It’s that time of year again, folks: time for another Best-of-the-Year list. I sincerely hope that your favorite show pops up on this list somewhere. Happy reading.
10. “Better Call Saul” (Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould)
I’ve had to wrestle with a uniquely first-world dilemma while digesting this last season of “Better Call Saul”: a show that, in its fourth season, is as relaxed in its rhythms and poised in its execution as any prestige drama currently on-air. Four seasons in and “Better Call Saul” — which began its unlikely life as a sure-footed, distinctively low-key character study about an aspiring lawman, Jimmy McGill, who would come to be known as fast-talking litigator and “Breaking Bad” fan favorite Saul Goodman — is now an increasingly bleak and byzantine moral drama about one man’s spiral into spiritual oblivion.
In a sense, the show has revealed itself to be a more of a parallel to “Breaking Bad” than its co-creator, Vince Gilligan, may have originally intended. Like “Breaking Bad,” “Saul’s” fourth season sees the writers moving away from the dry gallows comedy that characterized the show’s early run, and leaning into the simmering, uniquely Southwestern criminal intrigue and operatic acts of brutality that are more aligned with that earlier show. And so I have to ask myself: is “Better Call Saul” perhaps less riveting now, or just slightly less note-perfect than it was in its first three seasons? Am I secretly unhappy that the show is slowly turning into “Breaking Bad”? Shouldn’t I just shut up and not a take a show that’s this consistently inventive, engaging and well-directed for granted? The answers to those three questions, in order, are: no, possibly, and abso-fucking-lutely. Though it’s perhaps a little too easy to overlook the show’s languid pleasures in its most patient season to date, “Saul” remains one of television’s most absorbing dramas, and the continual misadventures of this twisted antihero and the droll, bountiful generosity of Bob Odenkirk’s performance more than make up for the occasional wonky episode.
The finale of season three concluded with one of “Saul’s” grisliest twists to date, as a house fire took the life of Jimmy’s noble but self-righteous brother, Chuck. In Chuck’s absence, Jimmy has been disbarred from practicing any kind of legitimate law, which leads to him hustling burner phones in Laundromat parking lots like a dime-store tough guy straight out of a Richard Price novel (a hustling-and-money-making montage scored to Randy Crawford’s funk jewel “Street Life” is up there with my favorite individual T.V. moments of the year). Kim, meanwhile, is getting too close for her own good to our devious “hero,” while the terrifying Gus Fring is still throwing his weight around as New Mexico’s most fearsome drug capo, and the ever-reliable Mike Ehrmantraut (seasoned scene-stealer Jonathan Banks) is taking his job as Madrigal’s security detail very seriously. Even if this season is more plotted than this show generally tends to be, the directing on “Better Call Saul” is some of the most creative on T.V. There are individual shots here that tell entire stories in miniature, filled with humor, layered meaning, and insight into these character’s doomed dreams. While it remains to be seen how all of this slow-burning madness will end (the very real possibility of a “Breaking Bad” shared universe seems like an increasingly unnecessary prospect, but whatever), its power is all but impossible to deny in the moment.
9. “Evil Genius” (Barbara Schroeder and Trey Borzillieri)
In 2011, “Zombieland” and “Venom” director Ruben Fleischer directed a hacky, half-funny/half-lame dark comedy called “30 Minutes or Less”. That film, which starred Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, Nick Swardson, and Danny McBride, took its story from the real-life tragedy of Brian Wells. Wells was a hapless pizza deliveryman who was coerced by dim-witted criminals to participate in a robbery with an explosive device forcefully strapped to his chest. Barely anyone remembers “30 Minutes or Less” seven years later — why would they? Despite the facile execution of Fleischer’s movie, though, this is a truly upsetting story: a thoughtless example of a haphazardly executed scheme that ended in tragedy.
