The 6 Best Shows Released Between 2020 and Now
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TV's in a weird spot right now, everyone keeps saying the golden age is over while somehow still turning out shows this good. The six shows picked up here aren't just well made, they're the kind you actually think about days later, arguing with people about a scene, rewatching an episode just to catch something you missed the first time.
A few of these shows are adaptations nobody expected to work. One's basically a workplace comedy that forgot to be funny half the time and got better for it. Ranked from great to can't-miss, here's what's actually been worth your time these last few years.
6 'Fallout' (2024–present)
Lucy (Ella Purnell) grows up safe inside Vault 33, generations after a nuclear war wrecked the surface, until her father gets kidnapped and she has to leave the vault to go find him. Walton Goggins plays The Ghoul, a former pre-war actor turned bounty hunter who's spent two hundred years rotting into something barely human, and he steals every scene he's in. Showrunners Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the same team behind Westworld, mix gore and pitch-black comedy so freely that you're never quite sure what tone the next scene's going to hit.
The show closely sticks to the video game's whole retro-futuristic look, all that fifties optimism bolted onto a wasteland, without it ever feeling like a theme park tour. Kyle MacLachlan plays Hank, Lucy's father, and his backstory ties into a Vault-Tec conspiracy that keeps twisting the more you learn about it.
5 'The Last of Us' (2023–present)
Joel (Pedro Pascal) is hired to smuggle a teenage girl, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), across a country wrecked by a fungal infection that turns people into something closer to a hive mind than a zombie. Craig Mazin, who made Chernobyl, co-created this with Neil Druckmann, the guy who directed the original game, and together they expand a few side characters way past what the game ever gave them. Episode three, a quiet standalone love story between Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett), barely touches the main plot and still ended up being the episode everyone talked about.
The fungus itself is loosely based on a real one that actually does infect and control ants, which is a genuinely unsettling thing to learn after watching this show. Pascal and Ramsey build something that feels like an actual relationship instead of a plot device, gruff protector and stubborn kid slowly turning into something closer to family. Season two dives into darker, messier territory, and it doesn't soften any of it to keep people comfortable.
4 'Arcane' (2021–2024)
Vi and Jinx (Hailee Steinfeld and Ella Purnell) start out as sisters growing up together in the slums of Zaun, and end up on opposite sides of a war between their underground city and the wealthy one floating above it. Riot Games' animation studio, Fortiche, spent six years building this, and the style mixes hand-painted textures with 3D movement in a way that doesn't look like anything else on TV right now. It's based on League of Legends, a video game most people watching never even played, but have heard of a lot.
Showrunners Christian Linke and Alex Yee don't pull punches with how bleak this gets either, addiction, grief, a slow descent into violence that never gets walked back for the sake of a happy ending. The soundtrack, including a track with Imagine Dragons, actually fits the show instead of feeling bolted on for marketing. It's picked up a stack of Emmys for animation, and it's honestly reshaped what people expect a video game show to look like.
3 'Shōgun' (2024–present)
Lord Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) is fighting to hold onto power in feudal Japan around 1600, and an English sailor, John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis), washes up in the middle of it with no idea how far in over his head he is. Roughly seventy percent of the dialogue is in Japanese, subtitled, which was a real risk for a big-budget American show, and it pays off completely. Sanada didn't just star in this, he also produced it and pushed hard to keep the culture and history accurate down to small details most viewers would never notice.
Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), Blackthorne's translator and eventual ally, carries a lot of the show's quiet tragedy, and her arc is loosely built on a real historical woman from the same era. Toranaga himself is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, an actual Japanese ruler, and the show treats that history with real respect instead of flattening it into background color. It won eighteen Emmys for a single season, a record, and pretty much every one of them was earned.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Netflix Character Would Be Your Best Friend? Dustin · Emily · Wednesday · Gi-hun
Some friends drag you out of the house. Some sit with you on the worst night of your life. Netflix has written both, plus the one who tells you the truth you have been avoiding all week. Answer eight quick questions about how you actually do friendship, and find out which of them was always going to end up in your corner.
🧢Dustin(Stranger Things)
🗼Emily(Emily in Paris)
🕷️Wednesday(Wednesday)
🟢Gi-hun(Squid Game)
01
How do you usually end up making a new friend? The origin story says a lot about the friendship that follows it.
02
What is a perfect Saturday with your best friend? Friendship is mostly built out of very ordinary hours.
03
You call them at two in the morning. What happens? This is the real test of a friendship, and everybody knows it.
