It’s a pretty impressive list to be fair.
Putting together a ‘best of all time’ list in any field or category is an often thankless exercise because it is guaranteed to attract controversy, criticism and in many cases, ridicule.
The best thing about such lists, however, is the debate that is created as a result and there is likely to be plenty of discussion about the top ten American TV shows of all time listed in a new book by two renowned TV critics in the US.
The book by Alan Sepinwall (HitFix) and Matt Zoller Seitz (New York Magazine), simply titled TV (The Book) actually ranks the 100 best American TV shows of all time, but we know that your time is at a premium so we’ve narrowed it down to the top ten below.
Sepinwall and Zoller Seitz didn’t merely determine the rankings off the top of their heads; they gave it a lot of thought.
They ranked the shows using six different categories – innovation, influence, consistency, performance, storytelling, and peak (how great the show was at its best) – and penned essays about every single one of them to explain why they made the cut.
Six of the shows on the list also made a top ten published by Rolling Stone recently; are there any glaring omissions that immediately come to mind?
TV (The Book): The top 10 American TV shows of all time
- The Simpsons
- The Sopranos
- The Wire
- Cheers
- Breaking Bad
- Mad Men
- Seinfeld
- I Love Lucy
- Deadwood
- All in the Family
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