When one thinks of the defining TV performances of the past 25 or so years, what comes to mind? For Variety staffers, some of the answers included a teacher-turned-drug kingpin, spies working both for and against the U.S. government — and perhaps the defining comedy character of this long political moment, in part for how dark her will to power becomes.
Quantifying greatness is a tricky thing. Any ranking like this one — which sets out to list the 100 greatest performances of the century so far — is going to make some fans feel slighted. How, for instance, can we compare the work an actor does on a drama to that of the work on a comedy? Is it unfair to place shows long off the air, and thus either burnished or faded by memory, to shows that are still dropping new episodes? And who, in the end, should rank No. 1?
Suffice it to say that this list is meant in the spirit of fun, but it was undertaken with seriousness; Variety staffers debated first the performances we might want on the list and then their placement over the course of many months. We started with certain parameters. In order to define the pool of shows we were working with, we limited ourselves to scripted series that began on or after January 1, 2000. (The years we list on each entry are the years the performance were given, not the years the show ran.) Simon Cowell, for instance, may have given the performance of a lifetime over his seasons of “American Idol,” but scripted TV, it seemed apparent to us, is just a different beast. And Sarah Jessica Parker, James Gandolfini and Sarah Michelle Gellar may have delivered era-defining work well into the 2000s on “Sex and the City,” “The Sopranos” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” but — unfortunately! — there had to be a cut-off somewhere. Starting the clock in the year 2000 focused our attention on work that happened in the wake of the prestige-TV boom that those three shows helped to kick off.
Beyond that, we forced ourselves to include only one performance per show in order to boost the visibility of more series. We all know that the ensemble cast of “Succession” could bulk out most of the Top 10 on this list (at least!); what readers will simply have to imagine is how the argument over which aspirant to the Roy fortune played out over many, many emails and Zooms.
Part of the delight of a project like this is the opportunity to think expansively about what an actor’s greatness can look like. It’s by now, years after their respective hit shows left the air, hardly a surprise that Bryan Cranston and Regina King and Peter Dinklage are gifted actors (and this list wouldn’t be complete without them!). But what about Sydney Sweeney’s prestige-TV-redefining emotional explosions, Niecy Nash’s quietly serene ultracompetence, or Emma Stone’s inside-out depiction of influencer-era vanity? Is it too soon to enter Anna Sawai’s 2024 “Shōgun” performance into the pantheon? And isn’t Michael Emerson’s crucial supporting work on “Lost” as or more utterly integral to that show’s success as any of the leads?
The answer to all of these questions, happily, was “Why not?” Think of this, perhaps, as less of a ranking than a celebration of the great TV we’ve enjoyed from the Golden Age through Peak TV onward into whatever it is that’s going on now — and a declaration of hope that there’ll be more good stuff ahead.
From Variety US