For nonfiction aficionados who aren’t dissuaded by unpleasant material, “Evil Genius” — a four-part gut punch of a true crime documentary that aired on Netflix earlier this year — gives this awful story much more weight and dimension than “30 Minutes” ever could have hoped to. “Evil Genius” was partially produced by the brothers Mark and Jay Duplass, who also had a hand in bringing this year’s disconcerting cult doc series “Wild, Wild Country” to Netflix. “Evil Genius” turns out to be a tighter, more focused, and infinitely more distressing deep-dive into one tortured mindscape. It’s an engrossing work that makes prescient points about empathy, mental health, and the American culture of small-stakes crime en route to its gruesome and inexorable climax. Whereas a lot of modern true-crime series are lengthy, padded affairs — stuffed to the gills with red herrings, gruesome details, and the kind of laboriously researched statistics that insatiable gorehounds crave — “Evil Genius” whittles its brutal narrative down to four gripping, information-packed episodes. Narrator and series co-director Trey Borzillieri was allegedly inspired by the “Paradise Lost” films, and felt that the morbid, curious case of Wells’ unfortunate circumstance deserved another visit in 2018. The action begins fifteen years ago, in 2003. The setting is small-town Erie, Pennsylvania. On August 28th, Brian Wells walked into a local bank with a collar bomb strapped around his neck. Before local authorities could properly dismantle the device, the explosives were triggered on Wells’ person and he was killed.
How exactly did this utterly ordinary man — whose life’s purpose was delivering pizza pies in and around his neighborhood — end up a pawn in this senseless criminal plot? The true subject of “Evil Genius” (and perhaps the Evil Genius of the title, though that’s up for debate) is Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, a mentally unwell women armed with a curt, unfriendly countenance, a laundry list of enemies, and a series of ex-boyfriends who have all died under unusual circumstances. Diehl-Armstrong becomes the terrifying nucleus of this sad, sad story; though there’s ample time devoted to the secret life of one Bill Rothstein, whose husky frame and affable demeanor masked some unsavory secrets. In a true-crime landscape that’s currently oversaturated to the point where it’s hard to pick something to sink your teeth into, “Evil Genius” plumbs some painful truths about our dark national desires, and our twisted, often-one sided relationship to the symbiotic concept of mental health and murder.
8. “Baskets” (Jonathan Krisel)
In the early seasons of “Baskets,” it was easy to wonder how this consistently surprising little show would find a shelf life among FX’s more enduring programming. Jonathan Krisel’s half-hour comedy began its life as a kind of bizarre comedic bildungsroman, one suffused with passages of art-movie melancholy and disarmingly broad slapstick humor. “Baskets” was a show about the spiritual re-awakening of one Chip Baskets: a rodeo clown from Bakersfield (played by Zach Galifinakis in one of T.V.’s most consistently generous performances) whose aspirations have seen him rise to the gilded avenues of Paris, only to be dumped back into the unwelcoming morass of his arid California hometown.
As “Baskets” moseyed along its diversion-ridden path, its sense of narrative focus bloomed, growing beyond Chip’s childlike dreams of clowning to include compelling plots for his wound-up brother Dale (also Galifinakis), his miserable yet big-hearted best friend Martha (the inestimable Martha Kelly), and also the lovely, albeit overbearing Mama Baskets, embodied in an award-winning performance by the great Louie Anderson. In other words, “Baskets” has graduated from being a very singular, specific kind of show that was primarily seen through one man’s jaundiced lens to being one of T.V.’s most underrated ensemble comedies. In that regard, season three of “Baskets” might be the show’s best yet: this is Jonathan Krisel’s show at its sunniest and most emotionally exposed. Though I’m sure the show will no doubt still be an acquired taste for some, the darkness and ugliness that colored the early seasons of “Baskets” has largely faded into the distance, leaving us with an unusually buoyant season of television that focuses on the wackadoodle power struggles of the Baskets family and rodeo dynasty. “Finding Eddie” is a leisurely, gorgeously contained bottle episode that almost veers into nightmarish David Lynch territory, while “A Night at the Opera” might just be “Baskets’” most conceptually ambitious episode to date. Elsewhere, the “Thanksgiving” episode is a heartrending season highlight, while the surprisingly tender goofball denouement, “New Year’s Eve,” brings things to a suitably devastating close.
