Honestly I don't think there is a single one. Each genre has their own golden period.
this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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2000s is the best golden era, everything after 2010s just are pretty mediocre in trying to recapture that glory.
As part of the “Star Wars” generation, it feels like now. Star Trek used to be the only scifi on TV. Then Babylon 5 for a bit. XFiles. Sci fi wasn’t common. Now, scifi is everywhere. Something new pops up fairly regularly and I appreciate that quite a lot.
Another golden age was during the “rural purge” in the early 1970s. Shows like Mayberry RFD and Petticoat Junction were canceled and replaced with The Mary Tyler Moore show and All In The Family. This is when the reign of Norman Lear began.
It lasted a good long time until ABC introduced “Jiggle TV” with Charlie’s Angels and Threes Company.
Later we’d get the era of prime time soaps in the 1980s with Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, and many others.
There have been multiple “golden ages”. The last one I remember was when broadcast started trying to compete with cable. We got a slew of high production value and well acted shows like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Greys Anatomy, and Invasion around 2004/2005/2006.
Then the broadcast networks merged even further with streaming and cable conglomerates and became mostly a dumping ground for cheap reality programming and procedural spin offs.
1990-2010.
Babylon 5
Stargate
Star Trek
Farscape
Mythbusters
Futurama
Good Simpsons
Yeah, 1990-2010 was brilliant
Adding:
Battlestar Galactica
Breaking Bad
Sopranos
The Wire
I do find there are a lot of great shows out recently too but I'm not sure if that's recency bias and / or if they'll stand the test of time. Many of them (e.g. Chernobyl) definitely will though.
2010s to 2030s, maybe longer.
We have the most prestige TV now than any other time. Streaming has given us so much great quality TV by itself, but it also allowed more traditional TV the ability to expand and gain stronger followings.
That same era also has A LOT of crap and mid level stuff, but it also has the peak.
I actually think 2020 onwards can be reunderstood as the "International Era". Production from outside the USA has exploded and is more accessible than its ever been, so when people express grievance with say, post-2020 content (especially the release schedules) - you can point out how you aren't really confined to the USA anymore.
Now
Yeah i don't understand... You can now watch golden girls and black mirror back to back.
Taxi
The theme song immediately started playing in my head when I read that, and now I want to go downstairs and put on some Bob James
Really though I do like 80s sitcoms
I think the end would be around when Netflix started taking off, there was TiVo and similar recorded live broadcast/cable TV devices before but it was around then that larger groups of people went from watching scheduled TV to anything on streaming whenever, that change in viewing habits removed a monoculture around scheduled TV going back to black and white TVs & also changed quality dropping projects, development teams with experience, innovations, etc that don't maximize streaming metrics. The beginning was probably around when they moved from more unscripted reality gameshow and variety shows to scripted drama and sitcoms around the 60s.
2000-2010. star trek, sga, sgu, sg1, spn, ISAIP,other series. everything after 2010, the cinema just suck ass around the time weinstein for SA got outed studios(they felt they needed to be offended for the audience) started to do heavy handed virtue signalling which made for poor writing and overall story telling, especially in scifi. ever since after jjabrams trek, every nutrek series have copied it. 2020s is just the continuation of 2015ish era mediocre MCU/dceu type shows.
CGI had made shows super lazy. and recently FG have been caught using AI in most of its recent episodes.
You don't like any series after 2010?
The 80s through the mid 2000s. A combination of 9/11, the 2008 writers strike, and the rise of reality tv did a number on story telling.
Yes, there has been a resurgence in “good” tv since game of thrones and breaking bad. But most prestige tv feels more like mini series with longer episodes and a need to see every episode in order for anything to make sense. The period I mentioned was the best for casual viewing and entertainment given any random episode of any given tv show.
The A-Team (80s), for action. Three's Company (70s), for comedy.