15 Best TV Shows On Peacock, Ranked

In the ongoing streaming wars and the endless discussions about the state of the entertainment industry that they've sparked, NBCUniversal's Peacock has become something of a contentious topic, if not an outright comedic punching bag — with even Nikki Glaser's opening monologue at the 2025 Golden Globes joking that "The Day of the Jackal" is "about a top secret elite sniper that no one can find 'cause he's on Peacock." Nevertheless, the American streamer counts over 30 million subscribers, and jokes aside, those subscribers actually do have quite a plentiful offer of great television available at their fingertips.

Here, we've ranked the 15 best shows that Peacock subscribers can press "Play" on right now, including classics and gems from both sides of the pond and all eras of television. You'll find something for everybody, even if each show listed here is worth watching in its own right.

One of the most iconic horror TV shows of all time, "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" was a turning point for the television medium at a time when it was still seen by many in the film industry as a perilous, unwelcome competitor against cinema. If Alfred Hitchcock, arguably the leading popular filmmaker of the time, could create, host, and act as executive producer on an anthology series incorporating the style and personality of his films, then TV could be another valid avenue for audiovisual creation as opposed to just an existential threat to theatrical film.

Hitchcock himself only directed 18 of the show's 361 tales of crime, murder, and deceit between 1955 and 1965, but his fingerprints as producer and creator could be seen everywhere, as the best episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" had the same sense of hypnotic fascination and physical, unshakable fright as any of the Master of Suspense's films. Peacock has both the seven original seasons of half-hour episodes and the three additional seasons of hour-long installments released under the title of "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour."

Before there was "Veep," there was "The Thick of It," Armando Ianucci's original stab at documentary-style, idealism-free, profanity-laden political satire. With just four seasons aired in total — two on BBC Four in 2005, and two on BBC Two in 2009 and 2012 — and just 21 episodes and two specials counted in that time, the series nonetheless became one of the most notorious British sitcoms of all time, steamrolling everything that had come before in politics-themed television by approaching the world of British government with an unprecedented degree of clear-eyed cynicism.

The gloriously venomous show was, for the better part of its run, fronted by maybe the most gloriously venomous character in TV history in the form of Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker, perpetually angry director of communications for the British government. "The Thick of It" depicts the ins and outs of how Tucker, his team, and other members of the government deal with successive crises and embroil themselves in petty ego wars, always sustaining a level of raucous comedic energy that strikes a fascinating balance between baldly vulgar and balletically graceful. Peacock carries all four seasons.

Like most streaming services to have emerged in the past decade, Peacock has made inroads into the original content game, putting out such notable shows as "Bel-Air," "Brave New World," "Based on a True Story," the remakes of "Queer as Folk" and "Saved by the Bell," and the first two seasons of "Girls5Eva." The best and most essential Peacock original series, though, is arguably "Poker Face," Rian Johnson's spirited throwback to the great, bygone institution of the case-of-the-week mystery show.

Natasha Lyonne, ferociously entertaining as ever, stars as Charlie Cale, a casino waitress with the supernatural ability to tell when somebody is lying. Following a scuffle with her criminal boss that puts her life on the line, she goes on the run, and each episode finds her stopping somewhere in the United States and becoming involved in a new crime story — each one structured as a howcatchem and peppered with illustrious guest stars. Johnson directs only the first two and pens only the first and last out of the first season's 10 episodes, but the whole show is infused with his penchant for marrying zany character-based comedy to masterfully-structured suspense and intrigue.

The art of riffing humorously on a particularly, scrumptiously terrible movie has been a part of moviegoing culture for decades, but "Mystery Science Theater 3000" refined it into a form of delectable audiovisual entertainment in its own right.

Created by Joel Hodgson and originally premiering on local Minneapolis TV station KTMA-TV in 1988, this cult classic TV series places a hapless human test subject within an Earth-orbiting satellite controlled by mad scientists known as Mads, who force the subject to continuously watch the most wretched films on Earth. The original subject, Joel Robinson (Hodgson), builds sentient robots to keep him company, watching and roasting the movies with him.

The stage is thus set for a show that introduces shining treasures of trash cinema to the viewer on each episode, while providing witty, hilarious commentary on the films in question — a formula whose entertainment value has proven near-inexhaustible over the course of "MST3K'"s 14 seasons and 230 episodes, released across a total of 34 years on six different networks. Peacock has 10 total 90-minute episodes — one each from seasons 1, 3, and 4; three from season 5; one from season 6; two from season 9; and one from season 10.

Arguably the most popular upstairs-downstairs drama in British TV history, Julian Fellowes' "Downton Abbey" found the perfect alchemy between patient, sensitively observed historical fiction and unfettered high drama, producing six seasons' worth of sprawling, soapy, sophisticated entertainment. The rare ratings smash that never faltered in popularity over the course of its run, it also remained unusually consistent to the very end in terms of writing, with Fellowes' dutiful quality control extending to every "Downton Abbey" season and even the two theatrical films released in 2019 and 2022.

