The best TV episodes of the decade (from shows not on any of our other lists)

Sex And The City, “Easy Come, Easy Go” (August 6, 2000)
Several years removed from its heyday, it’s easy to spot the flaws in HBO’s fairy tale about a single girl in the big city. The much-lauded dialogue feels creaky with age—less witty repartee and more a stereotypical vision of how sophisticated women might gab about their lewdest moments. But it’s also hard to ignore Sex And The City’s cultural impact. It was one of the shows that vaulted HBO to the top of the heap, and fizzy episodes like “Easy Come, Easy Go”—in which all the women at the show’s center face relationship crises of one sort or another—were what made S&TC so beloved to so many people. The series is so of its moment that it’s already showing its strain, but there are few better time capsules of the dawn of the decade.

Malcolm In The Middle, “Bowling” (April 1, 2001)
Because Malcolm In The Middle got so bad for so long, the innovations it spurred when it debuted in 2000 have mostly been forgotten. It was the first successful single-camera sitcom in ages, and the first to translate the cartoony pace and jokes of The Simpsons to a live-action format. For its first two or three seasons, there was nothing quite like Malcolm: It was willing to attempt wild stylistic innovations, as in this episode, which plays out the same evening in two alternate timelines—one where Frankie Muniz’s Malcolm goes bowling and one where he doesn’t—and along the way, highlights the sterling work of Jane Kaczmarek and Bryan Cranston as the title character’s parents.

South Park, “Scott Tenorman Must Die” (July 11, 2001)
Although South Park was a bigger cultural sensation in the ’90s, almost all its best episodes came in the first half of this decade. Case in point: this acidic black-comic riff on what happens when Cartman vows to get his revenge on Scott Tenorman, an older boy who conned him by telling Cartman he could reach puberty by buying some of Scott’s pubic hair. Though South Park was most acclaimed for its political commentary this decade, some of its funniest episodes were ones that avoided issue-based storylines and came up with horrifying riffs on traditional sitcom plots. The final joke in “Scott Tenorman Must Die” is one of the decade’s darkest and best.

King Of The Hill, “Bobby Goes Nuts” (November 11, 2001)
King Of The Hill, on the other hand, experienced something of a back-and-forth stylistic struggle in the ’00s, as the comic visions of co-creators Greg Daniels and Mike Judge battled for the heart of the show. This episode—probably best known as the one where Bobby yells, “That’s my purse!” and “I don’t know you!” a lot—is the one that best blends the show’s competing schools of comedy, with Daniels’ dark, satiric sense of telling stories about the small indignities of life (even though he’d left the show at this point) blending with Judge’s celebration of common-sense values trumping political correctness. Judge’s view would come to dominate the show—to its detriment—but this episode crafted a funny tale from behind-the-scenes conflict.

Everybody Loves Raymond, “Talk To Your Daughter” (March 18, 2002)
In the wake of 9/11, America turned to old, reliable sitcoms like Friends, King Of Queens, and this one, which had its best season in 2001-2002. Everybody Loves Raymond’s hoary old plot devices and classic construction meant that it was never an Internet favorite, but the series defined its characters and their relationships so well that it could build an episode around a conflict between any of them. Later in Raymond’s run, everyone would grow too spiteful toward each other, but in this one—in which the characters try to figure out why they don’t go to church more often—the show gets at questions of America’s queasy relationship with its religious past, without lecturing, and while remaining funny throughout.

24, “Day 1: 11:00 p.m.-12:00 a.m.” (May 21, 2002)
A few years ago, 24—one of the most influential dramas of the decade—would surely have made our Top 30 list. Now, in the wake of two lackluster seasons in a row, it’s an afterthought. But for its first five seasons, 24 was TV’s most reliable rush, tossing Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer into crisis after crisis with a riveting made-up-on-the-fly feel. To watch 24 was to cheer how the writers got Jack out of trouble as much as it was to cheer Jack. The first-season finale contained one of the biggest shakeups of any show this decade, as the creative staff proved they meant business by killing off Jack’s wife at the hands of the treacherous Nina. A few years later, killing off regulars on a TV show would become so popular it would become a cliché, but in this episode, it was still bracingly unexpected.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force, “Dumber Dolls” (Nov. 3, 2002)
Aqua Teen Hunger Force is a hard show to describe to anyone who doesn’t watch it. It essentially reinvents the classic comedy team via stoner humor and talking fast-food products, pairing the old comedy trope of a really smart guy and a really dumb guy with the new idea of tossing a confrontation-loving personality that can only be described as “cable-news host” into their midst. This 15-minute near-masterpiece guest-stars David Cross as a suicidal, depressed doll named Happytime Harry who joins Meatwad’s playthings and ends up bringing down the mood of everyone around him. Dark, despairing, and scabrously funny, “Dumber Dolls” helped make Aqua Teen into Adult Swim’s first signature show.

