Rotten Tomatoes asked a group of critics to name the best TV shows over the last quarter-century. Is your favorite on this list?
The TV and movie review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes celebrates its 25th anniversary next month. In honor of that milestone, the site has chosen to do what it does best — identifying the best TV shows of the last quarter-century, based on input from critics who were approached by the site and asked to submit shows for this ranking.
Individually approved “Tomatometer” critics were given a survey, which asked them to list in no particular order the TV series that they think were the five best of the last 25 years (the critics did this same exercise for the best movies of the last 25 years, too). After tailing the best TV show votes, meanwhile, these were the results — in ascending order:
#5: Succession
By the time it ended in May, HBO’s Succession had managed to not only capture the zeitgeist — an increasingly fleeting prospect in the fractured streaming era — but made the smart decision to take its final bow while the show was still on top.
Season 4 raced to its climactic boardroom showdown in true Logan Roy fashion — Succession was never anything short of profane and brash, as well as addictive, Shakespearean in its inherent morality play, and unforgiving in the mirror it held up to the world, revealing the foibles of the 1-percenters and Masters of the Media Universe in all their neurotic, unhappy glory. TV family dramas don’t get much better than this.#4: Mad Men
No list of the best TV shows of the past 25 years can be complete without creator Matthew Wiener’s drama set in New York, during the Golden Age of advertising in the 1960s and 1970s.