04
What do you want from them when you are clearly wrong? The best friendships are the ones that survive being corrected.
05
What do your friends actually value about you? The friend you attract says something about the friend you are.
06
You have a falling out. How does it go? How a friendship repairs itself matters more than how it breaks.
07
What do you actually need a best friend for? Everybody is missing something. The right friend fills that gap.
08
Ten years from now, what keeps the two of you close? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who you get.
The Group Chat Has Spoken Your Best Friend Is…
Four Netflix characters, four completely different ways of showing up for somebody. This is the one who fits how you actually do friendship, and what having them in your life would be like.
Dustin Henderson
You do not do friendship at half volume, and neither does he. What you want is somebody who says yes to the plan before you have finished describing the plan.
- Dustin is the friend the entire show runs on: loyal past the point of sense, enthusiastic about everything, and incapable of leaving anybody behind.
- You have the same instinct. Your friendships are loud, specific and slightly ridiculous, and they last for decades because of it.
- He is also the one person who would take your strangest interest completely seriously, which is far rarer than it sounds.
- You would have a group chat. It would never once be quiet.
Emily Cooper
You are the friend who makes things happen, and so is she. Together you would be mildly exhausting to everyone around you and completely delighted with yourselves.
- Emily treats an ordinary Tuesday as something that could be turned into an occasion, which is either the best or the worst quality in a friend depending on your energy levels.
- You share her refusal to sit still. Neither of you has ever accepted a night in when something was happening somewhere else.
- She is far more loyal than people give her credit for. She defends her friends loudly, publicly, and occasionally before checking the facts.
- She would post the photo without asking. You would forgive her, because it is a very good photo.
Wednesday Addams
You have no patience for pleasant lies, and she has no ability to tell them. What looks like coldness from the outside is the most reliable friendship on this list.
- Wednesday never says a kind thing she does not mean, which makes the rare ones count for an enormous amount.
- You would rather be told the truth than be made comfortable. She is constitutionally incapable of offering you anything else.
- Underneath all of it she is ferociously protective. She simply refuses to make a performance out of caring.
- Do not expect a birthday message. Do expect her to ruin anyone who wrongs you.
Seong Gi-hun
You look after whoever is having the worst day. So does he. It is the least strategic way to move through the world and the best possible quality in a friend.
- Gi-hun is not the strongest player in Squid Game, or the cleverest. He is the one who keeps choosing to protect somebody else, over and over, at genuine cost to himself.
- You have the same instinct. You notice who is struggling and you stay with them, long after anybody would blame you for leaving.
- He is a flawed friend, and that is part of why it lands. He lets people down, then comes back and tries again, which is more than most manage.
- He would give you his last chance and never once mention that he had done it.
2 'The Bear' (2022–present)
Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) is a fine-dining chef who comes home to Chicago to run his late brother's rundown sandwich shop, and pretty much nothing about that transition goes smoothly. Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) round out a kitchen staff held together by duct tape and stress, and the show shoots kitchen chaos with quick cuts and clattering sound design that'll genuinely raise your heart rate. The season one episode "Review," built to feel like one continuous take through a disastrous dinner rush, is still one of the most stressful twenty minutes of television made in years.
Season two's "Fishes" flips the format entirely, a flashback Christmas dinner packed with celebrity cameos that slowly shows just how much damage this family did to each other. Creator Christopher Storer keeps blending comedy with actual grief so well that calling this a comedy at all feels a little off. It's won more Emmys in that category than almost any show ever has, which says a lot about how far the show pushes what a comedy's even supposed to be.
1 'Severance' (2022–present)
Mark (Adam Scott) works at Lumon Industries, a company that's split his brain in two through a procedure called severance, so his work self has no memory of his life outside the office, and his outside self has no idea what he does all day. Helly (Britt Lower) wakes up as a brand-new work-self with zero context for where she is, and her confusion mirrors the audience's for most of the first season. Ben Stiller directs several episodes and gives the Lumon offices this sterile, retro-corporate look that's somehow both funny and deeply unsettling at the same time.
Tramell Tillman, playing the eerily chipper manager Milchick, turned into one of the show's biggest breakout performances almost overnight. Theodore Shapiro's score moves into that same unease, all clean lines and quiet dread humming under every office scene. The first season ends on a cliffhanger big enough that the three-year wait for season two, partly due to industry strikes, felt genuinely brutal for anyone watching.
Severance
- Release Date
- February 17, 2022
- Network
- Apple TV
- Showrunner
- Dan Erickson, Mark Friedman
- Directors
- Ben Stiller
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