As you can probably tell already, The Sopranos is my favorite TV show. So, for everyone else here, what are some of your favorite shows and why?

Star Trek, particularly TNG because I grew up with it. For one hour every week as a child I got to see all sort wonderful places and have my mind expanded at the same time. Then to go back and revisit TNG and the original series in particular as an adult and truly appreciate how Gene Roddenberry pushed so many envelopes.

A Japanese helmsman not 20 years after WWII, a Russian navigator and tactical officer during the cold war. The communications offer, was a black woman during the civil rights movement. A cold, "heartless" alien first officer who looked like "Satan" we couldn't help but love.

Love it or hate it, I feel Star Trek gave us continual object lessons in humanity, ethics, culture, science, imagination, and even religion at times. And I think the world a much better place for it, even with all of it's imperfections and places it fell short.

I've grown up with Star Wars since I've been a kid however I do want to give Star Trek a try at some point. It always looked interesting!

The first season of True Detective: a perfectly nihilistic atmosphere of corruption and horribleness that makes it almost unmatched in the detective genre (discounting the books of James Ellroy or Disco Elysium)

Snuff Box: the strangest of the Matt Berry comedy shows its pure dreamlike nature and utterly bonkers sketches make it an incredible hidden gem.

Brass Eye: I love Chris Morris and this is him at his best. Surreal and dark and fucking seething and also really funny. The episodes "Drugs", "Animals" and ""Paedogeddon!" are must see but each episode is an absolute gem.

Veep: whilst I love The Thick Of It, the US (sort of) spin off is better in my opinion cos the characters are beyond perfect

I also really liked Mindhunter (specifically the interviews with Manson and Speck), love all the Alan Partridge shows and best recent British show in memory would be Taboo which was all around fantastic

I really quite like naff shite reality tv as well for fuck knows what reason. Hells Kitchen and Ex On the Beach are my faves. For daytime television over here in the UK I like Come Dine With Me and used to almost religiously watch Deal or No Deal (which is way cheaper and less lacklustre than the yankee version. For the quiz shows i lke Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Who Dares Wins and also University Challenge now i have the (dis)pleasure of universality education and pretensions of knowing about culture (i know fuck all except about critical theory really)

Not much of a TV person, I was limited to the amount and what I watched as a child (all things vetted by parents) but I still love animal/earth documentaries. Basically I will personally punch Death in the nuts if he comes for Sir David Attenborough!

I think the program that had the most affect on me was Babylon 5. Love sci-fi including Star Trek and Star Wars, but I preferred B5 because the characters were very fallible, often had no clue they were little fish in a big pond and the humour felt more real. It was by no means perfect but it was my favourite.

I'm a DS9 guy. It's basically my bible - it never dates, in fact it's gotten more and more relevant/prescient over the years. It's been with me since childhood and I must have watched it right through 4-5 times. I like TNG, VOY and the TOS movies too. Almost all Star Trek since about 2002 has been brain-dead garbage - empty spectacle with shit writing. Not about people or ideas, just twists and schlock.

Horace And Pete - the 10-episode limited drama series by Louis CK. It's essentially a filmed stage play with a phenomenal cast. A superb piece of literature that I'd like to think people will still be talking about/analysing in 100 years' time.

Daria, because it has fantastic writing and character arcs and wonderful acerbic humour. Again, it hasn't really dated, just gotten more relevant. As to Daria herself, I've rarely related to a fictional character more.

Witless is a fantastic 15-episode comedy thriller about two girls on the run from a gang in southwest England. It's well-plotted and really holds together as well as being really funny - and it sticks the landing (I hate it when series end badly). This Country is another good BBC comedy set in the same region. My favourite sitcom, though, will always be One Foot In The Grave, for its humanity, subversiveness and depth, all surreptitiously packed in a mainstream format.

Borgen, the Danish political drama, is great. I don't like most Nordic crime series like The Killing/The Bridge but I like Borgen a lot.

There's very little modern television that speaks to me, but The OA was/is one of the most incredible, resonant things I've ever seen.

I like B5 a lot too, but it's only really solid for a year and a half (halfway through S3 to the end of S4). S1 and S5 are bad, and S2 is good but uneven.

Wow, B5 fans!? Another wonderful show with great messages. I agree Seasons 1 and 5 are kinda crap. Season 3 is basically an object lesson that good and bad do not equal order and chaos. Season 4 is just straight up all about Civil Disobedience turning into a civil war.

I love DS9 too, in spite of the fact that it is STRAIGHT UP PLAGIARISM of B5. If you don't believe me I can draw the parallels right here easily but I don't want to spoil two series for people who may be interested that haven't watched them.

