HBO has been on the air since 1972, pioneers of the commercial-free, subscription-based model of broadcast television. However, it wouldn’t be until around the late 1990s that they would become the undisputed king of prestige television, largely thanks to The Sopranos, generally regarded as the first true prestige drama in the history of the medium. Over the course of the last 25 years, the network has continued to deliver some absolute masterpieces.
It’s one thing for a show to be great, but a wholly different deal for it to be perfect. The quality of any piece of art—television included—is, of course, highly subjective. However, HBO has produced particular shows since 2001 which are almost universally regarded as virtually flawless pieces of television. If anybody were to wonder what all the hype is about regarding HBO, all they’d need to do is watch one of these shows.
8
‘The Penguin’ (2024)
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Image via HBO“Another Batman reimagining?” was what inevitably came to many a DC fan’s mind with the announcement of Matt Reeves‘ The Batman. Little did they know, Reeves would end up delivering one of the most widely acclaimed renditions of the Caped Crusader to date, also introducing fascinating versions of other classic Batman characters—including Colin Farrell‘s take on a certain villain. That villain went on to become the protagonist of his own HBO limited series: The Penguin.
There are no current signs that there will ever be a second season of The Penguin, but that’s okay, because it would leave this as one of the most perfect miniseries of the last 15 years. Gritty, dark, and with a perfect balance between violence and psychological intensity, The Penguin is easily one of the greatest DC TV shows to date. With great writing, clear inspirations from The Sopranos, and Farrell at his very best, what’s not to praise?
7
‘The Leftovers’ (2014–2017)
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Based on co-creator Tom Perrotta‘s own 2011 novel, The Leftovers is probably not a show that will appeal to people that don’t like ambiguity in television. However, those whose favorite part of the “mystery box” format of genre television is not the answers, but the questions and the thought-provoking themes they generate, will likely find this to be one of the best HBO shows to have aired since 1990.
Masterful performances all across the board by stars like Justin Theroux and Carrie Coon, a beautifully haunting Max Richter score, and a sublime ending that’s perhaps one of the best of any modern HBO show are but a few of the praise-worthy elements that make up The Leftovers. It’s a wonderfully character-driven sci-fi show whose sci-fi elements are subtle to the point of almost being invisible, instead focusing on deeply existential themes of grief and loss.
6
‘Six Feet Under’ (2001–2005)
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Though several of the most universally acclaimed HBO shows of the last 25 years have been full-on dramas, the network has also produced many great comedies and dramedies. Case in point: Six Feet Under, widely regarded as one of the greatest dramedies in the history of television. Everything that leads up to one of the best endings in HBO history is an equally powerful series about mortality, family, and the search for meaning in life.
It’s all very emotionally heavy stuff, but the way the writing balances that darkness with unforgettably endearing (yet undeniably flawed) characters, wonderful magical realism, and sharply satirical humor makes for a timeless exploration of a bunch of universally compelling themes. If Six Feet Under‘s ending is so legendary, it’s largely thanks to how the show powerfully de-stigmatizes death and inspires viewers to live, laugh, and love as much as possible while they’re still alive.
5
‘The Pitt’ (2025–Present)
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Medical dramas are a dime a dozen, the genre often crumbling under its own weight due to the vast number of shows that sacrifice realism and authenticity in favor of cheap melodrama. Every now and then, though, the world gets a medical show that goes down in history as one of the best—and that is precisely what R. Scott Gemmill‘s The Pitt, a show specifically designed to be the most accurate medical drama in history, is.
It’s one of the best TV shows to have aired since 2020, and it’s not just because of its incredibly admirable commitment to realism. You also get one of the most incredible ensemble casts of any HBO show in recent memory (including the great Noah Wyle at the top of his game), sharp commentary on the current state of the healthcare system in the United States, deeply endearing characters, and an inescapable sense of urgency lent by each episode being structured in real time.
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
- You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
- You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
- You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
- Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
- You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
- You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
- You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
- ER is television about endurance. You have it.
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
- You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
- Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
- You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
- It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
- You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
- You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
- Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
- The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
- You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
- You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
- You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
- Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
4
‘The Wire’ (2002–2008)
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As far as HBO shows go, if there’s any one title that easily earns the silver medal as the second most groundbreaking TV drama the network has thus far produced—after The Sopranos, of course—, it’s The Wire. Where The Sopranos offered a level of psychological depth and moral ambiguity that mainstream broadcast television had never really seen before, The Wire offered an unprecedentedly gritty and hyperrealistic critique of foundational American institutions.
For that and many more reasons, The Wire is one of the best crime shows to have aired since 1990, a masterpiece which anybody who loves crime dramas should check out at least once in their lives. With its almost documentary-like commitment to realism and rejection of traditional Hollywood television conventions from its time, The Wire only kept further expanding its scope and power with each subsequent season. Though fans tend to agree that the final season was the show’s weakest, it in no way detracts from this being among the best TV shows in history.
3
‘Chernobyl’ (2019)
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To this day, Chernobyl is one of the miniseries with the highest Rotten Tomatoes scores, and that’s for good reason. Over the course of a mere five episodes—all among the best that any miniseries has delivered throughout the last decade—, the show dismantles every nuance of the infamous 1986 disaster in the eponymous Ukrainian city. It’s a gripping horror story, a courtroom thriller, and a deeply moving tribute to human sacrifice all at once.
With its relentlessly bleak and realistic depiction of the disaster and its destructive consequences, Chernobyl is a miniseries that definitely requires viewers with a strong stomach. It’s a perfectly-paced masterclass in tension and dread, greatly elevated by the stunning cinematography and atmospheric score. The acting is fantastic, the writing is airtight, and the fact that there’s nothing of substance worthy of criticism over the course of those five hyper-ambitious episodes is worthy of applause.
2
‘Succession’ (2018–2023)
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Some may argue that it’s relatively easier for a miniseries to remain flawless, since there’s less room for error in such a shorter and cinematic form of storytelling. That’s not necessarily true, but it nevertheless makes the fact that Succession remained so virtually flawless over the course of four seasons all the more admirable. Part family dramedy, part political satire, part Shakespearean tragicomedy, this is one of the most addictive HBO shows of all time.
The show’s razor-sharp satirical humor and deeply character-driven drama remained in perfect balance over the course of its entire run, making for a series that could go from hilarious to incredibly intense from just one scene to the next. Add to that some of the best-written dialogue and character arcs of any HBO show in history, some unassumingly meaningful handheld camerawork, and a faultless ensemble cast, and it should be no wonder why so many people regard this as one of the greatest shows in history.
1
‘Band of Brothers’ (2001)
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Most people who have seen Band of Brothers would vehemently agree that it’s the most perfect piece of media that HBO has ever produced; and those who haven’t seen it either have it near the top of their watchlist or have somehow never heard of it. Executive-produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, and based on historian Stephen E. Ambrose‘s 1992 non-fiction book of the same name, this is still the highest-rated HBO show ever on IMDb, and the second-highest-rated fiction show in general.
It’s probably the best American miniseries of all time, and may even be one of the greatest pieces of audiovisual war fiction of modern times. Crafted with a level of cinematic scope and technical perfection that television has rarely seen throughout the last 25 years, complete with some incredible performances and a timeless message of heroism, brotherhood, and sacrifice. It’s perhaps the most perfect HBO show of all time, let alone of the past 25 years.
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