Entertainment
10 Netflix Shows That Quietly Became Modern Classics
Back in the early 2010s, the idea of Netflix producing its own television shows sounded like a risky experiment. However, the platform completely changed the game with House of Cards in 2013 and proved that a streaming platform could produce prestige television just like any other traditional network. That’s when Netflix actively began reshaping the TV industry thanks to the advent of binge-watching.
However, a huge part of that transformation also came from the streamer consistently delivering some of the best shows of the modern era. Netflix gave creators the freedom to experiment with format, genre, language, and storytelling on a scale that traditional television could just never do. Of course, the streamer has its fair share of hits and misses, but these are the Netflix shows that quietly became modern classics thanks to their timeless storytelling.
10
‘Love, Death & Robots’ (2019–Present)
Love, Death & Robots has no fixed cast, central storyline, or even consistent animation style, and that’s what makes it so compelling. The adult anthology series hands each episode to a different creative team and allows them to tell a complete science-fiction, fantasy, horror, or comedy story. This means that one episode could use colorful 2D animation, while the next uses a photorealistic visual style. Across four volumes, that unpredictability has become the entire appeal of the series. The stories themselves vary wildly in their settings and ideas. They might not be explicitly connected, but many of them explore similar questions about technology, violence, identity, and whether humanity is intelligent enough to survive its own inventions.
Love, Death & Robots definitely has its weaker entries, as does any anthology. However, that doesn’t take away from the show’s brilliant experimental approach. The series continues to find new ways to stretch its own format. Every episode introduces a world, explores memorable ideas, and leaves before the narrative loses its impact. Some stories in the show could easily turn into entire movies, but their self-containment is what makes them hit so hard. Viewers are left to imagine everything that existed before, and after the small piece of the world they were shown. Love, Death & Robots stands as a boundless creative playground for storytellers, a feat that not many shows can boast of.
9
‘The Queen’s Gambit’ (2020)
The Queen’s Gambit was a massive hit when it premiered, but it has only become more impressive with time. The seven-episode limited series follows Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), an orphan who discovers an extraordinary talent for chess while growing up in Kentucky during the 1950s. She first learns the game from the orphanage cleaner, Mr. Shaibel (Bill Camp), who reluctantly allows her to join him in the basement before realizing that she can already think several moves ahead of players with decades more experience. At the same time, the orphanage gives its children tranquilizers, which causes Beth to develop an addiction that becomes increasingly difficult to separate from her talent. The show follows Beth as she becomes famous, wealthy, and a legend in the world of chess.
However, every high in her career is accompanied by constant personal lows. That is what makes The Queen’s Gambit so much more than a straightforward drama. The show never shies away from portraying Beth as a nuanced individual who is just as self-destructive as she is talented. Not to mention how confidently the show visually captures the complexity of chess. The audience doesn’t need to understand the game to know what the stakes are for Beth. The cinematography, editing, music, costumes, and production design all come together to deliver one of the most thrilling yet personal stories Netflix has ever told.
8
‘American Vandal’ (2017–2018)
In the wrong hands, American Vandal would probably not have worked after the first few episodes. However, Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault really ran with the mockumentary format. The Netflix series follows high-school filmmakers Peter Maldonado (Tyler Alvarez) and Sam Ecklund (Griffin Gluck) as they investigate immature crimes with the seriousness of a prestige true-crime documentary. The show carefully copies the dramatic interviews, forensic reconstructions, suspicious editing, and cliffhangers popularized by series including Making a Murderer. However, the point here isn’t to simply mock the genre.
American Vandal Season 1 opens with 27 faculty cars at Hanover High School being spray-painted with obscene images. The obvious suspect is class clown Dylan Maxwell (Jimmy Tatro), who insists that he is innocent. The evidence is completely ridiculous, but the show treats Peter and Sam’s bogus investigation with such commitment that the question of who committed the vandalism becomes genuinely difficult to stop thinking about. American Vandal lasted only two seasons, but maybe that limited run made it all the more special.
