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Quarter centuries are funny things—cause for reflection and sweeping, possibly premature judgments about what we’ve lived through. At Vogue, we’ve already looked back at the greatest fashion moments of the quarter century. So why not extend our gaze across the culture as well? Lord knows there are more than enough movies and books and memes and music to recollect.
Perhaps the richest field is TV? Over the last 25 years, we somehow went from the Golden Age of Television to Peak TV to Mid TV, or whatever era we’re in now. Spanning all of that are some shows that we fondly remember, and a few that we’re grateful are still with us. As with any list, there will be plenty of room for disagreement (they’re in no particular order and we only considered shows that began after January 1, 2000, eliminating a couple of big titles from contention). But here’s our claim: These are shows of the last quarter century that loom large at Vogue. Why not spend much of the next quarter century rewatching them?
When Industry was first unveiled, it seemed an unlikely proposition: a Succession-meets-Skins drama set inside a cut-throat London investment bank, with a pilot episode directed by Lena Dunham. What a delight, then, to see it bloom over three seasons into one of the brilliantly written, funniest, and most stylish shows on television. Much like Skins and Euphoria before it, Industry has also served as a showcase and launchpad for a new generation of acting talent, from Myha’la as the fiercely intelligent (and possibly fraudulent) Harper, to Harry Lawtey as the cheeky but bumbling working-class outsider Robert, to Marisa Abela as the troubled heiress Yasmin. With showrunners Mickey Downs and Konrad Kay both having spent time working in finance, there’s a piercing ring of truth to how they depict this cold-blooded world of predators and prey. But thanks to the show’s exceptional performances—along with its wild plot twists and positively Shakespearean reversals of fortune—it’s already become a contemporary classic. —Liam Hess
How to watch: Stream it on Max.
You don’t usually recall where you were when a certain show aired. But who can forget one’s whereabouts—in an emotional sense—when Normal People emerged in the peak of the pandemic, when we had all been told to stay home for … who knew how long? What better atmosphere to lose yourself in the heady, erotic antics of novelist Sally Rooney’s college-age characters, translated to the screen by the charismatic duo of Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. Indeed, it was the chemistry of this pair that sustained the show, along with Rooney’s particular slant on sex, class, and coming of age in the twenty-first century. There are certain works that feel like they help give shape to the understanding of a generation, and with its acute sense of stalled promise, inequalities inherited at birth, and the difficulty of sustaining love across those chasms, Normal People, both the book and the show, feels like one of them. —Chloe Schama
How to watch: Stream it on Hulu.
This French espionage drama is the 21st century spy show I measure all others by. A slow-burn that, over five faultless seasons, immerses you in the operational and office life of French DGSE officers, The Bureau (which has been remade as a slick if somewhat lesser American version, The Agency, starring Michael Fassbender) is still, to me, the paragon of French TV cool–a confident, ratcheting chronicle of intelligence officers who go to psychological extremes in the name of national security. Created by Éric Rochant, it all builds to a fifth season sequence of episodes directed by the film auteur Jacques Audiard (he of Emilia Pérez). Incomparable stuff.—Taylor Antrim
How to watch: Buy episodes on Fandango at Home.
I defy you to find a better police procedural than the French genre drama Spiral, which ran for eight electric seasons. The model here is Law and Order: Spiral balances the muscular doings of a special Paris crime unit with the officious prosecutors who put the bad guys away. The early seasons can be a bit gruesome, but don’t be deterred, Spiral deepens and becomes more sophisticated as it goes, culminating in a sensational human drama of love and loyalty, civic corruption and morality, and ultimately heartbreak. —TA
How to watch: Stream it on MHz Choice.
