There is no surer way to start a fight at a dinner party than to announce, with confidence, what the best television program ever made is. Politics, religion and the correct way to stack a dishwasher are mere skirmishes by comparison. Television is personal. It’s what you watched on a school night with a TV dinner on your knees, while your father adjusted the rabbit ears with the delicacy of a bomb-disposal expert.

So hats off to Rolling Stone, which polled a small army of critics, actors and TV writers, including Jon Hamm, Ben Stiller and Carrie Coon, and published its definitive 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. It’s a magnificent list, and an exhausting one. It is also, it has to be said, about as Australian as a Thanksgiving turkey.

Here it is in full. Then we’ll put things right.

Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time
Source: Rolling Stone. Read the full list, with Rolling Stone’s write-ups, at rollingstone.com.

The Sopranos
The Simpsons
Breaking Bad
The Wire
Fleabag
Seinfeld
Mad Men
Cheers
Atlanta
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
Succession
The Twilight Zone
Veep
The Americans
The Larry Sanders Show
Twin Peaks
The Leftovers
Saturday Night Live
I May Destroy You
30 Rock
All in the Family
Star Trek
Watchmen
Freaks and Geeks
M*A*S*H
Sesame Street
Deadwood
Friday Night Lights
Roots
Parks and Recreation
Game of Thrones
Better Call Saul
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
The Office (US)
Lost
I Love Lucy
Arrested Development
Hill Street Blues
Curb Your Enthusiasm
The Good Place
BoJack Horseman
Battlestar Galactica
Insecure
Late Night with David Letterman
Columbo
The West Wing
My So-Called Life
The Shield
Friends
Jeopardy!
The X-Files
Barry
The Office (UK)
ER
Halt and Catch Fire
Community
Russian Doll
Six Feet Under
Key & Peele
Taxi
The Underground Railroad
The Dick Van Dyke Show
South Park
The Golden Girls
Girls
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
NYPD Blue
Fawlty Towers
Chappelle’s Show
SCTV
Better Things
Good Times
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
The Honeymooners
Frasier
Justified
The Jeffersons
Sex and the City
Mr. Show with Bob and David
Band of Brothers
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Party Down
I’m Alan Partridge
Fargo
Orange Is the New Black
The Bob Newhart Show
The Kids in the Hall
The Crown
The Carol Burnett Show
The Wonder Years
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
The Muppet Show
The Rockford Files
NewsRadio
Squid Game
Rick and Morty
The Odd Couple
The Good Fight
Oz
What We Do in the Shadows

Where’s the Aussie content?

Look, you can’t fault the taste. The Sopranos at number one is like naming the Sistine Chapel as a decent ceiling. Fawlty Towers sits at 68, which is roughly 67 places too low, but we’ll let that pass.

But scroll all the way down, past a Korean death game, a cartoon horse with a drinking problem and something called Mr. Show with Bob and David, and you’ll find not a single Australian program. Not one. No Graham Kennedy. No Kath. No Kim. No Bea Smith glaring across the laundry at Wentworth. It’s as though Australian television simply didn’t happen, when in fact it happened every night of the week from 1956 and frequently involved a man in a pink suit.

So we have taken matters into our own hands. We’ve cross-checked the big Australian countdowns, including Nine’s 50 Years 50 Shows from 2005 and The New Daily’s critics’ list, added a pinch of common sense and a good deal of nostalgia, and come up with the list below. It isn’t controversial. It isn’t meant to be. These are the shows a whole nation watched, then talked about at work the next morning.

The 20 best shows in Australian TV history

1. In Melbourne Tonight (1957–1970)

Before Graham Kennedy, Australian television was a nervous guest at its own party, wondering where to put its hands. Then the King of Melbourne arrived and simply took over the room. Live, loose, cheeky and frequently on the edge of being taken off air, IMT taught a young nation that television could be funny on purpose. It topped Nine’s 50 Years 50 Shows countdown, and no one has seriously argued since.

2. Kath & Kim (2002–2007)

There are shows that capture a country, and there are shows that capture a cul-de-sac in Fountain Lakes so precisely that you want to send them a sympathy card. Jane Turner and Gina Riley’s mother-daughter double act was so perfectly observed that half of Australia laughed and the other half asked where the cameras had been hidden in their lounge room. Noice. Different. Unusual.

3. Number 96 (1972–1977)

Advertised as “the night Australian television lost its virginity”, and frankly the virginity never stood a chance. A block of flats in Paddington housed nudity, scandal, the infamous “knicker snipper”, a bomb, and one of the first sympathetically drawn gay characters on world television. Your parents told you it was rubbish. Your parents watched every episode.

4. Mother and Son (1984–1994)

Ruth Cracknell’s Maggie Beare was the most quietly terrifying woman on Australian screens. She was forgetful when it suited her and razor-sharp when it didn’t, and she ran rings around Garry McDonald’s long-suffering Arthur. It was a sitcom about ageing and dementia that managed to be painfully funny and genuinely tender, which is a trick most dramas never pull off.

5. Countdown (1974–1987)

Every Sunday at six, a nation of teenagers sat in front of the box to find out what Molly Meldrum thought of the charts. Mostly he thought everything was terrific, and said so at length, and slightly incoherently, from under a cowboy hat. ABBA, Madonna and practically every Aussie rock band you can name owed it a debt. “Do yourself a favour” remains the finest music review ever written.

