Some TV shows are so perfect from start to finish that they demand more than a single viewing. A series like Breaking Bad plays great on the first watch, but by taking in the plot and being surprised by all the twists and turns, you’ve only just scratched the surface of what it has to offer.
When you rewatch a show like Twin Peaks or Mad Men or The Wire, you spot foreshadowing and visual symbolism and little character moments that you missed the first time around. From Seinfeld to Six Feet Under, some shows are so perfect that you need to watch them twice.
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a spot-on satire of the cutthroat tech industry, but it’s also just a great ensemble sitcom. There’s no dead weight in the cast, their characters are all clearly defined, and they have an endlessly hilarious dynamic. Silicon Valley is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of success — coming up with a game-changing invention is just the beginning of Richard Hendricks’ problems.
Atlanta
Donald Glover’s Atlanta started out as a surreal little comedy depicting the hip-hop scene as a bizarre world of its own, but it quickly evolved into something more unique and profound. It had standalone episodes parodying Get Out and It Follows, and it spent a whole season touring European cities. Atlanta feels more like a short story collection than a typical TV show.
Chernobyl
Craig Mazin’s dramatization of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster captures the terror of the fallout so effectively that it’s scarier than any horror series. It chronicles the immediate aftermath of the explosion through the eyes of the people affected by it, and it shows the government’s attempts to cover it up through the eyes of the one man who’s willing to stand up for the truth.
Fleabag
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s crowning artistic achievement is her fourth-wall-breaking pitch-black comedy Fleabag. Fleabag is searingly honest and brutally frank in its portrayal of an angry, selfish, yet endearing young woman navigating the modern world. Fleabag is a perfect show from start to finish. It’s a keenly observed character study, and it doesn’t have a single bad episode.
Succession
With the razor-sharp writing of Succession, Jesse Armstrong pulled off the magic trick of making regular people empathize with billionaires. The Roys are all terrible people, but their incredible actors bring real depth and vulnerability and humanity to show that, deep down, they’re really just broken people. Succession has more laughs than the average sitcom, but it’s also a sobering drama humanizing the ruling class.
Cowboy Bebop
Cowboy Bebop is the gateway anime that introduced a lot of western audiences to the wonders of Japanese animation. It’s a curious mix of genres, blending hard sci-fi with a moody neo-noir and a gritty, bloody western. This dazzling, thought-provoking, fiendishly cool tale of intergalactic gunslingers chasing their bounties across the cosmos is a true TV masterpiece with succinct storytelling and stunning visuals.
Derry Girls
Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls is a perfect sitcom. The characters are all distinctively defined, and they’re recognizable as people we all know. The dialogue has a Seinfeldian wit and the storytelling deftly weaves comic absurdity into relatable situations and builds to a hilariously ironic twist in every episode.
But it’s also one of the best cinematic chronicles of The Troubles, shown through the innocent eyes of teenagers who were born into this conflict. Derry Girls plays like a prototypical sitcom (and one of the best ever made), but there are always soldiers and bomb threats and Orange walks in the background.
Six Feet Under
Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under is a bleakly funny, quietly devastating look into a family-run funeral home. As the dysfunctional Fishers try to reconnect in the wake of their patriarch’s untimely demise, they spend their days commemorating the dead and reckoning with their own mortality. It’s a morbid examination of the inevitability of death, but it’s also a touching celebration of life.
Dark
Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese’s Dark is one of the most devilishly complex sci-fi shows ever made, but it’s also one of the most profound and deeply emotional. It introduces us to a sprawling ensemble of colorful small-town characters, then it spreads them all across multiple timelines, ranging from the distant past to the post-apocalyptic future.
Better Call Saul
Spinoffs rarely live up to their classic predecessors, but Better Call Saul was the perfect follow-up to Breaking Bad. It tells another heartbreaking tale of a broken man’s moral downfall, but it focuses less on action, so it can go even deeper into the character study. Saul Goodman was conceived as comic relief, but he proved to be one of the most fascinating, three-dimensional characters ever created.
Better Call Saul gets off to a slow start in its first season, but it carefully ratchets up the tension from season to season, gradually building to some of the most exhilarating payoffs in TV history. The series expertly charts wayward attorney Jimmy McGill’s transformation into a *criminal* lawyer putting on a full-time clown show, and doesn’t hit a single false note along the way.
