Any show not listed below falls into one of three categories: I watched it and thought it was fine/bad, I never considered watching it, or I didn't get around to it. If you care enough to ask about a show that's not in here, I will tell you which category it was in. And now for a few shows I did watch that just missed the list: Comedy Central continued to crank out some worthy comedies with Corporate and Detroiters (RIP). Netflix did so too, with GLOW and The End of the F***ing World. Some legacy comedies like It's Always Sunny and Bob's Burgers still hold up. Killing Eve found a worthy spin on a lot of the typical globe-trotting assassin tropes. And the second installment of German spycraft Deutschland 86 was a treat.
#25 - Homecoming (Amazon)
Let's start the countdown with a show that is a perfect illustration of both the pros and cons of modern TV. On one hand, the show is beautiful to look at, features great acting, and is slyly suspenseful at times. On the other hand, it basically jams two hours of story into five hours. I suspect that the problem of bloat will be reduced as streaming services mature, but for now we'll continue to get a lot of perfectly good shows like this one. There are worse fates.
#24 - Nannette (Netflix)
Nannette is a fascinating hour of comedy if only for the amount of conversation and criticism that it inspired. And while I find a lot of the criticism to be worthwhile, I feel that it often misses the point. Yes, Nannette is rightfully read as a condemnation of the patriarchal comedy industry, but it is first and foremost a personal story about Hannah Gadsby's lived experience. Her act of "quitting comedy" is not explicitly a call for all to do so, but rather a diagnosis of how her profession re-inflicts the damages of past trauma. That isn't to say that her story can't serve as a jumping off point for discussing larger issues. Just don't make the mistake of over-generalizing one person's extremely unique and precise story.
#23 - The Good Place (NBC)
My reluctance to rank The Good Place in previous years stemmed entirely from problems with the text of the show. Namely, it often spelled out a moral/ethical quandary and then attempted to resolve it the span of one sitcom episode. While I appreciate a show willing to explicitly deal with matters of philosophy, this was at times a rather unartful way of doing so. This complaint of mine remains, but three seasons in the show has covered so much ground and reinvented itself so many times that there is now a rich subtext to explore. It also doesn't hurt that the third season (mild spoiler) returned its subjects to Earth, which added a modicum of emotional resonance to their moral journies. There's a lot more to say both good and bad about The Good Place, but at this point it's clear that it belongs in a list of TV's best shows.
#22 - Dear White People (Netflix)
The second season of Justin Simien's playful but incisive look at modern racism wasn't as fresh as the first - It didn't help that the added mystery angle wasn't particularly compelling. But Dear White People has built a cast of characters and an atmosphere that is nonetheless worth your time. And one of the best episodes of the year is a welcome addition to the pantheon of great interpersonal arguments.
#21 - Baskets (FX)
When we last saw the Baskets clan (at the end of a fantastic second season), they were sharing a rare moment of clarity by coming together to take over the local rodeo. It turns out that this level of relative stability led to a bit of staleness, both for the characters and for the story itself. But even a slightly disappointing season of Baskets has enough clowns, California vistas, opera mishaps, and Arby's employees to make it worthwhile.
#20 - Love (Netflix)
My personal interaction with each season of Judd Apatow's Love followed the same pattern: Wait a while to finally start watching and then binge it and then feel stupid for waiting because it's awesome. The third and final season took that to the extreme as I waited several months and ended up liking it the best of all. Every storyline reached a satisfying conclusion, with the best part coming in the penultimate "Anniversary Party," where Gus shares the realization that his more subtle neuroses are just as damaging to their relationship as Mickey's obvious problems. This was the rare time where highlighting the theme of a show worked, because 1) it counteracted the "women be crazy" subtext the show sometimes peddled in, and 2) it was actually the logical conclusion of everything that came before it. In the end, Love was a true Apatow production in that it was a big shaggy (and slightly problematic) dog that ended up being warm enough to draw you in.
