How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
Photo: Getty Images
Six Feet Under (2001-2005)
A standard-bearer for high-concept prestige television—and a chronicle of the Fishers, a Los Angeles family running a well-trafficked funeral home after the death of their paterfamilias—Six Feet Under was crammed with lights-out performances. (I’d single out Peter Krause as the searching, tragic Nate; Michael C. Hall as his brother, David; Lauren Ambrose as their sister, Claire; Frances Conroy as their neurotic mother, Ruth; and Rachel Griffiths as Nate’s depressive, shiatsu-practitioner girlfriend, Brenda, at the expense of so many others.) But so, too, did it balance enough light gore, dark humor, sexual drama, and existential inquiry to make every kind of viewer happy. While I can’t say that I rank its series finale, prominently featuring the song “Breathe Me“ by Sia, as highly as most, I did find all five sprawling, ambitious seasons to be total killers. —Marley Marius
How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection
Friday Night Lights (2006-2011)
To this day, Friday Night Lights, based on the renowned Buzz Bissinger book about a real-life high school football team in West Texas, remains the single multi-season series that my wife and I have watched together with equal enthusiasm. This despite the fact that my wife has zero interest in football and I have little patience for teenage soap-style dramas. I submit that it is the ur-example of the latter, with its attendant cliques, heroes, and antiheroes. It is also a Law & Order-style procedural with each episode offering some form of intrigue between Coach Taylor, wife Tami, everyman Landry, bad-boy Riggins, do-gooder Saracen, Kardashian-in-the-making Lyla, temptress Tyra, and the rest of the cast of vivid American archetypes—along with, crucially, the Big Game at the end of it all. The qualities that made the characters such great (if cliched) archetypes also made them believable, even true, and what began as a lowbrow way of passing the time quickly became, in our household, heart-rending must-watch TV. Texas forever.—Corey Seymour
