A serial killer you root for. A spy nobody believes. A mom moving weight. Ranking the shows that made Showtime television’s most underrated network.
There was a stretch, somewhere in the back half of the 2000s, when the entire prestige-television conversation seemed to belong to two networks, and Showtime wasn’t one of them. HBO had the gravitas. AMC had the subversive edge. Showtime had…what, exactly? A reputation as the other premium channel, the one you maybe forgot you were paying for, the place where a great show could air for years and somehow never quite enter the public dialogue the way a Mad Men or The Wire did. That framing was always a little unfair, and looking back across the whole catalog, it reads now as flatly wrong.
That’s because while HBO and AMC were riding the dark antihero wave, Showtime went even further and dove headfirst into character driven projects and bet on protagonists nobody else would touch. A serial killer you root for. A bipolar CIA officer nobody believes. A consultant who lies for a living. A suburban mom moving weight. A nurse stealing pills while saving lives. So, while the competition was busy ennobling its antiheroes, draping them in tragedy and operatic strings, Showtime kept its people messier, hornier, funnier, less interested in your forgiveness. The network’s signature wasn’t the difficult man. It was the unrepentant one.
That’s the thread running through this list, even when the shows have nothing else in common—and they often don’t. A Tudor king and a Pittsburgh friend group and a girls’ soccer team gone feral in the snow don’t belong to the same genre, the same era, or the same level of polish. What they share is nerve: a willingness to be lurid, to be flawed in public, to chase a premise past the point of comfort and see what’s on the other side.
So we ranked the best 15 with the full understanding that ranking art is a slightly absurd thing to do and that doing it anyway is half the fun. We weighed staying power against ambition, cultural footprint against the simpler question of whether the thing still holds up at 1 a.m. when you can’t sleep. Disagree freely—that’s the point of a list—but read the cases first. Showtime earned the second look.
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15. The Chi
Created by: Lena Waithe
Years: 2018-Present
Lena Waithe built The Chi as a corrective, and you feel the intention in every frame—the South Side rendered not as a body count or a think-piece but as a place where people fall in love, hustle, raise kids, and bury friends, sometimes in the same week. The show moves like an ensemble mixtape, dropping a storyline, picking it back up three episodes later, trusting you to keep the threads. What sets it apart is the tenderness: it refuses to flatten Chicago into tragedy, insisting instead that ordinary life is the actual story, and that ordinary, in a place this loaded, is its own kind of radical.
14. The Affair
Created by:Â Sarah Treem, Hagai Levi
Years:Â 2014-2019
A single affair told and retold from clashing points of view, memory bending each account toward self-justification. The Affair understood that no one is the villain of their own story, and it built a whole architecture from that unease—the same scene rendered tender or predatory depending on who was remembering it. It sits at fourteen because the device sometimes outpaced the drama, the cleverness threatening to crowd out the feeling. But when it worked, it worked as few shows dare to, turning the unreliability of perception into the actual subject.Â
13. Nurse Jackie
Created by:Â Liz Brixius, Linda Wallem, Evan Dunsky
Years:Â 2009-2015
Edie Falco, fresh from one iconic role, built another entirely from contradiction: a Queens nurse of genuine brilliance and bottomless compassion who was also, quietly (and then not so quietly), an addict. Nurse Jackie refused the redemption arc the genre kept offering, letting its protagonist be excellent at her job and a liar in her life, often in the same breath. It was a half-hour drama mislabeled a comedy, and the mislabeling was the point—the show found in the rhythms of the ER a way to make addiction look like competence, right up until it didn’t.
12. The L Word
Created by:Â Ron Cowen, Daniel Lipman
Years:Â 2000-2005
The L Word arrived to do for a community what almost no one had bothered to do—render it glamorous, complicated, and central rather than marginal or martyred—and the achievement survives the show’s own soapy excesses. Los Angeles became a closed ecosystem of desire and ambition, the relationships overlapping into something almost mathematical, and if the plotting sometimes strained, the project never did. Its reach occasionally exceeded its grasp, but the reach itself mattered: representation, the series understood, isn’t only about being seen. It’s about being allowed to be flawed, and shallow, and human in public.
11. The Tudors
Created by:Â Michael Hirst
Years:Â 2007-2010
Costume drama tends to overly flatter the past, and The Tudors mostly declined to, recasting Henry VIII not as a portly icon but as a young, vain, dangerous man—Jonathan Rhys Meyers playing him as appetite given a crown. The history was loose and the lighting was lush, and purists complained, but the show grasped something true about power: that it is erotic, that it is bored, that it kills to stay entertained. It sits at ten as the outlier here, a period piece on a network of contemporary provocations, proving that the past, handled with enough nerve, can be just as lurid as anything now.
10. Yellowjackets
Created by:Â Michael Hirst
Years:Â 2021-Present
The conceit is crazy: a girls’ soccer team survives a plane crash, descends into something feral, and decades later the survivors are still paying for what they did or didn’t do out in the wilderness. Yellowjackets braids two timelines into a meditation on how trauma metabolizes into adulthood, and it’s the rare recent series here still writing its own verdict—the ending unwritten, the cult logic ambiguous, the question of how much the wilderness changed them genuinely open. It trusts that the scariest thing isn’t the supernatural. It’s the version of yourself that survival required.
