The 20 Best Live-Action DC TV Series, Ranked

The special effects were anything but special, and honestly, so was a lot of the show. But in the ‘70s, the mere act of putting a woman at the forefront of a superhero TV series was kind of revolutionary, and Lynda Carter’s fierce turn in the lead role became rightfully iconic as a portrayal that outlived the limitations of its production decades later. Depending on how you feel about Gal Gadot, this is most likely still the defining Wonder Woman.

With all the stylized violence and darker takes on DC properties, Titans was a fun ass watch with intriguing plotlines and characters you could grow to care about—even if a good amount of the acting itself was too stiff for the show to be truly great.

Lucifer wasn’t one of my personal favorites, but Tom Ellis was both hilarious and convincingly menacing as one of America’s best fake antiheroes. The elevator pitch was kind of like a primetime fever dream: what if we made a new Castle, but instead of a quirky, self-absorbed author, we made the main character the literal Prince of Darkness? And it worked exactly as it should’ve. The first season was somewhat mid, but eventually, his playful chemistry with “no-nonsense” Detective Chloe Decker (Lauren German) gave the show a push-pull flirtation that made a lotta folks want to dance with the Devil.

Perhaps taking a cue from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the folks at DC took a sizable lick when they turned a bunch of C- and D-list heroes into pretty good television. For this one, a group of heroes—and villains—have to clique up to take down forces that would wash them otherwise. Sure, there’s some CW lameness to it, but the storyline is imaginative enough—and the action cool enough—that it stuck around for more than half a decade, making not-so-legendary characters into legit legends.

By the early ‘90s, live-action superhero TV shows had been in a little bit of a slump, with Superboy (1988) and The Flash (1990) both being more cringe than creative. So it’s only right America’s OG man in tights came to save the day. Before Dean Cain lost his goddamn mind, he was pretty good in his dual role as Clark Kent and The Man of Steel, where his boyish charm helped him soar alongside Teri Hatcher’s girlboss Lois Lane—with or without a cape.

The classic “old hero gets pulled back into heroism” is rarely rendered as entertainingly as in Black Lightning, where Cress Williams brings paternal strength as a super-powered school principal forced to don his mask once more. While it never became as big as the other CW shows, this one had enough tension, and, you know, general electricity, to shine bright for four full seasons.

You know how you watch NBA clips from whenever and you immediately notice nobody’s got any bag and you can’t believe your OGs are trying to tell you these swag-less old heads are legends? Well, then you might feel something similar when you watch The Adventures of Superman, a cheesy spectacle that definitely looks like its era. But here’s the thing: being one of the first is always valid, and the character has an inherent goodness that made the stories worth watching. Here, the fairly straightforward plot line helped make the Superman tales feel like biblical proverbs. Meanwhile, George Reeves brought regal Boy Scout earnestness to a role that made it cool to put on a cape.

Aside from the racism and an unjustified war, the ‘60s were largely a period of free love, good music, and drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. Want evidence? Just watch any episode of Batman. Here, in the Adam West-starring series, you could see things like Bat Shark-repellant and name-tagged sliding poles to the Bat-Cave in the same episode. When you didn’t see that, you might peep Batman hitting the ‘60s equivalent of the Dougie mid-mission. Sure, it’s ridiculous, but there’s a valor in being so committed to camp. Looking back at the show, you can see it as a moment Batman lost his national credibility. You can laugh at it and roast TF out of the writers. Or, if you’re more enlightened, you’ll kick back, throw on an episode, call your sketchy local drug dealer, and ask for whatever the writers were having.

So like, there’s no way Jim Gordon, Harvey Bullock and basically like, everyone, didn’t know Bruce Wayne was Batman after this, right? If you can suspend your disbelief long enough, you’ll accept this show as yet another dope TV series that made the best of wanting to tell a Batman story without ever uttering the word “Batman.” While the plot becomes a little ridiculous by the end (why in the hell would Bane be involved in any aspect of Young Bruce Wayne’s life?), it’s cool seeing the young caped crusader learning how to become one.

A staple of the Arrowverse, The CW’s The Flash stands as perhaps the most enduring depiction of the character, with Grant Gustin imbuing Barry Allen with a lovably geeky charm fit for prime time. It could be cheesy, but that was part of its charm as an unashamedly comic book-ass TV show rather than a prestige television event. In total, it will be remembered for its sincerity, endurance, and its role as glue for The CW’s increasingly sprawling Arrowverse.

It took more than 20 years to bring The Sandman to live action, but once it arrived, it was worth it. Draped in surreal imagery and sophistication, the Netflix series follows Morpheus (Tom Sturridge), the God of Dreams, as he fights to restore order to his dream kingdom and the waking world outside it. It’s basically a supernatural detective flick spread out over two seasons, and most of the time, it’s as dope as that sounds. In the lead role, Sturridge brings detached intensity while his nemesis, The Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), serves up icy cunning in a series that’s got all the visual and narrative tools to make the absolute most of its mythic source material.

