Best 10 TV shows so far in 2026 ranked

Small Prophets are one of Garry's favourite shows of 2026

Season six starts on 16^th September, but why wait? This wonderful series revolves around a B-team of second-rate secret agents – the titular slow horses – run by Gary Oldman’s rude, crude, hugely cunning and utterly compulsive Jackson Lamb.

There are great joys to be had watching the underdogs of London’s grotty Slough House outperform their MI5 betters, and slovenly Lamb is an endless source of foul-mouthed joy. “You’re fired,” he tells one agent. “I’ve got haemorrhoids that are more ****ing use than you”. Other sparkling lines have included, “Bringing you up to speed is like trying to explain Norway to a dog” and “Of course you didn’t mean to kill him, if you’d meant to kill him, he’d still be alive.”

Oldman brings Lamb to flatulent, fag-smoking, Scotch-swigging, curry-stained life. Yet you still believe that beneath that chaotic slob exterior, Jackson possesses a first-class brain. The Apple TV series, based faithfully on Mick Herron’s wonderful novels, is arguably the best British TV series of the decade. Some critics complain that the recent fifth series drifted to the left, but isn’t that true of the Service itself? Jaded cynicism is at the show’s beating heart.

Two casino workers with money problems start skimming the takings. Problem is the Liverpool casino is run by villain Gary Packer who is cleaning the profits from his booming drug trade through the tills by paying people to gamble and lose… In this grim setting, casino manager Matty and cashier Leanne, the two light-fingered employees, are (almost) the good guys.

Written by Tony Schumacher, who created sparkling police series The Responder, The Cage balances a tale of poverty and crime with heart and authentic humour. It’s set in the late 80s. Sheridan Smith is widowed single mum Leanne raising two teenagers who needs the money to pay for her grandmother’s care home; Michael Socha is the hangdog Matty, a gambling addict in way too deep, who has got behind with his daughter’s child maintenance.

They end up working together as they blunder deeper into the danger zone. We’re supposed to root for the thieving employees driven by desperation, or, more accurately by poor life choices. Gary’s heavy, Paul (Louis Emerick) seems most human when he tells Matty, “You’re a mate, I don’t want to keep knocking the **** out of you every week.” The magnificent Geraldine James plays Gary’s elegant mother Nancy, unaware of his criminal enterprises.

The only reality TV show that doesn’t insult the intelligence, Jeremy Clarkson’s series is funnier than most BBC comedies and more authentic than TOWIE and co. The series is honest and educational, snubbing the romanticised townie view of farming to show us the real hardships that go with the tough job, including dealing with unpredictable yields, rotten weather, over-zealous councils and strict planning regulations – all on a profit margin thinner than the straw in a scarecrow’s hair.

Laugh-out-loud moments have included Clarkson’s sheep escaping while he tried to erect an electric fence, and him getting his over-sized Lamborghini tractor stuck (after completely ignoring farm hand Kaleb Cooper’s warnings). Scenes like a calf spraying its waste into Jeremy’s mouth or a cow headbutting him in the genitals can’t be planned any more than Gerald Cooper’s rapid-fire West Country chatter can be easily understood. The latest series ended with an awful twist – Clarkson revealed he has prostate cancer, shortly after his heart attack scare. Real-life drama.

Viewers love Clarkson, a bright, argumentative and cack-handed Englishman from Doncaster, with the ability to rub bores and virtue-signallers up the wrong way. When he starts a series by telling us, “Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong” we know we’re in for a treat. Let’s hope he recovers fully. Long may Didley Squat thrive. And long may goats kick him in the unmentionables.

If you like your G.R.R. Martin universe to come with the full shebang of fire-breathing dragons and warring dynasties, fantasy saga House Of The Dragon is for you. Just back for its action-packed third season with another epic, budget-blowing battle, this show is set 100 years after the Targaryen conquest of the Seven Kingdoms and 200 years before the birth of Daenerys Targaryen, the Game Of Thrones dragon queen who regains it.

Based on Martin’s Fire & Blood, it portrays the events that lead to the initial fall of House Targaryen, caused by the Dance of the Dragons, via a devastating war of succession. Shows are as awesomely impressive as GoT, but at $20m an episode this looks incredible. It’s well-written, well-acted, and awash with royal court intrigue. We get tragedy, believable family feuds, fine acting and sharp dialogue.

Season two felt a little sluggish and Martin himself criticised the showrunner’s changes to his original book, but the new series packs in fresh characters and plenty of thrilling battlefield action.

This successful addition to the Game Of Thrones franchise swaps wars, dragons and political scheming for the simpler, character-driven story of Ser Duncan the Tall (aka Dunk), a lofty and likeable lowborn hedge knight who is fully committed to the knightly values of honour and chivalry.

On his quest to compete at a jousting tournament, the naïve Dunk takes on Egg, a young, cheeky squire who is secretly of noble blood. Peter Claffey is perfectly cast as well-intentioned Dunk and Dexter Sol Ansell shines as his quick-witted kid side-kick.

The six-part series is based on George R.R. Martin’s The Tales Of Dunk & Egg novellas and set 89 years before Game Of Thrones. It starts slowly, as an odd couple road trip, and by episode five we’re plunged into one of the bloodiest and most draining fight scenes since Martin’s brutal Battle of the Bastards. Somehow our hero survived and a second season is scheduled for next year.