Set in the United Kingdom between 1912 and 1926, "Downton Abbey" follows the bustling lives of the Crawleys, an aristocratic Yorkshire family, and their numerous domestic servants. The secret to the show's longevity lay in rich character work carefully positioned within history, with each major event of the early 20th century sending shockwaves through the cast that felt both momentous and organic. With a cast full of British acting legends and head-turning breakout stars alike, merely watching the lives of everybody on the Crawley estate transform over the years makes for a constant, dependable joy, give or take the occasional tear-jerking season finale. Peacock has all six seasons and 52 episodes, plus "Downton Abbey: A New Era," the second of the two films.

There may not be another show in the history of United States television with as strong a claim to the title of "institution" as "Saturday Night Live." Since its premiere in 1975, the late-night NBC sketch comedy series has had its ups and downs — stronger and weaker cast lineups, all-star hosts, iconic and dismal sketches alike, great moments of political sharpness and just as many instances of noncommittal timidity — but, in those 50 years, it has never ceased to be an integral part of American pop culture.

If you're a fan of any major American comic to have emerged post-1980, chances are that you'll find some of their work on "Saturday Night Live," whether as hosts or as cast members at the dawn of their careers. The very same goes for popular musical acts, with the show's live music performances making up its own fascinating mosaic of the past few decades of pop culture. Whether you want to chart the origins of "Wayne's World" or "The Blues Brothers," count how many words per minute Kristen Wigg can rattle off as Judy Grimes, marvel at Chris Farley's superb physical comedy, or just watch Sir Patrick Stewart excitedly yell "Ladies and gentlemen, Salt-N-Pepa!," Peacock has got you covered, with all 50 seasons available for streaming.

Before "Saturday Night Live" ushered in a new era for variety television, the 1960s had already seen their own, arguably even more momentous television revolution in the form of "The Carol Burnett Show." Hosted by Carol Burnett at the height of her career, the CBS series broke innumerable glass ceilings by demonstrating that a female performer wasn't just capable of acquitting herself well enough in the male-dominated world of sketch comedy — she could outright beat the boys at their own game.

Led by Burnett and her explosive, all-purpose comedic energy, the show's legendary cast — primarily made up of Vicki Lawrence, Harvey Korman, Lyle Waggoner, and Tim Conway for the majority of its 11-season run — put together incredibly sly, irresistibly giddy parodies of various pop culture items, as well as fully original sketches so tight and well-timed that it's now hard to wrap one's head around the fact that they were performed live. Not a lot of popular comedy shows from that era have truly stood the test of time and remained equally delightful viewing to this day, but "The Carol Burnett Show" has.

What makes "Parks and Recreation" one of the best sitcoms of all time is the way it bridges the gap between idealism and cynicism: Although perennially exasperated by the endless possibilities of human idiocy and infused with the right amount of snark, contempt, and tartness for a show sending up small-town American politics (which is to say, a lot), the Greg Daniels and Mike Schur-created NBC series still somehow managed, episode after episode, to make a case for the beauty of love, community, and connection. Even a decade later, there's still nothing quite like it elsewhere on American television.

On the level of sheer craft, it's also one of the most accomplished sitcoms of the contemporary era, with more laugh-out-loud moments per episode than some shows manage in whole seasons, and writing that knew how to mine the eccentricities of its ensemble cast in ever-new ways without ever growing stale. As for the ensemble cast in question, it speaks for itself just as a list of names: Amy Poehler, Nick Offerman, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Pratt, Rashida Jones, Aziz Ansari, Adam Scott, Rob Lowe, Retta, Jim O'Heir — all at the top of their games. There's a reason why "Parks" launched so many star careers.

The cult series to end all cult series, "Garth Marenghi's Darkplace" feels like a post-2010 social-media-era surrealist comedy that somehow got sent back through time to the year 2004. In fact, it was the arguable father of all such shows — which is an especially impressive achievement when you consider that it managed to leave that footprint with just one season of six half-hour episodes.

What six episodes, though! A conceptual project with the king of stringent commitment to authenticity that you almost never see on shows or movies of its ilk, "Garth Marenghi's Darkplace" is presented as a special repertory presentation of a fictional 1980s sci-fi series set in the eerie Darkplace Hospital, which supposedly had over 50 episodes produced by Channel 4 only to be shelved without ever airing due to its transgressive nature. Six ramshackle, cheaply-produced episodes are shown along with interviews and commentary from the (fictional) cast and crew — including Matthew Holness as Garth Marenghi, the popular horror author and unrepentant egomaniac who birthed "Darkplace" and also stars on it as Dr. Rick Dagless. Dense, deceptively ambitious, and most of all hilarious, "Garth Marenghi's Darkplace" is a relic of a time when TV was beginning to learn how to play to lore-obsessed internet fanbases — and reveling in it like it never would again.

