When the original Roots miniseries aired nearly four decades ago, it was unlike anything else on TV: an award-winning historical phenomenon (based on Alex Haley’s bestseller) that broke ratings records with an all-star cast. The story of Kunta Kinte and his descendants was the first honest, horrific TV depiction of slavery, making clear America’s foundation in white supremacy. [Ashley Ray-Harris]

Sharp Objects sets its tone as a nightmarish Southern gothic in its first few minutes, spiraling down into a visceral story about gender, violence, control, abuse, and addiction. It’s one of the most striking depictions of self-harm in TV history, and Amy Adams and Patricia Clarkson give performances that sink in one’s skin. Family drama and murder mystery collide spectacularly in this incisively written, beautifully shot knockout. [Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya]

It’s the destiny of every David Simon show to toil in relative obscurity while on the air, only to find an audience and acclaim in the afterlife. Let’s hope that’s also the case for Show Me A Hero, which, despite being rooted in a different politician’s career, doubles as commentary on the Obama administration. The irresistible force that is a Yonkers mayor’s optimism meets with an immovable object—bureaucracy—grinding his progress to a halt in a beautifully rendered limited series marked by hope, despair, and exceptional performances across the board. [Danette Chavez]

Ahead of the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries, HBO reached out to Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau to create a fictional candidate to run alongside the real ones. Trudeau would only sign on to the project if HBO could get [Robert] Altman, his “boyhood hero,” to direct. Altman agreed and together they invented Jack Tanner, a Baby Boomer liberal with a telegenic, Kennedy-esque physique who could conceivably compete against Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson. [Michael] Murphy’s genial disposition and warm personality were instrumental to his viability as a fictional candidate, but they also helped endear him to real politicians, media personalities, and operatives with whom he hobnobbed during the primaries. Everyone quickly caught on to Altman and Trudeau’s game, and many subsequently played along by providing cameos throughout the series. In the beginning, however, Murphy and a young Cynthia Nixon, who played Tanner’s impassioned daughter, fooled people like Pat Robertson and Gary Hart into believing that he was “for real” (the cheeky slogan for Tanner’s campaign). A nice smile and a firm handshake go a long way in politics. [Vikram Murthi]

Watchmen always deserved to be a miniseries. No one expected it to be this miniseries, a continuation untethered from theatrical run times, cinematic tidiness, or fidelity to the source material, arriving at something searing, surreal, and truly in the spirit of Alan Moore’s costumed-vigilantes-as-fascists philosophy—whether Moore likes it or not. Showrunner Damon Lindelof works from the blueprint (emphasis on “blue”) he set for one of the decade’s best shows: Like The Leftovers, Watchmen is a gutting, occasionally gut-busting contemporary parable set in the wake of a global catastrophe. But the psychic wounds inflicted by a Freudian space squid have nothing on the earthbound racism Watchmen exposes by unmasking American history, in sequences like Nicole Kassell’s harrowing re-staging of the Black Wall Street Massacre and scripts like Cord Jefferson’s splashy mindfuck, “This Extraordinary Being.” It’s a superhero show about so much more for a superhero-obsessed, so-much-more era, every episode an “Avengers assemble” roll call of onscreen excellence. [Erik Adams]

From our list of the best made-for-TV movies and miniseries of the ’00s:

Spike Lee’s exhaustive, essential documentary lines up what must be a hundred interview subjects to talk about the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, the flood that ensued, and—the most underreported part of the whole tragedy—the nightmare of trying to rebuild the city. The flood footage is as startling as ever, right down to the bloated bodies floating in submerged streets. But even more disturbing is the exhausted unanimity of the people Lee talks with. Whether they’re black or white, rich or poor, they’re all victims of a presumption that became more widely vocalized in the months after Katrina: that they were somehow asking for it. When The Levees Broke focuses on the frustrations of people who were stranded in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, facing gun-toting government agents telling them where they could and couldn’t go. Just for recording their descriptions of being herded into pens and scattered across the country, When The Levees Broke is as significant a piece of documentary reporting as The Sorrow And The Pity.

It was the marketing campaign that launched a thousand memes, an HBO offering earning the unbridled scorn of the internet on the basis of a ridiculous title, an absurd premise, and a seemingly stern tone. The Young Pope itself proved to be even more ridiculous in execution—completely to the show’s benefit. Much as the titular pontiff, Lenny Belardo (Jude Law), flew in the face of Catholic convention, The Young Pope was everything you wouldn’t expect from a prestige drama, a surreal and self-aware affair that replaced pretensions of subtlety with a rich sense of humor bordering on camp. At any point, its strangeness could have fallen apart, but writer-director Paolo Sorrentino held the unlikely enterprise together with a true craftsman’s hand, his gorgeously considered shots giving equal weight to the sacred history of the Vatican and the kangaroo randomly hopping through its gardens. And it was all driven forward by a marvelous performance from Law, who managed to wring every possible interpretation out of Lenny’s actions. Was he a true believer obfuscating to keep his enemies off track? An agnostic who doubted the Holy Spirit he ostensibly represented? The greatest hypocrite to take St. Peter’s throne since Rodrigo Borgia? The Young Pope kept viewers constantly guessing, and managed to make the guessing infinitely more amusing than any snide tweet. [Les Chappell]