I’ve watched enough television to know that the shows that stick with you aren’t always the ones that deserve to. The Emmy-winning darlings with the perfect pacing and the restrained performances… I respect those. But the ones I actually remember? The ones I texted people about at one in the afternoon? Those are usually the shows that made me lose my temper.
There’s this whole category of TV that operates on hitting a nerve. A character makes a choice so ridiculous that you pause the screen and walk out of the room. A finale dismantles everything you spent nine seasons caring about in a 10-minute montage. A love triangle has the entire side picking sides like it’s an actual conflict with real people involved. You finish an episode, and you’re furious, but you surrender and start the next one immediately.
None of the 10 shows on this list is perfect, but they know how to get a reaction out of you, and that reaction keeps you watching.
10
‘Glee’ (2009 – 2015)
Let me paint you a picture: a high school teacher raps “Ice Ice Baby” in front of his students, a teenage girl tricks a rival into going to a crack house, and somewhere in the background, a beloved character is being written off the show because the creator had it out for half the cast. That’s Glee. Created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan for Fox, Glee won six Emmys despite being, at various points, totally unhinged.
The first season impressed me, I’m not going to lie. It had real charm, a killer ensemble, and Lea Michele’s voice doing great things. But even then, the seeds of chaos were already planted. By the time the later seasons arrived, Glee had fully abandoned any pretense of logic. I remember watching the infamous “Blurred Lines” episode and just sitting there in silence. Kevin McHale and Jenna Ushkowitz did a rewatch podcast where they openly admitted some episodes were so bad, they didn’t even want to be on set filming them.
9
‘Riverdale’ (2017 – 2023)
Okay, so Riverdale started as a genuinely good show. I want to put that on record first, because the internet likes to pretend it was always a disaster. Season 1 was a tight, Lynchian murder mystery, centered around the death of Jason Blossom, the secrets of a small town, and a surprisingly compelling cast including KJ Apa, Lili Reinhart, Cole Sprouse, and Camila Mendes. Then Season 2 arrived, and Archie’s dad got shot in the first episode, there was a serial killer in the hood, and something started to crack.
By Season 3, the show had fully lost the plot. The Gargoyle King was a man in an animal skull mask and tree branches. Cheryl kept her dead brother’s corpse in the basement and dressed him up. Babies got thrown into a fire and then floated into the night sky, and nobody ever questioned or explained that. Riverdale got progressively worse, and I cannot stress it enough. There was an organ-harvesting cult run by a Chad Michael Murray character who escaped in a rocket ship dressed as Evel Knievel. I remember Archie fighting a bear and Veronica performing a speakeasy number during a college interview. And the final season sent the entire cast back to 1955 to prevent a comet from destroying the town. I can go on and on.
8
‘The Idol’ (2023)
There are bad TV shows, and then there is The Idol, an HBO series that arrived at Cannes with a five-minute standing ovation and left with a 9% score on Rotten Tomatoes, becoming the lowest-rated HBO original series of all time. Created by Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, the show stars Lily-Rose Depp as Jocelyn, a pop star recovering from a breakdown. She falls into a disturbing relationship with Tedros (Tesfaye), a nightclub owner and self-styled cult leader with a greasy rat-tail and no rizz.
Rolling Stone called it “nasty, brutish, and way, way worse than you’d have anticipated.” Collider, with utter disbelief, asked, “How can a show with so much nudity, sex, and eroticism be so bland?” The Idol is a fascinating disaster. Let me tell you why. Levinson co-directed after the original director, Amy Seimetz, departed with roughly 80% of the show completed, reportedly because Abel wanted to take the show into a more explicit direction. The result was an exploitative show. And yet, people watched it… mainly to confirm the best reviews and then aggressively rant about it.
7
‘Emily in Paris’ (2020 – Present)
I remember putting on Emily in Paris, thinking I’d get a breezy little pick-me-up, and I did, but I also got one of the most frustrating protagonists on TV. The Netflix series stars Lily Collins as Emily Cooper, a cheerful American marketing professional who moves to Paris without speaking a single word of French, immediately starts telling her new French colleagues how to do their jobs, and falls into a series of beautiful apartments and beautiful men… these are experiences no real person has ever experienced.
The French were, predictably, not thrilled. Critics called it an “Americentric embarrassment, full of clichés, and devoid of consequences.” Variety even wrote a piece called “Why Does Emily in Paris Make People So Mad?” as though the answer wasn’t self-evident. Here’s the thing, though. Emily in Paris has been, by any metric, a monstrous success for the streamer, and it has earned that success by being breezy and frictionless. Emily solves all her problems; she cycles through love interests with the same enthusiasm that women feel while shopping. And I believe when you let yourself stop fighting it, the show is entertaining in the same way a sugar rush is entertaining.
6
‘Grey’s Anatomy’ (2005 – Present)
22 seasons and over 450 episodes… and Meredith Grey has survived a drowning, a bomb, a plane crash, a shooter, and a pandemic. She lost a husband, several best friends, a hand (briefly, sort of), and more interns than any hospital should statistically be allowed to misplace, and Grey’s Anatomy is still going strong. Shonda Rhimes’ long-running medical drama should have ended around Season 7 or Season 8, but it’s become a multi-generational institution that people have watched with their mothers and daughters.
In the early seasons, the chemistry between the characters, particularly Ellen Pompeo’s Meredith and Sandra Oh’s Cristina Yang, was electric, and the show wasn’t afraid to put its characters through actual emotional hell. The Season 6 finale, if you remember, was so intense. And then it kept going. I remember the ghost sex storyline – where Izzie (Katherine Heigl) was grieving her dead fiancé, Denny, and then she literally had sex with his ghost, which turned out to be a symptom of a brain tumor – and thinking, okay, we’ve reached a limit… but we hadn’t. So many wild and infuriating things have happened since then that I genuinely lost count.
