Honestly? It has a very serious claim to the title—but I wouldn't call it the greatest TV show of all time.

I think Star Trek: The Next Generation has an unusually strong argument because it does something that very few "greatest shows" do: it is simultaneously extremely ambitious, extremely rewatchable, and unusually humane.

The case for TNG

4

1. Its ceiling is extraordinarily high.

At its best, TNG produced episodes that are legitimate works of science fiction:

"The Measure of a Man" — personhood, artificial intelligence, slavery, legal rights

"Darmok" — language, communication, and the limits of shared conceptual frameworks

"The Inner Light" — mortality, memory, love, and an entire human life experienced in minutes

"The Offspring" — parenthood and the rights of artificial beings

"Who Watches the Watchers" — religion and the Prime Directive

"The Drumhead" — political paranoia and authoritarianism

"Chain of Command" — torture and psychological domination

"The Best of Both Worlds" — probably one of television's greatest cliffhangers

And there's something distinctive about the kind of intelligence these episodes exhibit. TNG frequently takes a philosophical problem and says:

Okay, let's actually live inside this problem for an hour.

It doesn't merely use philosophy as decoration.

2. Picard's Enterprise is probably the greatest "ideal society" ever depicted on television.

This is an underrated part of the show's greatness.

The crew isn't just entertaining. They're inhabitants of a radically different civilization. There is no money, little material scarcity, relatively little status competition, and an enormous emphasis on education, self-development, rationality, cooperation, and intellectual curiosity.

And then the show asks: What would people actually be like if they lived that way?

Picard, Data, Riker, Geordi, Crusher, Troi, Worf, and others are essentially experiments in different forms of humanity.

3. It is extraordinarily optimistic without being stupid.

This might be its greatest achievement.

TNG's basic premise is that human beings can get better.

That's a fairly unfashionable proposition in a lot of prestige television. Modern great dramas often derive their power from showing people corrupted by institutions, incentives, trauma, ambition, sex, money, etc.

TNG instead says:

Yes, humans have those things. But civilization can actually teach people to transcend some of them.

And importantly, the show doesn't make this argument by pretending evil doesn't exist. It repeatedly puts its characters in situations where they have to decide whether their principles actually mean anything.

But there are huge problems

The biggest is inconsistency.

TNG has some mediocre episodes. It has some really mediocre episodes. Seasons 1–2 in particular are extremely uneven, and even later seasons occasionally produce something astonishingly silly.

The pacing can also feel glacial compared with modern television.

And the show isn't particularly good at serialized storytelling. If you're comparing it against something like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, or Better Call Saul, TNG's character arcs and season-long narratives aren't remotely as sophisticated.

There's also a strange paradox:

TNG may have a higher philosophical ceiling than almost any television drama, while having a lower average dramatic ceiling than the very best prestige dramas.

So what would I actually rank as "greatest"?

It depends enormously on what greatest means.

Criterion My pick

Best overall drama The Sopranos

Best serialized narrative Breaking Bad

Best world-building TNG / The Wire

Best philosophical TV TNG

Best characterization The Sopranos

Best dialogue Mad Men

Best individual episodes TNG has an extraordinary claim

Most intellectually optimistic TNG by a mile

Most rewatchable TNG is near the top

Greatest sci-fi series TNG has a very strong claim

But there's another way I'd frame it.

If you forced me to preserve only ten television shows from the entire history of the medium, TNG would probably make my list.

And if you told me:

"You can only watch one television series for the rest of your life, and you want something that will remain interesting when you're 60, 70, 80..."

I'd be very tempted to choose TNG.

Because The Sopranos is arguably a better television drama.

But TNG is arguably a better companion.

It has Picard sitting in his ready room reading Shakespeare. Data trying to understand humanity. Riker playing jazz. Geordi building things. Worf wrestling with honor. Troi trying to understand people. The crew sitting around Ten Forward talking about life.

There's an almost inexhaustible amount of "let's think about what it means to be human" in that show.

And that's why, even if I wouldn't objectively crown it #1, I think the proposition "TNG is the greatest TV show ever made" is substantially more defensible than it initially sounds.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5893281&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310690#50069515)