Sherlock Holmes purists look away now. Guy Ritchie’s adaptation/hi-jacking of Conan Doyle’s greatest sleuth is exactly what you’d expect from him – it crackles with energy, inauthentic fight scenes, and a plot so unlikely it would surely make Sherlock’s pipe smoke curl into a permanent question mark.

Set in the 1870s, it takes liberties with the characters, making 19-year-old Holmes a pickpocket and a close pal of the roguishly charming James Moriarty – his future mortal enemy. It also comes with a time-travelling soundtrack that includes Kasabian and The Damned. But if you suspend belief and roll with it, there is much fun to be had here.

Holmes (Fiennes Tiffin) is bailed out of Newgate prison by his older brother, Mycroft, who punishes him by making him work as a porter at Oxford University, where naturally he is smarter than most of the dons. The TinTin-like plot, loaded with misdirection and unexpected twists, includes the death of Sherlock’s sister years before, his mother’s incarceration in a dubious asylum, a stolen 5^th century scroll of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, foreign espionage, a Chinese princess, murdered dons, the Moulin Rouge and the return of Sherlock’s inventor father Silas. A three-pipe mystery indeed.

At its heart, the show is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid reborn in Victorian England. (Character name of the series? Oxford dean Sir Bucephalus Hodge, played by Colin Firth with a Ben Turpin moustache.)

Some of the sex scenes in Industry make Rivals seem like Carry On Camping. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s hit series, based initially on their own experiences as investment bankers, started as a no-holds-barred portrait of London high finance and new dotcom industries. Most of the characters seem to have had a morality bypass.

Backs are stabbed, huge quantities of drugs are taken, along with huger risks, financial and sexual. It’s fuelled by testosterone, but beautiful women play the game too. American Harper (Myha’la Herrold) and the Machiavellian Yasmin (Marissa Abela) merrily double-cross each other to stay on top. By this year’s fourth season, the show hit peak darkness.

Harper was heading an investment fund backed by an English toff; and Yasmin was trapped in a dying marriage to Henry Muck (Kit Harington) a green energy wiz with an online payments company. Like Succession, this is a show about money, class, power, selfishness and sex. And also like Succession, no matter how far they push it, it always rings true. It’s Game of Thrones for grasping bastards.

This gentle comic fantasy blends the mundane with the supernatural. Created by Mackenzie Crook (Detectorists), it stars Pearce Quigley as the aptly named Michael Sleep, one of life’s natural somnambulists. He’s a weary man with a ZZ Top beard and a tedious existence.

He’s been in a daze ever since his other half, Clea, mysteriously vanished; his job at a local D-I-Y store is dull, and his father, Brian, is in a care home battling dementia. Grieving Clea, Michael has let his garden overflow to the annoyance of his houseproud neighbour. Meanwhile, Clea’s skint brother Roy thinks the house should belong to him. The twist comes when Brian (Michael Palin) lets his son into a secret he learned on his travels – a way to grow homunculi, small magical creatures that know everything and can only tell the truth, in glass jars...

Sleep gives the ancient alchemy a go, and bingo – he grows his own. It’s a bizarre tale pitched warmly at a very human level. It also feels very English, in the vein of those brilliant Ealing films of the late 40s and 50s. The six-part series is fantasy rooted in everyday life with humour that feels drawn from it. Crook plays Michael’s ineffective manager, Lauren Patel is the young colleague who brings him out of himself. It will return for a second series. Small Prophets, big joys.

A masterful blend of dark pulp fiction mixed with the Marvel alternative universe. Nicolas Cage is on glorious form as hard-boiled, hard-drinking gumshoe detective Bob Reilly in the gangster-plagued alt-New-York of 1933. World-weary Reilly was a Spiderman-style superhero known as The Spider who quit after failing to save Ruby, the love of his life, from drowning.

Inevitably he is lured back into superhero action. The cast are terrific, the direction first class – some of the shots look like they could have come straight from the pages of a graphic novel – and Cage seems possessed by the spirit of James Stewart throughout.

This is adult fare with murders, mysteries, glamour and sexual energy. When other super-powered folk, all veterans of the First World War, come to light working for a local villain, The Spider comes out of retirement. The script is loaded with verve and sharp lines. The series is shot both in black and white and true-hue colour so you can choose how you want to see the action unfold. It’s tremendous fun.

A gripping drama based on true story of brave undercover Customs men and women who, with no field experience and zero financial backing, went undercover to close down the booming 1980s and 90s heroin import trade into the UK.

Plucky underdogs pitched against vicious gangsters. Tom Burke and Steve Coogan star in this fast-paced, six-part thriller crafted by Neil Forsyth (who wrote Brinks Mat drama The Gold). Coogan plays veteran agent Don Clarke and he assembles a team of volunteers on behalf of the Home Secretary and HM Customs & Excise’s Director of Investigations, who make it clear that there’s no budget to fund it.

Burke’s Guy Stanton adopts the Legend (i.e. alter-ego) of a London narcotics smuggler to entrap the Turkish and Scouse drug lords. Two other investigators head for Liverpool. “You think a few customs officers can take on the biggest drug gang in Britain?” asks the sceptical Home Secretary. They did, and against the odds they do. But not without jeopardy.