7
‘Blue Eye Samurai’ (2023–Present)
Blue Eye Samurai is a revenge story set in 17th-century Japan. The story follows Mizu (Maya Erskine), a mixed-race swordmaster born during a period when the country’s borders were largely closed to outsiders. Her blue eyes make her an outcast, so she disguises herself as a man and begins hunting the four white men, one of whom is her father. However, Mizu plans to kill all four rather than waste time discovering which one it is. The action in the series is obviously a major attraction, but the violence never overshadows the story.
Mizu is a deeply complex character whose emotional journey centers on all the sword fights and dramatic revelations. The animation in Blue Eye Samurai is just as great as the storytelling. The visually stunning TV series combines three-dimensional character models with painterly backgrounds, detailed lighting, and action influenced by live-action choreography. Every fight has weight and rhythm, while the more emotional scenes have a cinematic quality to them. Even with Mizu’s journey still unfinished, Blue Eye Samurai already feels more confident and complete than many shows manage across several years.
6
‘Baby Reindeer’ (2024)
Baby Reindeer is a downright haunting experience. The thriller miniseries follows struggling comedian and pub worker Donny Dunn (Richard Gadd), who offers Martha (Jessica Gunning) a free cup of tea when he sees her distressed and sitting alone. However, that simple act of kindness leads to an increasingly disturbing obsession as Martha begins stalking Donny and trying to insert herself into every part of his life. What makes all of this hit even harder is the fact that the story is inspired by Gadd’s own experiences.
Baby Reindeer begins as a dark comedy, but the show quickly takes a much more uncomfortable turn. Donny knows that Martha’s behaviour is dangerous, yet he repeatedly delays reporting her and occasionally allows her back into his life. The series never presents this as logical or healthy, but it gradually helps the audience understand why Donny behaves this way. Martha is never presented as a one-dimensional villain either. The series barely offers any easy answers because it aims to show how clueless the characters feel themselves. This blatant honesty makes Baby Reindeer unlike anything else on TV.
5
‘The Sandman’ (2022–2025)
The Sandman begins when Morpheus, also known as Dream (Tom Sturridge), one of the most powerful beings in existence, is pulled from his kingdom during a failed occult ritual and imprisoned inside a glass cage for more than a century. During this time, his kingdom, the Dreaming, slowly falls apart. When he finally escapes, Dream must recover his stolen tools and restore his realm. This brings the protagonist into direct conflict with Lucifer Morningstar (Gwendoline Christie), the dangerously unstable John Dee (David Thewlis), and the Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), a nightmare who has spent Dream’s imprisonment becoming a serial killer in the waking world.
This narrative is pretty intriguing as it is, but the show adds another layer of excitement to the mix by giving Dream the ability to disappear into the background while an episode follows an ordinary person whose life briefly crosses his path. That freedom produces some of the show’s best stories that make this enormous fantasy world feel a lot more personal. Visually, The Sandman moves from gothic horror and historical fantasy to mythology and quiet human drama without feeling restricted to one genre. There’s no denying that the series does get buried under its mythology time and again, but the fantasy show’s unpredictable structure is exactly what keeps the audience hooked till the very end.
4
‘Midnight Mass’ (2021)
Midnight Mass is a signature Mike Flanagan horror that openly talks about how dangerous religion can become when faith is replaced by blind certainty. Just like the showrunner’s other masterpieces, this one also uses horror as a doorway into something far more sinister. The story takes place on Crockett Island, an isolated fishing community whose population is slowly declining. The narrative picks up when Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) returns home after serving time in prison for causing a fatal drunk-driving accident. He has lost his faith and has no idea what to do with the rest of his life, but his return coincides with the arrival of Father Paul (Hamish Linklater), a charismatic new priest.
Soon, seemingly impossible miracles begin occurring, church attendance rises, and the residents become convinced that Crockett Island has been chosen for something extraordinary. Now, Flanagan does not present faith itself as the villain. Crockett Island is just a place full of people who desperately need something to hold on to. The show spends a lot of time with its characters and keeps building a constant sense of dread before finally dropping the ball and letting the audience in on what is actually happening. Midnight Mass is not the fastest-paced show, but its patience and restrained approach to horror separates it from predictable supernatural stories.
