The New York Times published its list of the best television series of the 21st century on Sept. 24, 2026, and "The Sopranos" appears nowhere on it.

The exclusion is deliberate. "The Sopranos" (1999–2007) premiered before this century began, and the Times drew its eligibility line there. As chief television critic James Poniewozik, who wrote the accompanying Critic's Notebook and began working as a full-time TV critic in 1999 — the year the HBO series debuted — put it: "A list honoring continuing series must make a choice that discrete works like movies and books don't require: Where do you draw the line?"

The Times' answer: "21st-century TV is TV you couldn't watch in the 20th century." That rule also excludes long-running institutions such as "The Simpsons," "S.N.L.," "Sesame Street" and "60 Minutes."

The technical answer, though, is only half the story. "The aesthetic one is that 'The Sopranos' is all over this list," Poniewozik writes.

The ranked list of 100 series came from polling hundreds of TV makers and TV lovers. Together, the shows cover a quarter century of creativity that, in Poniewozik's account, became possible partly because "The Sopranos" helped redefine what TV could look like. It was a period when "great and daring TV became not an exception but an expectation," reshaped by changes in how TV was made, who made it and how audiences watched it.

To measure the distance traveled, Poniewozik proposes a thought experiment: take a time machine to fall 1999 and turn on a television. No "Sopranos" — its first season had ended in April. The viewer's options included traditional multicamera, studio-audience sitcoms like "Friends" and "The King of Queens," and dramas that mixed a few departures from the norm — "The West Wing," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" — with genre workhorses like "The Practice" and "Law & Order."

"TV could, occasionally, be special. But mostly, it was fine. It was fun. It was what was on," Poniewozik writes.

Nearly everything aired on traditional broadcast networks, watched when it aired, unless the viewer owned "one of those fancy new TiVo machines." The experience, he argues, was "altogether not that different from watching TV in 1979 or 1959." Netflix, at the time, would mail you a DVD.

The list itself, Poniewozik notes, shows how much and how quickly television changed — a change that becomes even more apparent, he suggests, when the 100 ranked series are reordered chronologically.

The antihero lineage that "The Sopranos" helped inaugurate runs visibly through the ranked shows, from Bryan Cranston in "Breaking Bad" and Ian McShane in "Deadwood" to Michael K. Williams in "The Wire" and Jon Hamm in "Mad Men."

The Critic's Notebook frames the poll not as a farewell to the HBO landmark but as evidence of its afterlife: a century of television whose ambition the series helped set in motion, even as the eligibility rules keep it off the page.