Best Of
The Best TV Shows of 2026 So Far, Ranked by What Delivered
By Jordan A. · · 5 min read
Most "best of the year so far" lists are one person's taste with a headline on top. This one has receipts. Two useful things landed within a month of each other: the Emmy nominations on July 8, and Nielsen's streaming report for the first half of 2026 in early August. Critics voted. Then everyone else voted with their evenings.
When a show shows up big on both lists, that's not a coincidence, that's a show. Here's what actually delivered between January and August 2026.
How we sorted this
Two signals. Emmy nominations, which tell you what the industry respected, and Nielsen's minutes, which tell you what people genuinely could not stop watching. Neither one is the truth on its own. A show that lands on both is about as close to consensus as television gets.
Everything below premiered or ran in 2026 unless noted, and I've said where it lives.
The Pitt season 2 is the year's biggest show, full stop
The Pitt led all shows at the Emmys with 25 nominations, and it was the third most streamed series of the first half of the year with 21.12 billion viewing minutes, according to Nielsen. Nothing else in 2026 is close on both axes.
Season 2 ran 15 episodes on HBO Max from January 8 to April 16, set 10 months after season 1, unfolding in real time across a Fourth of July weekend. The July 4 conceit sounds like a gimmick and then episode four happens and you understand why they did it. Noah Wyle is nominated for lead actor and he'd have my vote.
The one honest criticism: it's exhausting. Two or three episodes a sitting is the ceiling for most people.
Pluribus made the strangest swing and landed it
Pluribus technically ran from November 7 to December 23 of last year, all nine episodes on Apple TV, but its year was 2026. Rhea Seehorn won Best Actress in a Drama at both the Golden Globes and the Critics' Choice Awards, and the show picked up an Outstanding Drama Series nomination.
Vince Gilligan's premise: an alien virus turns humanity into a contented hive mind, and only 13 people are immune. Seehorn's Carol Sturka is one of them, and she is furious about it. The show's best trick is that the hive is nice. Genuinely, unnervingly nice. Fighting something kind is much harder to dramatize than fighting something evil, and Gilligan pulls it off.
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was the small one that worked
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms ran six episodes on HBO and HBO Max from January 18 to February 22, and it got an Outstanding Drama Series nomination that almost nobody predicted. Peter Claffey plays Dunk, Dexter Sol Ansell plays Egg, and the whole thing is a hedge knight and a bald kid going to a tournament.
No dragons doing city-wide damage. No twelve-way succession chart. Just two people on a road, in a world we already know, being decent to each other. It turns out that was the missing ingredient.
Comedy's year belonged to Hacks, and it's over
Hacks set the all-time record for a comedy series with 24 Emmy nominations, which Variety confirmed broke the previous high. That happened in its final season, which is the kind of exit most shows would kill for. Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder spent five seasons circling the same question about whether the two of them are good for each other, and the answer they land on is better than a clean one.
Widow's Bay was the other comedy story. Apple TV's horror-comedy pulled 19 nominations, the most of any new show in 2026. Matthew Rhys plays a mayor trying to turn a haunted, actively dangerous island town into a tourist destination. It's the Jaws mayor as a full character study, and it's funnier than that description makes it sound.
The full Outstanding Comedy Series field this year: Abbott Elementary, The Bear, Hacks, Margo's Got Money Troubles, Nobody Wants This, Only Murders in the Building, Shrinking and Widow's Bay, per CBS News. More on that field in our comedy roundup.
Limited series: Beef season 2 and The Beast in Me
Beef came back April 16 with all eight episodes on Netflix and a completely new cast: Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan as one couple, Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton as the other. Same format, same escalating pettiness, different flavor of misery. It's a limited series nominee and it earned it.
The Beast in Me, with Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, is in the same category. Rhys is nominated in two categories this year, comedy lead for Widow's Bay and this. Not many actors get that year.
The ones everyone actually watched
Nielsen's first half chart is a reminder that the most watched shows and the most nominated shows are different lists. Stranger Things finished No. 1 with 23.26 billion minutes, months after its finale. Bluey was second with 22.81 billion. Grey's Anatomy was fourth with 20.41 billion, and Bridgerton was sixth with 17.15 billion.
Stranger Things is the wild one. That show ended on the last day of 2025 and still beat everything currently in production. Finished shows keep working. That's worth remembering next time you skip something because it's over.
What we're still waiting on
The back half of 2026 is loaded. Lanterns started August 16. Brothers, Crystal Lake, Carrie and VisionQuest all hit between late September and mid-October. Ask me again in December and this list may look different in the top five.
For the platform-by-platform view, our 2026 drama rankings go deeper on the prestige side, and if you want to see how this year stacks up against the last one, the 2025 list is still a good hit rate.
Nine great shows is a lot of homework and you're only going to start one of them tonight. Give BingeNext two shows you already love and it'll tell you which of these is the right one for you, ranked, and only from services you already have.
Topics covered: best of 2026, tv rankings, emmys, nielsen, prestige tv
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and writes every guide on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu, and he still tests every pick the hard way: by watching it.