Every X-Men TV Show, Ranked Worst to Best

X-Men has a very storied history of some brilliant adaptations on television, be it live action or animated. Be it classic stories from the comics or some original ideas that were thrown on screen, the X-Men have had a lot more success in animation than they did in live action. Be it the classic X-Men: The Animated Series or its revival, X-Men ’97, fans have had quite a positive response to the various animated incarnations of the characters.

While it might seem that there are a slew of X-Men adaptations for television, there are only eight, with only two live-action shows. The idea behind ranking them is to look at how fans enjoyed the shows and how much they impacted the image of the franchise at large. This does give the animated shows an edge, given the strong relevance that they have had in making the image of the X-Men. Further, X-Men shows have not yet been able to make the kind of splash that other superhero properties have on the small screen.

8 Marvel Anime: X-Men

Marvel Anime was very well realized visually, but had little other substance || Credit: Marvel Entertainment

Marvel Anime was one of the brief but serious forays that Marvel had into the world of anime. Comprising shows that would follow not just the X-Men, but also Wolverine, Iron Man, and Blade, it was an anthology collection about key Marvel characters going to Japan. Marvel Anime: X-Men was largely considered the weakest entry in the series, with 2-dimensional characters, unclear motives, and a remarkable focus on style, but little on substance and consequence. It suffered from trying to put a lot of characters in a short season, leaving each part of the ensemble paper-thin.

7 Marvel Anime: Wolverine

Wolverine looked different from his X-Men anime counterpart || Credit: Marvel Entertainment

Wolverine took care of one glaring problem that X-Men had: it shrunk the cast to a manageable size for the number of episodes that it was getting. However, what ended up doing Wolverine in was the fact that it simply did not have good pacing. Further, there were pieces of dialogue that did not translate well, with the story developing some of the same pains that plagued X-Men. Both these stories failed to resonate with either fans of anime or the X-Men.

6 The Gifted

The Gifted featured a slew of fan-favorite characters from X-Men comics || Credit: Marvel Television

Canceled by Fox before any of its characters could get a resolution to their arcs, there was a lot to like about The Gifted. It built up a lot of momentum with its premise, which was genuinely interesting. Mutant persecution in the show mapped well to social commentary, but it was never able to build on the X-Men charm of the films, which it was inevitably compared to. Add to that the fact that the X-Men timelines at the time seemed to be in flux, which hurt casual viewership, who might have been expecting to see heavy hitters like Wolverine and Magneto to show up (with his daughter, Polaris, being a main character).

5 X-Men: Evolution

X-Men Evolution was a welcome addition to the X-Men animated canon || Credit: Marvel Studios

X-Men: Evolution was a show that took a bold step by turning the main X-Men cast into high-school teenagers. However, this is something that ended up working in their favor, with Storm and Wolverine featuring in the show as older, mentor-like figures to comic contemporaries like Cyclops and Beast. While it had some brilliant initial seasons, the later seasons devolved into ‘team-of-the-week’ gimmicks. This would ultimately be the reason why the show stopped resonating with fans, completely breaking down the already flimsy teen-drama structure.

4 Wolverine and the X-Men

Wolverine and the X-Men simply came out at the wrong time || Credit: Marvel Studios

The only reason why Wolverine and the X-Men is so low on the list is that it never got to finish the brilliant story that it set out to tell. A notably darker successor to X-Men: Evolution, Wolverine and the X-Men definitely had the charm and the cheer to carry the show into places where X-Men animation had not gone before. However, coming out around 2009, the show was released during writers’ strikes and licensing issues, which landed the story’s future in a perpetual limbo. There is only one thing that everyone who watches this show agrees on- there should have been more seasons of Wolverine and the X-Men.

3 Legion

An oddball in the list, Legion did not directly deal with the X-Men, but was set in an X-Men continuity anyway. The show earns its spot on the list thanks to the cerebral storytelling that it engages in, looking at one of the most intriguing characters in the X-Men comics. Dan Stevens’ performance and Noah Hawley’s surreal directing choices are what cemented the show as one of the most important pieces of superhero fiction to come out in the 2010s. However, it lacked the pomp that general audiences had linked with something like the X-Men, with team-ups, costumes, and quips.

2 X-Men: The Animated Series

X-Men: The Animated Series remains one of the best interpretations of the team || Credit: Marvel Television

X-Men: The Animated Series remains the gold standard for X-Men media, even informing the MCU as it marches towards Avengers: Doomsday, and Avengers: Secret Wars. Everything from the Phoenix Saga to Days of the Future Past was on the table for the animated series, which is something that strayed from the standard cheeriness of other Saturday morning cartoons. It is the entire reason that X-Men ’97 was able to receive the sort of hype that it did prior to its release.

1 X-Men ’97

X-Men has always been about a class of people who have been discriminated against by systems for no good reason. X-Men ’97 was able to pick up the baton where the animated series dropped it. With its first season, it was able to deliver a story that had the hallmarks of all the shenanigans that X-Men fans have come to know and love from the comics: civil rights, time travel, epic melees, and, of course, give Cyclops the respect he deserves. As one of the best mutant-focused entries in Hollywood superhero canon, it made the X-Men’s homecoming so much more worth it.

Do you think the X-Men films do X-Men better than the shows? Let us know in the comments!

X-Men ’97 Season 2 will begin streaming on Disney+ on July 1, 2026