TV 10 Best Shows of 2020 So Far
In any year, these series would be champs. During life in lockdown, they’ve been saviors
In any year, these series would be champs. During lockdown, when bingeing has replaced all the things we used to do outside, they’ve been saviors.
Arguably nothing has sustained us through quarantine like television, as binges old and new replace the many activities we used to do when it was safe to go outside. But with the COVID-19 shutdown of Hollywood entering its fifth month, the “new” side of that equation is about to change. While the big streamers like Netflix have some shows stockpiled, it could be lean times for broadcast and cable networks for a bit. (Don’t expect planned new seasons of Succession and Fargo, among many others, anytime soon.) If Peak TV becomes a barren valley for the rest of 2020, this list of the year’s best to date might be just as valid in December — but these shows are so damn good, it might not matter.
1. Better Call Saul
AMC
The Breaking Bad prequel had long been two shows running on parallel tracks: amiable shyster Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) building a legal career while romancing unflappable lawyer Kim (Rhea Seehorn), and ex-cop Mike ( Jonathan Banks) slowly immersing himself in the local drug game run by Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). In Season Five, the two storylines finally started intersecting and eventually merged, including a couple of gripping encounters between Kim and charismatic cartel boss Lalo (Tony Dalton, a fantastic late addition to the franchise). Suddenly, no corner of the show is safe, with the notion that Kim could be the one to break bad — maybe even worse than when sketchy-but-decent scam artist Jimmy turns into heartless consigliere Saul Goodman full-time — an idea as exciting as it is terrifying. The tale of Walter White going from teacher to kingpin may be more inherently thrilling than Jimmy’s transformation, but after spending nearly 15 years in this world, the Saul creative team has only gotten better at telling its stories — meaning Saul now rivals, and at times surpasses, its legendary parent.
2. Brockmire
IFC
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel . . . amused? The Hank Azaria baseball comedy jumped ahead to 2030 for its final season, presenting a pre-apocalyptic future that was simultaneously horrifying and reassuring. On the one hand, it’s a period when the planet has been ravaged by climate change and economic inequality has grown so severe that professional baseball telecasts feature ads offering to euthanize people so their organs can be harvested to pay off their crippling debt from predatory loans. On the other, baseball is at least still being played, sort of, with Jim Brockmire made commissioner in a last-ditch bid to save the sport — and, by extension, America. Tragic and hilarious (see this description of the iconic Law & Order actor Jerry Orbach: “Imagine if a loaf of rye bread came to life and started arresting everybody”) in equal measure.
3. Normal People
Hulu
Boy meets girl. Boy loves girl but messes everything up. Boy and girl keep reconnecting, as friends and/or lovers, as they grow into adulthood. No, the broad strokes
of this miniseries version of Sally Rooney’s bestseller — where the boy is small-town Irish jockturned-writer Connell (Paul Mescal) and the girl is his classmate, nerd-turned-queen-bee Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) — aren’t anything new. But the execution by Rooney and her collaborators (including directors Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald) makes Normal People feel achingly specific to this couple, their profound connection — never has the sound of two people breathing been a more crucial part of a television show — and the reasons why Happily Ever After keeps proving so elusive. Intimate and unforgettable.
4. My Brilliant Friend: The Story of a New Name
HBO
Few shows in television history offer scenery quite as beautiful, let alone as lushly photographed, as this continuing adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. But those gorgeous seascapes and piazzas are harshly contrasted by the ugliness in the foreground, both between former childhood best friends Lenu (Margherita Mazzucco) and Lila (Gaia Girace) and between each young woman and the many horrible men in their lives. Where the adventurous Lila found herself trapped in a bad marriage to a temperamental gangster she did not love, Lenu willfully blinded herself to her friend’s suffering and to how useless and small all these guys are. Each episode is sad, angry, wistful, and poetic. Consider this series one of the great treasures of the more-international model of television that’s developed over the past few years.
5. Better Things
FX
The first three years of Pamela Adlon’s autobiographical dramedy portrayed her alter ego Sam as a saintly single mother whose daughters had turned out to be insufferable despite her best efforts. Season Four finally saw Sam’s heroic efforts paying off with all three girls; as they matured, they found their concern turning toward their mom as she grappled with a midlife crisis that seemed more suited to her useless ex-husband. (She even replaced her minivan with a muscle car!) An absolute gem that continues to make the smallest moments overflow with big emotion.
6. Ramy
Hulu
Ramy Hassan the character has a vague idea about what he wants out of life — to be a better Muslim, and thus a better person — and very little idea of how to accomplish that goal. Ramy Youssef — who plays the fictional Ramy and helps write and direct his misadventures — has a crystal-clear idea how he and his collaborators should tell Ramy’s story in one of TV’s most consistently remarkable half-hours. Season Two added the great Mahershala Ali as Ramy’s new spiritual guru, who didn’t realize until it was far too late that he had taken on an enormous fixer-upper. The series remains just as potent, if not more so, when its title character takes a back seat to his family and friends, so that Ramy never feels like one narrow snapshot of being Muslim American, but a much wider and more complicated tapestry.
7. Little America
Apple TV+
Easily the best of Apple’s early entries into the streaming wars, this anthology series tells stories of American immigrants that in any given moment can be heartwarming or heartbreaking, and often both at the same time. There’s the spelling-bee champ forced to run his family’s Utah motel while his parents are sent to India to re-petition for asylum. The Nigerian-born college student who styles himself as a cowboy to make friends in Oklahoma. The gay Syrian refugee who finds a new home in Idaho. With each episode, the series finds lovely new ways to illustrate the American dream, even as its heroes and heroines have to make do with the more complex reality they found when they got here.
8. The Good Place
NBC
Like Netflix’s BoJack Horseman, The Good Place only aired a handful of episodes this year while concluding its run. They just happened to be among this great series’ most wonderful, kind, ridiculous, and hopeful installments, as Team Cockroach figured out how to fix the afterlife and make all of reality a whole lot more fair and happy. (If only our own world were that easy to fix!) If you need a minute to compose yourself after thinking about the lovely final sequence — which somehow summed up the meaning of life with the phrase “Take it sleazy” — we can wait till whenever you’re ready.
9. High Fidelity
Hulu
A very high bar was set for the Zoë Kravitz vehicle, which is based on a beloved book (by
Nick Hornby) that was already translated into a beloved film (with John Cusack). But as a record-store owner navigating various romantic failures,
Kravitz was just so charismatic, and the chemistry between her and shop employees played by David H. Holmes and Da’Vine Joy Randolph so joyous, that it felt like the best kind of cover song: one that only increases your appreciation of the original, even as you hear new things in it for the first time in years. In a half-year where Hulu established itself as the most essential TV streaming service (if you haven’t yet, also check out Devs, Dave, and The Great), High Fidelity became perhaps its most purely fun original.
10. What We Do in the Shadows
FX
This mockumentary about a trio of vampires (Matt Berry, Natasia Demetriou, Kayvan Novak) living on Staten Island — along with a superhumanly dull “energy vampire” (Mark Proksch) and a human familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) — remains the exact kind of stupidity we need in these scary times. Season Two hit absurd new highs (or lows, depending on your point of view), including Guillermo grappling with the discovery that he was literally born to kill the undead, the vamps mistaking their neighbor’s Super Bowl party for a “superb owl party,” and, especially, Berry’s Laszlo turning fugitive and adopting a new identity as small-town bartender and girls’ volleyball enthusiast Jackie Daytona. (Even better: His “disguise” is a toothpick, and it actually works!) As explosively funny a half-hour as you can find.