Entertainment
10 Most Perfect Fantasy Shows of the Last 25 Years
If you’re the kind of fantasy TV fan who watches the credits roll on a series finale and immediately opens six tabs looking for more dragons, more magic, and more insane world-building, hi, hello, this list is for you.
These fantasy shows from the last 25 years, ranked from great to life-altering, each with a pitch for why it should be the thing you queue up for tonight. Some run tight; a few pile on the laughs; and one features a 6′ 5″ Lee Pace as a touch-averse pie maker. But all of them earned the descriptor “perfect” in an honest way: by giving us incredible stories we can’t stop thinking about.
10
‘A Discovery of Witches’ (2018–2022)
Deborah Harkness‘ academic-witch romance got a genuinely lush adaptation on Sky One, with Teresa Palmer as Diana Bishop, a reluctant Oxford historian, and Matthew Goode as Matthew Clairmont, the vampire geneticist who won’t stop stalking her all over the Bodleian. Across three seasons and twenty-five episodes, A Discovery of Witches treats alchemy and evolutionary biology with the same straight-faced rigor it brings to the Congregation of supernaturals policing them both.
Cinematographically, it’s one of the prettiest fantasy shows of its era, shot with a painterly eye for English stone, Venetian canals, and the Auvergne countryside where the Clairmont family keeps its château. The plot layers together a lost alchemical manuscript, a genetic mystery about why the supernatural species are dying out, and a Season 2 time walk to 1590 London that lets Diana train with the School of Night and reintroduces Christopher Marlowe (Tom Hughes) as a member of Matthew’s old circle. The show’s real charm, though, is its worldbuilding: vampires, witches, and daemons are treated as distinct species with their own biology, history, and internal politics. All done in a three-season arc that’s as swoony as book fans could hope for.
9
‘Preacher’ (2016–2019)
AMC’s adaptation of Garth Ennis‘ comic stars Dominic Cooper as Jesse Custer, a small-town Texas preacher on the verge of quitting the church when a rogue entity called Genesis, the forbidden offspring of an angel and a demon, hurls itself into his body and hands him the Word of God. Basically, whatever he says out loud, people obey. He picks up his old flame Tulip O’Hare (Ruth Negga) and a chatty Irish vampire named Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) and hits the road to find God Himself, who has abandoned Heaven and gone missing somewhere on Earth. Four seasons of that hunt, chased at every turn by a resurrected cowboy assassin from Hell and Herr Starr’s doomsday-cult bureaucracy.
Preacher is genuinely funny and, also, genuinely nasty, often in the same scene. There are chainsaw brawls, a Hitler subplot played for pitch-black laughs, angels getting killed and resurrected in motel bathrooms. The show swings hard at ideas most prestige dramas wouldn’t touch with tongs, and when it connects, which is often after the New Orleans arc kicks in midway through Season 1, it’s one of the most unhinged action-comedies of the last decade.
8
‘The Magicians’ (2015–2020)
Syfy’s college-set fantasy took Lev Grossman‘s novels and grew it into something the books never quite managed: a musical, a heist, a therapy session, a surprisingly insightful argument about the ethics of magic. Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) is depressed and reading a Narnia knockoff at a Brooklyn coffee shop when he’s yanked into Brakebills, a graduate school for magicians. There, he meets friends and foes, eventually going on an alternate-universe-spanning adventure with a bunch of gifted weirdos who become family.
What The Magicians figured out is that fantasy is the best available language for the stuff realist drama flattens: depression, grief, addiction, and assault. The show routes all of it through a magic system that runs on precision and memory, through a cast of unforgettable characters.
7
‘Pushing Daisies’ (2007–2009)
Bryan Fuller‘s candy-colored ABC confection about Ned the Pie Maker (Lee Pace), who can bring the dead back to life with a touch, was killed by the writers’ strike before it could stretch its legs. What Pushing Daisies left behind is 22 episodes so aesthetically committed that the visuals feel like a Wes Anderson pop-up book, and a central romance between Ned and Chuck (Anna Friel), who can never touch again, that made an entire generation of TV writers rethink what “will they, won’t they” could mean.
Kristin Chenoweth sings. Swoosie Kurtz and Ellen Greene, as Chuck’s shut-in ex-synchronized-swimmer aunts, spend most of the series eating cheese and harmonizing in a kitchen that looks like a Fabergé egg. The fact that it existed at all, on network television, in the late 2000s, is a small miracle.
6
‘Lost’ (2004–2010)
Yes, the ending. We’re all going to talk about the ending forever, and that’s fine, because it means we’re still talking about Lost two decades after the pilot aired. Damon Lindelof’s brainchild gave us six seasons, 121 episodes, one polar bear, and roughly 48 characters worth caring about. Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), Sawyer (Josh Holloway), Hurley (Jorge Garcia), Locke (Terry O’Quinn), Sayid (Naveen Andrews), Sun (Yunjin Kim), Jin (Daniel Dae Kim), Ben (Michael Emerson), Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell): pick a favorite, defend them to the death.
