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Launching in 2020, Binge is the streaming service that brought HBO out from behind the pay TV wall in Australia. Titles from the storied American network dominate this list of must-see scripted series, but there are also Australian additions and cult successes to balance out a top 20 that reveals enduring breadth.
Bill Hader in Barry: playing the looniest of tunes.Credit: HBO/Foxtel
Barry
The concept sounds slight: co-creator Bill Hader’s disaffected hitman visits Los Angeles for work and decides to stay and try his hand – badly – at acting. But over four seasons this black comedy reveals a unique vision of withering self-analysis, deadpan action set-pieces, subconscious terror and Hollywood satire. At a certain point the show becomes unique, playing the looniest of tunes dead straight.
Battlestar Galactica
The best commentary on America’s response to 9/11 is this science-fiction drama, radically rebooted from the original 1970s space adventure, about the remnants of a human civilisation fleeing their android adversaries. Military versus civilian rule, robot mysticism, and deep space combat – this sprawling series is intent on containing multitudes. And mostly it succeeds.
Stellan Skarsgard and Jared Harris with Emily Watson in Chernobyl.
Chernobyl
A historical procedural about confronting the incomprehensible, Craig Mazin’s forensic depiction of the devastating 1986 explosion and fire at a Soviet nuclear power plant is both compelling and deeply prescient. Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgard are grimly magnetic as the officials from a totalitarian regime trying to contain a disaster that destroys bodies and the environment alike; the many malignancies here are masterful.
Curb Your Enthusiasm
A show so excruciatingly funny that some find it too uncomfortable to watch, Larry David’s semi-fictionalised comedy about his everyday misadventures in LA’s wealthy enclaves brings Jewish-American humour into the 21st century with wilful circumstances and Larry’s wild refusal to accept social norms. There are 11 seasons of mishaps to date, punctuated by some truly inspired celebrity cameos.
Larry David with Cheryl Hines and Ted Danson in Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Enlightened
Yes, Mike White’s The White Lotus is a juicy treat, but his standout series remains this 2011 portrait of wilful self-delusion created with Laura Dern, who plays a corporate middle manager returning – with deeply flawed intentions – to her old job and mother’s home after a workplace mental breakdown. It’s psychologically perceptive, deeply sustained, and vividly watchable.
The End
One of the best Australian shows of the last decade, Samantha Strauss’ illuminating comic-drama can jolt you upright but also make you laugh out loud. Exploring not only how we live but how we die, it opens up multiple angles inside a multi-generational Gold Coast family, including a doleful matriarch (Harriet Walter, quite brilliant) who wants her life to end.
Game of Thrones
Despite rushing through a truncated final season when there were years of valuable storytelling to go, this fantasy epic remains one of television’s great populist achievements. Across a vast canvas, it weaves betrayal and moral failings, dragons and magic, complex characterisations and truly shocking twists. It’s a one-of-a-kind success, as demonstrated by failed successor House of the Dragon.
Game of Thrones weaves betrayal and moral failings across a vast canvas.
Girls
Now that the think-pieces have moved on and creator Lena Dunham has stopped saying questionable things in public, we’re left with a bracing, idiosyncratic comedy of manners about a group of twentysomething women making their way in New York City. A self-aware show whose characters lack self-awareness, it has much to say about friendship, sex, and how we mostly don’t change. Crucial bonus: meet Adam Driver.
Friends
A giddy, reassuring artifact from the age of Hollywood studio-shot sitcoms, this spirit-of-the-1990s comedy about half a dozen pals with palatable Manhattan rent masters the constant churn of punchlines and marries it with an exemplary ensemble cast where each actor turns their character outline into a winning portrayal. Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey – enough said.
I May Destroy You
It’s fitting that a show about powerlessness – being deprived of sexual consent, financial security, and the ability to fix yourself – should be an incredibly powerful viewing experience. Michaela Coel’s 2020 tour de force, where she plays a young writer who is sexually assaulted after her drink is spiked, interlaces barbed humour, social commentary, and creative cataclysms.
The Larry Sanders Show
It’s the definitive Hollywood satire, not to mention a black comedy about ego that has the most telling of insights. The late Garry Shandling plays the Hollywood talk show host whose entitlement totters on his many insecurities, with note perfect support from Jeffrey Tambor as a problematic sidekick and the magnificent Rip Torn as seen-it-all producer. The best episodes are comedic masterclasses.
Jeffrey Tambor, Rip Torn and Garry Shandling in The Larry Sanders Show
Looking
This San Francisco-set comic-drama drew scads of attention in 2014 as the first HBO series to focus on gay men, but the series wisely sidesteps the chatter and simply depicts the lives of these characters with unadorned clarity and naturalistic direction. Across two seasons it steadily finds new highs, while the cast – featuring Jonathan Groff and Murray Bartlett – make time-worn struggles genuinely moving.
Parks and Recreation
The mix isn’t quite there in the first season, but after that this mockumentary blossoms into one of the genre’s most delightful. It’s laced with irascible warmth, confounding humanism, and eccentric insight, as community-minded bureaucrat Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) tries to improve the town of Pawnee despite persistent setbacks (including her colleagues). Optimism is the show’s secret superpower.
Sex and the City
Ground-breaking in its depiction of women on American television and the frankness of their matter-of-fact conversations about sex and relationships, this spiky reinvention of the romcom debuted in 1998 and launched characters so recognisable – headlined by Sarah Jessica Parker’s columnist, Carrie Bradshaw – that their foibles have become defining and their successes iconic.
The Sopranos
Rightly one of the most obsessed over programs the medium has produced, David Chase’s masterpiece about a New Jersey organised crime boss (James Gandolfini) remakes the mob drama as a visceral tale of intertwined families that is psychologically acute and violently unpredictable. It finds pathos in the most bittersweet ways and haunts characters and audience alike with the lingering fear of everything slipping away.
Succession
The dialogue on Jesse Armstrong’s coruscating series about a rapacious media mogul and his flawed, competitive adult children is so good you could close your eyes and simply savour the biting wit. Open them, however, and you see a seamless exploration of familial trauma and dysfunctional need told with documentary-like intimacy. There’s never been a funnier tragedy.
Veep
The insult is a virtuosic instrument in Armando Iannucci’s Washington DC political satire, and no one plays it better than Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ fictional vice-president of the United States. Willing to embrace crudity, self-interest, and the frankest of truths, Veep levels the mythmaking of politics (RIP The West Wing) while letting a gifted ensemble absolutely swing.
Wentworth
A prison drama delivers confinement, deprivation, and a palpable power imbalance: it’s the perfect stealth setting for social commentary and jarring insights to seep in beneath the machinations and revenge. That’s just what this long-running Australian series, set at a women’s facility, does over eight seasons, delivering a closely plotted mix of unhinged clashes, pulp friction, and female truths.
Wendell Pierce and Dominic West in The Wire.Credit: HBO
The Wire
I’ll say it – the best show in the history of television. Fusing lived experience, anthropological insight and wrenching analysis, David Simon’s crime drama looks at the city of Baltimore through the lens of many dysfunctional institutions: the police force, narcotics gangs, the docks, the school system. As a depiction of America, it offers neither lessons nor reassuring archetypes, but its shattering of illusions remains without peer.
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