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The 10 Best Original TV Series on Netflix

Eric Griffith
 & Eric Griffith Senior Editor, Features

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There was a time not so long ago when all new TV shows and seasons debuted in the fall, and episodes were doled out on a weekly basis. If you missed an episode, you'd have to wait until summer to catch a rerun.

It was a dark, dark time.

We now live in the binge-watch age, where streaming video services mean TV is a constant. New shows appear year round, from all corners of the globe, and services frequently drop an entire season all at once.

For that we have to thank Netflix, which changed the paradigm of TV watching enough that many now mimic it. But few come close to what Netflix is willing to spend on original content. It debuts dozens of original TV series every year across live action and animation (and anime).

That's a lot to watch. For selections from all genres, read on.

Big Mouth

Prefer your animated shows to be adult in nature, even when featuring little kids? Big Mouth, helmed by Nick Kroll and a cast full of his comedy friends, treads where even South Park or Family Guy has rarely, if ever ventured—the sexuality of budding youth. All told from a total gross-out, hilarious point of view. There are three seasons, and the show is so hot, Netflix has renewed it for three more already.

Bojack Horseman

There's a lot of animation on the streaming services, but few do adult storylines with the aplomb and wit of BoJack, where half the adults are talking human/animal hybrids for no reason whatsoever other than it's funny. Bojack Horseman himself is a former sitcom star (from the 80s show Horsin' Around) trying to cash back in, and also find love. Voiced by Will Arnett, he's the epitome of anxious, obnoxious, and sympathetic—perfect for a satire on Hollywoo (there's no D, it was stolen on the show) and beyond. Six seasons are streaming, with part two of the final season coming Jan. 31, 2020.

The Crown

Post-WWII Britain was thrown when the King died unexpectedly, leading to the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II, who reigns to this day. The Crown is the fictional retelling of her ascendancy to the throne, and how her family and the English government coped along the way and thereafter. It's told with approximately one decade passing per season—enough so that the stars of the first two seasons were replaced for the third (they'll continue into the fourth, then get replaced in the fifth). Relish the star turns by Matt Smith as Prince Philip, Vanessa Kirby as Princess Margaret, John Lithgow as Churchill, and the award-winning performance by Claire Foy as Elizabeth herself in the first episodes. You may even see some corgis. For season three, the cast now includes Oscar-winner Olivia Colman as the Queen, Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip, and Helena Bonham Carter as Princess Margaret.

Dear White People

This adaption of the award-winning 2014 movie was in good hands, since the movie's director, Justin Simien, also directed the first and last episodes of the 10-episode first season. Not many shows have a 98 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes, but this one does, though unsurprisingly it got lots of online hate early on as well for being "racist" to white people. Logan Browning takes over the lead roll of Sam, who runs a campus radio show also called Dear White People on a mostly white campus. A fourth and final season arrives in 2020.

GLOW

If you liked wrestling in the 1980s, you probably were utterly agog at the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling—a real-life all-female wrestling show. This is a fictionalized telling of the origins of GLOW, starring Alison Brie (Community), Betty Gilpin (Nurse Jackie), and comedian and podcaster Marc Maron. Come to watch gals grapple, stay to be charmed by these women's stories, many of whom were chasing a dream but got sucked into GLOW and decided to make the very best show possible. The 80s soundtrack will have you nostalgic for more than just wrestling in its heyday. The final season is coming in 2020.

Master of None

Master of None is a tour-de-force series personified entirely by one personality: co-creator and star Aziz Ansari. It would remind you perhaps of Louie, the once-considered-great single-camera dramedy from Louis C.K. over on FX—but it's hard to think of Louie much there days. Ansari almost suffered similarly, but controversy hasn't tarred his reputation as thoroughly as that of C.K.

Master of None remains a master-work. It's funny, it's romantic, it's melancholy, it's surprising. It won the Critic's Choice Award for Best Comedy, a Peabody, an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a comedy (twice) and for editing, and Ansari won the Golden Globe for the second season. It may not be back for a third season... even before the accusations, Ansari said he'd need a long break before he'd come back.

Which would honestly be a shame. With the introspection displayed in this show, what played out for Ansari in real life would have a serious impact on his storytelling, potentially a very positive impact. He'd already tried to address the issues of harassment in season two—perhaps in a way that echoes his tangential closeness to harassment (some say he kept silent about C.K.) and not speaking up in the past. It would surely be different if he wrote it today.

Stranger Things

This is the crown jewel in Netflix's bid to make a show with as much audience chatter as rival HBO used to get with Game of Thrones and hopes it gets with Watchmen and Westworld. The first three seasons of Stranger Things are a phenomenon in and of themselves. Set in the 1980s in a small town called Hawkins that just so happens to have a lab full of mad scientists who experimented on children and opened a doorway to a nightmare dimension dubbed The UpsideDown, it's like all the disquieting-but-addicting horror/sci-fi you remember from the 80s distilled into one stunning and macabre series. Season 4 is a foregone conclusion, but who knows when it will arrive.

One Day at a Time

Multi-camera situation comedies (sitcoms) were the mainstay of TV for decades—you can tell them apart from the "single-cam" comedies because they're staged like a play, sometimes in front of an audience—think I Love Lucy, Mary Tyler Moore, Cheers, Friends, All in the Family, etc. They've kind of fallen out of favor these days (The Big Bang Theory notwithstanding). However, when Netflix revived the classic 70's sitcom One Day at a Time—complete with original exec producer Norman Lear—it did it as a multi-cam show shot on stage. The big changes were instead in the family makeup, as the new show is about a Cuban-American family dealing with lots of modern issues faced by Latinos. All that and some kick-ass performances from the likes of Rita Moreno made it one of the top shows the streamer had. That's past tense, because Netflix cancelled it after 3 seasons. However, it's still available to watch; and a new season is coming in 2020 from POP. Making this the first show to jump from Netflix to another network, rather than vice versa.

Unbelievable

Put a stellar cast including Toni Collette and Merritt Wever into an adaptation of this caliber and you've instantly got a winner. This mini-series is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning article, "An Unbelievable Story of Rape," written by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong, and the This American Life radio episode, “Anatomy of Doubt." It will leave you guessing and breathless through all eight episodes, as you watch a traumatized teen (Booksmart's Kaitlyn Dever) report, then recant, her own rape. But cops (Collette and Wever) in a completely different jurisdiction discover the truth of what she said.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Sometimes the TV networks are dumb. NBC had Tina Fey and Robert Carlock—who helmed the classic 30 Rock—develop a show for star Ellie Kemper (The Office) but passed it on to Netflix. Silly, silly NBC. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt quickly became one of the go-to Netflix classic comedies in its four seasons, displaying the rapid-fire sensibility it earned from its 30 Rock DNA. A catchy theme song doesn't hurt, either. It's been nominated for an Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy four times in a row, among many other nominations. It also has the best opening theme song of the last decade.

Other Top Originals

For more, check out our picks for the best original:

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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