The 15 best British TV shows of the last decade

Michael Coel's inventive and fearless limited series "I May Destroy You" follows Arabella, (played by Coel who also writes and co-directs), a young writer who is in the process of completing her first book when she is sexually assaulted by a stranger during a night out. The show follows her as she tries to rebuild her life and find the perpetrator.

Written and created by Russell T. Davies ("Queer As Folk"), "A Very English Scandal" is a thought-provoking yet hilarious mini-series that follows the story of British politician Jeremy Thorpe (Hugh Grant).

Thorpe finds himself at the center of a scandal when his secret partner, Norman Scott (Ben Whishaw), threatens to go public about their affair in the early 60s when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.

For nearly a decade, Thorpe uses all his political power and influence, including a supposed murder plot, to keep Thorpe quiet.

"The End of the F**ing World" is a baffling dark comedy about two off-beat teenagers.

James (Jessica Barden) is a quiet loner, who is convinced that he is a bloodthirsty psychopath, whil Alyssa (Alex Lawther) is his witty and more commanding companion, who has grown tired of her home life and stepfather.

One day, out of the blue, she convinces James to join her on a cross-country road trip to find her birth father, and along the way, they encounter dangerous and hilarious obstacles.

Netflix's "Sex Education" is an odd-ball mash-up of American style and British accents.

The show centers on Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield), a precocious high schooler who starts an undercover business providing sex advice to his clueless but hormonal classmates.

"Sex Education" has won praise from critics and audiences alike for its contemporary and emotionally intelligent depiction of sex, young relationships, and its inclusive cast.

Gillian Anderson also stars as the show's resident sex-expert.

"Normal People" is, for the most part, set in Ireland, which is not part of the United Kingdom. And the show is based on a novel of the same name by Irish author Sally Rooney, but it was co-produced by the BBC, so it has made this list.

The show is a brilliantly conceived drama about two Irish teens: Connell (Paul Mescal) and Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) who together navigate high school in their small, rural town.

We follow them and the awkward transition to college in the big city, which sees the power dynamics in their relationship reversed.

The UK is known for producing some of the most innovative game show television anywhere in the world, and "The Great British Bake Off" is perhaps the biggest British hit of the last decade.

The show is a high-stakes competition between a group of amateur bakers who gather each week to complete a series of baking tasks — all under a strict theme. Later, they present their goods to a panel of expert judges who pick their favorite cakes, biscuits, and pastries.

Each week the worst baker is sent home until the final where Britain's best amateur baker is crowned.

The British cult crime drama "Top Boy" was brought back to life in 2019 with the help of Canadian rapper Drake.

The show, which follows the lives of two major drug dealers in London's infamous East End, had been surprisingly canceled in 2014 by its home producers Channel 4 after two acclaimed seasons.

But Drake was such a fan that he brokered a deal between Netflix and the show's creators, Ronan Bennett and Ashley Walters, to create a third season. It premiered on the streamer to huge acclaim for its expansive look at London's criminal underworld and the structures that uphold it.

Peter Morgan's sweeping Netflix series "The Crown" is the first interesting dramatization of Queen Elizabeth II's tumultuous but steadfast reign.

The show's narrative is expansive and covers almost every major event of the second half of the 20th century and uncovers — sometimes with an extensive artistic license — the British crown's position within them.

In the first two seasons, which cover events from around the mid-1950s to the late '60s, Claire Foy and Matt Smith star as Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.

The third season, which began streaming in 2019, saw Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies take over the roles, and in the fourth, newcomer Emma Corrin was unveiled as Princess Diana.

"Doctor Foster" follows a similar trajectory to most dark primetime dramas, but the show executes all the familiar story beats with far more precision than most of what we see on either TV or the big screen.

Gemma Foster (Suranne Jones) is a talented and beloved family doctor from a rural English town. But her life begins to unravel when she suspects that her husband may be having an affair with a younger woman. And soon, after following several lines of inquiry, she discovers a long and dark pattern of behavior.

Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) also stars.

Charlie Brooker's brilliant anthology series "Black Mirror" has assumed the coveted but elusive position of event television. Whenever it drops, people immediately watch.

The show is now five seasons deep and follows a similar structure to "The Twilight Zone." Each episode features a new cast and an autonomous story that grapples with the potentially dark and twisted results of the 21st century's obsession with technological innovation, celebrity, and social media.

Since migrating from British terrestrial television to Netflix in 2017, the show has picked up eight Emmys and helped to launch the international careers of Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright, and Brooker himself.

Russell T Davies' new drama is a beautiful story about friendship, family, and love.

"It's a Sin" follows the lives of three young gay men: Ritchie (Olly Alexander), Roscoe (Omari Douglas), and Colin (Callum Scott Howells) who all move to east London in 1981.

And just as they begin to enjoy the sexual freedoms of youth in the big city, the first terrifying reports of a new disease called AIDS begin to filter through from across the Atlantic.

Traditionally, teen dramas are sun-drenched affairs with casts dominated by A-list actors who were always about 10 years older than the characters they portrayed on screen. But "Skins" changed the genre.

The show follows a group of angst-ridden British teens, living in the city of Bristol as they party, drink, and snort through their unglamorous late-teenage years while struggling to contend with broader societal issues such as religion, race, and sexuality.

Several overseas adaptations of "Skins" have been attempted and most recently HBO's popular drama "Euphoria" dipped into the show's hedonistic formula. But still, no adaptation has managed to depict the lifestyle of its character with as much unflinching candor as the original series.

Armando Iannucci's "The Thick of It" is a biting political satire about the inner workings of a fictional British government, which isn't run by elected officials but by the iron fist of a unscrupulous and Machiavellian public relations expert named Malcolm Tucker.

Inspired by real-life working dynamics of former British Prime Minsiter Tony Blair, the show ran for four seasons, spawned a big-screen adaptation, and inspired a US spin-off titled "Veep," starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's raucous dark comedy "Fleabag" is undoubtedly one of the most innovative television comedies of the last decade.

The show, which was based on Waller-Bridge's one-woman play of the same name, follows an unnamed and directionless anti-heroine who tries, largely unsuccessfully, to find a meaningful path for her life whilst trying to come to terms with the tragic death of her best friend for which, in part, she is to blame.

Across two acclaimed seasons, the show picked up six Emmys and two Golden Globes before gracefully bowing out in 2019.

Adapted from Julia Quinn's bestselling series, "Bridgerton" provided a beacon of light during a really rough year.

Produced by Shonda Rhimes and written by one of her adjutants, former "Scandal" writer Chris VanDusen, the series follows a Regency London family as they navigate the marriage market.

Season one centers on Daphne Bridgerton, whose quest to find an ideal partner is bungled after a few missteps. It doesn't help that she's determined to marry for love and not obligation.

The Netflix series has already been renewed for a season two, which will focus on the eldest Bridgerton child, Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey).