10 TV Shows Worth Watching in 2026: TGK Picks

There is more television than anyone has time to watch, which makes choosing something good strangely harder than it should be. Every platform has another expensive drama, another adaptation and another series everyone is apparently supposed to care about, but plenty of them fall apart after three episodes or never become interesting enough to justify the time.

This list is simply the ten shows TGK would recommend in 2026. They are not here because IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes told us to include them, although we have added both scores for context. We care more about whether the story holds up, the casting feels right, the dialogue sounds like people rather than writers showing off, the humor lands, and the show still gives you a reason to keep watching once the novelty of the first episode is gone.

That gives us a fairly mixed ten: Widow’s Bay, Westeros, Gotham, dystopian offices, post-apocalyptic America, Dexter coming back again, Jeremy Clarkson arguing with farmers and Billy Bob Thornton dealing with oil money in Texas. Different genres, very different moods, but all of them earned their place for a reason.

Quick Answer

These are our current ten. Rotten Tomatoes is the series-level Avg. Tomatometer and IMDb is the current user rating; both were checked on 22 September 2026.

1. Widow’s Bay

Rotten Tomatoes: 98% · IMDb: 8.1/10 (Rotten Tomatoes)

Widow’s Bay is the easiest show on this list for us to put first because it gets an awkward combination of things right without feeling as though somebody designed it by committee. It is funny without constantly reminding you that it is a comedy, creepy without turning every episode into generic horror, and mysterious enough that finishing one episode normally creates a perfectly reasonable excuse to start another.

Matthew Rhys is excellent as Mayor Tom Loftis, but the casting around him is just as important. The town feels populated by people rather than disposable characters waiting for the plot to reach them, and a lot of the humor comes from dialogue, reactions, and the general weirdness of the place rather than somebody delivering obvious jokes. Rotten Tomatoes currently has it at 98%, while IMDb users have it at 8.1. (Rotten Tomatoes)

What we like most is probably the balance. Plenty of horror-comedies lean so heavily into jokes that nothing feels threatening anymore, while others throw in two funny lines and continue behaving like a conventional thriller. Widow’s Bay stays somewhere in the middle, which makes the whole thing unusually easy to binge.

2. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

Rotten Tomatoes: 94% · IMDb: 8.6/10 (Rotten Tomatoes)

Anyone expecting another Game of Thrones full of dragons, enormous battles and three murders before breakfast may initially wonder when A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms plans to get moving. The first season is smaller, quieter and spends a lot of time simply letting Dunk and Egg exist inside Westeros, which is also what gives it its charm.

Peter Claffey works very well as Dunk, while Dexter Sol Ansell is ridiculously good as Egg, especially for an actor that young. The production has the familiar HBO Westeros quality without needing every scene to announce how expensive it was, and the writing gives ordinary conversations enough personality that slower episodes rarely feel empty. The season finale is where a lot of that patience pays off, and in retrospect the whole first season feels like a carefully built introduction rather than six episodes desperate to manufacture a cliffhanger every week. (Rotten Tomatoes)

Some viewers will still find it too slow, and that criticism is understandable. We liked that it had enough confidence to stay small.

3. The Penguin

Rotten Tomatoes: 95% · IMDb: 8.6/10 (Rotten Tomatoes)

If you grew up watching Batman cartoons and somebody told you that one of the best modern crime shows would revolve around the Penguin, it would have sounded slightly ridiculous. Colin Farrell makes the idea work because after a while you stop thinking about Colin Farrell wearing prosthetics and simply see Oz Cobb.

The smartest decision was keeping Gotham recognisable while making the criminal world feel dirty and believable enough to support a serious gangster story. It still belongs to the universe of The Batman, but the show does not spend eight episodes waving comic-book references in your face. Cristin Milioti is excellent opposite Farrell, the power struggle has real weight, and the violence usually feels uglier than the polished superhero version of crime.

The finale currently sits at 9.5 on IMDb, which matches how well the season holds itself together toward the end. (IMDb)

4. The White Lotus

Rotten Tomatoes: 90% · IMDb: 8.0/10 (Rotten Tomatoes)

The White Lotus has built an entire show around the feeling that everybody at a beautiful hotel is slowly making the atmosphere worse.

That sounds simple, but Mike White keeps finding new variations of it. Characters say something slightly wrong, somebody misunderstands somebody else, small resentments build underneath expensive dinners and eventually the whole holiday develops this strange uncomfortable energy where nothing needs to explode for you to feel that something is going badly.

For us, each season has found a different way of improving that formula, helped enormously by casting. The show is funny, but rarely in a setup-punchline way, and a lot of its best moments come from watching privileged people convince themselves that their increasingly strange behaviour is perfectly reasonable.

Everybody already knows The White Lotus, so this is hardly our hidden discovery of 2026. It remains on the list because being obvious does not make a recommendation worse.

5. Severance

Rotten Tomatoes: 95% · IMDb: 8.6/10 (Rotten Tomatoes)

The first season of Severance is still one of the cleanest examples of taking a very good idea and pushing it far enough without explaining away all the interesting parts. Adam Scott is excellent, the Lumon offices somehow become more disturbing the cleaner they look, and the split between an employee's work consciousness and outside life gives the writers almost unlimited ways to make normal office behaviour feel sinister.

Season two is less consistent for us. After a first-season finale rated 9.7 on IMDb, expectations were absurdly high, and some of the follow-up feels slower and less focused than you expect after that ending. IMDb's episode ratings reflect some of that variation, ranging from 6.6 to 9.4 across the second season. (IMDb)

Even with that drop, Severance belongs above Fallout for us because the idea remains more original and the best episodes are better. It asks for a little patience, though, particularly if you are watching with somebody who considers ten minutes without an explosion a personal insult.

6. Fallout

Rotten Tomatoes: 94% · IMDb: 8.3/10 (Rotten Tomatoes)

Video-game adaptations spent so many years being terrible that Fallout almost feels suspiciously competent. The world looks right, the humor survives the transition to television, the violence has exactly the right amount of absurdity and Walton Goggins understands precisely what kind of show he is in.

Season one is the stronger of the two for us because it moves with more purpose. Season two is still quality television, and Rotten Tomatoes even has it slightly higher with critics at 96%, but parts of the story feel more drawn out and the overall momentum is less immediate than the first run. (Rotten Tomatoes)

None of that damages the recommendation very much. The cast is good, the production is excellent and the show manages to serve people who know the games without spending all its time congratulating them for recognising things.

7. Dexter: Resurrection

Rotten Tomatoes: 95% · IMDb: 9.0/10 (Rotten Tomatoes)

Long-running shows coming back years later normally make us nervous because there is always a decent chance that somebody simply noticed the old title still had an audience. Dexter: Resurrection had even more baggage than most because Dexter has already had endings, continuations and plenty of debate about where the series should have stopped.

Somehow, the new version feels like somebody cared.

Michael C. Hall still knows exactly how to play Dexter without turning him into a parody of the character, while the new cast gives the story enough reason to exist beyond nostalgia. Uma Thurman works surprisingly well in this world, Peter Dinklage brings something different to the villain side, and the season has enough confidence to use the history of Dexter without spending every episode pointing at it.

Its 9.0 IMDb rating is unusually high for any modern revival, never mind one carrying this much old franchise baggage. (IMDb) If you never liked Dexter, this probably will not convert you. If you did, Resurrection is much better than the cynical cash-in it could easily have become.

8. Clarkson’s Farm

Rotten Tomatoes: 94% · IMDb: 9.0/10 (Rotten Tomatoes)

Jeremy Clarkson spent decades proving on Top Gear that he could make cars entertaining to people who did not care about compression ratios, and Clarkson’s Farm pulls off a similar trick with agriculture.

You can put this on after a long day without preparing yourself for political intrigue, serial killers or another mysterious corporation experimenting on its employees. Clarkson remains Clarkson, Kaleb remains one of the best people to put beside him, and beneath the entertainment the show has become a surprisingly effective look at how difficult, expensive and unpredictable farming can be.

The 9.0 IMDb rating tells you how much people have taken to it, while Rotten Tomatoes has the series at 94%. (Rotten Tomatoes) It is also valuable on this list because television does not need to be dark, complicated or prestige-coded to be worth recommending.

9. Silo

Rotten Tomatoes: 92% · IMDb: 8.1/10 (Rotten Tomatoes)

Silo scratches a very specific itch: give us a sealed society, a set of suspicious rules, some history nobody is allowed to know and enough evidence that the people in charge are lying about something.

Rebecca Ferguson gives the series a strong centre, but the world itself is what keeps us watching. The best episodes constantly make the silo feel larger and stranger without giving away the whole mechanism too quickly, and the show understands that a dystopian mystery stops being interesting the moment the audience knows everything.

The pacing has not been perfectly consistent across every season, and some stretches take longer than they need to reach the next revelation. The third season currently carries a 96% Rotten Tomatoes score, though, and the series remains one of Apple TV's better reasons to keep the subscription active. (Rotten Tomatoes)

10. Landman

Rotten Tomatoes: 80% · IMDb: 8.2/10 (Rotten Tomatoes)

Landman is probably where our list disagrees most visibly with critics, and we are fine with that.

Billy Bob Thornton fits the West Texas oil world so naturally that after a while the business, family problems, roughnecks, lawyers and billionaires all become part of the same strange ecosystem. The show has good character development and enough detail around the oil industry to give the drama a setting that feels different from another generic wealthy-family series.

It also contains dialogue that occasionally makes you wonder whether anybody in a real house has ever spoken this way, particularly some of the exchanges involving Tommy's family. The show can overplay those personalities until the joke has already landed and somebody keeps talking for another minute.

We still became attached to it, which matters more to us than whether every line is elegant. Rotten Tomatoes sits at a comparatively modest 80%, while IMDb users currently have it at 8.2. (Rotten Tomatoes) For us, tenth feels about right: flawed, distinctive and easy to keep watching.

The Painful Cuts

The Bear is probably the hardest omission because on quality alone it could easily sit inside the ten. It finished its five-season run in 2026 with a 93% Rotten Tomatoes average and an 8.5 IMDb rating, and when the show is at its best the acting, kitchen pressure and family dynamics are as good as anything here. (Rotten Tomatoes) The reason it narrowly misses this version is that we wanted the list to lean toward shows that still feel active and ongoing in 2026, while also keeping the genres from collapsing into ten flavours of prestige drama.

House of the Dragon misses for almost the opposite reason. We love being back in Westeros, some episodes are excellent and season three currently sits at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, but the political stretches can drag and the quality has moved around more than we would like across the seasons. The series average is still a strong 88% RT and 8.3 on IMDb. (Rotten Tomatoes) If you want the larger, darker and more political side of Westeros, watch it; we simply prefer A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms right now.

The Gentlemen is stylish, funny and very easy to put on, with Guy Ritchie doing Guy Ritchie things in a form that works surprisingly well as television. Its second season has pushed the Rotten Tomatoes series average to 80%, while IMDb sits at 8.0. (Rotten Tomatoes) It could enter the ten on another day, but we would still choose the shows above it first.

Pluribus is the strange one. Critics have it at an enormous 99% on Rotten Tomatoes while IMDb sits at 7.9, and that gap makes sense to us. (Rotten Tomatoes) Rhea Seehorn is excellent and Vince Gilligan's premise is genuinely unusual, so there is a lot to admire, but admiration and wanting to watch another episode immediately are not always the same thing.

MobLand has Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren fighting through a gangster story that my wife would probably rank higher than I would. It currently has 83% on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.3 on IMDb, which is a pretty strong audience result despite more mixed critical reactions. (Rotten Tomatoes) For us, The Gentlemen has more personality, but MobLand is an easy recommendation if you want something harder and more straightforwardly criminal.

Final Verdict

The point of this list is not that Widow’s Bay has scientifically defeated Clarkson’s Farm or that an 8.6 on IMDb makes The Penguin objectively better television than Landman. They are doing completely different jobs.

What connects the ten is simpler: we would recommend watching them. Some are beautifully written, some have exceptional casting, some are just incredibly easy to binge, and most have at least one weakness we would rather tell you about than pretend does not exist because they made the list.

If you want something strange and easy to devour, start with Widow’s Bay. If you want fantasy, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is our current Westeros pick. The Penguin handles crime, Severance handles the mind-bending office nightmare, Fallout gives you the big expensive sci-fi adaptation, and Clarkson’s Farm is there for the night when you want none of those things.

That variety is probably why this ten works better for us than simply sorting IMDb from highest to lowest.