The 7 Best CW Shows of All Time, Ranked
Since its original formation as The WB in 1993, The CW has served as a dependable purveyor of entertaining television content throughout the last three decades.
Providing a welcome break from the sitcoms, medical dramas, and police procedural mysteries featured on mainstream networks like CBS and NBC, The CW specialized in more niche TV genres that quickly captured the attention of audiences across the globe. From comedic horror series to gothic romantic dramas, these TV series helped cement The CW’s place in contemporary pop culture, allowing the network to gain the same respected status as ABC, HBO, Showtime, or AMC.
From ingenious superhero epics to expansive fantasy horror series, here are some of the greatest TV shows we’ve seen on The CW yet, ranked in order from worst to best.
7. Arrow
With the notable exception of Smallville, the live-action superhero genre hadn’t yet found a place in network television. After being relegated to film with the early days of the MCU and Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies in the 2000s, though, the superhero narrative soon made its way to The CW’s catalog with 2012’s era-defining series, Arrow. While its later successor The Flash arguably surpassed the quality of this 2010s fan-favorite show, Arrow single-handedly kick-started an expansive canonical universe still going strong to this day. For that reason alone, it deserves repeated praise and attention from comic book fans the world over – not to mention the fact that it helped reinvigorate DC’s pluckish Green Arrow as a dark, brooding vigilante every bit as nuanced as Bruce Wayne or Wolverine.
6. The Vampire Diaries
Love them or hate them, vampires were a hot commodity throughout the 2000s and 2010s, ushering in a golden age for steamy vampire dramas like Twilight, True Blood, and The CW’s The Vampire Diaries. With the latter, showrunners Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec found a way to adopt the monster-of-the-week-style presentation of The X-Files or Supernatural and blend it with the underlying melodrama of a gothic romance story. What followed proved to be an intricate, complex, thoroughly engrossing supernatural drama that audiences instantly fell in love with, owing as much to the work of Anne Rice as it does to the Twilight films.
5. Gilmore Girls
Among the most popular television dramas of the 21st century yet, Gilmore Girls helped The WB successfully transition into The CW, paving the way to a long-running series that hooked viewers’ interest from the very get-go. Characterized by its sympathetic characters, grounded humor, and relatable subject matter, Gilmore Girls eloquently explored the continuously evolving relationship between its titular characters. Overcoming heartbreak, setbacks, and triumphant moments together, the eponymous Gilmores consistently shared in each others’ victories while consoling one another through their defeats, showcasing their gradual growth from a single mother and her teenage daughter into inseparable best friends.
4. The 100
Just as the vampire romance narrative had been done to death by the early 2010s, so too were YA-driven survival dramas a bit passé by the time The 100 arrived in 2014. But by focusing on its own self-contained universe and enthralling cast of characters, The 100 distanced itself from similarly-veined dystopian series like The Hunger Games or Divergent, etching a distinguished place for itself as one of The CW’s best shows in recent memory.
3. The Flash
Arrow may have introduced audiences to The CW’s fast-growing superhero universe fittingly dubbed the Arrowverse, but The Flash is the series that pushed the boundaries for superhero television forward in exciting new directions. Existing side-by-side with the various other DC-related media, The Flash regularly found a way to widen its scope to include multiple realities and branching universes, from Tim Burton’s Batman series to Zack Snyder’s DCEU. At its heart, however, The Flash succeeded first and foremost as a long-awaited adaptation of DC’s famous speedster, bringing the fast-paced brilliance of the Flash to the small screen with graceful energy and judicious verve.
2. Supernatural
Succeeding Buffy’s place as the most popular paranormal fantasy series in The CW’s lineup, Supernatural quickly rose to the epic heights as The X-Files upon its debut in 2005. Through its simplistic monster-of-the-week premise, Supernatural ingeniously drew on pre-existing folklore, mythology, even religious motifs in the course of its 15 seasons on television, finding new ways to reinvent fantastic creatures through an intrinsically modern lens Throughout it all, viewers heartily rooted for Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles’s humorous Winchester siblings, cheering aloud as they watched the brothers battle werewolves, vampires, vengeful spirits, and Machiavellian demons plotting the end of the world.
1. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Before franchises like Twilight and The Vampire Diaries established vampires as a permanent fixture of melodramatic love stories, the infamous creatures of the night formed an integral part of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s horror-centric universe. The flagship series of The WB during the network’s infancy, Buffy cleverly mixed the core components of a John Hughes-style teen comedy with the undercurrent of an ‘80s horror film. What followed was a unique hodgepodge of contrasting genres and fascinatingly opposing tones, contributing to a horror TV series as beloved now as it was in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