When it aired in 2016, Fleabag felt like a bolt from the blue. Sure, there had been shows that broke the fourth wall, but none did so with quite the same conspiratorial panache as Phoebe Waller-Bridge, delivering her straight-to-camera confessions with winking glee and singular wit. The show, which reified a kind of hapless, single-girl London life, while foregrounding larger themes of grief and family, was funny, dark, and unique to Waller-Bridge’s vision of the world. It was so distinctive, in fact, that its creator had the good sense to call it quits after a stunning second season. (We have that season to thank for introducing the entire concept of the “hot priest” into our collective cultural consciousness, as well as introducing the vast majority of us to Andrew Scott.) It was a bittersweet goodbye, but its two perfect seasons will be forever undiluted. —Chloe Schama
How to watch: Stream it on Prime Video.
It took a while for Better Call Saul to emerge out of the shadow of Breaking Bad, but eventually this six-season drama, about a small-time Albuquerque lawyer named Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) becoming the drug-cartel attorney Saul Goodman turned into the best thing on television, and for its devotees, an even greater achievement than Breaking Bad. Season by season, Saul upped the tension and the emotional stakes until the relationship between Jimmy and girlfriend, lawyer Kim Wexler, played magnificently by Rhea Seehorn, became profoundly moving and ultimately tragic. The final episodes in the sixth season, shot in magisterial black and white, are masterpieces.—TA
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
I sporadically lived in Belfast while Game of Thrones was filming around Northern Ireland. I would regularly see Sophie Turner in my favorite Italian restaurant (she having just wrapped maybe, or before a night shoot). I’d see Kit Harrington and co in the dive bars, and people I went to high school with onscreen as Winterfell villagers and the Army of the Dead. Through the years, GOT embedded itself in the north of Ireland, whose rugged coastline became the Iron Islands, and its castles the ancestral Stark homes. Location tours, themed escape rooms, and babies called Arya continue to this day.
Well beyond Belfast, its eight seasons captivated fantasy heads and sceptics alike with expansive world-building, and intricate stories of sex, magic and faith, fucked up families and power grabs, dragons and disembowelling. Has there ever been a show so massive and communal, that would have people rapt at the watercooler and on Reddit threads discussing red weddings, epic (and expensive) battle scenes, and winter, finally, coming? The finale had the impossible task of putting the monstrous show to an unquiet grave, and while some storylines seemed rushed and others completely ignored, even everyone’s least favorite season of GOT is heart palpitating. Plus, to watch to the end is to see Arya’s final and most satisfying kill.—Anna Cafolla
How to watch: Stream it on Max.
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What was Barry and what did it become? It started as a quirky black comedy-thriller about a hitman who wants to be an actor in Hollywood, a vehicle for the deadpan wit of its star and co-creator Bill Hader. But by its third and fourth seasons it had become profoundly strange and wonderful: a show that was part art project, part emotional rollercoaster, part bravura display of filmmaking chops. There was jolting violence and savage satire and melancholy that clung to you. The performances were off the charts, especially Sarah Goldberg as Sally, playing a careerist actor who is both vulnerable and casually cruel, and Anthony Carrigan as NoHo Hank, a live-wire gay Chechen criminal who steals each scene he’s in. Hader directed every episode of the incredible final season four and made the show entirely his own. –TA
How to watch: Stream it on Max.
No one would argue that Succession is one of the defining shows of the last quarter century. And yet the reaction to its debut in 2018 was weirdly hostile: Did we need a show about wealthy people acting ruthlessly toward each other? It turns out we very much did. And by Succession’s second season its following had grown and it was steadily becoming a phenomenon that reflected, better than anything you can find on TV, the corrupting influence of wealth and power. It also had the most magnificently realized characters—Kendall, Roman, Shiv, Logan, Tom–all of whom you surely know by name. Four seasons, each one of them a masterpiece of drama, comedy, satire, and packed with scorched-earth emotional power. Nothing compares to it. —TA
How to watch: Stream it on Max.
