The last decade was a golden period for US TV, but all good things must come to an end. Could one of these hard-hitting shows fill the void?

In his 2013 book Difficult Men, author Brett Martin makes a bold claim on behalf of the American TV drama. He calls it “the significant art form of the first decade of the 21st century, the equivalent of what the films of Scorsese, Coppola, Altman and others had been to the 1970s, or the novels of Updike, Roth and Mailer had been to the 1960s”.

The temple of the US one-hour TV drama has four pillars: The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, novelistic shows that indicted America for its failures but refused to condemn their complex, emotionally crippled leading men. In the wake of Tony Soprano, Don Draper and Walter White, we’ve become accustomed to characters defined by rage, guilt, secrets and self-doubt. There was a time we could look to movies, music and literature to hold an unflattering mirror up to society and point out the flaws. Now, if we want a critique of the culture, the only destination is TV.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tough act to follow: Breaking Bad. Photograph: Alamy

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But is this golden age of drama already dwindling into the distance? That quartet of seminal shows are now history, and networks are ravenous to find the next series that will lodge itself inside viewers’ consciousness and inspire furious pub debate long after they have finished. Obviously, there’s Game Of Thrones but, other than financially, it doesn’t meet the qualification of Great American Drama. True Detective elicited a feverish response to its first season but creator Nic Pizzolatto decided the appropriate way to follow up a brilliantly cast, relatively simple story was to do the exact opposite of everything that worked for him the first time.

Amid the plethora of programming available on an ever-increasing array of platforms, though, there are still great shows to be found. Here are some worthy contenders….





Mr Robot

An isolated, socially awkward, morphine-addicted computer genius toils unnoticed, performing security checks in the bowels of faceless multinational corporation Evilcorp. Until he’s recruited by an Anonymous-like band of anarchist hackers led by the mysterious Mr Robot (Christian Slater: shaking up the system since the days of Heathers and Pump Up The Volume), that is, and persuaded to put his skills to better use, ie DESTROYING CAPITALISM. It’s kind of amazing to see a show use its platform to loudly and continuously blast out an anti-consumer society, anti-social media, anti-corporate message. Gripping and deliberately disorienting, Mr Robot continually confounds its obsessed audience with clues that the entire show might actually be taking place inside the main character’s addled mind. It will be swiped by a UK network soon, no doubt.

American Crime

Sticking out like a sore thumb on the otherwise soapy ABC network (it’s yet to hit the UK), John Ridley’s unremittingly grim examination of the murder of a war hero and his beauty queen wife digs deep into an America where racial lines are drawn and no one trusts, believes or listens to anyone who doesn’t look exactly like them. It’s no wonder it’s already been called the new Wire. Felicity Huffman as the disgusted, heartbroken, bigoted mother of the soldier is the highlight of a stellar cast.

The Knick

American exceptionalism and the drive of the individual are celebrated and mourned in Steven Soderbergh’s medical drama, set in the under-equipped Knickerbocker Hospital in the New York of 1900, a period during which a credible cure for depression was the removal of the patient’s teeth. Clive Owen is the arrogant, coke-and-opium-addicted rock star of the operating theatre who is gradually overwhelmed by his appetites, while Andre Holland is the brilliant black surgeon who returns from Europe, where his skill was respected, to his homeland, where dying patients refuse to let him touch them. Imagine one of those Sunday night period shows like Mr Selfridge, but made with wit and vision. That’s The Knick. Soderbergh directed all 10 episodes of the first season and does not skimp on the gore.



Shown on Sky Atlantic and available on demand

Halt And Catch Fire



An engineer and a charismatic huckster attempt to blaze a trail in the PC revolution of the early 1980s. The tiny audience tuning into season one took a quick, unimpressed look at the way the show was fixated on Lee Pace’s moody, mercurial salesman and decided they had zero interest in Mad Men with a mainframe. But in a remarkable salvage act, the creators put the male leads on the back-burner and focused on the two female characters, the engineer’s equally tech-savvy wife (played the awesome Kerry Bishé) and a brilliant, bratty coder (Mackenzie Davis). In its second series, Halt And Catch Fire turned into a show about two female pioneers trying to survive in a male-dominated world where they’re each other’s only allies, while the men formerly in the spotlight find themselves unmoored and without purpose.



Available on Amazon Prime Instant Video

The Leftovers

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End-of-days paranoia bumps up against fundamentalist anticipation of The Rapture in HBO’s adaptation of the Tom Perotta novel about life in a world where 2% of the population vanish without explanation. The numb survivors in small-town Mapleton try to maintain the facade of a normal life while being tormented by the presence of the mute, white-clad, chain-smoking cult the Guilty Remnant, who aspire to a permanent state of grieving and guilt. The Walking Dead holds out more hope for the future of humanity than The Leftovers, but if you want your misanthropic views of the world validated, this is the show for you.



Shown on Sky Atlantic and available on demand

The Americans

We fear the enemy within and we don’t trust the Russians: these prevailing attitudes make The Americans a potent slice of paranoia. The situation of the KGB operatives embedded in the suburbs of 1980s Washington is a scary, complicated mess. The Russian pretending to be affable travel agent Philip Jennings is not only married to the agent pretending to be his wife Elizabeth but also to the secretary of an FBI supervisor whom he manipulates to get information. In the brutal third season, the Jennings have to recruit their Bible-quoting daughter, who is unaware of their true identities, into the family business. Moscow demands it!



On ITV Encore from 19 August

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The cast of The Good Wife. Photograph: CBS

These are shows that I recommend without reservation. There are other series – Manhattan, Being Mary Jane, Kingdom (the MMA Friday Night Lights!) – I didn’t have the space to praise. And then there are a whole world of titles I know are out there but may never have the time to watch: Netflix’s Bloodline and Sense8; Amazon’s The Man In The High Castle; anything on Netflix or Hulu or even Xbox. We’re in a unique, unprecedented position here. There’s not just too much choice in terms of American drama: there’s too much good choice.

Battlestar Galactica was three years in before I was persuaded to watch it. The Good Wife was two. I’m hardly alone in this. I know people who have just discovered Six Feet Under, which I’ve STILL never watched. What if it turns out to be terrible and I’ve committed all that time to it? I can’t even make that commitment to my actual human relationships.

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There’s a definite thrill in the belated discovery of a TV series you never knew about but suddenly can’t stop watching. It’s a private thrill, though. There used to be a different kind of thrill: the experience of being part of a mass audience that sat down to watch the same programme at the same time.

There is only really one show that currently exerts a vice-like grip over what now passes for a mass audience: by its final episode, Fox’s Empire was pulling in 18 million same-day viewers. For a series based on King Lear, featuring an almost all-black cast, whose breakout characters are a woman in her 40s and a young gay man, that level of success is a strong indicator that the Golden Age Of American Drama is nowhere near over yet.