About

TV has changed. Now there are so many ways to watch shows, and the culture of bingewatching and streaming has taken over. Who watches TV when it first airs anymore? No one, that’s who.

But there are only so many hours in a day. Sure, you could waste an afternoon watching an entire season, waiting for things to get good, but why do that when you could spend an afternoon watching the best episodes, and then decide whether you want to continue?

That’s our goal with Essential Episodes. We pick out the most indicative episodes of what a TV show is like, to save you the time of watching more than a decade worth of X-Files, for instance. This isn’t just a series of “best episode” lists, though: some of the ones may only be fair-to-middlin’, so long as they represent what the show is about. And instead of just listing them, we try to offer an insightful, critical look at the show. This is no paragraph-and-a-GIF Internet linkalism.

We are living in a new Golden Age of Television. In 1994, there were 23 new shows on cable, while last year there were 180. And that’s just scripted shows. With so many new and critically acclaimed shows  (along with all of the shows that have ended that you never got the chance to watch), how do you know what shows to spend your time on? Because, as Bob Odenkirk and The Birthday Boys once sagely pointed out, there are just too many shows.