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Picking eight HBO shows is the easy part. Leaving the rest off is where it gets hard, and I already know somebody’s going to yell at me about Deadwood and Curb Your Enthusiasm. I went with the ones where I can still remember individual scenes years later, which is a better test than any awards list.
I called them nearly perfect because each one has something I’d quibble with, whether that’s a shaky first season, a stretch that drags, or a finale people are still arguing about. At their best, though, they’re the reason everyone talks about HBO the way they do. Here they are, from the one I’d recommend last to the one I’d recommend first.
8
‘The Leftovers’ (2014–2017)
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Image via HBO</figure>
The Leftovers starts with a strange event. Two percent of the world’s population disappears in a single moment, with no explanation and no warning. Three years later, Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux), a small-town police chief in New York, tries to keep his community together while his wife, Laurie (Amy Brenneman), joins the Guilty Remnant, a cult that dresses in white, smokes constantly, and never speaks. Damon Lindelof, who co-created Lost, made this with Tom Perrotta, who wrote the novel it’s based on, and it feels like he wanted to prove he could tell a story without promising answers.
Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) lost her husband and both kids in the Departure, and Coon gives one of the best performances I’ve seen on television. The second season moves to Jarden, Texas, a town where nobody vanished, and its opening credits play over Iris DeMent’s “Let the Mystery Be,” which gets me every time. The third season ends up in Australia and finishes in a way that’s quiet and surprisingly hopeful.
7
‘Veep’ (2012–2019)
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Image via HBO</figure>
Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is the Vice President of the United States, and she spends most of her days finding out how little power the job actually has. Armando Iannucci, the Scottish writer behind The Thick of It, created Veep, and the insults are a big part of the charm. They’re creative, filthy, and so fast that you miss half of them the first time through. Gary (Tony Hale), her loyal bagman, follows her everywhere carrying her purse, and his devotion is both the funniest and the saddest thing about her.
Louis-Dreyfus won six Emmys in a row for the role, a record for a lead actress in a comedy. Amy (Anna Chlumsky) and Dan (Reid Scott), two of her staffers, keep scheming, while Jonah (Timothy Simons), a hated White House liaison, gets worse every season. David Mandel took over after Iannucci left following season four, and the show kept its edge right through the final year, which is unusual for a comedy that ran seven seasons.
6
‘Succession’ (2018–2023)
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Logan Roy (Brian Cox) is the aging founder of a media empire, Waystar Royco, and he can’t decide which of his four kids to trust, if any, to run it after him. Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Connor (Alan Ruck) all want the crown, and each one falls short in a different way. Succession was created by Jesse Armstrong, who also wrote Peep Show, and people often compare it to the Murdoch family, though Armstrong has said it draws from several shows.
Nicholas Britell’s score mixes classical piano with hip-hop beats, and it makes even a boardroom scene feel like a heist. Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) and Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) make the show funnier than a story about billionaires has any right to be. Logan dies in the third episode of the final season, a choice that shocked a lot of viewers, and the rest of the season plays out like one long, strange funeral.
5
‘Barry’ (2018–2023)
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Image via HBO</figure>
Barry Berkman (Bill Hader) is a hitman and former Marine who follows a target into an acting class in Los Angeles and, to his own surprise, finds out he likes it. Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler), the teacher, is a vain, self-absorbed actor who somehow becomes a father figure, and Sally (Sarah Goldberg) is the classmate Barry falls for. Hader created Barry with Alec Berg, and he directed a lot of the episodes himself, which is a heavy load for the star of a show.
Winkler won his first Emmy at 73 for the role, which made a lot of people happy. NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), a cheerful, polite, weirdly sweet Chechen mobster, started as a small part and turned into a fan favorite. The season two episode “ronny/lily” features a fight between Barry and a ten-year-old girl, and it’s one of the strangest and best things the show ever did. It starts as a comedy, turns into a tragedy, and doesn’t promise anyone a happy ending.
Four criminal masterminds. One of them was always going to be yours.
Here is who comes for you, why they picked you out of everyone available, and what they want from
the encounter.
Your nemesis does not want to beat you. He wants to know you
completely, and he is patient enough to wait for it. The frightening part is how good the
conversation is.
- Lecter is the most dangerous kind of opponent: the one who finds you interesting. He
never raises his voice, because he has never needed to. - You keep a great deal to yourself and you are careful about what you show. That reserve
is exactly the door he would knock on. - The films understood something other thrillers missed. The horror is not the violence.
It is being perfectly understood by the wrong person. - He would be unfailingly polite about all of it. That is the worst part.
