Ordinary list of best TV shows in abnormal year
Everyone knows that the year 2020 changed everything. What this 10-best list presupposes is: What if it didn’t?
The pandemic naturally disrupted television — talk shows, sports and especially scripted comedy and drama.
But because of the glut of material already in the pipeline when the shutdowns came, my TV retrospective of the year is surprisingly ordinary. There was still too much TV to watch it all, and still too much extraordinary material to whittle down. (In a boom year for limited series, for instance, “Unorthodox,” “The Plot Against America” and “The Queen’s Gambit” missed the cut.)
This also means that you will not get me to create a ranked list. There is not a show I was more awed by this year than “I May Destroy You,” and there was not a show I enjoyed more than “What We Do in the Shadows.” But to weigh these exceptional and very different shows on a scale seems absurd.
Enjoy, instead, this alphabetical list of 10(-ish) great programs, a little ordinary ritual until life resumes its regularly scheduled programming.
“Better Call Saul”(AMC)
The prequel to “Breaking Bad” is television’s most finely rendered slow-motion car crash. You know where this vehicle is pointed: Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) will become Saul Goodman, the loquacious and lizardy legal consigliere to drug kingpins, eventually fleeing into Cinnabon exile. But the beauty is in how exquisitely the pieces fly apart, never better than in season five.
“Better Things”(FX)
Directed by and largely written by Pamela Adlon, who also stars as actress Sam Fox, the fourth season generously explores family, mortality and the ways of being a woman in the world. In the season finale, Sam’s daughter Duke (Olivia Edward) meets a mysterious elderly woman who recounts having had a full life without marrying, telling Duke, “One compliment from a woman is worth a thousand compliments from a man.” Fair enough: “Better Things” is beautiful TV, and I will gladly say it a thousand times.
“City So Real”(National Geographic) and“The Good Lord Bird”(Showtime)
My cheat-tie of the year is an odd couple: a documentary about the 2019 Chicago mayoral election and a miniseries about the abolitionist insurrections of John Brown (Ethan Hawke). Premiering in October, they spoke to each other in a vituperative election year that saw nationwide uprisings for racial justice. Steve James’ “City” captured Chicago as a living, roiling confederacy of neighborhoods separated by class and race. “Good Lord Bird” was a rollicking, picaresque tale of the holy madman and problematic ally Brown, seen through the eyes of the escaped slave Henry (Joshua Caleb Johnson). In both shows, a country teeters on the brink.
“I May Destroy You”(HBO)
Michaela Coel’s revelatory series was to 2020 what season two of “Fleabag” was to 2019: a seamlessly conceived masterwork that is impossible to imagine being written or performed by anyone else. As an author dealing with the aftermath of her hazily remembered rape, Coel is like a juggler keep
ing flaming torches, bowling balls and cream pies in the air, balancing a story that is simultaneously incendiary, weighty and shockingly funny.
“Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!”(Crunchyroll)
Based on a Japanese manga and overseen by Masaaki Yuasa, this smart, spunky anime about anime earned its exclamation point. A trio of high school girls — an eccentric animator, a popular model and a business obsessive — form an anime club, a part-time diversion that soon grows, like a radioactive monster, into an all-consuming obsession. Woven into the let’s-put-on-a-show storyline is one of the best renderings of the creative process I’ve seen on TV and an affecting theme of discovering identity through art.
“Mrs.America”(FXonHulu)
Dahvi Waller’s double-barreled story of the fights for and against the Equal Rights Amendment went a half-century into the past and found today. In the ensemble story of the feminist movement’s advocates, we can see not just the promise (realized and unrealized) of women’s equality but echoes of up-to-the-moment arguments between revolutionaries and pragmatists. In the parallel story of ERA opponent Phyllis Schlafly (Cate Blanchett), there’s a direct line to our era of culture wars and alternative facts.
“Normal People”(Hulu)
This 12-part adaptation was like a warm Instagram filter laid on the black-and-white portraiture of Sally Rooney’s novel of the same name. The series layers on poetic imagery, while Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal connect in a way that makes the central relationship a living character in itself.
“Pen15”(Hulu)
There is a fine line between horror and humor, and that line runs straight through your middle-school years. In the second season of their retrospective comedy, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle handspring down that line like Olympic gymnasts. The seven episodes (intended as the first half of a two-part season that was interrupted by the pandemic) found new depths of cringe and heights of weirdo glee, as its turn-of-the-millennium besties had their friendship tested and found a calling in the school drama club.
“P-Valley”(Starz)
Katori Hall translated her 2015 play “Pussy Valley” into a swaggering melodrama of ambition, building out the stories of the women who command the stage of the Pynk, a threadbare club in Mississippi’s “Dirty Delta” at the center of a web of dreams and schemes. The vibrant dialogue is well-served by the cast. The fuchsia-lit sex appeal may get you in the door, but what keeps you coming back is the show’s devotion to its characters as athletes and strivers, working muscle by muscle to get a leg up.
“What We Do in the Shadows”(FX)
The funniest hangout comedy of 2020 featured no hugging, no learning and no direct exposure to sunlight. The second season of this series, about a clan of decadent vampires living (or unliving) in reduced circumstances on Staten Island, highlighted an elite cast of regulars and well-chosen guests, including Mark Hamill as an undead ex-landlord out for revenge.