Television has evolved substantially over the last twenty years, both in the content on screen and how that content is delivered. Weekly sitcoms have become bingeable streaming products, episodic cop dramas have become serialized miniseries, 22-episode seasons have become “ten hour movies.” We seem to have entered and left at least three “TV Golden Ages” in the past decade. And with the rapid decline of linear networks and the over-saturation of streaming, it’s inevitable that the medium is about to change again. But the one thing about television that has remained stedfast is where we watch it: at home. This year, we’ve collectively spent more time at home than perhaps any other year in human history. And television was there to keep us company through the solitude—to make us laugh, to bring us comfort and instill a sense of normalcy, as thin as it may sometimes be. It was a tall task, one that television was not always up this year. But it tried its damndest under some incredibly trying circumstances. Here were ten shows that rose to the occasion.
10. Jeopardy!
Network: Syndicated Signature Episode: The Greatest of All Time, Game 4
I suppose I could have used this spot to talk about Curb Your Enthusiasm or I May Destroy You or Industry or High Fidelity or ZeroZeroZero or The Last Dance or any of the other wonderful shows that just missed my top ten. But with Alex Trebek’s death still fresh in my mind, I found it worth mentioning that I’ve spent more hours of my life watching Jeopardy than just about anything, meaning, I’ve spent more hours with Alex Trebek than just about anyone. In many ways, the sadness I felt in early November was not just for the tragic death of a lovely person, but for the end of an era and the disruption of normalcy. In two weeks, when Alex’s pre-taped episodes finish airing, I won’t be able to turn my television on at 7:00pm, catch the tail end of ABC World News and be lulled in by the voice of Canada’s favorite television emcee. I’ll still watch Jeopardy with semi-regularity, hosted by LeVar Burton or George Stephanopoulos or whoever ends up behind the podium permanently. But it won’t be Jeopardy. A small portion of my universe has been removed from existence, and I’ll have to learn to live with that. This has been a year of many such changes, some more significant than others. A year of reteaching seemingly banal tasks, a year of relearning how to live. And it’s been mentally and emotionally draining on all of us. But this year, I chose to take comfort in the last gasps of normalcy left at my disposal. And watching the greatest game show presenter of all time read Daily Doubles, banter with Ken Jennings and reveal answers to life’s most difficult questions one last time was the perfect remedy.
9. The Outsider
Network: HBO Signature Episode: Fish in a Barrel
Here’s a strange combo: hardboiled crime novelist Richard Price—the writer behind Spike Lee’s Clockers, Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money, HBO’s The Night Of and several seasons of The Wire—and populist horror icon Stephen King—who occasionally attempts crime fiction, but usually can’t help but throw in a ghost or a vampire or some shit. Sprinkle in some Jason Bateman, who has picked up some nifty directorial flourishes from his days in the Ozarks, and you’ve got The Outsider. Equal parts horror and police procedural, B-movie in premise but glossy HBO drama in execution. The terrifically chilly Ben Mendelsohn plays Detective Ralph Anderson, who is tasked with investigating the murder of a young boy in town. Terry Maitland (played by Bateman) seems like a shoo-in for the crime, but as the case unfolds—and with the help of private investigator Holly Gibney, played by the insanely overqualified Cynthia Erivo—Ralph learns that it’s not so open-and-shut and that supernatural forces may be to blame. I’ll admit, as the King-ness of it all revealed itself in the latter episodes, the show kind of lost me. But in the front half of the season, the combination of King’s cinematic instincts and Price’s meticulous, dialogue-driven style was a match made in heaven (or wherever El Coco is from).
8. The Comedy Store
Network: Showtime Signature Episode: The Wild Bunch
Stand-up nerds like myself will find more than enough interesting nuggets in this five-hour documentary to satiate their appetite. Tales of the cantankerous Mitzi Shore, the herculean Richard Pryor, the comedy strike of 1979, the suicide of Freddie Prinze, the feud between young Joe Rogan and notorious joke thief Carlos Mencia. The layman may hear these stories and roll their eyes at the petty drama, snicker at the fragile egomaniacs and pity the drug-addled rebels who used the Comedy Store as an outlet to stunt their own development. And all this talk of spots, bits, sets and acts may come across as too inside baseball. But when it comes to documentary filmmaking, the only place to find the story is inside. And director Mike Binder, a veteran comic from the early days of the Store, understands the venerable comedy club in a way no objective documentary crew ever could. It’s a story told by the people who lived it, as they’re the only ones who can tell it right. It’s the best kind of love letter—nostalgic, regretful, deferential, but always true. Come for the deep bench of talking heads: David Letterman, Jim Carrey, Andrew Dice Clay, Michael Keaton—they got everybody. Stay for the powerful moments, like when comic Carl LaBove recounts the story of Sam Kinison’s fatal car crash. As personal and riveting as any scripted series you’ll see this year.
