A Big List Of The Only Important TV Shows

I'm a big TV history nerd, and recently a friend was asking for recommendations on like...essentially what the important shows to have seen in the canon are. The more I started developing the list, the more I decided it deserved a spot on my page somewhere so I could refer other people to it. I've also decided to add some "starter packs" for people interested in specific niches, topics, etc. It's a mix of shows I like, shows I don't love but are important in discussing TV, and shows that may not be important yet but really appeal to the types of people4 who take TV seriously.

As of right now, the list heavily focuses on classic sitcoms from the 60s-90s. However, I'll explore some other eras and genres in the future and add to the list. It's too hard to just sit down and make a list of every important bit of TV history from the last century.

Read the notes below, or jump to the lists, or to some curated starter packs.

Some Notes Before The List

The title is a joke, and this list is massively subjective. To some degree it's ordered by how excited I would have been to flip through the channels and see a rerun of these on. There's also shows I haven't really watched, or only half remember seeing one or two episodes of as a kid, that may deserve far better and I just don't know. So it's basically ordered by what I'm excited to recommend, and not completely objective importance in TV history, even though that does factor into how I feel about shows! Just because I find Gunsmoke boring as hell doesn't mean that it's not important. This is also why I tried to keep the categories more vague than just Tier 1 through Tier 4 or S-Rank to E-Rank or whatever.

I've tried to break these out into categories, both to aid in helping people find what they're interested in and to make it a little easier to know what I need to add to the list next. Within each category I've also tried to add the extent of my recommendation--there are some shows I think you should see an episode of once to have some sort of cultural understanding of them, and there are shows that I think are worth watching all of. After all, if you're just interested in cultural impact, watching one episode of The Love Boat is probably good enough to see what's going on there, whereas All in the Family needs some more time and consideration. I've tried to highlight shows that I am unsure about but think (from cultural osmosis) are important to see or sound interesting as well, since it's kind of hard to rank shows I know little about. But don't take the rankings too seriously, it's largely just so that if someone wants to start checking shows out, they have a more digestable starting place.

While I love TV history enough to have dug through a lot of foreign series, I AM American, so this list is going to weigh heavily towards American TV and foreign series that got a lot of airtime on American TV. Also I was born at the tail end of 1989, so I'm going to also be heavily biased by what showed in reruns when I was growing up, just because I'm the most familiar with that.

I'm always finding new shows, reevaluating old shows, etc. so this list will evolve. And if other people would like to make similar lists, especially in other countries, I would LOVE to add a link on this page to your lists! But I definitely want to reemphasize that this is not my final complete forever list so it doesn't look like I think it's more important to see The Flying Nun than Twin Peaks just because I haven't gotten to that sphere of TV yet. I also have a lot of kids shows and animation to get to some day and that will be a huge project. There is in fact a lot of important TV that was made after I was born, and I have seen some of it!

I'm alphabetizing the lists by hand, largely because I'm using Wikipedia lists as a starting point to filter through, so if something is out of order I am truly sorry and will never forgive myself. Also, I've tried to add the years to some of these shows so you can look them up easily since many of these shows have seen reboots at one time or another. Be sure to also note that there's a lot of shows with extremely similar names out there, such as The Bob Newhart Show vs Newhart. These are different shows! Nobody was worried about SEO back then!

Towards the end I have a section titled "Weird Stuff for the Sickos". This is the stuff that I would not normally recommend people to just watch casually, but more the stuff that's either notable (bad) or notable (weird) in TV history. So some of these are genuinely good shows that aren't for everyone, some of these are just shows that are very strange or unique in what they're doing, and some of these are just absolutely awful but if you dig into TV history you'll probably hear people talk about them a lot.

The Lists

Sitcoms and Variety Shows

These Are The Ones To Watch

These Are Also A Big Deal

Maybe Watch Some Of These Too

You Should Probably See One Episode of These

Shows I Don't Know Enough To Know Exactly Where To Put Them

The lists beyond here are fairly underdeveloped, more to come.

Dramas, Genre Series and Soaps

These Are The Ones To Watch

You Should Probably See One Episode Of These

Shows I Don't Know Enough About But Should Be On Here

Adult Animation

Weird Stuff For The Sickos

Sitcoms

Variety

Dramas and Soaps

Non-Fiction

Starter Packs

Successful Spinoffs

A lot of TV shows attempt a spinoff, and most spinoffs are pretty doomed. However, there are occasional winners. Below are some notable successful spinoffs, and what they were a spinoff of.

Works of Norman Lear

Norman Lear was responsible for creating some of the most provocative and important TV series of all time, some spinoffs of his previous shows and some original. Below is a sampling of some of his most notable shows (listed chronologically).

The "Rural Purge"

Rural sitcoms, westerns and woodsy adventure shows became extremely popular in the 50s and 60s, leading to an absolute glut of these types of shows being put out. This eventually oversaturated the market, causing networks to start dropping them like crazy in the early 70s and move to more urban focused shows. Some were cancelled, some just ended due to waning popularity. Quoting Pat Buttram (Mr. Haney from Green Acres), "CBS canceled everything with a tree in it--including Lassie." These are a few of the rural shows that fell off in the purge, combined with some of the urban shows that were rising from those ashes.

Media About TV

Documentaries About TV

Podcasts About TV

Books About TV

=> Return to Home