There were plenty of exciting shows this year, to the extent that it’s hard to choose just ten for the best of the year list. There’s just too many shows out there, and even if you spent weeks binging, you would probably only crack a small percentage of all the good shows out there.
This list is merely reflective of one person’s preference for great TV entertainment. If you have other shows that you think were great this year, feel free to mention them in the comments!
Succession
One critic described Succession as ‘King Lear meets Arrested Development‘ and that’s a perfect way to describe this corporate family drama. Headed by a shrewd (and often baleful) patriarch in Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the Roy Family maneuver each other and mutual enemies as they fight with the threat of an acquisition. While the first season set up the stakes wonderfully, the second season delves into the relationship Logan has with his children, particularly Shiv and Kendall. These are all rich, often terrible people who can’t stop doing horrible things to each other. Nothing is sacred, and no one knows better than Logan Roy himself.
The finale, which ends with a scandal that threatens to bring down the Roy family, leaves the story in an interesting place for next season.
The Boys
In the Boys, we get to see a more realistic depiction of superheroes. Unlike The Watchmen, it satirizes superheroes by putting them inside a celebrity culture and making them generally amoral and self-centered assholes. Of course, ex CIA agent Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) has an axe to grind with superheroes, especially The Homelander (Antony Starr), who is just the right blendful of charismatic and horrible. The first season was a solid opener that introduced the world and its characters; let’s see how the second season carries on after the strong cliffhanger ending for the first season.
Euphoria
Euphoria is a new, mature take on today’s teens, showing teens who are both bright and messed up, immersed in a culture of drugs, sex and heartbreak. Rue Bennett (Zendaya) is slowly dipping back into drugs after recovering from an overdose months earlier. She meets the lively Jules (Hunter Schafer), a transgender girl who seems too good to be true, but has problems and demons of her own to deal with. Throughout the season, we see these characters drift through life and hurting each other without meaning to. It’s a striking new show which doesn’t always depict the current teenage experience accurately, but is nevertheless compelling to watch.
Doom Patrol
Doom Patrol is probably the weirdest show of the year, and the fact that it works as well as it does is a testament to the strength of not only the source material but also the cast and the direction. A group of misfits, all dealing with complications of their own, come together when they are thrown into an adventure after their mentor is abducted by an old enemy. There’s a lot of humor in the first season, as well as a handful of sincere, wholesome moments. The season ends with a giant cockroach and a giant rat fighting each other off inside a sentient street; and that’s hardly the weirdest moment in the season.
The Mandalorian
The Mandalorian is perhaps the best new Star Wars content out there right now. Instead of going for flashy stuff, it goes for a tried and tested route, with a core narrative threading through an episodic structure where the titular protagonist tries to keep to himself (and fails) in a space western setting. Everyone is going gaga over the adorable Baby Yoda, and rightfully so, but what’s great about The Mandalorian is that it’s consistently solid from episode to episode. It’s a self-contained story that’s light on its feet, only focusing on the minimal details needed for the narrative.
Chernobyl
An engaging dramatization of a real life disaster, Chernobyl succeeds because of its harrowing focus on the disaster itself, and the way it depicts characters rising above the bureaucratic red tape to find the truth and tell it to the world. Jarred Harris and Stellan Skarsgard are terrific in their roles, and the camaraderie they share throughout the miniseries forms the core of the narrative.
Undone
Undone is a beautifully animated, rotoscoped take about family and existential, mystical powers that may or may not be a mental illness. Alma (Rosa Salazar) survives a car crash and starts having hallucinations of her dead father (Bob Odenkirk). As Alma tries to figure out what’s happening to her, her father tries to convince her to solve the mystery of his death. In the middle of all this, Alma’s sister is also getting married and that often means being confronted by her mother about her lifestyle choices.
Barry
The dark comedy about a former marine juggling his double lives of being an actor and a hitman hit new strides in its second season. There’s also the ongoing side story of NoHo Hank, the most polite gangster you will ever see, and his ongoing efforts to survive among the shifting landscape of his local crime scene. Barry (Bill Hader) struggles to keep his secret, which becomes difficult when his ex-handler Fuches goes rogue and tries to make his life hell, including framing Barry’s teacher Gene (Henry Winkler) for murdering his sweetheart Moss. The season ends with scenes of deadly carnage, and then one Breaking Bad like moment where the penny finally drops on Gene.
Mr. Robot
It’s criminal that Mr. Robot has gone under the radar since the well-intentioned but convoluted second season, because the fourth and final season had everything working in order as Elliot (Rami Malek) tried to stop Whiterose before she could set her plan into motion. There is a lot of tension in the first half of the season, and then the show substitutes that for dread and unease as we explore Elliot’s past and find out that there’s still a lot we don’t know about him. The finale is emotionally resonant, and it resolves the story in a sincerely poignant way.
Watchmen
No one expected Watchmen to be as good as it turned out to be, but then again Damon Lindelof did come off fresh from a wonderful but underrated The Leftovers. Set three decades after the original comic, Watchmen focuses on ex-cop Angela Abar (Regina King) who soon gets drawn into a plot involving white supremacists and Dr. Manhattan. On the other hand, Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons) is trapped in a strange place, and the more he tries to escape, the deeper he gets stuck inside it. It’s a strange, winding narrative that slowly pieces everything together, just in time for a decent finale that could, perhaps, have been better. The story feels both a natural extension of the original comic and a solid standalone narrative. Kudos to Lindelof for pulling that off.