A ranking of every HBO original comedy and drama series
Photo-Illustration: Emily Denniston/Vulture and Photos by HBO During the rapid expansion of cable and satellite television in the 1980s, HBO was one of the new services’ biggest selling points, thanks to a lineup that featured uncut recent theatrical movies, concerts, stand-up-comedy specials, and even the occasional Broadway show … and not the same ol’ sitcoms and dramas.
But not everything HBO executives sign off on has been solid gold. And now the network itself is in a transitional period, with veteran executives stepping down, and new owner AT&T reportedly pushing for more of a Netflix-style “quantity first, quality if there’s time” approach to making television.
Figuring out what to put where wasn’t easy. Generally speaking, the top ten here should be considered canonical television: Shows that didn’t just distinguish themselves with their quality and cultural reach, but which suggested entirely new approaches to making TV. The bottom ten would be the dregs: The real misbegotten products of the whole HBO experiment. Everything in between falls into more of a loose continuum.
A quick note about what’s not on the list. We’re excluding made-for-HBO movies and miniseries, with the exception of the minis and movies that later became regular, ongoing series. We also left off children’s shows and animation, and because the emphasis is on scripted entertainment, we excluded all the sports and documentary series. Apologies to Real Sex fans.
The hardest exclusion was sketch comedy and dramatic anthologies, since the former category includes a few of HBO’s best and the latter represents some of HBO’s earliest . But because the focus of this list is on how the network changed television by competing directly with broadcast TV, we decided to stick with serialized sitcoms and dramas. Still, it is possible that some future version of this article will add one or more of the other genres.
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