Before this decade, the idea of a network dropping an entire season on one day was not a serious one. Episodes aired week to week, occasionally back to back, and so it went — until streaming services made clear that they were willing to tread a different path.
While exciting at first, this shift eventually started to flatten seasons out in a way that kept episodes from shining in and of themselves. Assuming that a viewer would rather marathon a show than consume it sporadically, many shows leaned into interminably stretched narratives and a frustrating lack of urgency.
That's why highlighting particularly great individual chapters of shows feels even more relevant for a retrospective of this decade in particular. The following 25 episodes represent some of the very best chapters of television the medium had to offer this decade and beyond.
