From Better Call Saul to Parks and Recreation, some of the greatest TV shows ever made got off to a slow start before they eventually got better. There are some Lost’s action-packed feature-length pilot has you intrigued by the mysteries of the island from the get-go. Twin Peaks introduces its bizarre tone and the mind-bending enigma of Laura Palmer’s murder in its opening moments. Stranger Things’ first chapter instantly immerses audiences in its spooky Spielbergian world.

But it’s rare that a show can hit the ground running like that. It’s much more common that a series will take a season or two to really find its voice, figure out what makes its characters unique and interesting, and mine that stuff for compelling storytelling. Some of the best shows in television history took a little while to find their feet. When you sit down to watch something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, don’t worry if it doesn’t grab you straight away — it gets better.

10 Community

In its early episodes, Community is a pretty standard sitcom about a ragtag band of college students. It spends its entire pilot simply getting the study group together. Later in the first season, it would start to grow into something much more unique. As the show continued, it became a sort of live-action cartoon. The college became a playground for the writers to explore experimental ideas like a paintball-based action thriller or a multiversal meditation on fate. It’s a straightforward sitcom in its first few episodes, but you have to power through those episodes to get to Community’s paintball wars.

9 Justified

The TV adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Raylan Givens character, Justified, started off with an episodic case-of-the-week format in season 1. In each episode, the roguish deputy U.S. Marshal would pursue a different perp and dole out his own particular brand of justice. But in its subsequent seasons, Justified morphed into a more serialized drama with long-running storylines to keep the audience engaged. In doing so, it became a much better and more distinctive show. The series developed Boyd Crowder into Raylan’s arch-nemesis, and that rivalry alone makes the show worth sticking with.

8 The Office

It’s almost unheard of for an American remake of a beloved British sitcom to even be halfway decent, let alone match its legacy as one of the greatest shows in television history, but that’s what happened with Greg Daniels’ reimagining of The Office. However, the U.S. remake wasn’t an all-time classic upfront. In its first season, The Office skews too closely to the drab, cynical style of the British original, which didn’t work for an American sensibility. In season 2, the writers made the show a lot more hopeful and uplifting, and the Michael Scott character came into his own.

7 Better Call Saul

There’s even more pressure on Better Call Saul to hook viewers from the outset than most TV shows, because it’s the follow-up to Breaking Bad. Audiences who go from the thrilling binge of Breaking Bad right into Better Call Saul will undoubtedly be taken aback by the slower, more somber pace of the spinoff. But please, stick with it. It takes that time to slowly but surely build up an even more complex character study than Breaking Bad. Each season of Better Call Saul gets closer and closer to the nail-biting tension of the flagship show.

6 Parks And Recreation

In its first season, Parks and Recreation feels too much like an Office clone: a dreary workplace sitcom about a dim-witted office manager with a staff who couldn’t care less. Going into season 2, the writers made Leslie Knope a more unique and empowering character: a devoted public servant who gives her all to improve her community against insurmountable odds. It stopped being The Office 2.0 and became the ultimate feel-good show. At the end of the second season, the show added Rob Lowe and Adam Scott, who turned a really good sitcom cast into one of the all-time greats.

5 Buffy The Vampire Slayer

In its first few episodes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer struggled to find the right tone. It started off skewing overly campy, but it eventually found a nice balance between the campy monster-movie antics and the genuinely moving teen drama. In the early days, the show had a lot in common with the schlocky B-movies that inspired it. But in the later seasons, it transcended those genre trappings to achieve something really profound. Buffy eventually finds a way to tell deeply touching human stories through the lens of its supernatural horror.

4 It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia nailed its pitch-black comic tone from the very beginning, but it didn’t quite have its characters nailed down. Charlie, Dennis, and Mac are all typical immature everymen and Dee is the archetypal straight man. The later seasons would make Charlie illiterate, Dennis a sociopath, and Mac obsessed with Christianity and men’s physiques, and turn Dee into every bit the degenerate that her friends are. Plus, they added Danny DeVito as Frank Reynolds, who turned out to be the special sauce the ensemble was missing.

3 Breaking Bad

Although Breaking Bad has a really strong pilot episode (one of the greatest ever produced), the rest of its first season is oddly paced. The plot moves really slowly — a couple of episodes are spent disposing of a corpse that has very little bearing on future events — and it’s broken up by quick, jarring bursts of action. It might have been intentional to have the violence punctuate the drama in such startling ways, but Breaking Bad found a much better balance of these elements as the series went on. By the time season 3 rolls around, it’s a stone-cold masterpiece.

2 Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek: The Next Generation is one of the go-to examples of a show that took some time to find its feet and achieve greatness. The spinoff’s first season got the series off to a rocky start with mostly weak episodes. There were a handful of great episodes in there, and the cast had strong enough chemistry and likability that the show was able to continue. From the second season onwards, it’s a much better show. There are still some less-than-terrific episodes, but it’s a classic overall. The Next Generation’s improvement happens right around the time Riker grows a beard.

1 Seinfeld

Today, Seinfeld is ed as one of the most popular and influential TV shows of all time, but its success wasn’t always a given. Seinfeld season 1 was given one of the shortest episode orders in television history, because the network didn’t have much faith in its potential. Those first few episodes show promise that Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David are a unique pairing of comedic minds who can write a truly idiosyncratic sitcom like no other, but they’re not exactly hall-of-fame material.

There are some really great episodes in seasons 1 and 2 — the famous “The Chinese Restaurant” episode was in season 2 — but Seinfeld wouldn’t really fire on all cylinders until its third season. The first couple of seasons might not live up to the hype, but season 3 onwards is some of the greatest television ever produced. By then, Seinfeld had rounded out its signature wit, pioneered its dovetailing narrative style, and developed its characters beyond their early archetypes (George starts out as a nebbish Woody Allen type and Kramer starts out as a typical nosy neighbor).