3
‘Ozark’ (2017–2022)
Ozark is a thriller series that deserves way more appreciation than it gets. The story follows financial adviser Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) relocating to the Missouri Ozarks with his wife, Wendy (Laura Linney), and their children to escape from a Mexican drug cartel that is after him. However, his solution only pulls the family further into the criminal world. Soon enough, Marty comes into conflict with local criminals, the FBI, the Kansas City mob, and the ruthless Snell family. He also meets Ruth Langmore, who soon becomes his most valuable employee. Ruth quickly becomes the emotional center of the show, but the story actually takes a turn when Wendy goes from Marty’s reluctant accomplice to the actual mastermind behind it all.
The couple’s complicated marriage drives the narrative as they lie to each other, undermine each other’s plans, but still keep coming back together because they are the only ones who truly understand each other. By the final season, Wendy’s willingness to take risks is so extreme that even Marty struggles to control her, and that descent is fascinating to witness. One wouldn’t imagine everyday business dealings, and the unglamorous process of money laundering would feel so thrilling, but Ozark makes it work. The show is often compared to Breaking Bad because of their similar themes, but over Ozark‘s four seasons, the Netflix series definitely established an identity of its own.
2
‘The Crown’ (2016–2023)
Image via Netflix
The Crown looks like a grand historical drama about the British monarchy, but it’s surprising how intimate the show actually is. The series begins with a young Elizabeth (Claire Foy) enjoying a relatively private life with Prince Philip (Matt Smith), only for the death of her father, King George VI (Jared Harris), to place her on the throne at 25. From that moment onward, every decision she makes as a wife, sister, mother, or daughter has to be in sync with what the monarchy requires of her. The Crown’s boldest decision was replacing its main cast every two seasons as the story moved through more than fifty years of Elizabeth’s reign. Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies take over as the middle-aged Elizabeth and Philip, before Imelda Staunton and Jonathan Pryce play them in the final era.
Instead of weakening the audience’s investments in the characters, the recasting perfectly captures the evolution of political crises, changing governments, public tragedies, and the monarchy’s struggle to remain relevant. Eventually, the series also includes Diana Spencer (Emma Corrin), whose marriage to Prince Charles (Josh O’Connor) becomes one of its most compelling storylines. There’s no denying that The Crown takes historical liberties and openly presents itself as a fictional dramatization inspired by real events. However, the show stands as an undisputed modern classic because of how patiently it examines the people trapped behind one of the most important institutions of the world.
1
‘Dark’ (2017–2020)
Dark will easily go down in history as one of the most ambitious shows ever made. The mystery thriller is Netflix’s first original German-language series that is set in the gloomy town of Winden that’s practically defined by a nuclear power plant and a network of caves hidden in the surrounding forest. The story begins shortly after teenager Jonas Kahnwald (Louis Hofmann) loses his father and returns home following psychiatric treatment. When young Mikkel Nielsen (Daan Lennard Liebrenz) suddenly disappears, Jonas joins Mikkel’s siblings, Martha (Lisa Vicari) and Magnus Nielsen (Moritz Jahn), in searching for him.
The investigation quickly reveals that Mikkel’s disappearance is connected to another child who vanished exactly 33 years earlier. Now, what’s interesting is that a passage beneath the caves links different periods in Winden’s history, which allows characters to move between generations and discover how the town’s families have been connected for far longer than they realize. All of this sounds extremely complicated, but Dark never treats time travel as a gimmick. The audience feels genuinely invested in all these characters. Every revelation contributes to the overarching tragedy that the narrative is built around, and the sci-fi elements only add more weight to it. All of that, combined with the fact that Dark delivered one of the most memorable and fitting finales in recent television history, makes it a strong contender on this list.
Dark
- Release Date
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2017 – 2020-00-00
- Network
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Netflix
- Showrunner
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Jantje Friese
- Directors
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Baran bo Odar
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Louis Hofmann
Jonas Kahnwald
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Lisa Vicari
Martha Nielsen
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