Leo Noboru Lima

Pull up the resume of your favorite actor, and it will most likely include a litany of small television parts leading to a big breakthrough on either the big or the small screen. On some rare occasions, however, an actor will nab a major part on a TV series without that portfolio of prior credits. And, on even rarer occasions, that debut performance will be excellent enough to stand alongside any seasoned pro.

"The Twilight Zone" was nothing if not a series with admirable foresight. The Rod Serling-created CBS anthology classic aired between 1959 and 1964 in its original run (not counting the fact it was remade more than once ), yet it managed to touch on social, political, cultural, and existential topics that remain relevant six decades later — if they haven't become even more so.

It might not necessarily have been expected for Katie Dippold, who cut her teeth writing for "Mad TV" and "Parks and Recreation," to become the mastermind behind TV's newest horror sensation, but such is the unlikely creative circumstance that brought "Widow's Bay" into being. An Apple TV horror comedy series with Guillermo Del Toro's approval

Starz's "Outlander" recently aired its series finale after eight seasons, wrapping up one of the most rousing and overpowering television journeys of the 21st century so far. The Ronald D. Moore-developed series, which began with the accidental transportation of World War II nurse Claire Randall (Caitriona Balfe) from 1945 into 1743 by a magical stone circle in rural Scotland, gradually grew to become the epic, time-bending tale of the transcendental connection between Claire and rebel Highlander Jamie Fraser (Sam Heughan), whose love endures through multiple eras and wars.

Few current TV shows are as consistently entertaining and addictive as "Your Friends & Neighbors." Created by Jonathan Tropper and already renewed for Season 3 on Apple TV, this dark-comedy-slash-campy-drama series alternates between belly laughs and genuine tension as it follows Andrew "Coop" Cooper (Jon Hamm), a wealthy hedge fund manager whose life unravels after a power move from his boss (Corbin Bernsen) pushes him out of the industry. Forced into a rental home and facing few prospects of employment at his former income level, Coop leverages his relationships with his wealthy Westmont Village neighbors into a new career as a burglar.

There's something about animation that brings out the best in sitcoms. Be it the visual flexibility, relatable storytelling, or potential for absurdism with little need for justification, cartoons have historically been a great source for comedy in the episodic, situational format. In fact, several of the wildest, most interesting, and just out-and-out funniest sitcoms of all time are animated.

For a portion of the universe that has never been occupied by more than a small handful of humans at a time, outer space sure is conducive to great longform stories. Some of the finest television shows of all time have imagined what narratives may unfold in the mysterious reaches of the universe beyond the Earth, whether aboard massive faster-than-light spaceships or down on the ground in strange new worlds.

HBO has been one of the most dependable production hubs for quality miniseries going back to the '80s, so it stands to reason that HBO Max would have maybe the strongest catalog of single-season TV shows of any streaming service. Of the hundreds of limited series available on HBO Max, many are worth watching, and dozens could reasonably be called great. The self-contained, open-and-shut format pairs especially well with HBO's knack for high-production, star-studded, cinematic storytelling — and that's not even getting into the available shows that were produced in-house by Max.

If ever a show became notorious for its plethora of main cast deaths, it was HBO's "Game of Thrones." The massively popular, medium-redefining, and ultimately controversial blockbuster adaptation of George R. R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" novel series endeavored to tackle the epic high fantasy genre with the gritty rigor and unsparing realism of a real-life war story, and one of the ways it brought off that mission was by presenting a world in which no character — no matter how central, heroic, or seemingly indispensable — was truly safe.

"Everybody Loves Raymond" is a great show about a really, really bad family — or at least one that has a very hard time enjoying each other's company. For the most part, the turn-of-the-century biographical sitcom that revitalized the CBS lineup is excellent at mining the Barones'cantankerousness for first-rate comedy and even some honest-to-goodness pathos. But any show with 200-plus episodes will have rough patches, and, sure enough, there are times on "Raymond" when the sourness overwhelms the fun.