17 of Our Favorite TV Dramas of the Past Decade

Network TV shows are fighting against the current to stay relevant, but thanks to great characters and dramatic plots, This Is Us managed to keep ahead of the competition. It also united households and brought back watercooler conversations. With the right mixture of '80s nostalgia and heartstring-tugging family drama, This Is Us is still giving us an emotionally fulfilling experience each week.

After decades of low budgets and niche audiences, sci-fi and fantasy shows finally became international sensations, and The Walking Dead was one of the heavyweights of the decade. Ten years later, the show doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon. In fact, it's going through a creative revival. It's a testament to its appeal that AMC expanded it into two spinoffs, video games, and now movies. Like the undead, The Walking Dead has proven it will continue giving us memorable moments and brutal deaths.

Back when the three episodes of Black Mirror aired in 2011, nobody had yet attempted to dissect our relationship with technology this closely. To offer some context, in that year, Netflix had to apologize for attempting to split off its DVD-by-mail business, the iPad was one year old, and social media as a protest tool took everyone by surprise. And then, when our relationship with the little black mirror kept changing, so did the show. While the sheen might've worn off (the last three episodes have quickly disappeared from the collective consciousness, let's be honest), it's undeniable the impact the series has had on how we portray technology in entertainment. Sometimes frighteningly prophetic, sometimes elating, Black Mirror is for sure one of the shows that best reflect this decade.

Mr. Robot is an experience. Dripping with meta references and never-ending twists, this show is unique in every sense of the word. Week after week, it experimented with its format, direction, and story beats. Determined to explore the psyche of its main character, Elliot, it presents the hacker world as closely to reality as it can while going deep inside Elliot's mind, bending reality and fantasy. Nothing on TV is like this show.

In just four episodes, Ava DuVernay gave us the shocking and horrifying true story of the Central Park Five. Netflix's miniseries won two Emmys — including one for lead actor Jharrel Jerome — and was nominated for 14 more. If you haven't seen this one yet, you need to make time for it.

Sometimes we look in the past to make sense of the present, and perhaps that's the case with The Handmaid's Tale. When author Margaret Atwood wrote her book in 1985, her motivation was to speculate where the panic over women's empowerment movements would lead the religious right of the United States. When the TV show adaptation was released by Hulu, it seemed to reflect the worst of religious extremism once again. Perhaps it's a sad thing that depictions of dystopias where women are subjugated remain relevant. Yet, it's also important that women-led shows like The Handmaid's Tale can talk about the subject and explore it without fear of being silenced.

In many ways, Netflix wouldn't be Netflix without Stranger Things. Although the streaming service had critical successes with its originals such as Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards, it was only after this show debuted that the company solidified its mass appeal. An amazing journey back to the '80s, Stranger Things combines the best parts of our childhood movies with the lessons learned by shows like Lost. It's brought back innocence and wonder with a healthy dose of mystery and danger. It's fun, flashy, and adorable.

It stumbled after outpacing its source material, but Game of Thrones is still one of the shows that marked the decade. While its success looks obvious now, back when the first season started airing, not everyone was sure it would survive for long. Instead, it turned into a worldwide phenomenon and solidified fantasy as a great TV genre. Ambitious, Game of Thrones conquered hearts worldwide with a great cast of characters and actors and enormous battles and set pieces never before seen on the small screen.

There isn't anything quite like the first season of The Terror. The idea of following a Victorian expedition in search of the Northwest Passage seems more fitting as the subject of a historical documentary. Instead, the show offers a gripping tale of isolation and despair. It has a spectacular cast (you will see Jared Harris again in this list) and a perfect atmosphere of paranoia and claustrophobia. Combined with an alien-like setting, The Terror manages to create terror not from cheap scares but by exploring the deepest, darkest spaces of the human mind.

Pristine and meticulous, The Crown is the jewel in Netflix's library. Created by Peter Morgan, who also directed The Queen (2006), the show has just the right amount of historical fact and family drama to keep audiences hooked season after season. With a long reign filled with incredible events, Queen Elizabeth II's life makes for the perfect exploration of how society changes and transforms around institutions. And how institutions fight to stay relevant.

The definition of "prestige" TV might as well have True Detective in it. The first season of this grisly crime drama was unafraid to explore profound themes and antiheroes. Following two detectives on a trail of a possible cult, it was actually about the meaning of life, humanity, and good and evil. Philosophical and gripping, the show's only concern is to explore characters obsessed with cases that will probably destroy them. Showcasing incredible performances and complex plots, True Detective attracts stars and audiences alike with its mystifying scripts and direction. (We won't talk about season two, but season three is pretty solid.)

Orange Is the New Black made a huge splash in its first season, but uneven storytelling made it fade into the background a bit with each passing year. The series concluded this year without much fanfare, but to leave it off this list would be a major oversight. OITNB ushered in a new norm for diversity and female representation on the small screen, featuring stories about women from all walks of life. Creator Jenji Kohan deserves some kind of Bechdel test award.

Before this decade, the idea that great directors would work on the small screen seemed extremely unlikely. TV's small budgets and episodic nature didn't seem like a good combination for creative exploration, but the industry changed. And with those changes came Mindhunter. David Fincher's methodical and perfectionist show about a group of FBI agents interviewing serial killers builds tension masterfully, turning simple conversations into nail-biting vignettes that haunt viewers long after they are finished. Based on real-life events and criminals, Mindhunter is chilling without being exploitative.

In a sea of limited series and lackluster procedurals, it's easy to forget that long-running shows are capable of maintaining quality and even improving over multiple seasons. That's the case with The Americans, a Cold War thriller that continued to deliver season after season, shining a light on the sometimes mundane but always chilling double life of two Soviet spies, whose cover is so good, they pass as the perfect American suburban family of the 1980s. At its best, The Americans is a family drama and an exploration of marriage and deceit. It touches upon love, secrets, ideology, and cynicism while delivering tense missions and hair-raising near-misses.

This Emmy-winning anthology not only has a star-studded cast (Kirsten Dunst, Ted Danson, and Ewan McGregor), but it also seamlessly transitions the world of the Coen brothers to the small screen. Keeping the style of the acclaimed directors, it presents to the viewer a familiar yet bizarre version of the world (specifically, Minnesota) and asks them to buy into a cast of characters equally real and fantastical. Fargo has brought us hilarious dialogue, complex character motivation, and great storytelling not only once but three times. Hopefully, it'll continue to confound and surprise audiences for years to come.

Although Breaking Bad might not be on this list, its spiritual successor certainly deserves a spot. Vince Gilligan applied every lesson learned with his previous work to construct something more refined but no less gripping. Set six years before Walter White's story, Better Call Saul tells the journey of another antihero: Saul Goodman. Or, as he was known then, Jimmy McGill, a small-time lawyer struggling to find his way in life. Without missing a beat, the show constructs and deconstructs its characters, challenging the audience to both sympathize and despise them, sometimes during the same scene.

This was the decade for 1980s nostalgia. We had Stranger Things reviving the children-get-into-danger genre of adventure, American Horror Story bringing back the slasher movie, a Blade Runner sequel, and so many more references everywhere in pop culture. But the '80s weren't all about shoulder pads and ETs wanting to go home; it was also a time of social turmoil and the start of all the technological advances that would lead us to a Black Mirror-style world. Depicting a real tragedy even in its gory details, Chernobyl reminds us of the pitfalls of human hubris but also remembers our capacity to achieve heroic feats for the greater good. Taking place in a world where many want to deny reality and scientific facts, the show reveals the devastating costs of lies: eventually, the truth catches up with all of us. And by then, it's too late.