6. The Norman Gunston Show (1975–1979)

Garry McDonald again, this time with tissue stuck to shaving cuts and hair combed over like a failed experiment. Norman, the “Little Aussie Bleeder”, ambushed visiting celebrities with questions so gormless they became works of genius. He even turned up on the steps of Parliament House on the day of the Dismissal in 1975. Sacha Baron Cohen has built a career on it. Norman got there first.

7. Prisoner (1979–1986)

Wobbly sets, and walls that famously shook if you shut a door too hard. And yet Prisoner was the most gripping show on television. Queen Bea, Lizzie, Doreen and the monstrous Joan “The Freak” Ferguson ruled Wentworth Detention Centre, and the show went on to cult status in Britain and America. It was never meant to run for years. It ran for 692 episodes.

8. The Sullivans (1976–1983)

A Melbourne family weathers the Second World War, and Australia weeps along for seven years. Lorraine Bayly’s Grace and Paul Cronin’s Dave were everyone’s parents, or the parents everyone wished they’d had. It was gentle, warm and handsomely made, and it gave early screen time to a few youngsters you may have heard of since, including a tiny Kylie Minogue.

9. Homicide (1964–1977)

The show that proved Australians could make their own drama rather than just importing everyone else’s. Crawford Productions’ police procedural ran for more than 500 episodes, put Melbourne on screen and launched the careers of what felt like every Australian actor of the era. Hats, trench coats and car chases through the suburbs. Glorious.

10. A Country Practice (1981–1993)

Wandin Valley gave us country doctors, wombats and the most enduring heartbreak in Australian TV history. When Molly died in 1985, the nation went into mourning. People still talk about it with a catch in their throat. It’s the reason a generation of Australians assumes every country town has a vet with impeccable hair.

11. Hey Hey It’s Saturday (1971–1999)

Daryl Somers, a pink ostrich called Ossie, Red Faces, a gong, and an air of benign chaos that would never get past a modern compliance department. Saturday nights in Australia were Hey Hey, and for nearly three decades nothing else came close. Some of it has aged about as well as a prawn left in the sun. Most of it was enormous fun.

12. The Paul Hogan Show (1973–1984)

Before Crocodile Dundee, before Hollywood, Hoges was a Sydney Harbour Bridge rigger who stumbled onto a talent show and never went back up the ladder. With John Cornell as the dim-witted Strop, he made sketch comedy out of the Aussie larrikin, and made the larrikin a national treasure.

13. Bluey (2018– )

The only programme on this list your grandchildren will fight you for the remote over. It’s made in Brisbane and loved everywhere from London to Los Angeles. The adventures of a Blue Heeler pup and her family are so funny, wise and sneakily moving that adults now watch it with no children present and pretend they’re “keeping an eye on it”. Let’s be honest: you cried at “Sleepytime”.

14. Frontline (1994–1997)

The Working Dog team skewered commercial current affairs so accurately that some people thought it was a documentary. Rob Sitch’s vain, hopeless anchor Mike Moore remains the gold standard for gormless television presenters. Watching it now is unnerving. Most of it has since come true.

15. SeaChange (1998–2000)

Sigrid Thornton’s high-flying lawyer loses everything and washes up as a magistrate in sleepy Pearl Bay. Sunday nights were never the same. It made a star of David Wenham’s Diver Dan and launched a thousand tree-changes, plus quite a few regretted real estate purchases on the coast.

16. The Box (1974–1977)

Set in a scandal-riddled Melbourne television station, The Box was Crawford’s saucy, cheerfully ridiculous answer to Number 96. It was the other show your mother told you not to watch, and it was soapy, sexy and gloriously bitchy. It was a soap about the business of making television, decades before anyone thought that was clever.

17. Neighbours (1985–2025)

Ramsay Street sent us Kylie, Jason and Scott and Charlene’s wedding, which half the country stopped work to watch. It became so bafflingly huge in Britain that students organised lectures around it. It was cancelled, rescued, and finally wrapped up after nearly 40 years. Good neighbours, as we were told roughly 9,000 times, become good friends.

18. Skippy the Bush Kangaroo (1968–1970)

A kangaroo who could untie ropes, fly a plane in a pinch and say an awful lot with a “tch-tch-tch”. Skippy sold an idealised version of Australia to the world and remains one of the country’s most successful TV exports. What’s that, Skip? The ratings are through the roof? Good girl.

19. Brides of Christ (1991)

Possibly the finest miniseries ever made in this country. It’s a beautifully observed story of a Sydney convent in the 1960s, as the Church and the world around it change forever. It was moving, intelligent and exquisitely acted, and it made Sunday nights feel like a cathedral.

20. Fast Forward (1989–1992)

Steve Vizard, Magda Szubanski, Jane Turner, Gina Riley, Glenn Robbins and friends sending up everything on the box at a breathless clip. It was frantic, clever and silly, and without it there’d be no Sharon Strzelecki, no Kath and no Kim. Which makes it, in a roundabout way, partly responsible for number two. Respect.

Honourable mentions

Gentle readers will already be reaching for their pens, so here are the ones that nearly made it: Blue Heelers, Play School, Rake, The Mavis Bramston Show, Round the Twist, Home and Away, Mr Squiggle, The D-Generation, Utopia, Wentworth, Underbelly, Packed to the Rafters, Bandstand, The Don Lane Show, The Mike Walsh Show and the 2000 Sydney Olympics opening ceremony, which technically isn’t a show but did make an entire nation cry into its Jatz.

What did we get wrong? Which Aussie show would make your top 20, and which would you cheerfully throw out of the box? Tell us in the comments.