Gilmore Girls, “They Shoot Gilmores, Don’t They?” (Nov. 12, 2002)
In the first few development seasons after 9/11, networks green-lit a lot of shows that purported to be about good, decent American values and people who really cared for each other. Often, it seemed like they were all just trying to clone Gilmore Girls, a show that was nearly canceled in its first season, then became one of The WB’s signature hits in its second. The series’ vision of a New England small town as a kind of heaven—where everyone wanted to help a single mom raise her kid—was one of the most warm-hearted visions of American life on TV this decade, even in episodes like this one, where a town dance marathon leads to sadness and heartbreak for both of the titular girls.

Alias, “Phase One” (Jan. 26, 2003)
Yeah, Alias eventually became so labyrinthine that it made no sense even to its few remaining fans, and sure, this episode was a big reason the show eventually turned sour, but for its first two seasons, there was nothing as wildly entertaining as Alias on the air. It was an action-thriller that blended family drama, relationship angst, spy shenanigans, and some of the most fraught workplace politics in television history into a heady blend of plot twists galore. And it featured some of the best acting a genre show could muster, from the likes of Jennifer Garner and Victor Garber. This episode broke apart everything on the series before it could get too predictable, providing a huge thrill for the handful who stayed up to watch it after the Super Bowl.

The Simpsons, “Moe Baby Blues” (May 18, 2003)
The Simpsons spent most of the ’00s trying to prove that it still deserved to exist. No matter how hard showrunner Al Jean tried to bring the show back to its roots after Mike Scully turned it into a cartoonish fantasy early in the decade, there was always something missing. The series, which had done everything, mostly lost its ability to surprise. Every so often, though, it came up with an episode like this one, offering a funny new way to use the characters. Here, forlorn bartender Moe becomes obsessed with caring for baby Maggie, in ways both hilarious and rooted in the characters we’d grown to know. “Moe Baby Blues” added a new relationship to the show, and represented one of the few consistently funny episodes this decade.

Angel, “Smile Time” (Feb. 18, 2004)
Angel, often the black sheep of Joss Whedon’s TV universe, spent most of its run in danger of cancellation for one reason or another, which meant the constant wheel of retooling essentially made Angel into a new series every season. All five of those series were compelling to varying degrees, but what it became in its final season—a workplace drama about the employees at a demonic law firm—proved the most durable. This episode, wherein the hero investigates an evil children’s show and is transformed into a puppet, is both screamingly funny and surprisingly sophisticated in its examination of adult sadness.

Scrubs, “My Screw Up” (Feb. 24, 2004)
Few shows have caused as much debate among TV fans in the ’00s as Scrubs, a sitcom that was warmly funny to some and gratingly whimsical to others. One thing all seemed to agree on, though, was that John C. McGinley’s Dr. Perry Cox was one of the singular TV characters of the decade: an antisocial man who pushed away all who came close, but a brilliant doctor nonetheless. (Sound familiar?) Most debates about the series centered on its star and narrator, Zach Braff, but this episode puts him in the background and instead focuses on how Cox tries to deal with the death of a close friend. The Sixth Sense-inspired ending would feel cheap if McGinley didn’t make it so moving.

Desperate Housewives, “Pilot” (Oct. 3, 2004)
For its first five or six episodes, Desperate Housewives seemed like it would accomplish the impossible and be both a funny satire of primetime soaps and a satisfying soap in its own right. Almost immediately afterward, the series began to fall apart, unable to handle its huge mainstream success. But for those first few episodes, Marc Cherry’s vision of suburbia as a campy, slutty, Day-glo world felt like nothing else on TV, simultaneously arch and sincere. The expert pilot bought the show so much goodwill that a lot of viewers didn’t notice Desperate Housewives had gone downhill until well into its second season.

