The Best TV Shows of the 2010s Manage to Stand Out in the Greatest Decade of Television

The term "Peak TV" might have been coined almost exactly halfway through the 2010s, but the groundwork had been set long before the decade began. The origin of this era of prestige television is marked by the phenomena that was The Sopranos, which began in the waining days of the 20th century and ended in June of 2007. That same year The Sopranos ended, it passed the baton to Mad Men, AMC's '60s drama that carried Peak TV into the 2010s where it exploded across cable and streaming services. Mad Men ended in 2015, the same year the term Peak TV originated when we were two years into the next era of streaming originals, past the stunning conclusion of Breaking Bad, and well into the cultural fascination with the swords and dragons and fantasy that was Game of Thrones.

In just the last half of this decade, we've been overwhelmed with so much big-budget, high-concept content that it's almost impossible to pick just 10 stand-out TV shows that define these years. And for the purposes of this thought experiment, we stuck with shows that aired a majority of its seasons this decade. Since the influence of Mad Men and Breaking Bad resoundingly echoed throughout the 2010s, they couldn't be left off this list of the best TV shows of the decade. Though those shows are behind us, the future of television beyond this decade is even more promising, with talents like Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge just getting started. We go into the 2020s with TV in a more intellectual, diverse place, which has produced a fundamental shift in what we watch and how we watch it. —Matt Miller

Read Esquire's full best of the 2010s coverage here.