The 10 best television shows of the year so far
Michael Hogan picks his favourite dramas, comedies and documentaries of 2020
This has been a strange, sad year but hey, at least we’re now halfway through it. With the live arts put on pause, we’ve never relied on our TVS more for cultural nourishment. With so many channels and streaming services, though, it’s easy to miss the good stuff. Here we count down our 10 favourite shows of 2020 so far, along with where you can find them.
10. The Windermere Children (BBC Two, January)
The year got off to a strong start with this one-off drama telling the little-known story of 305 orphaned Jewish children, rescued from concentration camps, who began new lives in the Lake District in summer 1945. The compassionate story of survival by writer Simon
Block and director Michael Samuels was beautifully made and deeply moving – culminating in a breathtaking ending, when the excellent Polish teen actors were suddenly replaced by their real-life counterparts: still alive, telling us about their happy and fulfilled lives. Poignant, optimistic and timely too, airing 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz.
How to watch it: Amazon Prime Video (£3.49 to rent, £12.99 on DVD) 9. This Country
(BBC Three, February-march) The Cotswolds comedy by siblings Daisy May and Charlie Cooper has been the best mockumentary since The Office. Its third and final series saw bickering bumpkin cousins Kerry and Kurtan Mucklowe capturing the banality of rural life – and viewers’ hearts with it. The ending was noteperfect, especially the knowing line when
Kerry admitted she’d never seen the documentary series she’d been starring in: “It’s not really my sort of thing.” Our pick of a solid six months for home-grown comedy, with The Trip to Greece, The Other One, Breeders, Feel Good, Sex Education and Inside No 9 all on funny form too. How to watch it: BBC iplayer
8. The Last Dance (Netflix, Aprilmay)
Netflix has enjoyed a docu-series hot streak, with college cheerleader series Cheer and water cooler true-crime hit Tiger King also winning acclaim this spring. Pick of the bunch was this bewitching 10-parter about the Chicago Bulls during their late Nineties pomp. You needn’t be a basketball fan to savour this sporting soap opera. Packed with slow motion slam dunks, introspective interviews and power politics, it’s beautifully edited and fairly pulsates with passion. A documentary as great as its protagonist, the sociopathically single-minded Michael “Air” Jordan.
How to watch it: Netflix
7. Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads (BBC One, June) Bennett’s masterful monologues are ideally suited to socially distanced production, hence the BBC smartly commissioning their current revival. Ten classics were remade by director Nicholas Hytner, while Bennett, at 86, polished up another two that had never been performed; An Ordinary Woman, starring Sarah Lancashire as a mother besotted with her 15-year-old son, is the searing standout. Scalpelsharp writing and A-list acting talent combine brilliantly. Just like first time around, it’s the mature women who shine brightest: Imelda Staunton, Kristin Scott Thomas, Harriet Walter and Lesley Manville.
How to watch it: BBC iplayer
6. Grayson’s Art Club (Channel 4, April-june) Cross-dressing potter Grayson Perry has become one of TV’S most fascinating documentary-makers, but he was in relaxed, freewheeling form for this endearingly chaotic art class from his home studio in north London. Viewers and VIP guests joined in over Zoom as benign presence Perry and his psychotherapist wife Philippa coaxed out our collective creativity and tried to bring the nation together through art. Informal, inspiring and a surprise treat at the peak of the covid crisis.
How to watch it: All 4
5. My Brilliant Friend (Sky Atlantic, June-present)
A subtitled saga set in post-war Naples might sound like hard work on paper but it’s so gorgeous and gripping on screen, you soon lose yourself in the travails of heroines Lenu and Lila. Adapting Elena Ferrante’s beloved, bestselling Neapolitan novels about a complex, decades-long female friendship was a daunting challenge but this high-class HBO production pulls it off with cinematic style. The sublime second series has just begun. How to watch it: Currently airing on Sky Atlantic and Now TV 4. I May Destroy You
(BBC One, June-present)
The formidably multitalented Michaela Coel, who won two Baftas for semi-autobiographical sitcom Chewing Gum, has now miraculously turned her own rape trauma into this genredefying triumph. Exploring issues of sexual consent from multiple viewpoints, you might expect it to be grim but it’s anything but. It’s a vibrant comedy-drama about friendship and family, social media and messy millennial angst, driven along by idiosyncratic dark humour and exhilarating energy. Astonishingly bold and assured, it deserves to be an award-garlanded phenomenon.
How to watch it: Episodes 1-8 on BBC iplayer, episodes 9-12 air on BBC One over the next fortnight
3. The Salisbury Poisonings (BBC One, June)
A deadly invisible threat. A city centre in lockdown. Desperate efforts to test, track and trace. The immersive three-parter about 2018’s Novichok nerve agent attack on UK soil could hardly have felt more resonant. Approaching the story not as a spy thriller but a human drama about everyday heroes dealing with the aftermath was a masterstroke, surely influenced by last year’s superlative Chernobyl. Anne-marie Duff stole the show as public health director Tracy Daszkiewicz, but the ensemble cast were uniformly excellent. Pulling in more than 10m viewers, it became the BBC’S biggest new drama since Bodyguard.
How to watch it: BBC iplayer
2. Normal People
(BBC Three/bbc One, April)
The agonisingly intense rendering of Sally Rooney’s novel about first love between class-divided Irish teenagers might just be TV’S best literary adaptation in years. Daisy Edgar-jones excelled as privileged-but-brittle
Marianne, while Paul Mescal delivered a star-making turn as tongue-tied, working-class romantic Connell. Notching record-breaking streaming figures for the BBC, it clearly struck an emotional chord with viewers of all ages.
How to watch it: BBC iplayer
1. Quiz (ITV, April)
Sure? Confident? Yes, final answer. Our show of 2020 so far is the irresistibly entertaining three-part dissection of the infamous “Coughing Major” cheating scandal on megabucks game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Written by playwright James Graham and directed by Stephen Frears as a glossy, giddy romp, it raced along like a heist movie. Which, in a very British way, it was. Matthew Macfadyen bumbled brilliantly as jackpot winner Major Charles Ingram, Fleabag’s Sian Clifford was superb as his stern wife Diana and Michael Sheen added host Chris Tarrant to his gallery of uncanny impersonations.
How to watch it: