For the last quarter century, premium cable has slowly but surely chipped away at audience shares once dominated by the Big Four networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. While some of this is due to cable’s not needing to adhere to the censorship rules levied on TV (profanity, nudity, graphic violence), production values for most cable productions rival those of feature films.
If that weren’t enough, fans of specific shows can often watch entire seasons in a single viewing (aka “binging”) instead of the traditional one episode per week. There are hundreds of active premium shows available, and these are what I believe are the current five best.
