiPress.
What is the best tv series of all time?
By critical consensus, cultural impact and staying power, Breaking Bad and The Wire are the two shows most frequently cited as the best tv series of all time, with The Sopranos close behind as the show that arguably started the entire prestige-TV era on its own.
What is the best tv series ever according to critics specifically?
Critics' lists vary from publication to publication, but Breaking Bad, The Wire and The Sopranos appear on nearly every major “best tv series ever” ranking published in the last decade, including IMDb's own long-running Top 250 TV chart.
Why isn't [a popular sitcom or anime] on this list?
This ranking deliberately excludes sitcoms, anime, limited/mini-series and region-specific dramas, since each of those categories has, or will have, its own dedicated and deeper ranking elsewhere on this site — see the “Best by Category” section above for what's already live.
What are the best tv series of all time available on Netflix specifically?
Stranger Things is the only title from this all-time top 10 that's a Netflix original specifically; for a broader, platform-specific ranking, see the “Best by Platform” section above once that dedicated guide is published.
Is this ranking based only on IMDb ratings?
No. IMDb's Top 250 TV chart was one input among several, alongside Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores and a separate judgment of cultural impact and long-term staying power — see the Ranking Criteria section above for the full methodology.