Your nemesis is not after money, territory or revenge. He is
after a demonstration, and you are the person he has chosen to prove his point on.
- The Joker only picks opponents who believe in something. Your decency is not a defence
against him. It is the entire reason he showed up. - He has no plan you can predict and nothing you can take away, which removes every tool
you would normally reach for. - His whole argument is that you are one bad day away from being him, and you would spend
the rest of your life proving him wrong. - He would call it a magic trick. You would call it the worst night of your life.
Your nemesis respects you, which sounds flattering until you work
out what it means. He chose you because nobody else was worth his time.
- Moriarty is the original criminal mastermind, the template every later one borrows from:
a mind the equal of the hero’s, pointed the wrong way. - You enjoy being the cleverest person in the room. He is counting on exactly that, and he
has already built the room. - This is the rare nemesis who would be genuinely disappointed if you lost badly. He needs
the game to be worth playing. - It ends the way these things always end. Two people, one problem, and only one way down.
Your nemesis has no personal interest in you whatsoever, and that
is precisely what makes him unsurvivable. You are not a rival. You are a stop on the way.
- Chigurh does not negotiate, gloat or explain. He arrives, he asks one question, and the
answer was decided long before you opened your mouth. - You trust yourself to handle things. He is the one problem in the world that has no
interest in how capable you are. - No Country for Old Men rewrote the screen villain by removing the thing audiences
quietly rely on: the sense that talking might work. - Call it. He will wait.
4
‘Six Feet Under’ (2001–2005)
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Every episode of Six Feet Under opens with someone dying in some unexpected way, and then the story moves to the Fisher family, who run a funeral home in Los Angeles. Nate (Peter Krause), the eldest son, comes home for his father’s funeral and gets pulled into the family business, while his brother David (Michael C. Hall) hides his sexuality from his mother. Alan Ball, who had just won an Oscar for writing American Beauty, created the show, and it carries the same dark humor.
Ruth (Frances Conroy), the mother, spends the series figuring out who she is after years of being a wife, and Claire (Lauren Ambrose), the youngest, tries to find her future through art. The finale shows what happens to each character over the next few decades, set to Sia’s “Breathe Me,” and it’s one of the most emotional endings in TV history. Hall went on to play Dexter, but David Fisher is still his most layered role.
3
‘The Sopranos’ (1999–2007)
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Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) is a New Jersey mob boss who starts seeing a therapist after a panic attack, and the show has you sit in the room with him while he tries to understand why he feels empty. Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) is the therapist, Carmela (Edie Falco) is his wife, and Christopher (Michael Imperioli) is his hot-headed nephew. David Chase first wrote The Sopranos as a movie, and other networks passed on it before HBO picked it up.
Steven Van Zandt, the guitarist from Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, had never acted before he played Silvio Dante, Tony’s consigliere, and he’s great. The ducks in Tony’s pool in the first season set up the show’s idea that even the toughest guy is afraid of losing everything.
2
‘The Wire’ (2002–2008)
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David Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, created The Wire with Ed Burns, a former homicide detective, and they built the show around the idea that every institution in a city is connected. Season one follows the drug trade through Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), a detective who ignores his bosses, and Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), a dealer who runs the Barksdale crew like a business. Both West and Elba are British, and they hide their accents so well that it’s hard to imagine them sounding any other way.
Each season looks at a new part of Baltimore, the ports, City Hall, the school system, and the newspaper. Omar Little (Michael K. Williams) is a stick-up man who robs drug dealers and lives by his own code; he becomes one of the most beloved characters in TV history. The show barely got any Emmy attention, which still annoys a lot of fans, and Barack Obama has called it one of his favorites.
1
‘Game of Thrones’ (2011–2019)
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Ned Stark (Sean Bean) seems like the main character of Game of Thrones for the entire first season, which is why it’s such a shock when he’s executed in the ninth episode. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss adapted the show from George R.R. Martin’s novels, and the series follows noble families fighting for the Iron Throne while an ancient threat gathers in the north. Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), the clever younger son who survives on wit, won four Emmys for Dinklage.
The Red Wedding, in season three, taught people to be afraid of every wedding, and the Battle of the Bastards, shot over about a month in Northern Ireland with hundreds of extras and dozens of horses, is one of the most impressive battle scenes ever put on TV. Daenerys (Emilia Clarke), Jon Snow (Kit Harington), Cersei (Lena Headey), and Arya (Maisie Williams) all had huge arcs, and the show won a record fifty-nine Emmys. The final season divided viewers, which is why it’s on a “nearly perfect” list, but the first six seasons are as good as TV gets.
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