A short list of Girls’ greatest contributions: Adam Driver, Allison Williams’ squirm-inducing rendition of Kanye West’s “Stronger,” and destigmatizing HPV (after all, “all adventurous women do”). But perhaps the greatest gift of this six-season series, courtesy of its creator Lena Dunham, was the way it captured a shambolic season of life with humor and unflinching honesty. Dunham was subject to much negative attention during and after the show’s run, which has led to a characterization of Girls—and its four central twentysomething white women navigating post-recession New York—as out of touch. But for anyone still holding out, I’d like to insist that Girls acknowledges the ugliness of being a young person with grace and perspective. Plus, no matter how bad of a day I’m having, I can always turn on an episode and be reminded that Hannah, Marnie, Shoshanna, or Jessa will be having a worse one. —Hannah Jackson
How to watch: Stream it on Max.
Full disclosure: I’ve always been obsessed with lost eras and yesteryear’s subcultures—the more recent the better. Not for me the period drama that limns Versailles under Louis XIV: I’d much rather an archaeological evocation of a time still so fresh in (American) history that one can almost smell the cigarettes and the aftershave. Mad Men loomed large on the horizon as soon as I learned it had been green-lighted, and its actual appearance on AMC back in 2007 was, for me, a cause of celebration: Here was the golden age of midcentury Manhattan; the ad campaigns that sold Americans virtually everything they suddenly began dreaming of; here were the gin-soaked corner-office shenanigans, Man In The Gray Flannel Suit-style conformity, pre-MeToo sexual politics; and, looming in the distance but approaching faster than Don and Peggy and Joan and Roger and Pete and everyone else realized, here were the swinging Sixties to blow the whole foundation to pieces. Come for the spot-on wardrobe, interiors, and period dialogue; stay for the epic clash of civilizations. —Corey Seymour
How to watch: Stream it on AMC+.
I still remember popping in DVDs of The Wire, discovering this Baltimore crime drama sometime after it had first aired on HBO and thinking that nothing else I’d ever seen on TV could compare. Yes, there’d been The Sopranos and Six Feet Under and other Golden Age prestige dramas but not one of them had The Wire’s blend of authenticity, streetwise intelligence, and civic sophistication. We now think of its creator David Simon as an uncompromising television-creator hero and he is, but the strength of the cast is equally staggering to recall: Dominic West, Idris Elba, the late, great Michael K. WIlliams—not to mention the cream of the crop crime writers that joined Simon as the series went on: George Pelecanos, Richard Price and Denis Lehane. If for some ludicrous reason you have never seen this show, you’re in for a ride. —TA
How to watch: Stream it on Max.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched 30 Rock start to finish, but whenever I do, I manage to unearth a joke that I’ve missed, usually delivered at machine-gun pace (I defy anyone to find a higher joke-per-minute ratio). The smart, layered writing, committedly goofy performances, and absurdist tone enshrined 30 Rock in the comedy canon and laid the foundation for great sitcoms to come (I see The Other Two as its most obvious successor). The cast all deserve their flowers: Fey as overstretched showrunner Liz Lemon, Alec Baldwin as the alpha male capitalist Jack Donaghy, Jane Krakowski as the narcissistic, fame-hungry Jenna Maroney, Tracy Morgan as the mercurial, childlike star Tracy Jordan, and Jack McBrayer as the provincial, happy-go-lucky NBC page Kenneth Parcell. Just as wonderful is the high-octane roster of guest stars: Chris Parnell as Dr. Leo Spaceman, Elaine Stritch as Jack’s disapproving mother Colleen, Dean Winters as Liz’s deadbeat ex Dennis Duffy—not to mention delightful one-offs like Carrie Fisher, Al Gore, and Isabella Rossellini, whose delivery of “Oh dammit Johnny, you know I love my Big Beef ‘N Cheddar!” deserves every accolade. —HJ
How to watch: Stream it on Hulu.
