The 10 Best TV Shows of 2019
We’re weeks away from Christmas, which means the arrival of a flurry of end-of-year coverage from your favourite angry film and tv blog. The first major feature is my less-than esteemed Best TV Shows Of The Year list: the ten shows from broadcast, cable and streaming that inspired, amused and entertained me the most during the past 12 months.
Shows I watched this year that just weren’t good enough: A Series of Unfortunate Events, Game of Thrones, Arrested Development, Big Mouth, True Detective, 9–1–1, Silicon Valley, The Morning Show, The Righteous Gemstones, The Mandalorian, Modern Love
Shows I missed this year: His Dark Materials, When They See Us, Russian Doll, Servant, Unbelievable, Mindhunter, Euphoria, Pose, PEN15
Netflix’s autism-based family dramedy remains the most singularly endearing and gentle original show on their platform, its ensemble (Keir Gilchrist, Brigette Lundy Paine, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michael Rapaport) terribly underrepresented in Emmy voting lists ever year. A show about discomfort and difficulty that always makes an incredibly pleasurable watch.
Meryl Streep screaming at the dinner table and Laura Dern smashing her husband’s precious model trains with a baseball bat: Big Little Lies’ second season was engineered as ideal meme bait. In that sense, it’s a resounding success, and provided a healthy supply of Twitter content for the dull summer months. Otherwise, it’s a dramatic step back from the smart first season, thematically unclear and remarkably low-stakes. Yet this group of actresses could never be less than entertaining.
Kathryn Hahn has previously irked me in a variety of unsuitable roles, but with Tom Perrotta adaptation Mrs. Fletcher she finds a character that’s perfect for her energy. As a single mother embracing her middle-aged individualism when her young son moves away to college (and finds his own serious misogyny confronted), Hahn dominates. The series explores the grey areas of sexual energy and modern feminism to engaging effect, with a supporting cast that includes wonderful trans actress Jen Richards.
With this aggressively timely BBC drama, Russell T. Davies applies his distinct brand of socially inquisitive melodrama to the current state of global political instability. The series follows a diverse English family and the trials they face over an extended period as a result of Brexit, a Trump-initiated nuclear war, the dawn of AI and more. It’s profoundly heavy-handed in its lecturing and sometimes enters the realm of parody with its message of doom and gloom, but there are genuinely stunning moments scattered throughout: for example the visceral depiction of Russell Tovey’s character — a young gay council worker — being smuggled through Europe with hundreds of asylum seekers. It shouldn’t take a show about white English people to help an audience understand the struggle of global refugees, but sometimes a story like this can be powerful in helping to shape people’s perspectives and perhaps change their minds.
Decades from now, we will look back and recall how we — as a cultural community — failed Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. The spiritual successor to 30 Rock’s “live action cartoon” vibe, Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s Netflix comedy was the closest an adult sitcom has gotten to the cheery kindness of Spongebob Squarepants and its final season did not disappoint. If you’ve never given this show a chance, the holiday period is your opportunity to binge it.
It takes masterful craft of storytelling to channel horrifying tragedy into highly addictive TV, but writer Craig Mazin achieved excellence in this regard with this gripping dramatisation of the 1986 nuclear disaster that finds humanity and heroism in the horror. The series follows Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgaard’s characters, a nuclear physicist and a government minister, as they travel to the site of the power plant where science clashes with state. Though full of gruesome insight into the personal tragedies that occurred, there are qualities of warmth in the characters — predominantly based upon real people — who exhibit strength and professionalism in a particularly dark historical moment.
The cultural impact of Fleabag as a cultural bellwether for sexually outspoken young women cannot be overstated: Phoebe Waller Bridge has constructed for herself a prime position as an icon of frustrated, unreserved millennial femininity. The acclaimed second season of her BBC series added Andrew Scott’s now infamous “hot priest” into the mix, as Waller Bridge’s titular heroine is forced to grapple with her complicated attitudes towards romantic relationships, as well as the fact that a Catholic priest is hardly ideal boyfriend material.
Watchmen sees Damon Lindelof take Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel and creates something entirely modern and traumatising. Set in an alternate American present where police wear masks and African-American communities have been awarded reparations for slavery (by four-term President Robert Redford), it’s a highly postmodern response to the past two decades of superheroic saturation, analysing the logistics of a vigilante-run justice system while exploring the mystery of a comic-book narrative, that borrows both from one of the medium’s true classics, and from some forgotten and grim pockets of American political history.
After years in development, John Green’s novel finally made it to the screen this year with a Hulu miniseries that’s been bizarrely overlooked by young viewers given that it’s one of the most moving, charming and fabulously-soundtracked teen dramas in recent times. Charlie Plummer stars as awkward aspiring intellectual Miles, who transfers to a boarding school where pranksters run riot, and he meets the enigmatic Alaska (Kristine Froseth), falling madly in, something a lot like, love. The series takes its time in adapting Green’s novel with a pace a feature film could never have managed; it’s a testament to the opportunities offered in the age of streaming television for novelistic storytelling that appeals deeply to modern adolescence and the very specific emotional trials of discovering yourself away from the comforts of home.
HBO’s Succession kicked off its second season with high expectations and exceeded them almost instantly: the sharply-scripted black comedy following a billionaire media mogul and his clan of eccentric children as they take on company takeovers, whistleblower scandals and a disastrous presidential campaign has rapidly developed a reputation for its hilarious writing and equally funny acting. Yet this season managed to achieve moments of genuinely dark emotional clarity as Jeremy Strong’s Kendall is faced with the trauma of a drug-fuelled tragedy from the end of season one. Consistently surprising and hugely meme-friendly, Succession seeks humanity in Trumpite corporatism. It doesn’t find any.
