Top 10 TV Shows: Romance

The highest-graded romance TV shows we have reviewed, best first.

  1. Master of None2015Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang's comedy grew bolder every season, from an observant New York sitcom to a Bergman homage on 16mm, and most risks paid off.Read the review
  2. Heated Rivalry2025Two hockey players hide a decade long affair, and the show takes the hockey and the romance equally seriously.
  3. Cheers1982Eleven years inside one bar, and American television never gets a better room or a better ensemble.
  4. Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story2023The best thing the Bridgerton franchise has made, because Shonda Rhimes finally gives its fantasy a real subject: a marriage lived with mental illness.
  5. Nobody Wants This2024Kristen Bell and Adam Brody make an interfaith romcom fizz; the writing around them leans on tired jokes about Jewish women and thins out in season two.
  6. Downton Abbey2010A first season nobody expected and five more that turn it into a very expensive soap, watched by everyone regardless.
  7. Gilmore Girls2000Nobody talks like this, and twenty minutes in you stop caring, because the talking is the show.
  8. Sex and the City1998It changed what television could say out loud, and its politics have aged in public ever since.
  9. Sex Education2019The kindest teen comedy in years, set in a British school that appears to be somewhere in Ohio.
  10. Euphoria2019The most beautiful looking show on television, in service of a story that keeps losing its own thread.

More lists

Every Top 10
  1. The critic's Top 10No. 1: The Wire
  2. DramaNo. 1: The Wire
  3. ComedyNo. 1: The Office (US)
  4. ThrillersNo. 1: Breaking Bad
  5. CrimeNo. 1: The Wire
  6. Sci-FiNo. 1: Rick and Morty
  7. MysteryNo. 1: Dark
  8. ActionNo. 1: Batman: The Animated Series
  9. SitcomsNo. 1: The Office (US)
  10. FantasyNo. 1: Game of Thrones