Yeah, B5 had some massive issues with the writers and actors (alcoholism causing a main character to be fired! etc), there was supposed to be a different ending to the big war but things went wrong again. They were very unfortunate causing a iffy show.

But when they got it right it was amazing, it was sci-fi with all the wholesomeness removed, the good guys didn't always win or were necessarily good!

Too be honest, the whole G'Kar-Molari story arc (and actors) is possibly the best sci-fi there has been, the only thing that worked over all 5 series.

Funny and Quotable too; "I'd like you to take the time to learn the Babylon 5 mantra: 'Ivanova is always right. I will listen to Ivanova. I will not ignore Ivanova's recommendations. Ivanova is God. And if this ever happens again, Ivanova will personally rip your lungs out."

I'm not a big TV person, but I managed to find Seinfeld at least a decade after It wrapped. It's one of my favorite sources of background noise. I'm not sure it counts as "television" as it was never televised, but I really dig Stranger Things as well.

Daredevil. I'm a big Marvel fan boy, and I've always loved the Daredevil comics, when Netflix made the show they blew my mind. It was perfect. It wasn't kid friendly and happy like all the Disney Marvel stuff, it was for adults. Great fight scenes, great villains...I was so crushed when it got cancelled.

Breaking Bad. I know it's cliche, and everyone loves it, but it was so damn good.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Office, Parks and Recreation, Arrest Development, The League, Seinfeld, Workaholics, Beavis and Butthead, The IT Crowd, Angie Tribecca...these are just a bunch of shows that makes me laugh and I could watch them all over again and again.

Black Mirror. This show is more like a bunch of mini movies, but they're all so creative and powerful and messed up. I love it.

Speaking for the geriatric older people like me, I have to say that my favorite hobby is binge-watching old tv series and seeing them for the first time in HD. Speaking of Star Trek, and watching it from a UK telly in the 1960's one has to remember that when Star Trek and other great 60's series like The Man From Uncle and Mission Impossible first aired....we only saw those shows in black and white because we did not have color tv sets or transmission in the UK at that time. Most 60's series that were made in color were only seen in black and white in the UK and most of them only gained cult status in the 1970's when they were re-run and for the first time we got to see them in color.....so the re runs had bigger ratings than the first airings did.

Some of the trends in tv productions today have not improved things at all. For example the standard tv show cliches have changed.....in countless shows made 20-50 years ago the standard cliche was "the fruit cart" cliche ...i.e. every car or foot chase scene always had to involve somebody knocking over a fruit cart or crashing into empty cardboard boxes. Today, every crime scene show made in the last 10 years has a mandatory cliche where whenever a body is discovered the actor must vomit directly into the camera lens. You can see the vomit shot coming in advance. I don't know why tv producers think that a close up vomit shot advances the storyline one inch. We get it -- somebody found a body -- I can understand a storyline without the graphic vomit shots thank you. All it does....it makes me scratch my head and wonder why a police detective has to vomit -- have they never seen a dead body before --- because I thought attending an autopsy was part of police academy training....so they should already have graduated from vomit training (e.g. opening titles to "Quincy").

I am a big fan of U.S. and UK tv detective shows....but most of the shows made in the last 10 years are just so unrealistic and the scriptwriters never do proper research when they write their shows....e.g. there are numerous UK tv crime series where murder investigations are led by low ranked sergeants and inspectors....that is just not true....because murder investigations in the UK are always led by senior officers at the Superintendent ranks and above. Low ranked offers do not lead murder investigations. Shows like the UK's "Line of Duty" are thrilling cliffhanger shows....but totally unbelievable fantasy.....because they would have you believe that 80% of the UK police force is either grossly incompetent and stupid, and those that are not stupid are totally corrupt. These days you cannot be a honest cop with integrity, you must either be corrupt or stupid.

And don't get me started on the political correctness in today's tv culture ... today's tv shows have the ugliest and most profane language ever heard on tv......but you are expected to listen to all this bad language (especially on modern UK shows) while ignoring the elephant in the room....i.e. they only use bad language in a generic way that is not directed at any minority groups. That is not realistic. If you want to deploy gutter street language in your shows then use real street language and not sanitized street language. If you don't want to offend anybody, then keep your shows 100% clear of bad language, like tv shows used to be 20-50 years ago.

Another beef I have with modern tv shows, is the camerawork and lighting. Most of the best 60's tv shows like Star Trek were shot in glorious technicolor on 35mm film and they had this wonderful invention called THE TRIPOD where cameras were mounted and all the shots were perfectly stable. Today most tv shows use digital video for shooting, and the video is processed using a term called "Color Grading"....which is a fancy editing term which basically means....lets wash out all the colors and make the footage as dark and colorless as possible....so everything looks so bleak and dismal. Then.....they stopped using tripods and steadicams.....and today they strap a go pro camera to a manic person with Tourette's Syndrome (UK comedian Jack Douglas made a career out of doing wobblies) and have them wander around the set to see if they can get a few shots of the scene via a wobbly Jack Douglas cam.