Structurally, Lost invented the modern mystery-box show. Oceanic 815 goes down over the Pacific, the survivors wash up on an island that isn’t quite an island, and across six seasons they contend with a smoke monster, a decades-old scientific cult called the Dharma Initiative, and an ancient feud between two immortal brothers who have been using the island — and the people who wash up on it — as pieces in a much longer game. It’s a fantasy show pretending to be a survival drama, and once you accept that, everything clicks.
5
‘What We Do in the Shadows’ (2019–2024)
Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement‘s 2014 mockumentary was already a cult object, but the FX series they developed from it did the near-impossible and improved on the source, trading Wellington flatmates for Staten Island housemates and giving the bit room to actually breathe. Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), and human familiar-turned-vampire-hunter-turned-something-else Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) share a crumbling New York house and, for a decade of viewer time, absolutely nothing changes about their vibe, which is the whole point.
Berry delivers every line as if he’s tasting it. Guillén’s slow-burn Guillermo arc is one of the great long-form character studies in recent comedy. Novak’s Nandor is a 750-year-old warlord rendered as the loneliest man on Staten Island, and Demetriou’s Nadja — Balkan-accented, monstrously vain, in a codependent feud with her own ghost trapped in a doll — is one of the funniest performances anyone gave on television in the 2020s. The comedy here makes the fantasy better…and vice versa.
4
‘Interview with the Vampire’ (2022–Present)
Rolin Jones‘ AMC adaptation of Anne Rice‘s novel reframes the story in 2022 Dubai, where an aging, Parkinson’s-afflicted Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) sits down with the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) for a second, more honest interview decades after their first one. What follows is Louis’ life across 15 episodes: turn-of-the-century New Orleans, his making by Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid), the vampire child Claudia (Bailey Bass and Delainey Hayles) they raise between them, and the Parisian coven that eventually takes them all apart.
Anderson and Reid are the reason it works. Anderson plays Louis as a Creole man trying to hold his dignity together while the century and his boyfriend take turns dismantling it. Reid’s Lestat is theatrical, cruel, needy, and impossibly in love. Season 2 hands the back half to the Théâtre des Vampires, a coven that stages actual murders as avant-garde theater, and lets Ben Daniels devour every frame as Santiago. The trial and the ruined-house reunion in the finale are the best 20 minutes of television anyone put out that year. Bailey Bass and then Delainey Hayles are both extraordinary as Claudia, Assad Zaman‘s Armand reshapes the show’s power structure, and the universe the series built keeps expanding.
3
‘Arcane’ (2021–2024)
Netflix’s League of Legends prequel had every reason to be a corporate cash-grab and instead turned into a two-season, 18-episode animated epic that made grown adults sob over sisters from an underground slum. Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) and Jinx (Ella Purnell) grow up in Zaun; up in Piltover, Jayce (Kevin Alejandro) and Viktor (Harry Lloyd) invent Hextech and doom everyone. That’s the basic plot.
Arcane‘s animation, by the French studio Fortiche, is the best-looking work in the medium right now, and the show uses its soundtrack, filled with hits from Imagine Dragons, Stromae, and Ashnikko, to help its emotional beats land. One late-season episode set in an alternate timeline is, on its own, worth the price of admission.
2
‘Game of Thrones’ (2011–2019)
We know. But, the first four seasons of Game of Thrones are, minute for minute, still the best sustained run of fantasy TV ever produced. Ned Stark’s (Sean Bean) execution, the Red Wedding, Tyrion’s (Peter Dinklage) trial, Oberyn (Pedro Pascal) versus the Mountain (Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson), Blackwater Bay. Lena Headey, Emilia Clarke, and Diana Rigg circling each other for a decade, 73 episodes, and eight seasons. Yes, we’re all going to fight about which point the wheels came off. What still holds up is the cultural shift the show pulled off.
Fantasy went from a genre people apologized for liking to one dissected weekly by New York Times critics. It reset HBO’s budget ceiling. And it briefly made swords and dragons the default cultural conversation instead of a niche one.
1
‘The Leftovers’ (2014–2017)
If you love fantasy TV for the way it can bend reality until something true falls out, The Leftovers is your show. Lindelof and Tom Perrotta built a series on one gorgeous, terrifying premise: two percent of the world’s population vanishes at the exact same second. Three seasons follow the people left behind, including Justin Theroux‘s grieving cop Kevin Garvey, Carrie Coon‘s Nora Durst (who lost her entire family in a single instant), plus Amy Brenneman, Christopher Eccleston, Regina King, and Kevin Carroll as they try to figure out how to keep going.
The show leans all the way into its weirdness in the best possible way. There’s a cult that dresses in white and refuses to speak. There’s a hotel in the afterlife where Kevin has to sing karaoke to save the world. There’s a Season 2 opening credits sequence set to an Iris DeMent song that you will never get out of your head. It’s dreamy and devastating, and too good to spoil. If you’ve ever finished a fantasy show and wished the emotional stakes matched the mythology, this is the one.
The Leftovers
- Release Date
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2014 – 2017-00-00
- Showrunner
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Damon Lindelof
- Writers
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Damon Lindelof, Tom Perrotta
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