Galifinakis carries much of the show, and those who are already fans of his very curious, unique body of comedic work will find much to appreciate here. What I find so dependably rewarding about “Baskets” is it’s leading man’s willingness to share the spotlight with his lesser-known castmates: devoting an entire episode to Martha’s earthy indignities, for instance, or demonstrating why the larger-than-life Mama Baskets has become a certified fan favorite over three seasons. The writing, directing, editing, and music supervision here are all top-notch. “Baskets” is one of those rare half-hour comedies that immerses you into what might as well be an alien world: that would be the dusty, soul-dead sprawl of Bakersfield, California. It’s a show you can watch for its discernibly off-kilter vibe just as much as you can watch it for Galifinakis’ marvelously uncomfortable brand of performance-art comedy. The moral of the third season of “Baskets” seems to be that you can’t choose your family: for better or for worse, they’re the ones you’re stuck with for the rest of your days. Meanwhile, I would say we’re “stuck” with “Baskets,” but that makes me sound like a grouch. Instead, I’ll say this: this is still one of T.V.’s most enjoyably weird and weirdly enjoyable shows, and season four can’t come soon enough.
7. “Mosaic” (Steven Soderbergh)
There was an abundance of rather odd pre-release hype surrounding Steven Soderbergh’s experimental T.V. “mystery”, “Mosaic” earlier this year. Unlike Soderbergh’s other game-changing television procedural, “The Knick,” pre-release plot details on “Mosaic” were kept to an absolute minimum. The release was somewhat unprecedented: the show became available to users as an app, one that was available via Android or iOS. The result was a kind of hyper-ironic cultural gimmick that essentially functioned as a digital update on the knowingly hokey choose-your-own-adventure reads we all used to thumb through in middle school. For the rest of us plebes, “Mosaic” was released on HBO, where its steely, characteristically detached Soderberghian aesthetic clashed with the overheated likes of “Westworld,” in which human characters act more like robots than built-from-scratch cyborgs. Granted, Mr. Soderbergh has had a busy year. He released the trashy, mostly effective social horror satire “Unsane,” and he’s got two more films in the can to release next year, including Netflix’s sports-biz drama “High-Flying Bird”.
In that regard, it is tempting to look at “Mosaic” as a tossed-off prank, something Soderbergh knocked out in between more substantial projects. While it lacks the immersive, cutting-edge period detail and intimate human drama of “The Knick,” “Mosaic” is still a devilish and twisty Agatha Christie riff that works in two ways. The first way that it works is as a kind of waggish parody of the poe-faced HBO police procedural (take that, “True Detective”). The second, and more interesting, reading is that “Mosaic” itself is a trenchant, hardhearted meta reflection of celebrity notoriety. It took a few episodes for Soderbergh’s television experiment to really take off, but once it did, the show’s rigorously detailed and wildly entertaining mix of small-town potboiler intrigue, subdued character work, and snappy, ice-cool plotting evolved into one of the network’s most winning recipes in some time. For a tightly wound six-episode series, “Mosaic” was fairly sprawling, sometimes suggesting Soderbergh’s wry, adult riff on the “Clue” board game if it were brought to life by a cast of undervalued character actors. The plot unfolded as a kind of screwy murder-mystery-in-reverse, bending and twisting passages of time into wily new dimensions.
