Small screen: Forgive yourself
Watching television in 2019 is all about forgiveness — and the first person you need to forgive is yourself. Accept that there are simply not enough hours in the year for any reasonable person with a balanced life to have watched every big, talked-about, must-see, “important” show out there.
If you didn’t watch Chernobyl or Succession or Watchmen or Russian Doll or The Chronicles of Baby Yoda (formerly The Mandalorian) the week they came out, it can feel like it’s too late to start now. But they’re all still there on their respective streaming platforms; and they’re all still as good as the day they were released. What’s stopping you?
Be open to the possibility that deep down you simply don’t want to watch them. Listen to your heart, let it choose what to watch next. Forgive yourself if you finally gave up on The Handmaid’s Tale this year. Notice how the world still turns. While we’re here, let’s also forgive ourselves for our half-hearted attempts at the Konmari tidying method at the start of the year. Forgive ourselves for killing
Dad in Netflix’s interactive Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (whatever happened to Netflix’s interactive TV revolution?) — we had to do it.
Now that our own consciences are clear we can begin to forgive others. Maybe we can even forgive the Game of Thrones creators for making a final season that seemed to be universally hated by just about every fan in the world — that’s actually quite an impressive feat when you think about it. Forgive Phoebe Waller-bridge for making the second series of Fleabag so good it kind of ruined all other TV for us, then drawing a line under the show after just 12 episodes.
Forgive whoever’s in charge of curating our increasingly sprawling number of streaming options for somehow missing the two best British comedies at the moment — Stath Lets Flats and This Country — and two of the best new US comedies of the year in The Other Two and Shrill. There’s still Pen15, Derry Girls, Sex Education …
There’s more to watch in 2019 than any of us know what to do with but two shows stand out as the year’s most essential new TV and both have forgiveness at their heart.
The four-part Netflix miniseries When They See Us told the story of the five young black men wrongfully convicted for a brutal attack on a jogger in Central Park in 1989, spanning the day of their arrests and the trial to their fight to clear their names and eventual release from prison. Another Netflix miniseries, Unbelievable, was based on the investigation into a series of rape cases in Washington and Colorado from 2008 to 2011, focusing on one teenage victim was initially charged with lying about her assault.
In an entertainment landscape saturated with varying standards of true crime, these two shows represented a step up and a step forward. They’re the ones most worth catching up on before starting 2020 with a clean TV slate.