5
‘How I Met Your Mother’ (2005 – 2014)
Nine seasons of Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) telling his children, in excruciating detail, about every woman he dates, every bad decision he made, and every time he was almost-but-not-quite in love with Robin (Cobie Smulders). For nine seasons, How I Met Your Mother established itself as something warm and funny, with characters like Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) evolving from a commitment-phobic womanizer to a grown-up, and the Lily-Marshall love story becoming an anchor. And then the finale aired.
People online renamed it “How I Settled for Your Mother.” The Mother – Tracy, played by the lovely Cristin Milioti, who fans finally got to meet in the final season and immediately fell in love with – died. And then Ted went back to Robin. The cruelty of this ending is that it was filmed during Season 2. The creators locked in their conclusion before the show could figure out who the characters would become over nine years. Barney and Robin’s entire arc got totaled in a 10-minute montage just so Ted could hold up a blue French horn outside Robin’s window. That’s outrageous
4
‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ (2022 – 2025)
I didn’t plan on caring about this show. I really didn’t. And then I watched three episodes and found myself on Reddit in the middle of the night reading strangers fight about Conrad Fisher with the same energy people bring into actual geopolitical issues. The Summer I Turned Pretty, Prime Video’s adaptation of Jenny Han’s beloved YA trilogy, is officially the most effectively engineered piece of romantic rage bait to ever air in this decade. Three seasons, two brothers, and one Belly Conklin, who cannot make a decision and stick with it for more than two episodes.
TSITP follows Belly’s (Lola Tung) summers at Cousins Beach, torn between Conrad Fisher (Christopher Briney), aka the human equivalent of a closed door, and his brother Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno), who is equally determined to make you lose your mind. The Team Conrad vs. Team Jeremiah debate became one of social media’s most heated ongoing arguments. Even Jennifer Lawrence publicly declared herself Team Jeremiah and called Conrad toxic. I cannot overstate how poorly that went over.
What annoys me the most is that nobody in this universe communicates. Conrad clams up exactly at the wrong moment; Jeremiah responds to insecurity by proposing marriage at 21, outside a hospital, right after Steven almost died; and Belly ping-pongs between them with a frequency that would be more exhausting if Lola Tung didn’t make her so watchable. I spent the entire third season with my jaw on the floor watching these characters say all the wrong things and make the worst decisions, and I still wouldn’t stop.
3
’13 Reasons Why’ (2017 – 2020)
My honest experience with 13 Reasons Why was feeling helpless while watching it. When it landed on Netflix in 2017, it became the second-most-watched series on the platform, which was a big deal at the time. Based on Jay Asher’s novel, it follows Clay Jensen (Dylan Minnette) working through cassette tapes left by Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford), a classmate who died by suicide and recorded thirteen reasons why. Langford received a Golden Globe nomination for her role, and the emotional weight of the story was hard to dismiss.
But the backlash from mental health professionals was quite intense. They raised concerns about the show’s graphic depiction of Hannah’s death, leading Netflix to remove that scene entirely. What still surprises me is that it ran for four seasons. The source novel ended where Season 1 did. Everything after that was an improvisation without a plan. Season 4 even threw in an active-shooter drill episode that critics called traumatizing. It scored 25% on Rotten Tomatoes. And yet, per FlixPatrol, the first two seasons are among Netflix’s twenty most-viewed releases of all time.
2
‘You’ (2018 – 2025)
Penn Badgley spent a meaningful portion of You’s run replying to fans on social media who were thirsting over his character. “He’s a murderer,” he tweeted directly at one of them, as if that would help. It did not help. The central paradox of Netflix’s You is that it’s a show about a serial stalker and killer, narrated from inside his delusion, which turned him into one of the most relatable protagonists on TV. Having read Caroline Kepnes’ novel, I watched this show knowing exactly what Joe Goldberg (Badgley) was, and I still found myself, at various points, understanding his logic. That’s either brilliant storytelling or a personal flaw. Probably both.
All five seasons landed Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, which is genuinely impressive for a show this problematic. The first four scored between 89% and 94%. Season 5 dropped to 82%, marking the lowest of the run. It brought in Madeline Brewer as Bronte, a new love interest who ultimately tricks Joe into confessing his crimes, and surprisingly, fans turned on her. The show’s own point – we keep falling for Joe’s manipulation like his victims do – played out in real time, and it’s both satisfying and disturbing. Reactions ranged from “perfect” to “this is Game of Thrones all over again.” But that’s just You in a nutshell. It makes you complicit, so you can’t really be mad about it.
1
‘Euphoria’ (2019 – Present)
Season 3 of Euphoria premiered in 2026, and I had been looking forward to this one for years, but I’m so confused now. Not in a bad way, exactly. More like when you feel after someone rearranges all the furniture in a room you’ve lived in for years. You get it? Sam Levinson jumped the timeline five years forward, and all the characters are scattered but still in touch. Episode 3 gave us Cassie and Nate’s wedding, which went about as well as you’d expect from those two.
The visual language has shifted completely. It’s widescreen, dusty, Southwestern. Critics called it “a Western now,” which is not a sentence I expected to read about a show that started as a coming-of-age drama. Viewership, though, is at 8.5 million per episode. Zendaya won two Emmys for this show because the first season was stunning. Rue’s addiction is portrayed with glamorous honesty, Jacob Elordi is so chilling he makes you hate Nate, and the late Angus Cloud made Fez the warmest person in a very cold brew. Then Season 2 arrived with so much meme material that it was impossible to keep track, and Season 3 is going in a whole new direction.
Which one of these TV shows annoyed you the most… and why did you keep watching anyway? Let us know in the comments.
