The Best Drama TV Series of the 2010s, Ranked

The 2010s were the decade when television stopped feeling like cinema’s smaller sibling. Prestige cable hit its stride, streaming services started spending serious money, and some of the decade’s best dramas gave you characters complicated enough to argue about years after the finale.

Ranking them means balancing consistency, performances, ambition and the simple test that matters most: would you still tell someone to watch this show tonight?

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10. The Americans (2013-2018)

A married couple raising two children in suburban Washington, D.C. sounds ordinary until you remember Elizabeth and Philip Jennings are Soviet spies. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys make that contradiction hurt.

The Americans ran for six seasons on FX and became better as its characters accumulated lies they could no longer neatly contain. The espionage is tense, but the marriage is the real story. By the 2018 finale, choosing between family, country and survival feels brutally personal.

9. The Crown (2016- )

Netflix’s royal drama arrived in 2016 with Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II and immediately made constitutional duty feel like a psychological trap.

The cast changes as the characters age, which could've turned the series into an expensive history pageant. Instead, its strongest episodes use palaces, ceremonies and political crises to examine what happens when a public role consumes a private person. The early Foy and Matt Smith seasons remain its sharpest stretch.

8. Mindhunter (2017-2019)

Two seasons. Nineteen episodes. Still unfinished.

David Fincher’s Mindhunter follows FBI agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench as they interview imprisoned murderers during the early development of criminal profiling. Its most disturbing scenes are usually conversations across tables, especially Cameron Britton’s unnervingly calm performance as Ed Kemper. You keep waiting for conventional thriller fireworks. The show keeps refusing, and it's better for it.

7. Succession (2018-2023)

Succession only squeezed two seasons into the 2010s, but that was enough to make the Roy family impossible to ignore.

Brian Cox’s Logan Roy rules his media empire through intimidation while his children compete for approval they’re never going to receive. The dialogue is vicious and often hilarious, yet the comedy never makes the emotional damage disappear. By Season 2’s “Boar on the Floor,” the show had perfected its peculiar mix of corporate warfare and family humiliation.

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6. The Handmaid’s Tale (2017)

Elisabeth Moss carries enormous stretches of The Handmaid’s Tale with little more than her face. That matters in a series built around people who’ve lost control over nearly everything else.

Based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, the Hulu adaptation premiered in 2017 and won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series that year. Its later storytelling can feel repetitive, but the first season remains ferocious television, turning Gilead’s rituals and restrictions into something frighteningly intimate.

5. Better Call Saul (2015-2022)

Yes, putting Better Call Saul below its predecessor will annoy some people. There’s a strong argument that Jimmy McGill’s slow transformation into Saul Goodman is the more precise piece of television.

Bob Odenkirk takes a character originally built for comic relief and finds years of resentment, charm and self-sabotage underneath him. Rhea Seehorn’s Kim Wexler becomes just as essential. The show is patient enough to spend minutes watching somebody move paperwork around an office, then make that paperwork feel like a loaded weapon.

4. Mad Men (2007-2015)

Only three of Mad Men’s seven seasons aired entirely in the 2010s, which keeps it out of the top three here. Those seasons still include some of the show’s finest work.

Jon Hamm’s Don Draper spends years selling idealized versions of American life while being spectacularly unable to live one himself. “The Suitcase,” first broadcast in 2010, strips away much of the advertising-world spectacle and leaves Don and Peggy Olson together through one exhausting night. Few TV relationships were written with more patience.

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3. Chernobyl (2019)

Five episodes were enough.

HBO’s 2019 miniseries reconstructs the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster with a suffocating sense of consequence. Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård and Emily Watson give the disaster a human scale, while the series keeps returning to a simple problem: what happens when institutions punish people for acknowledging reality?

Its short length helps. There’s no weak season to forgive and no late subplot hanging around after its purpose has disappeared. You can finish Chernobyl in a weekend, but parts of it won't leave quickly.

2. Breaking Bad (2008-2013)

The calendar is the only reason Breaking Bad isn't automatically number one. It began in 2008, although four of its five seasons concluded during the 2010s.

Bryan Cranston’s Walter White transforms from desperate chemistry teacher to drug kingpin without the show asking you to accept one implausible personality switch. Every compromise prepares the next one. The final run in 2013, including “Ozymandias,” turned years of carefully planted consequences into television that felt almost physically tense.

1. The Leftovers (2014-2017)

The Leftovers starts with an irresistible premise: 2% of the world’s population suddenly vanishes. Then it makes the smarter choice and refuses to turn that mystery into a puzzle box with a tidy answer.

Instead, Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta build three seasons around grief, faith, love and the stories people invent when reality stops making sense. Justin Theroux and Carrie Coon are exceptional, and the series gets stranger as it goes without losing its emotional center. The 2017 finale, “The Book of Nora,” trusts two people talking in a room to carry the weight of the entire show. It works.

Why You Should Care

You don't need to be a prestige-TV obsessive to get something from this list. These shows helped establish the kind of morally messy characters, season-long storytelling and cinematic production values that now feel normal across streaming television.

And if you've missed a few, that's good news. Your next great binge may already be finished, with no two-year wait for another season.

What to Watch Next

Start with Severance if you want the workplace unease of Mad Men mixed with a much stranger mystery. Try Shōgun for historical drama built around political maneuvering, clashing cultures and carefully controlled performances.

And if Breaking Bad is still the one you can't shake, go straight to El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. It gives Jesse Pinkman something the original series rarely allowed him: a little room to breathe.