The full ranking
Netflix originals only: the prestige dramas, animation, and crime sagas critics and IMDb users keep at the top, from Dark to BoJack Horseman to Arcane.
BoJack Horseman
An animated comedy about a washed-up sitcom horse in Hollywood, BoJack Horseman became one of TV's sharpest explorations of depression, addiction, and self-destruction. Critics consistently rank it among the most emotionally honest shows of the 2010s.
Dark
A German sci-fi thriller that unspools a time-travel mystery across four interconnected families in a small town over multiple centuries. Dense, beautifully shot, and narratively airtight, it is widely considered the best non-English language series Netflix has produced.
Arcane
An animated series set in the League of Legends universe, following two sisters whose bond is torn apart by class war and the rise of dangerous technology in the city of Piltover. Praised for its hand-painted visual style and unusually complex characters for an adaptation.
Black Mirror
Charlie Brooker's anthology series imagines near-future technologies turned catastrophically against their users, landing somewhere between The Twilight Zone and a Silicon Valley cautionary tale. Individual episodes vary wildly in tone but the best, like San Junipero and White Bear, are considered modern classics.
Stranger Things
A Spielberg-inflected supernatural thriller set in 1980s Indiana, following a group of kids who encounter government experiments and a parallel dimension called the Upside Down. The first season in particular was praised for capturing both the nostalgia and the genuine dread of the era it evokes.
Mindhunter
David Fincher's procedural drama chronicles the FBI's real-world development of criminal psychology and serial killer profiling in the late 1970s, built around interviews with incarcerated murderers including Ed Kemper and Charles Manson. Slow-burn and methodical, it is as much about the psychic toll of the work as the cases themselves.
Narcos
A dramatization of the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel, blending archival footage with scripted scenes and narrated by a DEA agent embedded in Colombia. Praised for its visceral tension and for not softening either the violence of the cartel or the moral compromises of the agents pursuing it.
When They See Us
Ava DuVernay's four-part miniseries dramatizes the wrongful prosecution and imprisonment of the Central Park Five, following each of the five teenagers from their 1989 arrests through their eventual exoneration. One of the most acclaimed limited series in Netflix's history, it prompted wide reexamination of the case.
The Crown
A lavishly produced historical drama tracing the reign of Queen Elizabeth II from her marriage in 1947 through the early 2000s, with each season recasting its leads as the characters age. Praised for its production values and for humanizing the royal family without flattering them.
Master of None
Aziz Ansari's semi-autobiographical comedy-drama follows a struggling actor in New York City through romantic relationships, career frustrations, and questions of identity. Season 2, filmed in Italy in black and white, was nearly universally praised as one of the most formally inventive seasons of television of its decade.
Ranked across 3 sources: Collider · 30 Best Netflix Series Ranked by IMDb 2026; SlashFilm · 15 Best Netflix Original Shows Ranked; CordCutting · Best Netflix Series by IMDb. Full scoring is on the Methodology tab above.
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