There are dozens of TV shows that everyone says you have to watch, and there just isn’t enough time to watch all of them, so where do you start? Which of the many shows that have been deemed essential viewing are actually essential viewing? Some of the greatest TV shows ever made, like Seinfeld and Succession and Arrested Development, have such a specific sensibility and point of view that they’re not for everyone. So, what are the shows that everyone should watch, no matter what their tastes are or what genres they like?

Some TV shows are so brilliantly written that they transcend their genre or subject matter and simply shed a light on flawed but relatable human beings living their messy, complicated lives, like Mad Men and The Sopranos. Some shows have such profound social commentary that they might just change the way you view the world, like The Wire, and some of them are just perfectly told stories with some of the finest acting ever captured on film, like Breaking Bad.

Mad Men

On paper, Mad Men might not sound particularly riveting: a prestige drama exploring the office politics and messy personal lives of a New York ad agency in the 1960s. But some of the best writers and actors in the business turned Mad Men into one of the most engaging shows on television.

Mad Men is both a razor-sharp social commentary, unearthing a time capsule of ‘60s culture and lampooning the advertising business as the pinnacle of capitalism, and a deep dive into a bunch of complex human beings. Mad Men has some of the subtlest writing on TV, exploring the lies its characters tell themselves and who they think they are versus who they really are.

Chernobyl

After years of writing Hangover sequels and Scary Movies, Craig Mazin did a complete 180 from comedy to tragedy and took the world by storm with his relentlessly intense, thoroughly researched dramatization of the Chernobyl disaster. Chernobyl is as terrifying as any horror show, because it captures the very real horrors of radiation poisoning.

Not only is Chernobyl an appropriately horrifying retelling of the nuclear explosion and its devastating aftermath; it’s also a searing critique of the government’s attempted coverup. It’s one of the scariest shows ever made, but it’s also a love letter to the whistleblowers of the world, who risk life and limb to expose the truth.

Six Feet Under

Oscar-winning American Beauty writer Alan Ball brought his pitch-black comic sensibility to the small screen with Six Feet Under, one of the defining TV dramas of the 21st century. Following the untimely death of their patriarch, the dysfunctional Fisher family comes together to keep his funeral home afloat.

Every episode is mired in death — the format dictates that each episode begins with the demise of the Fishers’ latest client — and the series itself is a twisted look at our own mortality. But it’s also an uplifting celebration of life, and what makes it worth living despite all the tragedy.

Breaking Bad

Before Vince Gilligan came up with a wild idea about a mild-mannered chemistry teacher becoming a meth kingpin to pay for his cancer treatments, TV was all about maintaining a status quo. A bunch of characters stayed in one place for an indefinite amount of time, so the network could hopefully get to 100 episodes and score a lucrative syndication deal.

But Gilligan realized this long-form medium was being underutilized. With dozens of hours at his disposal, he could chronicle a character’s gradual change. Across the game-changing saga of Breaking Bad, Gilligan and his star Bryan Cranston slowly turned Mr. Chips into Scarface — and it was magical to watch.

Twin Peaks

David Lynch brought his particular brand of gonzo terror to the small screen in Twin Peaks. Co-created with Mark Frost, Twin Peaks sets up a typical small-town soap opera, populated with colorful characters, then slowly introduces creepy Lynchian elements like a giant and a backwards-talking dancer and a portal to a hellish alternate dimension on the outskirts of town.

Twin Peaks is one of the most unique creations in the history of television. It has all the over-the-top melodrama of a classic soap, but with the chilling atmosphere of a movie like Eraserhead or Blue Velvet, and it’s still just as mesmerizing and confounding today.

The Sopranos

David Chase singlehandedly kicked off the Golden Age of Television with his creation of The Sopranos. He proved to network executives that their fusty old-fashioned hangup about lead characters being likable was completely misguided, because he made his protagonist a cold-blooded killer and audiences were captivated by him.

The Sopranos brought a real sense of authenticity to the gangster genre. It brings all the pulpy tropes of mob movies into the universally relatable world of a bickering, dysfunctional Italian-American family.

Band Of Brothers

After working on Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg reunited to make another one of the greatest war movies ever made — and this one is 10 hours long. Band of Brothers plays like Saving Private Ryan if it wasn’t confined to a feature-length runtime.

With its big-budget production values and film-like camerawork, Band of Brothers proved that television didn’t have to be less visually impressive than movies. Band of Brothers feels just as cinematic as Saving Private Ryan, but the cast and the filmmakers had another seven or eight hours to dig into the camaraderie between the soldiers.

Better Call Saul

After you’ve watched Breaking Bad, you need to check out its spinoff, Better Call Saul. Better Call Saul is a rare spinoff that actually surpasses its predecessor. It’s another probing character study of a morally gray antihero, but it digs even deeper into the human condition. It’s subtler and more patient than Breaking Bad, and the dramatic rewards are even greater.

Better Call Saul gets off to a pretty slow start in its first couple of seasons, but you have to stick with it. Eventually, it becomes every bit the white-knuckle rollercoaster ride that Breaking Bad was, and delivers some of the most shocking twists you’ve ever seen.

The Twilight Zone

Rod Serling’s seminal anthology series The Twilight Zone premiered 67 years ago, but it still holds up today. Serling masterfully used sci-fi and horror allegories to deal with contemporary social and political themes, so he only tackled those themes in broad strokes. The allegories are timeless, because they’re not specific. The talking points have changed, but the issues remain the same.

When Serling wrote a Twilight Zone episode about paranoid neighbors coming together to identify the alien impostor in their midst, it was a metaphor for anti-communist hysteria during the Red Scare. But now, it feels like a metaphor for the political territorialism of the Trump era.

The Wire

The single greatest achievement in the history of American television is David Simon’s groundbreaking crime drama The Wire. Simon turned his years of experience as a reporter in Baltimore into the most realistic cop show ever made, and an almost documentary-like examination of all the broken institutions keeping the city mired in crime and corruption.

But it’s not just a civic case study; it’s one of the most compelling TV dramas ever made. Everyone in the show’s sprawling revolving-door ensemble is a fleshed-out, three-dimensional human being with their own strengths and weaknesses, and they’re brought to life by some of the world’s finest actors.