Blackadder Goes Forth (1989)

Long before it became fashionable for a TV show to change setting and storyline between seasons, Richard Curtis and Ben Elton’s historical sitcom visited the 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Then, in the cunningly titled Blackadder Goes Forth, they settled in 1917 in the French trenches of the first world war. With Rowan Atkinson’s Captain Edmund Blackadder awaiting orders from Stephen Fry’s insane General Melchett to run towards German gunfire with Private Baldrick (Tony Robinson) and the stupidly patriotic Lieutenant George (Hugh Laurie), the series is the best of the Blackadder quartet. Its last episode is the single greatest achievement of TV Britcom. Watching the final 29 minutes again before writing this (probably the sixth time I’ve seen it) still delivered the astonishment of a half-hour comedy in which it is no plot-spoiler to say that every major character except one (Fry’s, secure in his chateau) is doomed to die horribly. ML

'Blackadder Goes Forth? Sorry you're wrong': readers on the definitive series of the best TV shows Read more

Seinfeld, series four (1992)

It’s pretty hard to pick between the trio of series – four, five and six – that marked the imperial phase of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David’s groundbreaking comedy, but, by the width of a Junior Mint, series four sneaks it. This was the one that featured a season-long storyline – Jerry and George pitch the very premise of Seinfeld itself (‘a show about nothing’) to execs – that was perhaps the most meta in the history of television. Which is impressive enough on its own, but four also boasts one of the show’s greatest standalone episodes: The Bubble Boy. There’s also the aforementioned Junior Mint, where Kramer manages to drop confectionary into the chest cavity of a man undergoing surgery, and – of course! – The Contest, Larry David’s highly successful attempt to smuggle 30 minutes of masturbation jokes onto primetime, and one of the greatest episodes of TV, ever. GM

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Boreanaz, Alyson Hannigan and Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy The Vampire Slayer Photograph: Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

Buffy The Vampire Slayer, series four (1999)

The fourth season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer has been much maligned, and its flaws are certainly evident. The concept that held the show together was reliant on its high school setting. It was about the horrors of adolescence, turned into monsters that could be battled: everything from the fear of being unpopular to classroom crushes were made manifest by the supernatural. In taking the characters to college, and putting them through a largely miserable transition to adulthood, many felt that season four lacked the vim the show once possessed. But season four produced some of the most inventive moments of the entire series. There was Hush, a near-silent episode in which everyone in Sunnydale lost their voices, and Restless: a surreal and witty shared dream that foreshadowed the more confident but less solid season five. Season four had to leave teen angst in the smouldering ruins of Sunnydale High, but in its place was a newfound maturity that marked a series peak, and has endured far beyond its first impressions. RN

The Sopranos, series two (2000)

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Season two marked the moment The Sopranos matured from interesting crime telly to something peerless. The Big Pussy Bonpensiero storyline ends on the high seas, Christopher starts his drug-fuelled descent, the gang go Godfather part two in Naples, and Furio joins the crew. The storylines that start in series two run throughout the show like the centre of a stick of rock, and it was the moment David Chase felt confident enough to leave some of the conventional elements of the first series behind. The final moments of the series, where the gang assemble at Tony’s for Meadow’s birthday, sum the change up nicely. It’s a strangely saccharine moment where The Rolling Stones’ Thru and Thru plays over shots of everyone eating birthday cake – seemingly content after dealing (brutally) with their rat problem – and images relating to the mob’s various hustles. The implication is that we’re now in on the action too, cheering on a crew of sociopaths from the comfort of our living rooms. The bad guys never looked as good. LB

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The Wire, series four (2006)

The Wire revealed the full extent of its portrait of Baltimore gradually. It was the fourth season – which took us into the city’s troubled classrooms – and saw The Wire reach its greatest dramatic heights and sociological depth. Although Simon gets most of the credit for The Wire, his co-writer Ed Burns steered series four. A former Baltimore policeman who retrained as a teacher – a journey echoed by one of the key characters here, Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost) – Burns co-wrote every episode of this season, with Simon penning only four. The series introduces us to a group of teenage boys – Dukie, Randy, Namond and Michael – as they are sucked inexorably into west Baltimore’s drug economy and are rapidly forced to leave childhood behind. Of the four new boys it is Michael (Tristan Wilds) who stands out. He transforms with chilling plausibility over the course of this season and the next, from a sensitive, relatively innocent youngster to a coarsened, cold-blooded killer. It is one of the most powerful and tragic stories The Wire tells. PO

Peep Show, series four (2007)

Seven minutes into series four of Peep Show, Mark is pulling the head off a wounded pheasant, blood spurting, trauma setting in to those dark kitten eyes. It’s the perfect Peep Show moment, bringing as it does exquisite awkwardness, farcical horror and Mark’s eternal desire to prove himself in the face of a more capable man (fiancé Sophie’s father, and Johnson). The series sees Mark reluctantly trudging towards marriage as if he’s “marching to the gulag for an undetermined crime”. The elements that made Peep Show so brilliant are all here: the scene-stealing secondary characters in Super Hans, Sophie and Johnson; dialogue that is clever, funny and contains revelatory human truths. It feels like writers Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong felt bold enough to push the farce as far as they could. Their skill is making even the most outlandish feat – being an accessory to arson (episode one), eating a dead dog (episode five), urine soaking through the church ceiling on to the hats of wedding goers below (episode six) – feel believable, because we’ve been on the excruciating path that got Mark and Jeremy there. Sublime. ES

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Mad Men, series two (2008)