#19 - Bosch (Amazon)
You're damn right I'm ranking Bosch. I formerly liked the show as both a mindless companion to late-night baby feedings and an ironically fun throwback, but now I unapologetically and earnestly love it. And while there's still a good deal of campiness to the proceedings, well, Brian Grubb already said it best:When you hear the wailing saxophone theme from BOSCH bumping out of the television speakers in the other room. pic.twitter.com/D3VCWHPL55— David Roth (@david_j_roth) September 12, 2017
"Bosch is a great lazy weekend show. It’s not overly heavy, it’s not meant to make you question the meaning of life, and you don’t need to visit multiple message boards to figure out what happened. It’s a good show about a detective who catches bad guys and sometimes drinks scotch at night while listening to jazz and staring out at Los Angeles from his multimillion-dollar glass-walled home. That’s what Bosch is about. And it is better than you probably think it is."
#18 - Big Mouth (Netflix)
The first season of Big Mouth was both hilarious and a surprisingly poignant tale about the pitfalls of adolescence. This year's follow-up season was....mostly the same. But when your laugh per minute ratio remains ridiculously high, and you add a few interesting wrinkles (David Thewlis' Shame Monster and the Planned Parenthood episode) that's more than enough to make the list.
#17 - The Deuce (HBO)
The second season of David Simon's latest slice of Americana has a lot of the lived-in qualities and the broad spectrum of characters that adorned his last great series (Treme). Still, The Deuce falls a little short of that level of greatness. The difference is that where Treme featured lengthy musical numbers that served to both enrich the atmosphere and take the edge off of the more dramatic storylines, The Deuce just adds more and more story simply for the sake of completeness. In spite of that, the whole comes together well enough, and the thrill of witnessing the process of Candy's film going from a good idea to a major success is one of the most viscerally exciting things from the year in television.
#16 - One Day at a Time (Netflix)
Normally, saying that the second season of a show was as good as its first would be damning with faint praise, but Norman Lear's throwback sitcom remains such a minor miracle that it feels like the best compliment I can give. The seemingly innocuous multi-cam format lets the viewer's guard down enough to deliver a knockout blow of emotion, time and again. And this isn't without a greater purpose: the cumulative effect of these stories culminated in one of the year's best episodes "Not Yet," which is as touching of a tribute to the power of family as I've seen.
#15 - The Handmaid's Tale (Hulu)
I would normally expect to trust any show debuted at #3 on my list, but I had some worries about how The Handmaid's Tale would live up to that lofty ranking. The first season took us through the entirety of the source material, so the show would now fully stand on its own, and would have to do so with an increased length of 13 episodes. Furthermore, critics seemed to sour on the show as it went on (I watched after the season finished), and were even fully quitting the show because of plot holes. So I was pleasantly surprised when the show exceeded my (admittedly lower) expectations. The middle of the season suffered from bloat, largely because the flashbacks (which are critical to the whole structure and thematic resonance of the show) briefly disappeared, giving us extra time to wallow in the misery of Gilead. But when the show was able to match the level of gripping drama and absurdly good acting from the first season, it was (almost) as good as ever.
#14 - Barry (HBO)
Barry is somehow both another hitman show and another show about trying to make it in showbiz. And sort of a cop show with a little bit of a love story thrown in. And it's funny. The ingredients suggest that Barry can't possibly have anything original or coherent to say, but then it proceeds to do so by telling its own version of a very small and darkly comedic story. And underlying all that is a morality play that hits home precisely because of its simplicity and subtlety. Bill Hader's titular character isn't a "bad guy" but he is a bad guy who can't stop doing bad things for reasons entirely within his own volition. This focus makes Barry one of the best studies on the nature of evil since Hannibal.
#13 - High Maintenance (HBO)
Where other shows suffer from adding length to their seasons, High Maintenance shined. The web-series turned TV series added a little more heft to the storyline of its main character (the unnamed drug-dealer, known only as "guy"), but didn't let that crowd out the stories of his far-flung clientele that give the show its richness. The first episode "Globo" is a series highlight, as a wide swath of New Yorkers react to an unnamed piece of recent bad news (but you know what it is).
