The 20 Smartest TV Shows Since '93
For VIBE's Big List Issue, we round up the 20 programs that served the most quality brain cuisine since 1993.
Reality foolery may give TV a bad rep. But it’s not all a dumbed-down dump yard. For every serving of junk food, there’s a bowl of Caesar salad in the form of programming like The Wire, Chappelle’s Show and Breaking Bad—shows that have turned average fans into drooling addicts. What exactly makes for smart TV?
Literary references, stellar penmanship and movielike character development are staples, for sure. But the formula for brainy television can be distilled into one simple element: presuming viewers’ intelligence. Mad Men rarely spells out the timeframe of events raging in the background (it’s the ’60s, Einstein), but that subtext is always as vital to the show as Don Draper’s afterhours highball. And if The Colbert Report’s writers didn’t presume a certain amount of sophistication beaming from sofas, loads of irony would glide like drones over people’s heads.
Ultimately, it’s what viewers bring to the table—a craving for meatier content—that makes clever shows work. Remember that next time a TV-less hipster tries to judge your couch potato tendencies. Click through for VIBE's ranking of the top 20 smartest TV shows since 1993.
(ED NOTE: The TV shows chosen are those whose popularity peaked during the VIBE era, between 1993-2013, not the year the show premiered.)
20. The Real World (MTV)
IQ: Eclectic housemates were thrown together to inevitably debate—and throw ’bows over—sex, drugs and prejudice. Evil genius.
19. ER (NBC)
IQ: At the height of its relevance, this OG medical drama put a spotlight on Darfur and introduced the world to George Clooney.
18. 30 Rock (NBC)
IQ: Satire lived at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where creator Tina Fey parodied her own stint as an SNL comedy writer through silly schemes and over-the-top personas.
17. Lost (Fox)
IQ: Mix Survivor with The Twilight Zone, shake really hard, and you end up with this supernatural brain-challenging drama about plane crash survivors.
16. Family Guy (Fox)
IQ: Straddling the fence between The Simpsons and South Park, then stomping it to splinters, it never found a sacred cow it couldn’t tip as the brunt of Seth McFarlane’s surreal humor.
15. Six Feet Under (HBO)
IQ: Based on the trials of the Fisher family’s funeral home, this do-or-die dramedy combats mortality head-on.
14. South Park (Comedy Central)
IQ: Crude fourth graders ether pop-culture figures and moments, exposing nuggets of truth behind the absurdity.
13. The Daily Show (Comedy Central)
IQ: Smarty-pants host Jon Stewart probes current affairs by cutting through political bullshit.
12. The Colbert Report (Comedy Central)
IQ: Leave it to The Daily Show crew to create a conservative spinoff as a counter for its own liberal perspectives, and still frame the right wing as a bunch of boobs.
11. Chappelle’s Show (Comedy Central)
IQ: The deftest satirical eye this side of Richard Pryor used racially charged wit to hold a mirror up to viewers.
10. Mad Men (AMC)
IQ: Adman Don Draper plays point, but social turmoil becomes an invisible character via sly humor.
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO)
IQ: While Seinfeld saw the humor in life’s niggling details, that sitcom’s co-creator Larry David struck comedy gold by getting annoyed at the same daily minutiae.
8. 24 (Fox)
IQ: The post-9-11 terrorist thriller dropped literal and figurative bombs (lead characters die) as plots progressed in real-time.
7. The Office (NBC)
IQ: At its best, Michael Scott and company captured the eccentricity and familial nature of corporate cube life.
6. Law & Order (NBC)
IQ: TV’s justice league cribbed plotlines from the papers and put a thinking man’s cap on the legal-drama genre.
5. The Simpsons (Fox)
IQ: A literal caricature of America, Homer’s dysfunctional family laid a donut-smudged blueprint for future cheeky animated series.
4. The Sopranos (HBO)
IQ: Its stratospheric level of writing and acting—coupled with its modern-versus-traditional take on gender roles, crime and domestic bonds—define this mob drama.
3. Breaking Bad (AMC)
IQ: Challenging the concept of bad meaning good, a cancer-ridden chem teacher becomes a meth dealer with hopes of leaving his kin a dinosaur-sized nest egg.
2. Seinfeld (NBC)
IQ: Four snarky, semi-immoral Manhattan BFFs proved a sitcom about nothing could be hysterical just by mining everyday scenarios.
1. The Wire (HBO)
IQ: Its scholarly storyline—a sweeping indictment of broken systems (education, politics, justice) from the eyes of Baltimore’s finest crooks and cops—should be part of every college syllabus.