I’d argue that there is no greater cultural byproduct of George W. Bush’s presidency than Arrested Development. Following the Bluths—a dysfunctional Orange County real-estate family forced to live together in one of their company’s model homes when their patriarch, George Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor) is arrested on charges of “light treason”—Arrested Development explores complicated family dynamics against the backdrop of the War on Terror. Make no mistake: while the disastrous early Bush years inform the series’s tone, the whole thing is nevertheless a lighthearted delight filled with wordplay and bizarro extended bits (The Literal Doctor, “loose seal”/Lucille, and Gene Parmesan all spring to mind). Each Bluth delivers a screamingly funny performance of their own, including Will Arnett as the family’s eldest son Gob, an unserious magician (and spiritual predecessor to Succession’s Connor Roy), Portia di Rossi’s spoiled, self-absorbed Lindsay, and David Cross as her clueless husband Tobias Fünke, who pivots toward an unsuccessful acting career after losing his medical license. Arrested Development’s crown jewel is the late Jessica Walters as the cold, judgmental Lucille, who—with as little as a wink—stole every scene she was in. If you haven’t seen Arrested Development yet, I don’t know what to tell you, besides: What are you waiting for? Also…whatever you do…just pretend it ends at season three. —HJ
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
A standard-bearer for high-concept prestige television—and a chronicle of the Fishers, a Los Angeles family running a well-trafficked funeral home after the death of their paterfamilias—Six Feet Under was crammed with lights-out performances. (I’d single out Peter Krause as the searching, tragic Nate; Michael C. Hall as his brother, David; Lauren Ambrose as their sister, Claire; Frances Conroy as their neurotic mother, Ruth; and Rachel Griffiths as Nate’s depressive, shiatsu-practitioner girlfriend, Brenda, at the expense of so many others.) But so, too, did it balance enough light gore, dark humor, sexual drama, and existential inquiry to make every kind of viewer happy. While I can’t say that I rank its series finale, prominently featuring the song “Breathe Me“ by Sia, as highly as most, I did find all five sprawling, ambitious seasons to be total killers. —Marley Marius
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
To this day, Friday Night Lights, based on the renowned Buzz Bissinger book about a real-life high school football team in West Texas, remains the single multi-season series that my wife and I have watched together with equal enthusiasm. This despite the fact that my wife has zero interest in football and I have little patience for teenage soap-style dramas. I submit that it is the ur-example of the latter, with its attendant cliques, heroes, and antiheroes. It is also a Law & Order-style procedural with each episode offering some form of intrigue between Coach Taylor, wife Tami, everyman Landry, bad-boy Riggins, do-gooder Saracen, Kardashian-in-the-making Lyla, temptress Tyra, and the rest of the cast of vivid American archetypes—along with, crucially, the Big Game at the end of it all. The qualities that made the characters such great (if cliched) archetypes also made them believable, even true, and what began as a lowbrow way of passing the time quickly became, in our household, heart-rending must-watch TV. Texas forever.—Corey Seymour
How to watch: Purchase episodes on Prime Video or Fandango at Home.
If we’re ranking Jewish contributions to popular culture, Curb Your Enthusiasm is probably up there with matzo ball soup and Jesus Christ. Starring Larry David as a fictionalized version of himself, Curb was a quarter-decade-long experiment in situational comedy—a head-on collision of social mores and Murphy’s Law in which David’s minor transgressions spiraled into full-blown disasters. Joining David were Cheryl Hines as his long-suffering wife, Jeff Garlin as his manager and co-conspirator, Susie Essman as Jeff’s hotheaded wife, and J.B. Smoove as his roommate, Leon. Though the show wrapped last year, David continues to delight with behavior that feels like it belongs in a lost episode: Recently he was publicly chastised for throttling Elmo on The Today Show. David is also responsible for introducing Hines to her now-husband—the brain-wormed, animal carcass aficionado and Trump ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—something that would almost certainly be deemed too far-fetched even for the show. —HJ
How to watch: Stream it on Max.