A super-powered preacher teams up with a vampire and a gun-toting ex to embark on a search for the creator of all living things? Yeah. Preacher was weird AF. But it was strange in the best ways imaginable, with its quirky cast and oddball plot forming an intriguing asymmetry with the disturbing images of the paranormal. Produced for AMC, it had higher production values and, frankly, better acting talent than a lot of these non-prestige shows, but its story wasn’t quite accessible enough to reach the best shows’ sense of universality.

Some of the best superhero movies, comics, and other adaptations take big creative swings that set them apart from the source material. It’s evidence of initiative, and it forces writers away from trite conventions in the source material. For major network television, Superman & Lois is near the apex of this approach. In the series, we get to see the titular married couple relocate to Smallville and raise their two teen sons as they learn to deal with their superpowers. The premise itself is intriguing, and they do a good job blending coming of age stories with … well, aging stories. The juxtaposition, along with some compelling action, made for a series that succeeded whether it was up, up and away or up, up, and at home.

If you’re anything like me, you spent the first season of Arrow thinking the verbiage and motifs were way too much like The Dark Knight trilogy. Spoiler: it kinda was. But by the end, there was so much character development, friendship, romance, and elaborate adventure that none of it mattered. Through its first few seasons, it succeeded by homing in on Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) and the gang, who operated like their own Bat Family. But by the end, he became the fulcrum of multidimensional-timeline collapses that brought the DC family together in a way only Batman, Superman, or The Flash had before him. It’s a series that created its own significance—they call those CW shows the Arrowverse for a reason.

Sure: parts of Smallville look dated now, and it definitely lacks the polish of the best prestige shows on this list. But give it credit for volume, casting, and imagination: it ran for a whole ass decade, Tom Welling was a perfect Clark Kent, and the idea to make Superman’s upbringing the focus of a TV series was genuinely inspired thinking. Aside from fun storylines and characters we cared about, we gotta give props to the writers for revealing a narrative truth hidden in plain sight: Clark Kent is, quietly, a more interesting character than Superman.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a gang of super-powered misfits joins forces to save the planet. OK. So on its face, not all that original, but for this particular series, the weirdos are truly weird, so they’re unable to simply jump in and out of society as they please, and their own troubled emotional states make them as much of a threat to themselves and the world at large as they are to their enemies. It’s a refreshing take on the trope that could’ve been tired, and folks like Diane Guerrero and Brendan Fraser make the characters feel as real as their issues. On top of all that: it’s funny AF, too. The narrator’s sense of humor is as dark and twisted as the story itself, which, in the end, is all about outcasts teaming up to save the world, and just as importantly, each other.

Could this be recency bias? Maybe. But together, Aaron Pierre (John Stewart) and Kyle Chandler (Hal Jordan) made an easy case for the 2026 version of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, with the Lanterns playing out like a superhero version of True Detective Season 1. For the show, Chandler’s Hal Jordan spends his time trying to solve a great mystery while schooling his trainee, Pierre’s John Stewart, on how to be the next Green Lantern. The fact that Stewart’s trying to, you know, replace Hal creates a natural narrative tension, and their back-and-forths create one of the most convincing “love-hate” relationships I’ve seen play out onscreen. Combined with a genuinely clever plot that takes some creative risks that scan as useful rather than gimmicky, Lanterns stands as one of the best live-action superhero TV series ever created—DC or otherwise.

In short, making Colin Farrell the star of your prestige TV series is every bit the cheat code it sounds like. Going a little longer, Farrell uses all his charisma and hard-earned mastery (and a *little makeup*) to create a character that you spend weeks growing to love, only to make you absolutely despise him in the very last episode. It’s a task he manages with twitchy winks and bats of the eye—an arm around your shoulder that can quickly become an arm around your neck. Throw an adventurous script and Emmy Award-winning Cristin Milioti performance into the mix, and it’s clear you’re looking at an all-timer: a series that provides all the adrenal highs of a hero before making you remember its main character isn’t one.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that no one—and I mean no one—gave a fuck about Peacemaker. He’s a D-list hero I hadn’t heard of until I saw James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. But James Gunn turned water to a Frosé. Here, a gym bro antihero wages a war against aliens, government officials, and the consequences of his own actions, and John Cena plays the part with a self-parodic version of his own outward jock persona and an affecting mix of humor, vulnerability, and a level of nuance that crushed any notion that he was merely a wrestler-actor. At the same time, the casting and writing made all his interactions feel equally authentic, and the series never runs the risk of taking itself too seriously or too lightly. It’s a tightrope that Gunn, Cena and the rest of the team dance across with all the grace of experts at the peak of their craft.