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The Best TV Shows of the Past 25 Years, According to Rotten Tomatoes Fans

Rotten Tomatoes’ 2023 25th-anniversary fan-submission list ranks Breaking Bad first, ahead of Game of Thrones and The Sopranos. Here is the top 10 and how to read the ranking.
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Rotten Tomatoes’ 2023 25th-anniversary fan-submission ranking puts Breaking Bad at No. 1, followed by Game of Thrones and The Sopranos. The 25-show list spans crime dramas, fantasy, comedy, science fiction and mystery—but Rotten Tomatoes does not publish the number of submissions or voting details, so it is best read as a fan-curated ranking, not a representative survey.

Rotten Tomatoes’ top 10 fan picks

The ranking comes from Rotten Tomatoes’ anniversary feature, which asked fans to submit their top television shows released during the preceding 25 years. Its first 10 entries are:

  1. Breaking Bad
  2. Game of Thrones
  3. The Sopranos
  4. The Office
  5. Stranger Things
  6. Better Call Saul
  7. The Wire
  8. Succession
  9. Lost
  10. Dark

The full feature lists 25 shows. The top 10 alone make clear that the picks are not confined to one kind of television: crime stories sit alongside fantasy, comedy, science fiction and mystery.

What the Rotten Tomatoes scores mean—and what they do not

Rotten Tomatoes displays Tomatometer and Popcornmeter percentages alongside the ranking. They are ratings shown on the page, not fan-submission totals and not an explanation of how the list was ordered. For example, the page showed Breaking Bad at 96% on the Tomatometer and 97% on the Popcornmeter. Those are score snapshots from the page checked in 2026; ratings can change.

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The first three titles’ displayed score pairs were:

Fan-list rank Show Tomatometer Popcornmeter
1 Breaking Bad 96% 97%
2 Game of Thrones 89% 85%
3 The Sopranos 92% 96%

All percentages in the table are Rotten Tomatoes page snapshots checked in 2026, not poll vote shares. A show’s position in the fan ranking should therefore be kept separate from its two displayed ratings.

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How to interpret “according to actual fans”

This is a fan-submission feature, rather than a critics-only ranking. Rotten Tomatoes’ 25th-anniversary page says it asked fans to submit their top television shows; independent contemporaneous coverage by BGR reproduced the same top 10. The available page does not state how many people submitted entries, how submissions were counted, or who participated demographically. It also gives no vote totals or genre-by-genre breakdown.

That makes the list useful as a snapshot of the shows fans put forward for the anniversary feature, but not evidence that a measured majority of viewers—or a representative sample of TV audiences—prefers these titles in this order. The framing “past 25 years” belongs to the anniversary retrospective: the page was updated November 6, 2023, and describes shows released in the preceding 25 years. It is not a newly conducted 2026 poll.

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Do you agree with the list?

The ranking invites debate because it places very different viewing experiences beside one another. Viewers may weigh a show’s ending, influence, consistency, performances or rewatch value differently; the published list does not explain what criteria contributors used. The most defensible way to compare the entries is to treat their listed positions as Rotten Tomatoes’ fan-submission order, rather than as a definitive measure of quality.

For a documentary-focused viewer, the broader takeaway is that this particular fan list includes a wide range of scripted television, not a documentary ranking. It can point toward popular series to explore, but it does not assess nonfiction programs or establish current streaming availability. Streaming rights vary by country and change over time.

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