The American version of "The Office" would have a serious claim to the title of most influential sitcom of the past 25 years. It is, in any case, the clear cornerstone of the genre's single-camera, mockumentary-style era — not just because it was great, but because it found a way to make that dry, observational style as conducive to big, crowd-pleasing belly laughs as any multi-camera outing.

The method of "The Office" consisted in replacing snarky retorts and boisterous laugh tracks with a refined feel for deadpan comedic timing. Utilizing everything from awkward silences to cringeworthy setups to knowing glances to the camera to perfectly-executed talking head cutaways, the show's cast and crew managed to develop a language of humor so irresistible and effective it barely even registered as novel. As if its hilarity weren't enough, "The Office" also managed to sneakily build out one of the richest, most engrossing casts in television history, allowing each supporting player in the Dunder Mifflin office, however minor, to develop into a complex, three-dimensional star of their own personal mini-sitcom.

Every contemporary TV show about an eccentric, unorthodox investigator who throws people off with their socially discordant behavior only to come back around to a brilliant solution has its roots in "Columbo." With seven seasons aired on NBC and three on ABC as part of the "NBC Mystery Movie" and "ABC Mystery Movie" anthologies, it's a show that's synonymous with the very evolution of the case-of-the-week TV crime drama.

Peter Falk — who wasn't the first choice for the role – stars as Lieutenant Columbo, a genius Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective who, through his unwavering attention to detail, dogged determination, and shrewd tendency to hide his own skills under a veneer of blue-collar modesty, continually finds answers that no one else can seem to find — presented to the audience through an innovative "inverted" format, where the killer is known to us from the jump, and the tension lies in wondering how they'll get caught. There are only a handful of feature-length episodes per season, but almost every one is sleek, well-shot, well-acted, and engrossing enough that it could comfortably stand as its own theatrical film.

Speaking of great crime dramas available to watch on Peacock, no diet of gripping investigation-themed television would be complete without "Broadchurch." Created by Chris Chibnall, the ITV series is set in the fictional English coastal town of Broadchurch, and follows local investigators Detective Inspector Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) as they deal with a succession of harrowing cases that take a heavy toll on their personal lives and on the fabric of the community.

Each of the three seasons follows a different case, with season 1 charting the investigation into the death of 11-year-old Danny Latimer, while subsequent seasons continue to unspool the long-term psychological and social ramifications of that tragedy and the grief it spurred, even as new cases take up Hardy and Miller's attention. It's intricate, gut-wrenching, masterfully-acted stuff, as hauntingly efficient as detective storytelling as it is incisive on the level of character exploration. And if you like "Broadchurch," there are plenty of other shows you might enjoy too.

One of the most original, uncompromising, irrepressibly creative sitcoms of all time, "Community" is a show that somehow managed to eke out six seasons of wholly gauche entertainment within the largely hostile and unappreciative network TV environment of the early 2010s — which only speaks to the amount of fervor it sparked in the relatively few who tuned in for it weekly.

Ostensibly a school-com about the daily lives of a study group at a flailing Colorado community college, "Community" evolved into two very special, very intertwined things over the course of its six seasons: First, a love letter to sitcoms and pop cinema history in the form of elaborate parodies, send-ups, and postmodernist deconstructions. Second, a genuinely bracing found-family story about misfits of all stripes learning to be a home in the world for each other, even as the universe kept throwing them into the most surreal predicaments and misadventures imaginable. Through it all, it was also incredibly, endlessly hilarious in ways that seemed almost too smart to keep up with at the time. Peacock carries all 6 seasons, including the infamous "gas leak year" and the post-cancellation season that originally aired on Yahoo! Screen.

The great thing about "30 Rock" is that, even if you've watched it all the way through more than once, it's still basically a new show every time you dive back in. Such is the feat that Tina Fey and company pulled off in the "30 Rock" writers' room, maybe the most cornucopian joke factory in TV history — a place where a single, 12-second cutaway gag about two characters' time in an improv group could be optimized into a matryoshka of nested setups and punchlines that don't even register fully at first glance.

Virtually every episode, every scene, and every beat of "30 Rock" was written, directed, and performed with that same level of sustained commitment to stacking laughs on top of laughs on top of laughs. It would be enough of an achievement to put the show in the TV history books even if it weren't also one of the sharpest, most cogent satires of American showbiz — and the absurd carnival of American society by extension — to have come out at the turn of the 2000s.

It's impossible to overstate how much of a seismic shift "Homicide: Life on the Street" represented for American television — even if it was a shift that largely happened away from public view.

A naturalistic, uncompromising look at the grim reality of metropolitan police work, shot on location in Baltimore and imbued with such narrative density that it was hard even for regular viewers to keep up with any given episode, the NBC series struggled in the ratings throughout pretty much the entirety of its 1993-1999 run. But it introduced those who were paying attention to a new way of making and thinking about television — to the medium's aptitude as a perfect vessel for epic, novelistic chronicles of modern life in all its ups and downs, crafted with the same rigor and formal deftness as any theatrical film. TV wouldn't have been what it was in the golden 2000s without it, and it only started streaming for the first time ever in 2024.