Dragon Ball GT
The black sheep of the family, and the only Dragon Ball series with no Toriyama manga behind it: GT is entirely anime original, which is why fans argue about whether any of it counts. The honest take: the first stretch…
Genre Adventure
Dragon Ball Z
The show that put anime on the map in the West. Goku is grown, his son Gohan is the audience’s surrogate, and the villains arrive in escalating order of apocalypse: Saiyans, then Frieza, then the androids and Cell, then Majin…
Dragon Ball
Before the energy blasts that could crack a planet, there was a weird little kid with a tail riding a cloud. The original Dragon Ball is Goku’s childhood: a loose, funny adventure series that slowly turns into the greatest tournament…
Survivor
The blueprint for everything reality television became, and still the best pure strategy game ever put on screen. Outwit, outplay, outlast is not a slogan, it is a complete philosophy of social manipulation, and forty plus seasons in, a well…
My Hero Academia
In a world where almost everyone has a superpower, a boy born without one inherits the greatest power of all and enrolls in hero school. The shonen formula executed at its highest level: tournaments, rivalries, villains with actual philosophies, and…
Hunter x Hunter
A boy searches for the father who abandoned him by taking the world’s deadliest licensing exam, and Yoshihiro Togashi’s masterpiece unfolds arc after arc of escalating genius: a tournament that isn’t, a video game that is real, a war between…
Vinland Saga
A Viking boy swears revenge for his father’s murder and gets raised by the man who killed him, and the revenge story becomes something no one expects: a meditation on violence, slavery, and whether a warrior can put down the…
The Wheel of Time
Amazon’s adaptation of Robert Jordan’s fourteen novel epic follows Moiraine, an Aes Sedai witch, gathering young villagers who might be the prophesied Dragon Reborn. Rosamund Pike gives it movie star gravity, and the world building is genuinely huge: cities, armies,…
1883
The best thing Taylor Sheridan has made. This prequel follows the original Duttons on a wagon train heading west, and it plays the frontier as the death march it actually was: river crossings, bandits, and grief at every mile. Sam…
The Witcher
Geralt of Rivia, a mutated monster hunter for hire, roams a grimy medieval world where the real monsters are usually the people. Based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s books (not the games, though the games made it famous), the series follows three…