Bob’s Burgers
It took a season to get going but Loren Bouchard’s animated sitcom about the family behind a New Jersey burger joint has become one of television’s enduring pleasures. The Belcher clan are a wonderful mix of characters, driving a winning sense of humour that eschews pop-culture references for a depiction of the everyday that is charmingly plausible.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
The original slay queen, Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Geller) is a Californian high school student chosen to battle the forces of evil. It’s the first of many inspired mash-ups in this deeply influential supernatural adventure, which shines as a tale of feminist empowerment, a goofy serial, and a homage to friendship powered by rat-a-tat dialogue.

Desperate Housewives
Is it a soap opera or a satire of a soap opera? Marc Cherry’s blockbuster comedy about the many intrigues surrounding a group of neighbouring married women was both and much more. Upending how network television depicted wives, life on Wisteria Lane was wild, insightful, and given to almighty twists.

Homeland
Episodic television has rarely seen a performance as fierce and finely judged as the one Claire Danes delivers in this spy drama, playing an obsessive CIA agent with bipolar disorder. The early seasons, with Damian Lewis as a possible foe hiding in plain sight, are a sinewy two-hander, before Danes’ Carrie Mathison becomes the focus of a taut, globe-trotting study of betrayal and sacrifice.

How I Met Your Mother
If you crave the reassuring familiarity of a multi-camera studio sitcom, the nine seasons of this Hollywood comedy about the loves and laughs of a group of (initially) 20somethings will hit the spot. The punchlines are sharp but the casting is perfect: Jason Segel, Cobie Smulders, Alyson Hannigan, and a fearless Neil Patrick Harris shine.

Loki
The one television spin-off of Marvel’s movie blockbusters that mattered follows the titular brother of Thor, Tom Hiddleston’s capricious, arrogant Loki, who finds himself caught up with the agency regulating time itself and its representative, Owen Wilson’s laconic investigator. The unlikely duo’s double act is the show’s selling-point, a give and take that is verbally dexterous and emotionally primed.

Lost
The network drama that didn’t so much kick the door in for grandiose ambitions as knock the entire house down, the 121 episodes of this science-fiction laced epic gave us smoke monsters, temporal shifts, labyrinthine conspiracies and a handful of finely revealed characters. The mysterious island they were trapped on was a puzzle box of vast possibility, somehow kept in motion through six seasons.

Mrs America
Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, and Uzo Aduba headline an exemplary cast in this historic drama about the 1970s battle in America between second wave feminists and the conservative women who opposed them. This is a vivid, telling recreation, with depictions of real-life figures that are anything but textbook – these public and private conflicts are both nuanced and prescient.

The Muppet Show
As the oldest show on this list – it ran between 1976 and 1981 – there are certainly dips in Jim Henson’s ground-breaking reinvention of the variety show, but Kermit, Miss Piggy, and their iconic fellow hand puppets thoroughly transcend the era. The best guests gave the backstage absurdity an artful, idiosyncratic charge, with guests like Elton John, Gilda Radner, and John Cleese.

NYPD Blue
Controversial when it debuted in 1993, Steven Bochco and David Milch’s police procedural about a fictional Manhattan precinct raised the bar for the cop drama with intertwining storylines, pungent dialogue, and reflections on trauma. David Caruso ducked out after one season, but the pairing of Jimmy Smits and Dennis Franz gave the show a memorable core that carried it to classic status.

One Mississippi
Debuting in 2015 and unfairly cancelled after just two seasons, comedian Tig Notaro’s semi-autobiographical series has her playing a breast cancer patient who returns to her hometown to care for her dying mother. The observational comedy that ensures is deeply personal, heartbreaking in its misunderstandings, and willing to suspend reality to grasp deeper truths. This hidden gem is ripe for rediscovery.

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Only Murders in the Building
Steve Martin, Selena Gomez, and Martin Short are aces together in this farcical crime caper about a trio of true crime podcast addicts who start recording when a neighbour in their NYC apartment block is murdered. It’s a rapid-fire satire and deadpan comedy of manners, but its secret weapon is a melancholic undertow that makes the motives tragic and the investigators dedicated to their unlikely friendship.

The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story
The murder trial that transfixed American 30 years ago is re-examined in a limited series that reveals the distorting nature of fame, rampant ego, and sexist double standards. In an all-star cast none surpass Courtney B. Vance as defence lawyer Johnnie Cochran: a showman created by the very system he despises.

Pose
Boisterous with a bittersweet chaser, this drama recreates in stunning detail the ball subculture in 1980s New York, where Black and Latino drag queens competed for recognition in private tournaments while representing their unofficial families. It’s hectic and not always subtle, but the show does what its historic subjects did: it claims space for the marginalised and lets their stories resonate.

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