#12 - BoJack Horseman (Netflix)
Five seasons in, BoJack remains ridiculously good at its high-concept episodes. Whereas most shows struggle to integrate the gimmicky nature of such installments with the larger themes of the show, BoJack does so with aplomb (it helps that the show itself is kinda gimmicky). The monologue of "Free Churro" highlighted how BoJack's relationship with his mother shaped his life (and showed how Will Arnett's voicework nails the quieter moments, too) while "The Showstopper" used its storytelling device to bring the seasonal arc to a head. There isn't an all-timer like season 2's "Escape From LA" in this batch of episodes, but that's an absurd standard that only highlights how great the whole show is.
#11 - Lodge 49 (AMC)
Two parts Northern Exposure and one part Twin Peaks, Lodge 49 is a throwback to the shaggy dog style of drama that's been underused in the so-called "Golden Age of TV." The format fits its peculiar set of characters well, but works even better in service of the shows overarching message of how late capitalism works to strangle people's desire to meaningfully connect with others. A more buttoned-up drama might have bungled it by underlining this theme too heavily, but in the half-supernatural world of Lodge 49 the malevolent forces in our society are just one of many external forces working against our protagonists. The finale did a great job of closing off some storylines while also opening others, so I'm excited to see where it goes from here.
#10 - The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story (FX)
The most enigmatic and ambitious series of the year is also the most easily misunderstood. Those expecting the titular event to be the climax will be surprised when it happens almost immediately. And we end up spending too much time with the assassin (Andrew Cunanan, played beautifully by Darren Criss), who is little more than a cipher that serves the story best when he's allowed to exist in service of the other characters. But peel back the misdirection and the minor narrative missteps, and you're left with an authoritative parable of how the AIDS crisis impacted gay men's very way of life. In this way, each of the dead is less a victim of Cunanan and more a victim of our society's violent repression of homosexuality. In an era where the architects of this pain are lauded, it's as vital of story as can be told.
#9 - Brockmire (IFC)
The first season of Brockmire was an incredibly goofy, slightly aimless, and ultimately disposable look at a comedic exaggeration of a baseball lifer/substance abuser, played with the perfect amount of half-winking seriousness by Hank Azaria. This year it morphed into something almost completely different as Brockmire's earnest road to recovery became the center of the show. With this change came more of a focus on the interpersonal dynamics involved in such a journey, as entire episodes tended to narrow the focus to Brockmire's efforts to repair individual relationships (Becky Ann Baker's turn as his sister is probably the best guest spot of the year). It's hard to believe that a throwaway comedy turned into one of the most moving stories on TV, but that's 2018 for you.
#8 - The Tale (HBO)
Like almost all social movements, #metoo has inspired and will inspire meaningful art. What writer-director Jennifer Fox's depiction of her own story of abuse shows us is that the most impactful of that art will come from a place of lived experience. It's not difficult to objectively understand how our faulty memories and our tendency to romanticize the past obscure the trauma that others place upon us. But what makes a film like The Tale necessary to a deeper, more human understanding of the problem is to put us face to face with that cursed process, with personal details both familiar and heartbreaking.
#7 - Counterpart (Starz)
Note: This ranking/capsule only concerns the first season that began in December of 2017 and ended this year. Blame Starz and its weird scheduling.
Earlier this decade, Orphan Black laid down a template of how sci-fi can use the concept of cloning as both a wry commentary on societal issues and a basis for a particularly exciting brand of thriller. The debut season of Counterpart wasn't quite as thrilling or taut as Orphan Black's near-perfect beginning, but its added elements of dystopia and spycraft may serve to make for a more sustainable series over the long term. Furthermore, JK Simmons' subtly detailed performance as the two Howards (as well as the other characters' "counterparts" in the shows' parallel worlds) served to highlight a different thematic note. Instead of commenting more generally on how both nature and nurture combine to shape women's lives, Counterpart highlights how different responses to singular events can lead to radically divergent paths in life. No show was better at purposeful world and character-building in 2018.
