There are plenty of TV shows that you watch and forget – forever lost and never to be rewatched. However, every now and again a TV series is immortalised by fans and becomes a timeless gem of pop culture.
It seems that people are always on the search for these iconic boxsets with searches for “best boxsets of all time” increasing by 450% and “best tv shows of all time” up by 60% over the past year.
Greetings card marketplace, thortful.com, have compiled a list of the top 20 boxsets that British people go back to time after time. These are those shows that, no matter how many times they’re on repeat, they’re still just as good as the first watch.
Find the list of the top 20 below:
| 1 | Friends |
| 2 | Breaking Bad |
| 3 | The Sopranos |
| 4 | Dexter |
| 5 | Modern Family |
| 6 | The Walking Dead |
| 7 | The Office (US) |
| 8 | Grey’s Anatomy |
| 9 | The Wire |
| 10 | Sherlock |
| 11 | Lost |
| 12 | Doctor Who |
| 13 | The Big Bang Theory |
| 14 | Criminal Minds |
| 15 | Supernatural |
| 16 | The X Files |
| 17 | Doc Martin |
| 18 | Mr Bean |
| 19 | Law and Order: Special Victims Unit |
| 20 | Steptoe and Son |
To create the list, thortful carried out desk research to find the most popular boxsets. They then created a weighted index using the following metrics: date, IMDB rating, how many reviews the show gets per year and google search trends.
Coming in first place, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the 1990’s US sitcom, Friends. The popularity of this programme is proved by Netflix reportedly paying $100 million for the right to air it on their platform in 2019 (1).
Interestingly, the top 9 TV shows Brits are going back to, were all created overseas. However, British TV classics also appear on the list with Sherlock coming in tenth, Doctor Who twelfth, and Doc Martin in seventeenth.
The full research can be found here: https://www.thortful.com/blog/best-boxsets-that-stood-the-test-of-time/
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