9. House of Lies
Created by: Matthew Carnahan
Years: 2012-2016
Don Cheadle as a management consultant is the joke and the thesis at once—a man whose entire job is selling rich companies expensive nothing, narrating his own grift straight to camera with a smirk that knows you’ve clocked it. House of Lies froze the frame, broke down the con in real time, then hit play and ran it anyway, which made it less a comedy about consulting than a confession about how American business actually talks: all jargon, all performance, all leverage. It never quite decided whether to indict the hustle or admire it, and honestly, that tension was the show.
8. Your Honor
Created by: Peter Moffat
Years: 2020-2023
A judge whose son commits a hit-and-run, and the long moral avalanche that follows—Your Honor was a machine built to ask a single question and ask it without mercy: what is a good man’s integrity worth the moment his child is in danger? Bryan Cranston played the unraveling with a sweaty, escalating desperation, each lie requiring two more, the law he’d devoted his life to revealing itself as something he’d happily burn. It lands at eight because the premise was its limit and its strength—a tragedy with the gears showing, grinding exactly as designed, toward a conclusion you dreaded and couldn’t look away from.
7. Californication
Created by: Tom Kapinos
Years: 2007-2014
It would be easy to dismiss Californication as a errant male fantasy, and for stretches it was exactly that—but the dismissal misses what gave the show its strange staying power. Hank Moody, played by David Duchovny in a register of charming dishevelment, was a writer who couldn’t write, and the comedy kept circling that wound: the gap between the sentences a man can produce and the life he keeps wrecking. The show ranks seventh because beneath the priapic swagger ran a genuine melancholy about creative paralysis, about the way self-destruction can pose, convincingly and for years, as romance.
6. Ray Donovan
Created by: Ann Biderman
Years: 2013-2020
The Hollywood fixer is a familiar figure, but Ray Donovan did something stranger with him, turning the man who cleans up other people’s messes into a study of the messes you can’t clean—the ones that live in the body, in the family, in the Boston accent you can’t quite leave behind. Liev Schreiber carried it with a stillness that read as competence and concealed grief, and Jon Voight, as his father, supplied the chaos. It sits at six because it understood, better than most, that violence is often just sorrow that ran out of other things to do.
5. Weeds
Created by: Jenji Kohan
Years: 2005-2012
While HBO and AMC were minting brooding troubled men as their antiheros, Showtime brought out Nancy Botwin, a suburban widow turned cannabis entrepreneur. The genius of Weeds—at least early on, before the premise wandered—was its refusal to treat her transgression as tragedy. Mary-Louise Parker played her with a maddening, watchful cool, a woman improvising her morality one bad decision at a time. The show secured its spot because it got somewhere first: it saw that the suburbs were already a kind of performance, the iced coffee a prop, and that the distance between respectability and crime was mostly a matter of who was watching, and how closely.
4. Billions
Created by: Brian Koppelman, David Levien, Andrew Ross Sorkin
Years: 2016-2023
“Billions” turned the contest between a hedge-fund titan and a U.S. attorney into something closer to opera, all aria and counter-aria, the language so dense with reference and bravado that it occasionally forgot to be about anything but its own velocity. And yet the velocity was the point. The series understood that American power now speaks in a private language, half boardroom and half locker room, and now show besides HBO’s “Succession” captured that idiom more precisely or more entertainingly.
3. Shameless
Created by: Paul Abbott, John Wells
Years: 2011-2021
What’s striking, watching the Gallaghers careen through eleven seasons of Chicago’s South Side, is how rarely the show asks for your pity, and how completely it earns your respect instead. Poverty on television tends to arrive pre-ennobled or pre-condemned; Shameless refused both, insisting that its characters were funny and resourceful and frequently their own worst enemies, sometimes within a single scene. William H. Macy made Frank a kind of national argument about whom we’re willing to forgive. The show managed to sustaine its messy vitality longer than anything else here—a feat of stamina that doubles, quietly, as a feat of feeling.
2. Homeland
Created by: Howard Gordon, Alex Gansa
Years: 2011-2020
For a few seasons there Homeland was the most anxious show on television, which in the years it aired felt less like a style than a diagnosis. Claire Danes’s cry-face became a meme, but the meme obscured how brave the acting was—and the series asked, with a directness American drama usually avoids, whether the people we trust to read the world correctly are the ones least equipped to live in it. It ranks this high because paranoia, handled well, isn’t a plot device. It’s a worldview, and Homeland committed.
1. Dexter
Created by: James Manos Jr.
Years: 2006-2013
Run the tape back: a blood-spatter analyst for Miami PD who moonlights as a serial killer, except he only takes out other killers, which is the kind of loophole morality you’d workshop at 2 a.m. and never actually believe. But that’s the flex. Dexter talked you into it anyway. Michael C. Hall played a guy faking normal so hard the fake became the realest thing he had, and the show got there first—before every cable network started minting antiheroes like rookie cards. Number one isn’t close. It made you complicit and made you like it, and never once apologized for the trick.
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