The coronation happened years ago, the plaque is bolted on, and almost nobody has re-examined the vote. I’d like to reopen it — because I think we crowned the show that flatters us, not the one that’s actually best.
By Marcus Vane, Editor-in-Chief · June 30, 2026 · 11 min readEvery medium eventually elects a champion, and once it does, the election stops. The trophy gets bolted to the shelf, the think-pieces calcify into consensus, and disagreeing starts to feel less like criticism than vandalism. Television has its champion. I think we voted for the wrong one, and I think the reason is flattering to us and unflattering to the show.
Here is the mechanism. The anointed “greatest show” tends to be the one that made its audience feel smart for watching it — dense, difficult, garlanded with the vocabulary of prestige. We didn’t just enjoy it; we passed a test by finishing it, and the trophy is partly a certificate we awarded ourselves.
Meanwhile the series I’d actually hand the trophy to did something harder and got less credit for it: it was great without announcing that it was great. No prestige lighting telling you to sit up straight. It simply built characters so complete that the show could put them in an ordinary room and generate more tension than its rival managed with a body count.
We confuse difficulty with depth. The hardest thing a show can do is be profound while looking effortless — and that’s exactly the achievement we forget to reward.
Difficulty is legible; ease is invisible. So the show that made us work got the credit, and the show that made it look easy got called “comfort television” — the faintest praise we have.
I’m not asking you to demote your favorite. I’m asking whether the trophy went to the best show or to the one that best matched our idea of what a Best Show is supposed to look like. Those are not the same question, and we’ve only ever seriously asked the second one. Reopen the vote. I think it comes out differently.
— Marcus Vane, for Reelist