Tag best Action shows

Angel

The Buffy spin off moved the vampire with a soul to Los Angeles and quietly became a different, better show than most people remember. Where Buffy was about surviving growing up, Angel is about a grown man trying to atone for a century of atrocities and learning that redemption is not a finish line but a job. Angel Investigations, a detective agency that helps the helpless, gives the series a noir spine Buffy never had, and the early case of the week years use the city's neon rot far better than most LA dramas.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Joss Whedon's high school horror riff did something television had not managed before: it took the dumbest possible premise, a cheerleader kills vampires, and used it as scaffolding for the most literate genre drama of its era. Buffy Summers moves to Sunnydale, a town built on a Hellmouth, and over seven seasons the show treats every monster as a metaphor for something real: first love that literally leaves a scar, the person you sleep with turning into a monster after, a mother's death that no slayer strength can fix. The gimmick was monsters, the subject was growing up.

The Night Agent

Shawn Ryan's adaptation of Matthew Quirk's novel became Netflix's surprise smash of 2023, and the reason is simple: it is a straight ahead, professionally built conspiracy thriller with no self importance and no dead weight. Gabriel Basso plays Peter Sutherland, a low level FBI agent stuck monitoring an emergency phone line that never rings, until it rings, and he is suddenly protecting Rose Larkin, a tech CEO played by Luciane Buchanan, while uncovering a mole hunt that reaches the White House. Ten episodes, one escalating night of it, and a full second season set in Bangkok.

The Gentlemen

Guy Ritchie does television, and somehow it works. Theo James plays the aristocrat who inherits a title along with the family business: a cannabis empire tucked into the grounds of a country estate. Kaya Scodelario is the brilliant, terrifying business…

The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live

The event series that paid off the franchise’s biggest dangling thread: Rick Grimes, taken away by helicopter in the flagship’s final season, and Michonne, who went looking for him. Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira return for a six-episode limited run…

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon

Daryl washes ashore in France, and the show somehow turns that into the most beautiful thing the franchise has ever filmed. Shot like a European art film with walker money, the first season follows Daryl shepherding a boy who may…

Fear the Walking Dead

The first companion series, and the one that answered the question every fan asked: what did the fall of civilization actually look like? The early Los Angeles seasons have a slower, sadder register than the flagship, watching a blended family…

The Walking Dead

The show that made zombies prestige television and kept the entire horror genre on the map for over a decade. Rick Grimes wakes from a coma into the apocalypse, and what follows is 177 episodes of survival drama where the…

Dark Matter

The one you meant: the 2015 space opera about six people who wake on a derelict ship with no memories, armed with a pile of weapons and a receipt for murders they cannot remember. Each carries a hidden past, and…

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

The newest Trek: the first new series built for a new generation of characters, following cadets at the rebuilt Starfleet Academy in the 32nd century. Robert Picardo is back as the Doctor from Voyager (a fan service moment done right),…