There Are 23 Near-Perfect TV Drama Seasons According To Metacritic

Unlike Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic defines itself in part through exclusivity. The site only pulls reviews from writers it considers to be top critics. Those critics are usually people who write reviews for major outlets, like The New York Times or Time Magazine. 

This isn't the only difference between the two sites, though. Metacritic also assigns each review a score from 0 to 100. If a critic truly loves a show, the review gets 100; if a critic finds flaws, the score drops. After evaluating how positive each review is, the site uses an algorithm to create an average score for each movie or season of TV it's aggregating reviews for on its service. Ultimately, these scores help users choose what to watch in a landscape of seemingly limitless entertainment options. Rarely, a show or movie gets a score so high that it's almost impossible to ignore. These shows are so acclaimed that their average score is 95 or better, which suggests that critics almost universally agree that it's one of the best things they've seen in a long time. 

Although the era of prestige TV has brought us everything from gut-busting comedies to musicals, it's the drama category that truly shines. The dramas below are those that earned the highest average score on Metacritic, proving that—at least according to professional critics—they're among the best seasons of TV to ever air. 

Although "The Americans" finished strong, the show's creative peaks came during its 4th season. It's in this season that the show most fully grapples with all of the ideas it's been playing with throughout its run. Philip's (Matthew Rhys) relationship with Martha (Alison Wright), a government employee he's been quietly siphoning information out of for years, finally comes undone after Philip is forced to frame Gene (Luke Robertson), one of Martha's coworkers, for her spying. 

Martha's exfiltration causes a rift between Philip and Elizabeth (Keri Russell), and ultimately leads both of them to question their loyalty to a country they haven't set foot in for years. At the same time, Paige (Holly Taylor), their daughter, is now fully aware that her parents are Russian spies. By the end of the season, she's considering entering the spy game herself, and the season's final moments emphasize the price that Philip and Elizabeth have had to pay as a result of their profession. 

"The Americans" was always a grim show, but Season 4 spends a huge portion of its run time examining what being a spy does to a person's soul. Philip and Elizabeth are hollow shells of people, and by the end of the season, they realize that's not the fate they want for their daughter. 

Shows as great as "Enlightened" should never be canceled, but especially not after they come off the terrific highs of a 2nd season like the one this show had. The series tells the story of Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a career-oriented woman who has a breakdown and ends up at Open Air, a rehabilitation program in Hawaii. When she returns from the program a sunnier, peppier version of herself, she discovers that her old life is not willing to embrace this new version of her. 

In Season 2, "Enlightened" transforms Amy into an impassioned crusader whose only goal is to take down the company she once worked for. She spends the season working with a journalist known for uncovering corruption (Dermot Mulroney), but ultimately discovers that the systems she's trying to destroy are much harder to take down than she thought. Like so many people in modern America, Amy wants to be an advocate for change, but she's caught between her fierce idealism and the intractable nature of modern capitalism. Huge, multinational companies just don't play by the same rules as the rest of us. 

It was easy to be dismissive of Noah Hawley's decision to adapt "Fargo," the 1996 Coen Brothers masterpiece, into a TV series of the same name. Even after the 1st season, it wasn't entirely clear how Hawley was going to transform this story into something that could last for years. After Season 2, though, people stopped worrying so much about "Fargo." 

The show's 2nd season dives back into the late 1970s, a time when many Americans felt like the country was in decline, to tell a story of warring crime families and intergenerational conflict. The 2nd season is consistently thrilling and features a wave of great performances from the likes of Ted Danson, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemmons, Patrick Wilson, Cristin Milioti, and Jean Smart. 

The narrative is beautifully paced through the show's 10 episodes, and all of the actors know how to make a meal out of the peculiar dialect that the show relies on. By telling a story about people who lash out and hurt one another for no reason, "Fargo" Season 2 pushes against the limits of what we can know about human nature.

Given the fact that it's widely regarded as one of the great TV dramas of all time, it shouldn't be all that surprising that several seasons of "The Sopranos" feature on this list. Even in its 6th season and finale, it was still one of the very best dramas on TV. 

The controversy over the finale tends to overshadow the fact that Season 6 was consistently great long before that abrupt cut to black. The 6th season was split into two parts, with 12 episodes airing in one block, followed by an additional 9-episode run to conclude the entire series.  

Many of the members of Tony's (James Gandolfini) criminal organization seem to be on a path towards redemption, but they're all ultimately pulled back into the violent life of crime they've been leading all along. They may believe that they're capable of change, but as the show's final season shows, becoming a new person is much harder than it seems. 

Laura Palmer is dead. That's the simple premise of "Twin Peaks," one that horrifies creators David Lynch and Mark Frost as much as it enthralls them. Across its 1st season, "Twin Peaks" aired 8 nearly perfect episodes that were focused on finding Laura's killer and discovering the seedy underbelly of the town of Twin Peaks. 

Across those eight hours, "Twin Peaks" combined elements of a murder investigation with small-town drama, science fiction, and a few helpful handfuls of soap opera storytelling. As with much of Lynch's work, the tone is nightmarishly surreal and incredibly stylish, complicating what at first gloss might seem like a standard police procedural. Twin Peaks feels like a normal town, but it's hiding a darkness as deep and terrifying as the pits of hell.

