Over Christmas I recommended Better Call Saul to my brother, calling it one of my top five shows. He asked what other shows I would put in my top five, and I suddenly had a really hard time naming 4 others that would be in that upper eschelon. There are certainly some that started out strong and then fizzled out along the way: Veronica Mars, Twin Peaks (oh, that first season is just on fire!), Lost and Game of Thrones come to mind. Fringe maybe less so, but still deteriorated in quality in the last season.
But let’s try to nail down a top five, shall we? Shows that are great from end to end, especially with a strong finish.
In no particular order:
- Seinfeld
- Firefly (Serenity counts as a “strong finish”)
- The Americans (This show takes number 1, even though this is an unordered list. It is heartbreakingly good.)
- Scrubs (we’re just going to pretend that last season never happened, which I’m allowed to do because it was almost like a completely different show…)
- West Wing
Ironically, this list had to exclude Better Call Saul, the show that got my thinking down this path, because it’s not yet concluded. So another list of shows with top 5 potential but are not yet concluded would include Better Call Saul, Dead to Me, and Stranger Things.
A caveat here is that there are some, by all accounts excellent, shows that I just haven’t seen: The Wire, Goodfellas, Breaking Bad.
A few other shows that were highly enjoyable end to end but not quite top 5: Battlestar Galactica (it actually hurt a bit that it didn’t make the cut, but five is five…), House, Castle, Halt and Catch Fire, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec (of course), The Office (of course), The Office UK, Marvel: Agents of Shield.
I’m not quite ready to say which of my top 5 Better Call Saul would displace. I’m pretty sure, depending on how it concludes of course, that it would do so, but it’ll take some thinking to properly order those other shows to make that happen.