As a card-carrying Mad Men evangelist (recent problems aside), it would be easy to make a case for any season of the show to be its finest. Given its long gestation – Matthew Weiner had a draft of episode one in his desk drawer for years – the show arrived into the world fully formed. But it’s series two, set over nine months in 1962, which is its most vital. Season two dug into Don Draper’s psyche – from his unravelling marriage to the truth about his secret past. Crucially, the second outing is when the symbiotic relationship between Peggy and Don comes into its own. The flashback to Don helping Peggy after the surprise birth and adoption of her child – “it will shock you how much this never happened” – remains one of Mad Men’s most poignant scenes. But it’s perhaps the sequence of episodes of Don in California – a call forward to the show’s famous finale - that make season two so excellent. Episode 11, The Jet Set, in which Don drifts in a Californian villa with a rabble of Eurotrash is like a Slim Aarons print come alive with ennui. The next episode, The Mountain King, in which we meet Don’s “ex wife” Anna Draper is a Peer Gynt-inspired masterpiece, culminating in Joan’s rape at the hands of doctor husband Greg, and Draper baptising himself in the Pacific to George Jones’s The Cup of Loneliness. A glorious 13 hours of TV. WD

The Thick of It, series three (2009)

The third series of Armando Iannucci’s political satire is its most completely realised. It’s the moment that The Thick Of It widened out its vision of political incompetence, showing us not only the continued uselessness of the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship (DoSAC), but also their equally hapless opposition counterparts headed up by an old dog trying desperately to learn new tricks Peter Mannion (played by the almost too likeable Roger Allam). Television’s swearer-in-chief Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) found himself grappling with “omnishambles” and facing off against old enemies, most notably super-smooth Andrew Adonis-alike Julius Nicholson (Alex McQueen) and brutish fixer Steve Fleming (David Haig). The first two series might have been more ribald and the final series was frighteningly prescient, but it is Capaldi’s perfectly pitched portrait of a man on the verge of being brought down by everything he’s ever fought for that is the reason why this series of The Thick of It remains the best. SH

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Breaking Bad, series three (2010)

There’s a couple of moments in Breaking Bad that stretch credulity; the passenger jet that falls out of the air, the red hot DEA agent, who can never quite see what’s under his nose. But largely Vince Gilligan’s drama carries so much power because of the way it maintains the viewer’s faith in what they are watching. Season three picks up after the plane crash, the death of Jesse’s junkie girlfriend (whom Walter does nothing to save) and the introduction of Breaking Bad’s Big Bad Gus Fring. Fring wants to use Walter’s chemical genius to swamp the American south-west with potent blue meth, and take on the Mexican cartels while he’s at it; Walter is suffering from terminal cancer and is also now a divorcee. But the determining factor in his decision is his ego: he is getting no small kick from acting out his criminal alter-ego of Heisenberg and is flattered by the invitation which he duly accepts. Another stand-out moment in this series is the entire 10th episode, Fly. Directed by The Last Jedi’s Rian Johnson, it is a bottle episode that had a Marmite affect on fans, but has aged well eight years on. PM





Facebook Twitter Pinterest Line Of Duty’s Detective Inspector Lindsay Denton Photograph: Steffan Hill/BBC/Steffan Hill

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Line of Duty, series two (2014)

Line of Duty’s second series was such a barnstormer, such a ridiculous edge-of-your-seat go-big-or-go-home funride, that it took people by surprise. “Where the hell did THIS come from?” they marvelled, still reeling from the spectacular defenestration that closed its first episode. Everything had been ramped up. The AC-12 officers – especially Adrian Dunbar’s Ted Hastings – had slipped their slightly generic beginnings and returned sharper drawn and better defined. The plot twists were pinned down and fed human growth hormone, lurching from ‘Oh my God’ to ‘No, seriously, I’m actually having a panic attack here’. And, most importantly of all, it found an all-time classic baddie in Keeley Hawes’ DI Lindsay Denton. Line of Duty’s second series wasn’t its most-watched. It wasn’t the starriest or most far-fetched. But it was where Jed Mercurio’s formula toughened up into scripture: big, bold, satisfyingly populist drama that refused to underestimate its audience. And the cliffhangers. Dear sweet god, the cliffhangers. SH

Girls, series five (2016)

Series five kicked off with an episode so good it could have been a finale: Hannah, Jessa, Marnie and Shoshanna in a rare group outing for Marnie’s doomed wedding to her needy musical partner, Desi. It gave Girls fans what they came for – the complicated politics of long-standing female friendships – right from the get-go. By episode three we were in Japan, where Shoshanna’s character finally made total sense (better late than never) and Girls’ ability to hold up a mirror could successfully take aim at westerners in general, rather than just western millennials. When Hannah and her mother headed to a female empowerment retreat, in what could have been a series lull, series five pulled it out the bag (namely via a lesbian tryst in the sauna). In fact, gay relationships were at the fore of this series: not only did Hannah’s dad meet a man online, but Elijah was finally given his own romantic plotline via a fling with the “quite famous” news anchor Dill – just one of the reasons why Girls’ penultimate series was its best. LH

The Leftovers, series three (2017)

Season three, the show’s last, was where The Leftovers hit its epically bonkers stride. The characters moved yet again to Melbourne, Australia, where they await the seven-year anniversary of The Departure. Justin Theroux’s Kevin Garvey, dies and resurrects himself at least three times; and Carrie Coon’s Nora, whose entire family departed, finally confronts her suicidal bereavement in one of the most affecting character arcs ever seen on TV. And if that doesn’t sound like your idea of fun, there’s also a Tasmanian sex cruise, a nuclear crisis set in purgatory, a self-incinerating Swedish death machine, and a soundtrack so prodigious you will wonder why no one’s ever thought to unite the music of Verdi, a-Ha, and the Wu-Tang clan. JN