In the opening scene of Julia Davis’s blacker-than-black comedy masterpiece Nighty Night, we see husband and wife Jill and Terry sitting in the doctor’s office, the bleach-blonde, heavily made-up Jill wailing “Why me?!” after the doctor delivers a cancer diagnosis. “Come on Jill, let’s put things into perspective,” Terry says, feebly. “It’s me that’s got the cancer.” It’s a swift introduction to one of comedy’s most virtuosically vile characters: the sociopathic, malignant narcissist beauty therapist Jill Tyrell—in her words, “a very attractive woman in her mid-20s with a lust for life and a flexible spine”—who goes on to fake her husband’s death by locking him in up in a palliative care home while she ruthlessly pursues her new neighbor, Don. (The only hitch? Don is an alcoholic and his wife, Cath, uses a wheelchair due to multiple sclerosis, not that any of this will stop Jill from honing in on her prey.) The show’s wildest moments have made it a camp classic: You’ll never forget Jill attending Terry’s (fake) funeral in Victorian mourning garb and riding a black steed down the aisle, before launching into a eulogy that reads more like a character assassination (“I will not hear a bad word against Terry,” she says, “but he was a very bad husband and quite an evil man”). But it also cleverly skewers a very British strain of crippling politeness—and then there are the more gonzo moments, such as murder by poisoned strawberry mousse, or the head-spinning orgy of bad taste that is season two’s “artificial insemination” sequence. Through Jill, Davis gleefully steamrolls every social norm in existence—and what a joy it is to watch her do it. —LH
While the American version of The Office may be one of the most beloved shows in TV history, in my eyes, nothing can beat the British original—whether for sheer cringe-per-minute, or the desperately drab banality of the commuter belt town of Slough. (Personally, I can never forget the first-season episode depicting the kind of “training day” every office employee dreads, which descends into chaos and concludes with Ricky Gervais’s David Brent delivering an acoustic performance of his toe-curlingly awful songs.) The Office’s more tasteless moments remain hysterically funny thanks to the show’s empathy: this was a series that punched up, not down. The show concludes with—spoiler alert!—office lovebirds Tim and Dawn finally ending up together, and David telling his odious misogynist of a “best friend” Chris Finch where to stick it. The Office may have been packed with excruciatingly awkward humor, but it had plenty of heart, too. —LH
How to watch: Stream it on Peacock.
The United States government inspires no shortage of film and television, but Veep is the gold standard. (And perhaps art and life were almost too intertwined in this case: That the first Trump Administration felt like an extended Veep plotline was not lost on anyone.) It followed Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Selina Meyer, the foul-mouthed, ruthless Vice President of the United States as she attempted to claw her way to power. Supporting her were her backstabbing chiefs of staff (Anna Chlumsky as Amy and Reid Scott as Dan), bumbling press secretary (Matt Walsh as Mike), steadfast bag man (Tony Hale as Gary), and unctuous West Wing liaison (Timothy Simons as Jonah). With its mile-a-minute pace, commitment to political incorrectness, and acerbic, expletive-laden dialogue, Veep is a far cry from the sunnier comedies on this list, skewering every facet of the political process with a take-no-prisoners attitude. You’ll never hear “Okie dokie Annie Oakley” the same way again. —HJ
How to watch: Stream it on Max.
I initially worried that my deeply subpar high-school French would be a barrier to enjoying this dramedy set within the drama-filled world of a Parisian talent agency, but as it turns out, Call My Agent is riotously funny, shrewdly observed and occasionally genuinely moving even if you don’t speak a word of any Romance language. The series kicks off with a young woman named Camille taking an assistant job at the fictional Agence Samuel Kerr agency where her estranged father works, just as the big boss dies (from swallowing a wasp on vacation, as one does), plunging the office into disarray. Call My Agent’s unforgettable cameos–from Isabelle Hupperti to Juliette Binoche to Charlotte Gainsbourg–work perfectly, anchored as they are within the world of the show. Camille Cottin is a standout as prickly, voluble talent agent Andréa Martel, but the whole cast intermingles with enough chemistry and charm to make this one of the best workplace comedies of the last decade. –Emma Specter
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
Hearing that twinkly intro of Skins, I’m back in my teenage bedroom, my nose milimeters from my small TV, the sound down low so my mom didn’t know a) I was up after 10PM on a school night and b) I was watching those ketty English teenagers fuck and fuck with each other. But it was only ever going to be about the Bristol lot, right? I’d like to ignore the international spin-offs, and focus, if I may, only on the British TV series’ first and second generations of angsty, ravey, pilled-up teenagers. But every season’s soundtrack was stellar: “Living on a Prayer” building with the hit of ecstasy, indie by way of TV on the Radio and Hadouken!’s relentless electro rave, heartache to the sound of “Heavy Water (I’d Rather Be Sleeping)” by Grouper. The show is a bit of a time capsule now—maybe even a period drama—but Skins’s issues remain potent: characters lost their virginities, dealt with parents’ divorces and affairs, battled eating disorders and substance abuse, shoplifted, fought, raved, and found dysfunctional, die-hard friendships. It balanced escapism and reality with originality, wit, and charm. Skins also nurtured the burgeoning careers of young Nicolas Hoult, Dev Patel, Kaya Scodelario, and Daniel Kaluuya—but to me, they’ll always be Toni, Anwar, Effie, and Posh Kenneth. Somehow, in this drug-addled, neon-slashed snapshot of the mid-00s southwest England, of teenagers living little, raw, authentic lives, people from all over saw themselves.—AC
How to watch: Stream it on Prime Video.
