Do you agree?
We’ve had a look through IMDb’s best rated episodes of TV. We’d be lying if we said we weren’t a little surprised by some of the entries, while others are undeniably dead certs. Check out the list below and see if it matches up with your own. Warning: spoilers abound.
10) It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia – Charlie Work
It’s not often that comedies are praised first and foremost for their cinematography, but the fourth episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s tenth season involves a second act reminiscent of Birdman or that scene from True Detective.
Charlie Day delivers a frantic and frenetic performance, furiously ordering his co-workers around their filthy bar as he tries to navigate his way through a health inspection edited to look like one ten-minute long take. The result is an expertly executed comedic showing from Day and an artful episode of TV well worth its 9.8 rating on IMDb.
9) Doctor Who – Blink
Blink is best known by Whovians as the episode that introduced the Weeping Angels, sharp-toothed stone statues that kill by locking eyes with their victims and waiting for them to simply blink. Their creator, Steven Moffat, attributes the popularity of his monsters to the belief that any statue could be a Weeping Angel waiting for us to blink.
This episode is further remarkable as it barely features David Tennant’s Doctor, and instead focuses on once-off character Sally Sparrow, played brilliantly by Carey Mulligan.
The episode was flooded by critical acclaim as well as Hugo Awards, Constellation Awards and BAFTAs.
8) Oz – Revenge Is Sweet
We won’t get too wordy about this episode of the prison drama Oz, because there’s a nice little monologue in there by Augustus Hill that serves as the case for Revenge Is Sweet’s inclusion on this list:
“When you take revenge on somebody, you are actually paying them the highest compliment possible. It’s like saying, “You’ve affected my life to such an extent that I must reciprocate. I must affect your life as deeply as you have mine”. Revenge may be the ultimate Hallmark card. Yeah. When you think of it like that, the cliché is true. Revenge is sweet.”
Goddamn, that’s good writing.
7) Community – Modern Warfare
Dan Harmon, creator of Community, loved to take classic themes and motifs from all kinds of genres and super-impose them on his comedy show, creating something you could call Hollywood-realism. Modern Warfare, the twenty-third episode of the Community’s first season, is the show’s first attempt at doing something most shows could never risk.
Community’s commitment to surreality was copper-fastened here in an episode where students of Greendale Community College lay waste to their campus in a schoolwide game of paintball.
Justin Lin, who directed this episode, has gone from paintball to police drama after being drafted in to direct episodes of True Detective’s second season.
6) Person of Interest – YHWH
The first of two entries on this list from the fourth season of Person of Interest. YHWH finished off the most recent season of the show on a bleak note, but did so with artful intensity. Its inclusion, however, is questionable. The episode features one or two extremely underwhelming death scenes (something that another of JJ Abrams’ big shows Lost was also guilty of).
The season does end on a tense, tasty, guns-blazing cliffhanger with our heroes about to engage the bad guys in a gunfight so it’s certainly going to rope you in for season five… But the sixth best episode of any TV show ever? I think fans of the X-Files, Lost, The West Wing, The Wire and a whole host of other shows should take issue with this one.
5) Six Feet Under – Everyone’s Waiting
The series finale of Six Feet Under inverted the classic format of the show. The drama revolved around the daily operations of a funeral parlour, with a sharp and unrelenting focus on death. Unlike every other episode of the show, Everyone’s Waiting begins not with a death, but with the birth of Brenda’s daughter by the late Nate Fisher.
The show concludes with a montage of the lives that each main character went on to lead after the events, and frankly we would argue that The Wire did this a damn sight better. Speaking of which, there’s not a single episode of The Wire in IMDb’s top 50 TV show episodes…
4) Breaking Bad – Felina
Perhaps the most anticipated series finale (that’s an anagram of Felina by the way, on the 0.0001% you didn’t see what they did there) of our times.
A series finale can often feel as though somebody has swiped the last bite of your favourite meal from under your nose. Felina took us on a journey through the final phase of Walter White’s salvage operation.
At breakneck speed, Heisenberg ploughed through the last steps of his Machiavellian machinations – making sure that his fortune be bestowed upon his son Walt Jnr., avenging the death of his brother-in-law Hank, wiping out the neo-Nazi gang who had double-crossed him and freeing Jesse Pinkman from their clutches.
It was a bittersweet barnstormer of a finale that threw subtlety to the wind in order to reward its viewers.
3) Game of Thrones – Hardhome
Hardhome, episode eight of Game of Thrones’ fifth season, was the moment that the dark cloud on the horizon finally settled overhead and started to pour like an upturned bucket. Jon Snow travelled to Hardhome in the hopes of enlisting free folk to the Night’s Watch, but almost immediately after arrival, the village was set upon by an endless horde of White Walkers.
The White Walkers were alluded to in the show’s prologue four long years ago, but this is the first time we really got familiar with our undead friends. Doubly remarkable is that the White Walkers haven’t even had much ink-time in George R.R Martin’s books, meaning that Hardhome really is the bona fide introduction of the biggest threat to Westeros. Even writing about it has us dying for season six.
Game of Thrones fans might be surprised that the Red Wedding episode didn’t make it onto this list, but there is a clear bias in favour of recently released episodes when it comes to IMDb.
2) Person of Interest – If-Then-Else
This episode of Person of Interest is a slightly more worthy of its place on the list, but still a silver medallist that’s going to raise more than a few eyebrows. If-Then-Else commits itself to a subversive sort of story-telling, wherein three hypothetical eventualities are all played out on-screen.
If-Then-Else explores The Machine as a character. We are afforded an insight into the decision-making processes of artificial intelligence, slowed down so that we can process it too. It is a novel idea, and perhaps the best execution of the multiple scenario plot device that the silver screen has ever seen.
1) Breaking Bad – Ozymandias
Two episodes away from the end of a TV series, viewers might expect the plot to be edging towards its resolution. Instead, Ozymandias delivered a catastrophically chaotic sequence of events that confirmed Walter White’s status as a tragic hero.
The most gut-wrenching scene of perhaps the entire series happens about ten minutes into the episode, where Walt pleads with Jack for Hank’s life. The scene is drawn out long enough that it gives the aching sense that deus ex machina is about to arrive – but it never does.
Hank speaks the audience’s worst fears, tells Walt that his captor made up his mind to kill him ‘ten minutes ago’, and with a single gunshot the show reaches peak despair.
