The TV Show That Makes You Say Just One More Episode

The entry rule here has two doors, and they disagree constantly. One is the audience: at least a hundred thousand IMDb votes and a rating of 8.0 or better. The other is the Television Academy: a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, Comedy Series, or Limited Series, with a small vote floor so the field stays to shows a person could still name.

The disagreement is the useful part. The audience door lets in Prison Break, Suits and Supernatural, none of which ever won one of those Emmys. The Academy door lets in M*A*S*H, Cheers, All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which invented most of what came after and now sit under the vote line because their audience was watching decades before anyone rated anything.

Animation is out, because the openings and the cartoons already have brackets of their own here. Documentaries and reality are out for a different reason: the question is which show kept you up past the point of sense, and a nature series has never once done that to anybody.

Every candidate plays a trailer rather than a still, because a title card tells you nothing about whether a show has a grip. What comes out the other end is not the best-made show. It is the one the most people could not put down.