What's your prestige-TV taste?
Beyond 'I like The Sopranos'. The picks you haven't found yet.
Start the quiz →What this quiz explores
Everyone who liked one landmark drama gets recommended the same eight others, most of which they've already tried. The useful question is what you were responding to: the interiority, the institutions, the formal ambition, or the drive. This quiz locates you on that, then names things you probably haven't got to.
How it works
The quiz has 3 possible results. Each answer option was written to lean toward one of them.
Your result is the one your answers pointed to most often. Skipped questions, and the occasional answer that does not lean toward any result, are not counted.
Alongside the result you see your answer profile: the share of your answers that pointed to each result. Close percentages mean you sit between two results, which is common.
Three prestige-TV appetites
Character Study
You're there for one face doing something complicated, and plot is the least interesting thing on offer.
An episode where nothing happens is often your favourite. You drop shows when you stop believing the people, you'll give something three episodes on the strength of a performance, and what you'd say recommending something is wait until you see what she does. Ambiguous endings are right when the character earned them. Where to go next: Rectify, which almost nobody watched and is the purest version of what you want. The Leftovers, particularly its second and third seasons. Olive Kitteridge. Enlightened, a short and remarkable thing. Somebody Somewhere. In non-English-language work, Scenes from a Marriage in the original Bergman version, and the Norwegian series State of Happiness. One thing worth widening: your taste is well served by British and Scandinavian television, which produces smaller, performance-led drama at a rate American prestige doesn't, and the four-to-six episode format suits what you want better than a ten-hour season does.
The Systems Drama
You want a city, an institution, or a profession rendered accurately, and you'll forgive a lot if the show knows its subject.
Getting the world wrong is what makes you switch off. You read about the real thing afterward, you find documentaries often better than drama, and the compliment you'd pay is that it's exactly how it works. Institutions not resolving doesn't frustrate you, because they don't. Where to go next: Show Me a Hero, from the same writer as the obvious one and considerably less watched. Treme. The Corner. Occupied, a Norwegian political series. Borgen. The Hour. For procedure done properly, the French series Spiral, and the Israeli series Fauda if you want something more contested. Chernobyl if you somehow haven't. Where you're underserved: institutional drama outside crime and politics barely exists, so the best writing about medicine, education, and industry is often in documentary and long-form journalism rather than television. Worth following the writers rather than the genre.
The Formalist
You're watching for how it's made, and a handsome, well-acted show that looks like everything else bores you completely.
One episode, undistracted, phone nowhere near you. You'll watch a scene again immediately, you read criticism and shot analysis, and you'd recommend something by telling people to just look at it. What you avoid is handsome and empty. You're the most adventurous of the four and the hardest to satisfy. Where to go next: The Singing Detective. I May Destroy You. The Young Pope, which is stranger than its reputation. Kingdom, Lars von Trier's hospital series. Top of the Lake's first season. Atlanta's later seasons, particularly the standalone episodes. Devs. In non-English work, the Japanese series Tokyo Vice's Michael Mann-directed opening, and anything by Hirokazu Kore-eda for television. A note on where to look: formally ambitious television clusters around limited series and single-author projects rather than long-running shows, since the form gets sanded off across seasons. Follow directors and writers rather than networks.
What this quiz can’t tell you
- It matches you on the preferences you report, so the result is only as good as the options offered. Your real favourite may not be among them.
- Taste shifts with mood and season. Treat the result as a suggestion to try, not a verdict.
How this quiz was designed
Built around what viewers say they were drawn to rather than genre.
Read more about how our quizzes are created, including how scoring works and what we do and do not claim.