It didn’t hurt that the acting was aces across the board. Sharon Stone — one of the more undervalued actresses of our era — enjoyed her best role perhaps since Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” as powerful, somewhat notorious children’s book author Olivia Lake. Garret Hedlund proved he was more than just a pretty face with his subtly affecting portrayal of Joel Hurley: the naïve illustrator whom Olivia takes under her wing early in the season, and who essentially acts as both the show’s beating heart as well as its potential bad guy. Devin Ratray, a standout in projects as varied as Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” and Jeremy Saulnier’s “Blue Ruin,” played the show’s resident lawman as a spurned, sensitive little boy, while the angular, razor-eyed Frederick Weller played “Mosaic’s” most fascinating and unpredictable character: a slippery con man, and one of Olivia’s premiere beaus. Have I even mentioned how good Paul Fucking Reuebens is in this thing? While “Mosaic” doesn’t stand out as a Soderbergh classic a la “Traffic,” “Out of Sight,” or “The Informant,” it is further evidence that this renegade director is willing to try just about anything in his old age — and that we should be grateful that his restless spirit hasn’t yet found itself stultified.
6. “Barry” (Alec Berg and Bill Hader)
It doesn’t sound like an idea that would work on paper: a cold-hearted hit man moonlights as a slumming thespian in a measly San Fernando Valley acting class. What’s the catch, you might be asking? Well, the catch is that “Barry” — the morose, inventive and often spectacularly dark story of a retired-marine-turned-professional-killer who learns how to be human when he discovers his inner DeNiro — has been blessed with the magic touch of “Seinfeld” writing vet and “Silicon Valley” co-creator Alec Berg, as well as the bizarro talents of its star, Bill Hader. Hader has, for a long time, been one of the funniest and most exceptional leading men in Hollywood. And yet, because Hader is in possession of a face that looks readymade for a Coen Brothers movie (the brother’s influence, by the way, is all over “Barry,” particularly in the alternately goofy and vicious tone that seems to stem from works such as “Raising Arizona” and “Burn After Reading”), he frequently stuck playing second bananas. Weaselly cops, mouthy best friends, and wisecracking side men are his bread and butter.
With “Barry,” Hader is not only stepping into the limelight — if you’ll pardon the rather obvious theatrical pun — he’s realizing potential that we knew he possessed all along. In “Barry,” Berg and his team have crafted a frightening, deeply weird and utterly believable character whose quirks play straight into Hader’s very specific strengths. While this new show took a few episodes to find its footing, “Barry” ended its eight-episode run as one of HBO’s most arresting half-hour comedies in some time. As the body count ballooned and the walls began to close in on our black-hearted hero, the laughs suddenly became uneasier, more substantial, more suffused with malevolence and meaning. Granted, “Barry” is not exactly an emotionally resonant show. In fact, the whole thing works better if you hate the characters, from the doltish aspiring actor who recites Gary Oldman’s Rasta-mon monologue from “True Romance” in an acting class, to the dead-eyed, chrome-domed Russian mobster who insists he’s actually a really nice guy, “Barry” is not loath for loathsome specimens. Henry Winkler’s deeply insecure human acting teacher Gene Cousineau probably came the closest to being a decent dude, though it was disheartening to see Sarah Goldberg’s fresh-eyed ingénue eventually reveal herself to be as callous and opportunistic as anyone else in this cold-blooded ensemble (a special shout out should also be reserved for Stephen Root, whose depiction of the protagonist’s predatory mentor Fuches proves that there’s absolutely nothing he can’t do).
Playing the show’s namesake assassin, Hader was a remarkable tangle of paradoxes: both reptilian and somehow human, cold as ice and yet possessing some twisted kind of morality, closed off from the world and yet somehow able to channel his homicidal rage into David Mamet’s famous “coffee is for closers” monologue from “Glengarry Glenn Ross”. The glib, rib-digging black comedy of the season’s first half eventually evolved into something sadder, more abstruse, and far more horrifically real as Barry’s penchant for bloodletting eventually took the lives of those whose only crime was getting mixed up in his lethal crosshairs. Maybe, “Barry” seems to be arguing, the age of the antihero isn’t dead after all.
