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Best TV shows of the 21st century: Breaking Bad or The Wire?

13 October 2026 · Series

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In October 2021 BBC Culture asked 206 critics, academics and people who make television to name the best series of the 21st century, and The Wire came out on top, ahead of Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Lists like that start arguments, and they should. On GOATvs nobody fills in a ballot: every show is picked or passed over one face-off at a time, by everyone, and the box above shows where this century's best stand in the world's list today. Like the BBC, we count only shows that began in 2000 or later, so The Sopranos, which started in 1999, has to sit this one out.

When everyone votes, one show keeps coming back: Breaking Bad. Vince Gilligan's AMC drama ran from 2008 to 2013 and promised to turn Mr. Chips into Scarface, and it did, one bad decision at a time. It also kept giving: a prequel, Better Call Saul, ran for six more seasons and is argued about almost as much. Its great rival for the decade was Game of Thrones, HBO's adaptation of George R. R. Martin's novels, which made a fantasy saga the show everyone talked about on Monday morning. Its final season divided fans, and the vote is where they settle that score.

Critics tell a different story. The Wire, David Simon's portrait of Baltimore through its police, drug corners, docks, schools and newspaper, ran on HBO from 2002 to 2008 and never won a single Emmy. It found most of its audience later, on DVD and streaming, and now tops critics' lists again and again. Mad Men, the AMC drama about the advertising man Don Draper, went the other way and won the Emmy for best drama four years in a row. The Wire against Breaking Bad is the critics' favourite against the fans' favourite, and it is the first pair in the box above.

Some of the century's best were short. Band of Brothers (2001), produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, followed Easy Company of the 101st Airborne from D-Day to the end of the war in ten episodes and won the Emmy for best miniseries. Eighteen years later HBO did it again with Chernobyl, Craig Mazin's five-episode account of the 1986 nuclear disaster, with Jared Harris as the scientist Valery Legasov. It won the Emmy for best limited series. Two of television's most admired miniseries meet in the second pair.

Britain gave the century two of its biggest exports. Sherlock, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, moved Conan Doyle's detective to modern London, made Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman stars and told its stories in feature-length episodes, three at a time. Peaky Blinders, Steven Knight's Birmingham gangster saga set after the First World War, did the same for Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby, years before he won an Oscar for Oppenheimer. They are the third pair.

The streaming era added its own giants. Netflix's Stranger Things, the Duffer Brothers' love letter to 1980s films, began in 2016 and ended at the end of 2025. Squid Game became the most watched series in Netflix's history and made Lee Jung-jae the first Asian actor to win the Emmy for lead actor in a drama. Comedy holds its ground too: The Office (US), a remake of the British original that critics put in their own top ten, found a whole new audience online, while Fleabag and Succession won the Emmys that critics hoped they would.

Pick your side above: The Wire or Breaking Bad, Chernobyl or Band of Brothers, Sherlock or Peaky Blinders. Then see how this century compares with every other in the TV Series Top 100, ranked by everyone.

Vote: Breaking Bad vs The Wire

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