Really the whole Mike White oeuvre should be on this list, but for the sake of fairness (lol) we will overlook the brilliant, ahead-of-its-time satire of wellness culture that is Enlightened, and direct our attention to the superb White Lotus (which, incidentally, contains a not insignificant strand of cultural critique itself). The concept is simple: A cast of rag-tag and also extremely well off characters washes up at a luxury resort; hijinks ensue. But this isn’t an Agatha Christie murder mystery, though there is, in each season, an untimely death. The show is a character study, a time capsule, a depiction of the clash of cultures when those who live and work to serve meet the roving one percent who believe that being tended to is their birthright—and all of this is set against some of the most stunning landscapes on earth. The show has been responsible for launching or re-launching a number of careers (all hail Jennifer Cooolidge), and with such an intelligent show as the vehicle, it’s not hard to understand why. — Chloe Schama
How to watch: Stream it on Max.
The Comeback (2005 & 2014)
When The Comeback premiered back in 2005, it was something of a curio. Co-created by Michael Patrick King and (in a stroke of self-aware genius) Lisa Kudrow, it followed the attempted comeback of faded sitcom star Valerie Cherish (played with eye-watering desperation by Kudrow herself) via found footage from a canned mockumentary. That meant we were given a warts-and-all window into her endless humiliations, on camera and off, as Valerie attempted to claw her way back into the limelight. (If that sounds a little bleak, rest assured the show was also uproariously funny.) Just a few months after that first season concluded, the Real Housewives franchise was launched, followed by The Kardashians two years later, only confirming The Comeback’s remarkable prescience. And in an additional stroke of genius, the show was revived nine years later, with Cherish attempting to reboot her career all over again with an HBO show, scripted around her experience of making the show documented in The Comeback’s first season. (Yes, it’s all very meta.) While the second season offered an updated—but just as stinging—satire of the fickleness of the fame game, it also took a surprising left turn towards the tough decisions Valerie had to face between her career and the people who are closest to her. You’ll laugh, you’ll cringe, and in the show’s final episode, you might even cry. —LH
How to watch: Stream it on Max.
Pamela Adlon’s slightly askew self-portrait chronicles the life of a working actor who is the sole supporter of three daughters and her mother. The whole, slightly dysfunctional matriarchy (which includes Mikey Madison, playing one of her daughters) lives adjacent to one another in a hive of hormones, emotions, obligations and struggle. The show is full of love, grounded in Adlon’s charismatic performance, and at the same time rangy and weird—as true a reflection of the varied, messy endeavor of being a daughter and a mother as anything I’ve seen. The show can at times feel like a tone poem, at others a family drama. But across it all, it is a portrait of all the tangled threads of caregiving. Your life may look nothing like the Better Things world, but if you have ever been in that position, you will undoubtedly feel very seen by it. —Chloe Schama
How to watch: Stream it on Hulu.