These days I will watch any show where there is good lighting and stable camerawork and has a reasonably coherent story line, but so much of what we get today is bad lighting, wobbly camerawork that makes you seasick, and totally incoherent story lines.

The latest technology of Streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime (I belong to both) are good for many things.....e..g. you can binge watch and not have to sit thru all the commercials. But many of the new shows that are made exclusively for streaming....are extremely lazy in the way they are padded out. Most streaming series made today....are padded out to be 8-10 episode dramas. In the past, before streaming existed, those would be made as 2-3 part tv miniseries.....but now the streaming companies need to pad out these series to make it last 8-10 episodes......and I find that most of these series are OH SO SLOW to watch....they are like watching paint dry. Often there is a 8-10 part show...where episode 1 is interesting, and then you get the next 5-6 episodes which are totally boring, and the finale episode is usually incoherent or predictable or laughably ridiculous.

Scriptwriters are lazy and instead of writing new original ideas, they do re-makes of classic old shows or they blatantly copy ideas from other writers....e.g.the most famous TV producer who produced many many hit tv shows was Glen Larson....and almost every tv show he produced was ripped off and copied from another network or by ripping off a hit movie. Glen Larson made a lifetime career by ripping off movies and other networks to develop his copycat tv shows...that is why he was called "Glen Larceny" in Hollywood circles, I am currently binge watching the UK series "Luther"....great actor....but a very poorly written show that basically steals Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character of Moriarty and injects a female Moriarty into that series.

MK

Most of my favourite TV programs are comedies. I do love a good giggle. I prefer a lot of older British sitcoms from the nineties. Things like dinnerladies (I'm a massive Victoria Wood fan), The Vicar of Dibley (also love Dawn French) and Gimme Gimme Gimme.
More modern stuff I like. RuPaul's Drag Race is my biggest guilty pleasure. Also love the Big Bang Theory (up to series 10), Rick & Morty and been watching a lot of Modern Family recently.
I also love my panel shows. QI, Mock The Week, Have I Got News For You and 8 Out Of Ten Cats Does Countdown are all great shows for a good giggle.

I have a looooong list of favorite shows, like we'd be here forever if I listed all of them, so to make it shorter, since a lot of really good classic shows are being mentioned, I'll list my favorites of the ones I grew up watching (some newer, some older, some family shows, some clearly made for adults shows because my mom let me watch anything I wanted as a child, she didn't care lol and neither did my grandparents who I often watched shows with as well, usually they would be watching one of their favorite shows and I'd get hooked. I didn't learn until my teenage years that it was not normal for a five to twelve year old watching some of these. Also we had a channel that played certain British shows I don't remember what it was called, and we also had PBS which played some as well, which is why there are so many on this list despite me being in the U.S my whole life)

BBC's Robin Hood
Keeping Up Appearances
The Worst Witch (both the original and the new reboot)
The Nanny
Frasier
Blackadder
Horrible Histories
The Flying Nun
The Golden Girls
Sanford and Son
Three's Company
Bewitched
Family Matters
The Beverly Hillbillies
Married With Children
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Dynasty
Everybody Hates Chris
Malcolm in the Middle
Sister Sister
Sabrina the Teenage Witch (as well as the new Chilling Adventures of Sabrina)
Goosebumps
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Tales From the Crypt
The Twilight Zone

I was as a child and still am way too obsessed with television and film XD My mom and grandparents got me hooked young. This is actually the short list of my favorite shows lol

What we do in the shadows! Brilliant and news series starts in the uk next week can't wait

As usual, late to the party...my signature.

Wamtec, I didn't know that about about Glen Larson, but, on, reflection, I ain't surprised.

All of the shows mentioned above are great, and almost many are my favs. (Friends can disagree.)

Let me add: the Dick Van Dyke Show, the Bob Newhart Show and Newhart (maybe you have to be from Chicago), Tattinger's--an obscure show with the wonderful Blythe Danner-- any show with Sid Caesar, the Honeymooners, Barbara Stresand and Frank Sinatra specials.

One thing I should explain: I had to work many late nights in the 1990s and early 2000s. There were so many shows I never really had a chance to watch.

And let me add "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,"
any of David Letterman's talk shows, and any talk show with Jack Paar.

Nowadays, I let Mrs B watch what she wants; she deserves that courtesy!