5. “Insecure” (Issa Rae and Larry Wilmore)
When did “Insecure” become one of the very best shows on T.V., regardless of genre? Issa Rae and Larry Wilmore’s irresistible and sharp-eyed behavioral comedy began its life on HBO as an undemanding outlier: a superior, more inclusive multicultural “Girls” that ditched the solipsism and self-pity of Lena Dunham’s flagship show for an unbridled, wildly funny look at sex, friendship, and dating in South Los Angeles. Fast-forward two years later and “Insecure” is one of HBO’s still-untapped jewels: a half-hour comedy with the depth, understanding and emotional reach of a great novel. The leaps that the show has taken in its third season are nothing short of mind-blowing in their confidence.
Whereas “Insecure” may have once surprised viewers by being consistently better than it had any right to be, this new chapter tops the emotionally resplendent climax of its last season by doubling down on all the qualities that make this show one of the most rewarding viewing experiences in the entire prestige T.V. landscape. The writing in this season is looser and more irreverent, while still being more indicative of the character’s buried desires. The directing has a cinematic feel to it: it’s lo-fi, lyrically funky, and even seductive in some scenes. Even the music cues are even more evocative. Of course, the primary performances here are dynamic, appealing across the board, and often suggestive of deep, poetic contradictions in the character’s inner lives. When last we saw Issa (Rae continues to give a warmly hilarious and revealing performance on her show, refining her traditional acting chops in each subsequent season), she had finally broken up with her deeply confused, often spectacularly slutty ex-boyfriend Lawrence (the marvelous Jay Ellis). She’s still working at the Inglewood-based nonprofit We Got Y’all, but she ditches that gig mid-season to take up residency as a landlord in a shabby Inglewood apartment complex. Meanwhile, the focused, career-oriented Molly (Yvonne Orji) is experiencing the downside of being black, ambitious and unwilling to accept other people’s bullshit in her increasingly impersonal corporate workspace, while Lawrence… while I suppose I had better let you readers wait and discover what happens to him for yourselves. Suffice to say, the Lawrence Hive (yes, such a thing exists) lost their goddamn minds near the end of a very special, particularly randy mid-season bottle episode.
Can you blame them? Is there a half-hour comedy that’s more pure fun to watch from week-to-week than this show? Season three contained some of “Insecure’s” best standalone episodes, including a winsome walk-and-talk between Issa and a prospective new suitor that recalled the most stirring parts of Barry Jenkins’ “Medicine for Melancholy,” while the girl’s-trip-to-Coachella chapter was by turns outlandish, raunchy, romantic, and finally, heartbreaking. Don’t be surprised if this show climbs even higher to the top of my list in 2019.
4. “Bojack Horseman” (Raphael-Bob Waksberg)
The sometimes-blurry line that separates waking life from the fiction we consume is the preoccupying motif for “Bojack Horseman’s” saddest, most ridiculous, and ultimately best season to date. The last season of this Netflix juggernaut — starring everyone’s favorite misanthropic, substance-abusing former T.V. star who also happens to be a horse — saw our damaged protagonist (voiced, as always, by the great Will Arnett) attempting to mend some fences in his life. Mainly, this involved Bojack finally making peace with his abusive mother Beatrice, as well as fumbling in his attempts to raise his introverted teenage daughter, Hollyhock Manheim-Mannheim-Guerrero-Robinson-Zilberschlag-Hsung-Fonzarelli-McQuack. Season four was a strong, emotionally affecting batch of episodes that nevertheless lacked a bar-raising highlight like the wordless, heartbreaking season three standout “Fish Out of Water,” or the devastating “That’s Too Much, Man!,” where Bojack’s appetite for destruction resulted in his co-star’s horrific overdose.
