Derek Jacobi as the stammering emperor and Sian Phillips as Livia; the BBC's 1976 Rome.
Connell and Marianne from Sligo to Trinity College; Sally Rooney's novel in twelve half-hours.
Donald Glover manages his rapper cousin; the series that could be anything each week.
A fine-dining chef takes over his dead brother's Chicago sandwich shop; the kitchen as panic attack.
A maximum-security prison in Emerald City; HBO's first drama and the model for everything after.
Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell by candlelight; Hilary Mantel on the BBC.
Upstairs and downstairs at a Yorkshire estate from the Titanic to the 1920s; Maggie Smith's put-downs.
The Targaryen civil war two centuries before Game of Thrones.
One year at a Michigan high school in 1980; eighteen episodes and every future star.
A financial adviser launders cartel money at a Missouri lake; Jason Bateman and Laura Linney.
The Roy children fight over a media empire; four seasons of Shakespeare in fleece.
Monterey mothers, a school fundraiser and a death; Kidman, Witherspoon and Streep.
Aziz Ansari in New York and Modena; the "Thanksgiving" episode.
Sorkin's Bartlet administration and the walk-and-talk; the fantasy of competent government.
A CIA analyst convinced a returned POW is a terrorist; Claire Danes and the first two seasons.
Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and a teddy bear at Oxford and Castle Howard; eleven hours of Waugh.
Elizabeth II from 1947 to 2005, with the cast replaced every two seasons.
Four Native teenagers in Oklahoma trying to get to California; the first all-Indigenous writers' room.
Debtors play children's games for a fortune and their lives; the most watched Netflix series.
A comedian and his stalker, from the true story of Richard Gadd; the Netflix surprise of 2024.
Five friends in London through the AIDS years of the 1980s; Russell T Davies.
Three Aboriginal girls walk 1,500 miles home along the fence in 1931.
A son accuses his father at a 60th birthday dinner; the first Dogme 95 film.
A supermarket worker and an alcoholic welder in Helsinki fall in love over the radio news of Ukraine.
An old man is shuttled between Bucharest hospitals for a night; black comedy as indictment.
Two students arrange an illegal abortion in Ceausescu's Romania; the New Wave's Palme d'Or.
A boy sent to a Swedish village in the 1950s compares himself to Laika; Hallstrom's breakthrough.
The last human fleet flees the Cylons; the sci-fi series that was really about the war on terror.
A letter writer at Rio's station takes an orphan across Brazil to find his father.
Emma Thompson wrote and starred, Ang Lee directed; the best of the 1990s Austen wave.
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