Although the show stumbled in its later seasons, the 1st season alone made "Twin Peaks" one of the most important and impactful TV series of all time. Decades after its 1991 air date, it still feels like audiences aren't fully ready for what the show has to offer.

By the time "The Sopranos" was in its 3rd season, it had cemented itself as one of the best TV shows on the air, and possibly of all time. In Season 3, the show dives even deeper into Tony's psyche and the reason for his continued panic attacks. Christopher (Michael Imperioli), who has been a presence on the show since the beginning, rises in the ranks inside the mob and becomes a made man, and we get deeper insights into Tony's relationships with his children. The season also gave us one of the best—and hardest to watch—episodes of the entire series, in which Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) is understandably tempted to use her client's extrajudicial power. 

The genius of "The Sopranos" was the way the show managed to put equal emphasis on every aspect of its character's lives. The mob stuff was as compelling as ever, but it was only made more interesting by the investment the show had in everything that Tony did when he wasn't working. There was never any separation in Tony's life, and as his children grow up and attempt to chart their own course, that only becomes more and more evident. 

The 4th season of "The Wire" may be the most heartbreaking. Each season of the show focused on a different institution within urban Baltimore. Season 4 turned the camera on Baltimore's youth and the underfunded school system that tries desperately to keep them from turning to crime. 

It's tough to watch how the system slowly corrupts innocent children, but it gives audiences a full picture of exactly how broken the world of "The Wire" is—a world that closely mirrors our own. The seasons' other major storyline, which involves the primary race for Baltimore mayor, establishes how the political machine stifles any attempts at reform.  

Thomas Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) ascends to the office of mayor intending to change the systems that have trapped so many people in difficult circumstances, but finds himself unable to deliver. The frank look at municipal dysfunction gets leavened by moments of gallows humor. 

Considered by critics to be the show's best season, Season 3 of "The Wire" has much to offer. The season's central premise is the creation of safe zones throughout the city of Baltimore where drug activity is legal (a situation hilariously dubbed "Hamsterdam").  It's a dangerous, high-stakes approach to crime management that seems irresponsible, but ultimately leads to lower levels of violence in the district where the rules are put in place. 

Ultimately, though, those safe zones are exposed, and politicians use their existence to make grandstanding speeches. Meanwhile, the drug war continues unabated across the rest of the city, and violence escalates to the point where Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) is offed by Omar Little (Michael K. Williams) and Brother Mouzone (Michael Potts). 

The season is a masterpiece of carefully plotted story, one that imagines a brighter future for Baltimore that always seems to be just out of reach. "The Wire" never shied away from the systemic nature of the problems it depicted, but in Season 3, it also showed how decisions made by the people in those systems can either reinforce or untangle those problems. 

"Murder One" is not as well known as many of the series on this list, but that doesn't mean the show wasn't influential. It lasted for only two seasons, and was created by Steven Bochco, who also wrote on hugely acclaimed shows like "Hill Street Blues" and "L.A. Law." "Murder One" broke the mold when it debuted in 1996, focusing for the entirety of its 1st season on a single criminal case. 

The show follows the work of a defense firm to clear the man accused of murdering a woman. In heavily serializing its story, "Murder One" helped to more firmly establish the idea that viewers would be interested in the minutiae of a case as it winds its way towards a trial (as opposed to the self-contained episodic nature of shows like "Law & Order").   

None of this formula-breaking would have worked if the story itself wasn't so solid. Fortunately, the series knew exactly what it was doing, and managed to make every detail of the criminal case more fascinating than the last. 

Clearly a long-simmering, delicately-executed passion project for its creator, an animation titan who looms so large over his world that his name is in the title, "Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal" is one of the most ambitious, visually deep, and gorgeous TV cartoons in decades. This is an epic fantasy quest that feels more like every famous novel saga smashed together than an Adult Swim show from the person who conceived "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Hotel Transylvania."

Consciously historically inaccurate to maximize drama and possibility, "Primal" takes place in a distant prehistoric time period in which humans, earlier evolutions of humankind, and dinosaurs all live among each other, fighting to survive and thrive. The action centers on Spear, a Neanderthal and caveman left alone in a brutal world when a pack of dinosaurs kills his family. He befriends a small dino whose family was killed by the same vicious clan, and they form a de facto unit and a strong bond, which fuels the action in the almost critically-perfect Season 2 of "Primal."

The final part of the final season of the final chapter of the "Breaking Bad" saga certainly stuck the landing. Bob Odenkirk joined the cast of "Breaking Bad" midway through its run as Saul Goodman, a sleazy bus-bench lawyer who helps with the legal issues of the show's various drug manufacturing and distributing characters. He was so compelling, AMC commissioned the spinoff "Better Call Saul," a "Breaking Bad" prequel that showed how small-time hustler and part-time public defender Jimmy McGill evolved from a sweet and scrappy Albuquerque nobody into a swaggering wheeler-dealer of questionable morality. 

By Season 6.5 of "Better Call Saul," the transformation from Jimmy to Saul nears its completion, while the rest of the "Breaking Bad" backstory also gets filled in, showing how all the pieces lined up for Walter White to become a meth kingpin amidst a world of ruthless traffickers and mercenaries. Character-driven and empathetic, the final slew of "Better Call Saul" episodes also give quite a few glimpses into what became of Jimmy after he had to abandon his life and identity as Saul and seek out a quiet if boring existence running a Cinnabon in the Midwest.