The Best TV Series of the Year
Covid made 2020 confusing and sad. These excellent shows provided a much-needed escape
These excellent shows provided a much-needed escape from 2020.
1. Better Call Saul AMC
Just as Breaking Bad’s most iconic moments tended to involve explosions or gunshots, plenty of stuff blew up real good in the prequel’s fifth season. But the parts that have lingered — and made clear that Saul now rivals its parent show — were quieter ones, where the weapons of choice were words, or even pointed fingers. In one of those moments, our beloved lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) lets his inner shyster Saul Goodman slip out, ranting that he’s grown so powerful that “lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips!” In another, dogged Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn, a.k.a. TV’s best dramatic actor) reveals just how much her relationship with Jimmy has corrupted her: Right after she outlines a plan to ruin their ex-boss’s career and cash in, she mimes finger guns at her shocked boyfriend. No show on TV sweats the details more, which in turn make scenes like Jimmy’s or Kim’s speeches play just as big as anything Heisenberg ever did. Saul has become a true classic in the making. 2. Lovecraft Country
HBO
Every other series on this list was far more consistent than this mashup of genres and history about a black family in the 1950s battling horrors both supernatural and painfully real. Lovecraft could
struggle to connect one story point, or horror or sci-fi trope, to the next, and the main plot was never as compelling as its detours. Yet at its very best — a road trip through Jim Crow’s America scored to a James Baldwin speech; Leti ( Jurnee Smollett) smashing up a row of cars owned by racist neighbors; Hippolyta (Aunjanue Ellis) leading a tribe of African warrior women into battle against a Confederate army — Lovecraft aimed higher and hit harder than almost anything else on TV.
3. Brockmire IFC
The pandemic shut down baseball only days before the final-season premiere of this unheralded comedy about a loquacious playby-play man (Hank Azaria, never better) slowly rebuilding his life and career after years of drinking, drugs, and sexual debauchery. (OK, so he never quite left the debauchery behind, and we are all the better for it.) Until MLB resumed, it was hard to ask for a better substitute than these hilarious and poignant concluding eight episodes, set in a dystopian near-future where Jim Brockmire is tasked with saving not only the sport, but the whole American experiment. A gem that viewers will hopefully discover for years to come on Hulu.
4. I May Destroy You HBO
Sometimes, the show of the summer is something light and frothy. This summer it was a dark, tough, 12-episode tour de force about sexual assault. Writer/star/co-director Michaela Coel made the tale of young author Arabella coping with the aftermath of being drugged and raped into a spellbinding, audacious meditation on consent, trauma, and even writer’s block. Where too many modern dramas feel padded and inessential, Coel packed an extraordinary amount of information and ideas into each episode, exploring Arabella’s ordeal not only through the lens of her recovery, but through her friends’ parallel problems. And Coel proved just as arresting in front of the camera as she was inspired behind the scenes.
5. The Good Lord Bird Showtime
Even those who knew that Ethan Hawke had grown into one of our finest actors may not have been ready for his thunderous turn as the violent abolitionist John Brown. And even those who suspected he had a performance like this in him were surely startled by just how funny Hawke made it, as both actor and co-adapter of James McBride’s novel. Bird looked at the blight of American slavery through the lens of dark comedy, as Brown and freed slave Onion ( Joshua Caleb Johnson) tried to lead an uprising against Onion’s oppressors, only for Brown’s many faults to get in the way. A miniseries about slavery shouldn’t be as delightful as it is poignant, yet Hawke made it so.
6. Normal People Hulu
An intensely private tale of romance between a girl and boy who grow up in the same small Irish town, wind up at the same college, and keep drifting in and out of each other’s lives.
Directors Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald worked with Sally Rooney to translate her book in ways that made us just as privy to its young lovers’ conflicted, painful thoughts as if we were reading them on the page. And stars Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal were never less than riveting, allowing the story to take its sweet, uncomfortable time figuring out if these two should stay together.
7. What We Do in the Shadows FX
The vampires at the heart of this mockumentary — housemates on present-day Staten Island — have lived for centuries without learning much about themselves or the world around them. Season Two was even smarter at depicting just how dumb the undead can be. Highlights included energy vampire Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) getting a promotion and reveling in the ability to bore co-workers at mandatory meetings, Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) befriending a doll inhabited by the soul she lost when she got bitten, and Laszlo, on the run from a rival vamp, posing as a “regular human bartender” named Jackie Daytona. A blessedly silly respite.
8. We Are Who We Are HBO
Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino made a gorgeous transition to television with this tale of two teenagers ( Jack Dylan Grazer and dazzling newcomer Jordan Kristine Seamón) becoming friends — and possibly more — while growing up on a U.S. Army base in Italy. Blurring boundaries of gender, sexuality, and age — the parents, led by Chloë Sevigny’s base commander, could be more immature than the kids — We
Are Who We Are contrasted its messy story with some of the year’s most stunning images and musical choices.
9. How to With John Wilson HBO
Each episode of this docucomedy series purports to follow filmmaker Wilson as he explains aspects of everyday life, like making small talk or splitting a restaurant check. Mostly, though, it’s about the digressions, which can be explosively funny, tragic, or both. Wilson’s quest to get a chair fitted with a protective cover somehow leads him to discuss the movie Parasite with a man who’s naked from the waist down and demonstrating a machine he built to restore foreskin; his attempt in the season finale to make his immigrant landlady some risotto instead turns into a heartbreaking portrait of the moment when Covid first hit New York. It’s tough to explain, but a joy to experience.
10. Pen15 Hulu
The gimmick in this comedy’s first season was that thirtysomething co-creators Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle were playing themselves as 13-year-olds, opposite actual middle schoolers. In the second, the illusion became so convincing that it was easy to watch whole episodes without being reminded of the age gap. Some of Pen15’ s humor went away as a result, but the series became an even more emotionally rich and satisfying study of adolescent turmoil, as the “girls” coped with unrequited crushes, parents divorcing, and threats to their friendship. An amusing show that’s matured into an excellent one.