7. How To with John Wilson
Network: HBO Signature Episode: How to Cover Your Furniture
About three episodes into my binge of How To with John Wilson, I decided to circumvent HBO’s autoplay feature and stick around for the credits. And what I saw can only be described as a betrayal. “Field Producer,” “Production Manager,” “Post-Production Supervisor,” “Assistant Director,” “Second Assistant Director,” “Sound Mixer,” “Dialogue Editor,” “Editor,” “Assistant Editor,” “Colorist,” “Injest & Proxies Technician” and about a dozen camera operators. Wait…there’s, like, a whole crew of people who work on this show? It’s not just a guy with a camera shooting shit outside of his apartment? How can this be? And more importantly, why? Understand, I meant this as a compliment. How To is a more expensive version of the short films documentarian John Wilson had been uploading to Vimeo since 2009. Executive producer Nathan Fielder (of Nathan for You fame and esteemed member of another top 10 list) was an admirer of the shorts and helped Wilson develop the idea into a television show. And what they ended up with is part documentary, part journal, part video essay and part nature show (or as Fielder describes it, Planet Earth for New York City). Much like Nathan for You, the draw of How To is a bit difficult to articulate with words. But for a fairly big HBO production, I was stunned by how the crew was able to showcase Wilson’s idiosyncrasies and keep the show within his specific point of view. Give it look and marvel at its hypnotic effect.
6. The Mandalorian
Network: Disney+ Signature Episode: Chapter 13: The Jedi
One of the initial charms of The Mandalorian—at least for those of us burnt out by Kathleen Kennedy’s cinematic universe—was how self-contained it all felt. Coming off of three erratic Star Wars sequels that insisted on keeping the stakes high and bringing unwelcome characters back from the dead, a space western in the vein John Ford’s 3 Godfathers and Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo felt like the perfect comedown from a very unpleasant high. Sure, there was an adorable little puppet that bore a striking resemblance to a classic character. But gone were the lightsabers, the Death Stars, the onerous questions of Rey’s parentage and Luke’s fate. This was to be a space western, rather than a space opera. Mandalorian was certainly Star Wars, but only in vibe. Well…that was fun while it lasted. One year later and Mando has gone from Lucasfilm’s intriguing side project to the primary delivery system of all Star Wars content. Not that I’m surprised; it is Disney we’re talking about. But I’ve got to imagine that even the most hardcore fanboys were a little shocked at the TEN Star Wars projects announced on Disney’s Investor Day, three of them direct spin-offs of Mandalorian. Am I worried about the future of this show and, more broadly, the future of this franchise? Moderately. But I won’t kid myself: the Ahsoka Tano episode exhilarated me, fat Boba Fett kicked so much ass and the season’s final reveal—although a bit of an overplay—elicited a leap and fist pump in my bedroom. For now, I’ll swallow my cynicism and choose to enjoy it.
5. Normal People
Network: Hulu Signature Episode: Episode 8
Two sexually charged Irish kids fall in and out of love in this half-hour drama, based on the best-selling novel by Sally Rooney and directed by Lenny Abrahamson. When Normal People hit Hulu back in April, much fuss was made about the explicit sex scenes featuring the two (very fetching) leads Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. And although these scenes are exquisitely crafted, the temptation was certainly there to cast off the show as steamy paperback fare. But when I look back on Normal People‘s entire run, I am just as struck by the quiet, fully-clothed moments as am I by the not-so-clothed ones. Through knowing gazes, subtle gestures and few words, Abrahamson is able to capture the intimacy of a college relationship in a way that I’ve never quite seen on film before. All the credit goes to Jones and Mescal for going places few actors are (pardon the cliché) brave enough to go. I was about as emotionally invested in the ballad of Marianne and Connell as any piece of art this year.
4. The Plot Against America
Network: HBO Signature Episode: Part 6
Screenwriters like to think big. All writers do, actually. It comes back to English class. While the rest of us googled the plots of the great American novels, the future writers in class took careful note of what Golding, Orwell, Hemingway and Steinbeck were up to. They learned about fascism from a bunch of kids on an island, Marxism from a bunch of talking pigs, the passion of the Christ from a tired old fishmen and the mirage of the American dream from some rabbit-loving ranchers. And drilled into these teacher’s pets was one fundamental idea: art exists to transform the micro into the macro. Except for David Simon. The miracle of Simon’s television work—from The Wire to Treme to Show Me a Hero—is that they take big ideas like race, class, political corruption and income inequality and shrink them down to the human level. His work is not usually allegorical. No one character represents something larger and no plot has higher stakes than those specifically related to the characters on screen. His primary concern is how larger-than-life problems affect the lives of the small, transforming the macro into the micro. With this in mind, it’s hard to see Simon as a natural choice to adapt Phillip Roth’s 2004 novel about an alternate history where Charles Lindbergh became president. It’s a high concept story, detailing the rise of fascism at the tail end of World War II, with high stakes and massive consequences felt around the world. Not really David Simon’s bag. But his constant commitment to going small, to finding the micro in the vast sea of macro, adds new dimensions to the story that not even Philip Roth could have imagined. By focusing the narrative on a single Jewish family and showing the specific consequences of the geopolitical landscape on their lives, Simon is able to communicate broad ideas about a fictional universe with the attention to detail he picked up in his journalism days. Beware, there are more than a few Donald Trump analogies to make you roll your eyes. But the political commentary is grounded enough to pack a serious punch.
