This Is The Best TV Drama Of All Time

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Most television programmers break shows into a small number of categories. These include, at least, sports, reality TV shows, soap operas, talk shows, comedies, news, cartoons, and dramas. Other major categories which once dominated ratings are gone. The leader among these was the Western. But “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza” are distant memories.

Americans spend as many as five hours a day watching TV. Television networks have cashed in on this. Disney TV revenue hit $5.6 billion in a recent quarter.

To determine the best TV drama of all time, 24/7 Tempo reviewed data on audience reviews from the Internet Movie Database. Television shows with the drama genre label on IMDb were ranked based on average IMDb user rating. Only shows with at least 75,000 user ratings, that have been or were on the air for at least one year, and have a rating from the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board were considered. Data was collected in November 2021.

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Some of the shows we considered, like “Twin Peaks,” “Oz” and “The Sopranos,” blazed the trail for modern day series. They helped elevate the medium to rivaling movies when it comes to storytelling.

Some of our candidates were critically-acclaimed — until they weren’t. But they still have plenty of great plot and characters even if they crumble in the later seasons.

The longform aspect of TV dramas lets writers and directors dive deep into the worlds they create and allows them to sculpt complex characters and settings. It’s hard to imagine “The Office ” being as funny if audiences didn’t have time to understand the characters and their relationships well.

TV series are also debatably a much better way to translate books to digital media than movies. Limited time means that a lot of the story is often cut out in movies. Meanwhile, series have more room to include details and tell stories properly.

The best TV drama of all time was “Breaking Bad”. Here are the details:

> IMDb user rating: 9.4/10
> IMDb user votes: 1,600,709
> Series run: 2008-2013
> Starring: Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Anna Gunn, Betsy Brandt

Click here to read the 100 Best TV Dramas of All Time

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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