#6 - Better Call Saul (AMC)
Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould's Breaking Bad prequel is two shows in one by design. Because Jimmy and Mike take very different paths to becoming the characters we know, separate narratives are all but required. This worked fine until this year, when Mike's story began to lag behind in both momentum and thematic importance (Jonathan Banks is still great, though). Regardless, the story of Jimmy's slow descent into becoming Saul is still worth the price of admission. The attention paid to every detail of Jimmy's suspension and the toll it takes on Kim reinforces how the precision of storytelling in the ABQ universe is second-to-none.
#5 - American Vandal (Netflix)
The second season of faux-documentary American Vandal covers a lot of the same satirical ground as the first, but adds more than enough wrinkles to stay relevant. Instead of working to exonerate a single character (season one's Dylan Maxwell), the show weaves its way through a much more complex situation (rest assured that it remains very funny...they are chasing someone called "The Turd Burgler" after all). None of the new suspects match the story of Dylan in terms of pure tragicomic heft, but the added diversity serves to create a more complete tableau of American youth. And the way the season ends with a (mild spoiler) cheesy lesson about the alienation of modern society is a wonderful sendup of basically every self-serious true crime documentary in existence.
#4 - The Americans (FX)
The final chapter of The Americans fell just short of being my favorite series finale of all time*. That said, I don't think an ending has ever clarified precisely what its show was about as completely as "START." The Americans was many things through the years - a spy thriller, a story about the ebbs and flows of a marriage, and a spry commentary on the socio-political climate of America in the Eighties. But above all, the slow dissolution of the Jennings clan was a tale of how slavish devotion to a cause inevitably leads to alienation. And The Americans pulled no punches delivering this message, as virtually every character "good" or "bad" ended the series in a place far from where they envisioned (sometimes literally). In the end, the real Cold War was the friends we lost along the way.
*It's looking more and more likely that nothing will ever surpass the end of The Shield
#3 - Sorry For Your Loss (Facebook)
It's only appropriate that the website that makes everyone unhappy would bring us one of the best shows about grief. Sorry For Your Loss follows a young widow (the terrific Elizabeth Olsen) and her family and friends in the aftermath of her husband's death. This may sound like an extremely dour setup for a series, but it manages to both master and transcend its subject matter in many ways. It does this in part by steering into the sad moments - instead of the neat and tidy anguish that peppers lesser tearjerkers, Sorry For Your Loss mimics real life and allows it characters to be nakedly, non-judgmentally barely rational in their moments of despair. It also mixes in moments of joy and laughter during both times of progress and backsliding, showing how the march towards recovery is almost never linear in nature. And most importantly, the show functions as a empathetic character study with no better example of this than the best half-hour of the year "17 Unheard Messages," the devastating examination of Matt's last days.
#2 - My Brilliant Friend (HBO)
Saverio Constanzo's adaptation of the first of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels is a number of things, all of them great. On its surface, it's a straightforward yet intimate story of how two girls navigate the perils of their isolated working class neighborhood. Going one layer deeper, it's a thoughtful rumination on the forces, both communal and individual, that subjugate women. And from the perspective of the televisual craft, it's a masterclass in how top-notch direction and acting serve to create truly memorable characters. But what sets My Brilliant Friend apart from the pack is its depiction of the unique friendship of Lenu and Lila. Both girls use their superior intellect to belittle, push, and support each other, but what ultimately keeps them together through the years is how their special bond means that each of them is the only one that truly understands the other. This not only gives the show its heart, but also leads to a "twist" in the finale so subtle and sweet that I feel dirty even calling it a twist.
#1 - Atlanta (FX)
True art in the televisual form necessitates and interplay between thematic purpose and an engaging story. Almost nothing is simultaneously great at both. Donald Glover's Atlanta is the exception. The show's second season remained engrossing and fun, whether it was following along with the burgeoning start rapper Alfred during the longest haircut in television history or sidekick Darius navigating the house of Teddy Perkins (a Michael Jackson stand-in) to get a free piano. All the while, the "Robbin' Season" motif served as a season-long allegory of how American society robs its black citizenry of their agency, dignity, and life. The best compliment I can pay is that I briefly considered making something else #1, and then realized I would feel stupid, so I didn't. Atlanta is the best.