3. Small Axe
Network: BBC/Amazon Signature Episode: Lovers Rock
Undoubtably, you’ve seen a few episodes of Steve McQueen’s anthology on many end-of-year movie lists. And had I taken them into consideration for my own top 10, episodes one and two (“Mangrove” and “Lovers Rock”) would have both made the cut. But I have taken the radical opinion that television is television and movies are movies. And since Small Axe is a television show, it by definition cannot be a movie. I don’t mean to sound so dismissive. Because I do understand where the cinephiles are coming from. Part of the temptation to call Small Axe a series of films rather than episodes comes from an age-old adage: that film is a director’s medium and that television is a writer’s medium. Past anthology shows like The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror were just as self-contained as Small Axe. But because their chief auteurs were writers, not directors, it was easy to throw them into the trash heap of TV. Indeed, Small Axe is nothing if not a director’s showcase for Steve McQueen, who is able to direct the shit out of fairly routine subject matter. The most obvious, yet instructive, parallel is between the episode “Mangrove” and Aaron Sorkin’s film Trial of the Chicago 7. Both are period courtroom dramas, and both center around the legal proceedings of a group of protesters. But Sorkin does not have McQueen’s cinematic instincts. And with a few subtle tricks behind the camera, McQueen is able to elicit so much more out of, essentially, the same material. This is to say nothing of “Lovers Rock,” a truly unconventional hour unlike anything I’ve seen before. There is little McQueen can’t do on both the big screen and small. And Small Axe has given him his largest and most varied canvas to date.
2. The Queen’s Gambit
Network: Netflix Signature Episode: Adjournment
What a beautiful, bizarre aberration that a period piece about a chess prodigy stayed atop Netflix’s top 10 list for two months and became the streamer’s highest rated limited series ever. I can’t help but laugh when I picture two lascivious twenty-somethings curling up for a Netflix-and-chill sesh, only to stumble upon a quiet, Cold War era drama, forcing them to take a break from their copulation to google the term “Sicilian Defense.” But according to some flimsy internal metrics, this very scenario happened around 62 million times. Anya Taylor-Joy is a marvel as the drug-abusing orphan Beth Harman, navigating her way to the top of the chess world. But writer/director Scott Frank (the Hollywood veteran behind Out of Sight, Minority Report, Logan and the Netflix limited series Godless) emerges as The Queen’s Gambit’s true star. It’s a miracle that Frank is able to film any chess match in a creative way. But it’s downright ludicrous that he’s able to do it over a dozen times, without repeating any tricks or becoming visually stale. The level of detail in the filmmaking—from the costume design to the score to the editing of montages—is so precise and so deliberate, it’s easy to ignore while impossible to look away.
1. Better Call Saul
Network: AMC Signature Episode: Bad Choice Road
Let’s not overthink this. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the new and exciting. But no television show this year was as consistently excellent episode to episode as the fifth season of Better Call Saul. We’re heading into year thirteen of the Breaking Bad universe. And although Saul’s sixth season will be its last, I have a hard time believing it will be the last hours we spend in the Albuquerque criminal underworld. Somehow, there are still stories left to tell. Which is insane, considering this prequel series is about to surpass the length of its parent show, a show widely considered to be one of the all-time greats. Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould and the rest of the Saul writers continue to produce at an unfairly high level, still discovering new dimensions to their characters and still mining drama out of seemingly superfluous material. Five seasons in, Saul has finally paid off its slow burn and ratcheted up the tension in its finest set of episodes yet. “Bagman”—a bottle episode with Saul and Mike stranded in the desert—collected most of the praise this year, on account of some thrilling set pieces and Gilligan’s masterful direction. But I’d point you to the following episode, “Bad Choice Road”, as the season’s crowned jewel—featuring the most nerve-wracking scene of the entire series. Again, how they’re able to get my blood pressure up when I already know how the show ends is a mystery I’ll never fully unravel. Two massive golf claps to Tony Dalton, who injected new life into this season with a truly volatile villain, and Rhea Seehorn, who continues to deliver the best performance on television no matter what the Emmys say. A safe choice for my number one spot? Perhaps. But one spot lower and I’d be a bigger liar than Jimmy McGill.
Smartest guy in the room, dumbest guy outside of it.
