The long-runners

A handful of the TV answers have run for years, and it shows up in the number-of-seasons clue. A high count narrows things quickly, because most shows do not last. Here are the long-runners, by number.

#0002, from 2005, is the hospital drama created by Shonda Rhimes, set in a Seattle teaching hospital and following a group of surgeons from their first day as interns onward. Ellen Pompeo has led it from the opening episode and stayed at the centre of it for two decades, on a contract reported at around twenty million dollars a year at its peak, among the highest ever paid to an actress on American television. It reached its twenty-second season at the end of 2025 and has since been renewed for a twenty-third, which makes it the longest-running primetime medical drama in the history of American television and, at more than four hundred and fifty episodes, one of the longest-running scripted dramas of any kind. It won a Golden Globe for best drama and several Emmys in its earlier years, and it turned Rhimes into one of the most powerful producers in the business, with a run of other hits built on the back of it.

#0043, from 2007, is the sitcom created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady about a group of socially awkward physicists at a California university and the aspiring actress who moves in across the hall. It ran for twelve seasons and two hundred and seventy-nine episodes, and through much of its later run it was the most-watched scripted series on American television. Jim Parsons won four Emmys for lead actor in a comedy as the most rigid of the scientists, part of ten Emmy wins for the show overall. The money became a story in itself. In 2014 its three biggest stars each negotiated a deal worth a million dollars an episode, then took a cut so that two of their co-stars could be paid more. A prequel about one of the characters as a boy ran for a further seven seasons after it ended, which is a fair measure of how much appetite there still was for it.

#0018, from 2009, is the first spin-off of a long-running naval-crime franchise, moved to a covert team on the American West Coast, with Chris O'Donnell and the rapper LL Cool J as its leads and Daniela Ruah alongside them. It ran for fourteen seasons and more than three hundred episodes before it was brought to a close in 2023 with a two-part finale, which made it one of the longest-running dramas its network had. It never drew the awards the flashier shows did, but it managed the harder trick in television, holding a large audience week after week for well over a decade.

#0025, from 2006, is the drama adapted from Jeff Lindsay's novels, with Michael C. Hall as a forensic blood-spatter analyst for the Miami police who is secretly a serial killer, kept in check by a code that sends him only after other murderers. It ran for eight seasons and won Hall a Golden Globe, and it was one of the shows that set the late-2000s taste for a drama built around a charming and monstrous lead. It is remembered now almost as much for how it ended. The 2013 finale, in which the lead fakes his own death in a storm and vanishes to live alone as a lumberjack, is routinely listed among the worst in television, and the reaction was strong enough that the show was eventually brought back, first for a ten-part return in 2021 and then for more, as though the makers themselves wanted to give it a better finish.

#0016, from 2009, is the supernatural teen drama adapted from L. J. Smith's novels, following two immortal brothers who feed on blood in a small Virginia town and the young woman caught between them, played by Nina Dobrev, Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder. It ran for eight seasons and a hundred and seventy-one episodes and became one of its network's signature hits during the teen-supernatural boom of the early 2010s. It also produced two spin-offs that ran for years of their own, one following the oldest and most dangerous of its bloodlines and another following the next generation, so that a single high-school love triangle grew into well over a decade of connected television.

The season count is the giveaway here. Most shows manage three or four years at best, so when the clue lands on double figures, everything short-lived can go straight out of consideration, and you are left choosing between the handful of shows that actually lasted.