Everwood, “A Mountain Town” (Feb. 21, 2005)
The WB was a font of interesting TV from about 1995 to 2003, but it was slowly splintering by the middle of the decade, unable to find companion pieces for the few minor hits it still had. Caught in the midst of this chaos was Greg Berlanti’s Everwood, a sweet, unassuming show about the world’s most hyper-earnest small town. Everwood could be too saccharine, but at its best, the series was about people who longed to do the right thing while struggling to know exactly what that might mean. For example, “A Mountain Town,” in which Treat Williams’ Dr. Andy Brown struggles to figure out how to tell his son Ephram that Ephram’s girlfriend put their baby—whom the son never knew about—up for adoption.

Carnivale, “New Canaan, CA” (March 27, 2005)
Carnivale was a stylish-to-a-fault series with a deep, nearly impenetrable mythology about the forces of good and evil moving toward a final battle, and it attracted one of the most vocal cults of the decade, even though it only lasted two seasons and was one of the few HBO original series not to garner very good ratings. While Carnivale was never as good as its gorgeous production design, the show had its sublime moments, particularly in this series finale, which brought a handful of storylines to a close while launching a series of others, all in a deeply stylish manner that wed apocalyptic imagery to cryptic stories that hinted at America’s dark past.

House, “Three Stories” (May 17, 2005)
Procedurals were the order of the day through most of the decade on the broadcast networks, because they offered single-serving stories that closed off neatly at the end of each hour. But some of these procedurals introduced interesting characters, and few in the ’00s were more interesting than Hugh Laurie’s Dr. Gregory House. Laurie gave one of the decade’s best performances, and this episode—in which he recounts the case studies of three patients to a med-school class—may be his finest hour, for the way it coats the show’s standard medical mysteries in a veneer of personal anger and pain. “Three Stories” won a well-deserved writing Emmy, unusual for a category dominated by shows with more serialized storytelling.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, “Grave Danger” (May 19, 2005)
CSI was the most popular drama of the decade: a cool burst of crime-solving that wedded the science geekery and directorial styles of The X-Files to a classic detective show. For its first few seasons, it was even a little cool, and heavily hyped in the media, until the series’ style became the dull default at CBS and other networks. One of the decade’s biggest TV events occurred when Quentin Tarantino directed the show’s fifth-season finale, wherein a member of the CSI team was buried alive, and the rest raced to find him. The heavily hyped, highly rated event ended up having something CSI was a bit short on at that point in its run: actual tension.

Everybody Hates Chris, “Everybody Hates Sausage” (Oct. 13, 2005)
Everybody Hates Chris may be the decade’s most misunderstood sitcom. Since Chris Rock was one of the primary creative forces, many anticipated that the show would be just like a Chris Rock comedy routine. Instead, it was a warmly sentimental valentine to the idea of living in a stable, two-parent household. Episodes like this one provided plenty of laughs, spurred by dad Julius (the wonderful Terry Crews), who felt his family should eat discount sausage at every meal, but underneath the jokes, the primary appeal of the show was its portrayal of a family whose members truly cared for each other.

Grey’s Anatomy, “Into You Like A Train” (Oct. 30, 2005)
Grey’s Anatomy was the decade’s other smash-hit drama, and the show that finally took down the CSI franchise for a little while. Its soapy complications, ridiculous medical storylines, and odd character beats couldn’t have been more different from the procedurals that were saturating the other networks, which may have explained why the ABC doctor soap was all the rage for a year or so. Or maybe it was because of episodes like this one, in which medical calamities commented on the larger issues at work in the doctors’ lives. Often, Grey’s Anatomy made this connection incredibly clumsily, but in “Into You Like A Train”—where a train crash becomes a metaphor for how quickly the doctors’ lives are spinning out of control—the show turned melodramatic excess into great, goofy fun.

Rome, “The Spoils” (Nov. 13, 2005)
No less an authority than the head of HBO said that the network botched its handling of Rome by canceling the swords-and-sandals epic before its time. The series—one of the most expensive in the history of television—was never quite as good as HBO’s buzzier hits, but it used its opulence to tell the story of an empire both simultaneously at its height and in perpetual decay. Rome’s best storytelling device was relaying the story of the city through the eyes of two soldiers who grew with the empire; in this episode, where one of them is arrested and forced into gladiatorial combat, the series reached a visceral, moving payoff.