Season five of Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s dizzyingly detailed and breathlessly funny Tinseltown takedown opens with its equine star on the set of a cartoonishly grim “True Detective”-style antihero drama called “Philbert,” overseen by a Nic Pizzolatto-style showrunner/professional asshole named Flip McVicker (Flip is voiced by Rami Malek, whose cartoonishly dead-serious vocal tones are put to far better use here than on “Mr. Robot”). Todd (an unreasonably endearing Aaron Paul) has somehow finagled his way into a job as CEO of WhatTimeIsItNow.com, while feline talent agent Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris) is still on the rebound from her breakup with her nebbishy mouse ex, Ralph Stilton (Raul Esparza). The tragedy of this show is that even though Bojack is making half-hearted attempts to be a better person — there’s a rich arc midway through the season where our sozzled sort-of hero adopts a woke feminist perspective, aligning his values with those of the #MeToo movement — he’s still the same impulsive, narcissistic bastard he’s been for four straight seasons. Season five seems designed to test viewers’ sympathy with the character, posing the question of whether or not this damaged colt is actually beyond redemption. In season five, Bojack inflicts a kind hurt that he can’t heal, and ends up reaching a point of no return. It’s amazing that a show that features the disgusting exploits of a sex-crazed robot named Henry Fondle can also manage to make you cry, but longtime fans of this show know that this bizarre alchemy is a major part of “Bojack’s” winning recipe. Season five includes some of the strangest, and most memorable episodes of this show to date: “The Dog Days Are Over” unfolds as a beautifully realized bottle episode that follows Diane (Alison Brie) to Vietnam as she attempts to get in touch with her cultural roots, while “Free Churro” is, simply, an emotionally shattering and beautifully sustained twenty-six minute monologue that Bojack gives at his mother’s funeral. The standout, however, might be “The Showstopper,” in which the show’s writers go all “La Notte” on our asses and give us an ugly, unadorned look at what Bojack’s endless dark night of the soul actually looks like.
The season ends with Bojack in rehab, Princess Carolyn facing the prospect of parenthood, and Diane healing from her rift with celebrity dog Mr. Peanutbutter (the unflappable Paul F. Tompkins), suggesting there’s no definitive happy end for any of us. “There’s no such thing as good guys and bad guys,” Diane proclaims to Bojack near the season’s end. “We’re all just guys!” “Bojack Horseman” understands this deceptively simple truth to its very bones, and this new season is “Bojack” at its most mature and emotionally restorative.
3. “Forever” (Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard)
Last year, watching Greta Gerwig’s heartbreaking coming-of-age comedy “Lady Bird,” I was struck by the singularity of the writer/director’s authorial voice, and the confidence with which she executed this particular story. Perhaps, I thought, I was not giving Gerwig enough credit for co-writing incisive millennial comedies like “Frances Ha” and “Mistress America” — films that, yes, bore the unmistakably neurotic stamp of her creative and romantic partner Noah Baumbach, but also films that could now be said to contain Gerwig’s trademark fusion of aching humility and big-hearted, character-specific comedy.
I had that same feeling watching “Forever,” an unexpectedly tender and emotionally generous new Amazon comedy co-created by Matt Hubbard (a longtime writer on “Parks and Rec”) and Alan Yang, best known for co-creating the Netflix smash “Master of None” with Aziz Ansari. “Master of None” is one of the most identifiable and unique comedies of our time, and it’s been easy enough in the past to attribute a great deal of this to its star. After all, Ansari writes and acts in almost every episode, and he’s even stepped behind the camera for a few of them. However, having seen “Forever,” I can now say that Mr. Yang’s own singular voice — loving, dry, concerned with diversity and empathy, ever so slightly absurd, and punctuated by poignant displays of human kindness — was one that I had clearly ignored. How foolish I was, not giving appropriate credit where credit was due. Let us not forget that Mr. Yang is also a producer on “The Good Place”: one of the smartest comedies currently on-air and, a show, like “Forever,” that applies a light comic touch to philosophically serious material. And “Forever” really is one of the year’s most special shows, and even though I’m not allowed to divulge the full range of spoilers (the show works best if you enter into its eight easy-to-binge episodes knowing next to nothing about it), I can definitively tell you I’ve never seen anything quite like it.
Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen — longtime buddies from their days on SNL whose screen chemistry is palpable and moving — play Jen and Oscar. Jen is another one of Mrs. Rudolph’s studies of wistful inwardness, and we can tell from seeing her navigate joyless encounters at her bland workspace (she works for a company that sells time shares) that she yearns for something deeper out of her humdrum existence. Oscar, June’s husband — played by Armisen as another one of his grinning, slightly creepy, passive-aggressive “nice guys” — doesn’t seem to mind the tedium. In fact, one could almost say he welcomes it. June and Oscar live a pleasant and unremarkable existence in the placid Southern California suburb of Riverside. They enjoy the same pre-prepared meals every night, Oscar being particularly fond of trout almondine. Presumably to procure said trout, Oscar and Jen also go on a yearly fishing trip: a kind of commemorative romantic milestone that essentially stands in place of an anniversary. When June, in a last-ditch effort to add some spice to their flailing union, suggests that she and Oscar go on a skiing trip instead, things begin to go awry and “Forever” transforms into a wiser, odder, more patient show that’s confident in foregoing easy laughs in favor of something more hard-won and experimental. This is an enchanting look at the monotony of romance, how our lives are defined by routine, and how life can easily slip into disarray when that routine is yanked from beneath our feet. “Forever” also embraces a litany of metaphysical and supernatural elements and (spoiler alert) ends its quietly eruptive first season as a kind of comedic meditation on morality and what it means to love someone unconditionally. Suffice to say, Mr. Yang’s feature-film debut (a Netflix-produced affair which is set to star John Cho) is now one of my most anticipated projects of 2019.
2. “Succession” (Jesse Armstrong)
The onslaught of filth and scummery begins early in the pilot for HBO’s “Succession,” an acid, bilious, brilliant tragicomedy about a dynastic family scourge in the vein of the Trumps or the Murdochs. The pilot — which introduces viewers to the Roy family, billionaire media scions who wield their seemingly endless power with a predatory glint in their eye — was helmed by veteran comedy director Adam McKay, and it sometimes seemed as though season one of this scorching, consistently hilarious show took its agitated visual cues from McKay’s black-as-night finance world satire “The Big Short”. It’s an admirably objective manner of introducing viewers to what may be the foulest fictional family in recent prestige-television memory.
Those who can’t acclimate themselves to “Succession’s” very singular wavelength may complain that the show’s view of the cretinous Roy clan is too comically detached: that, by asking us to guffaw at the mighty insecurities of pathetic middle child Roman (an imminently punchable Rory Culkin) or his delusional, coke-hoovering, slightly less loathsome brother Kendall (Jeremy Strong, giving one of the year’s most fascinating performances in a television series), we were somehow being asked to co-sign all this terrible behavior. When we as a collective American audience will stop confusing depiction with endorsement, I’ll never know. While a tediously moralistic look at the Roy family sounds pretty much unwatchable on paper, this reductive assessment all but ignores the preternatural comic wisdom displayed by showrunner Jesse Armstrong (best known for his collaborations with “Veep” mastermind Armando Iannucci in the British cult series “The Thick of It”) and his gift for lacing individual episodes with juicy morsels of capital-D drama. By its flashy, no-fucks-given finale, “Succession” had transformed from the cringiest of comedies about a rich, awful American family, to a riveting dramatic work informed by an almost Grecian sense of tragedy. Several episodes in the later half of the season take the Roy family out of their bubble of upper-crust Manhattan on forced family sojourns: we all remember Tom’s deplorable bachelor party in a debauched anything-goes nightclub (Matthew MacFayden, effortlessly summoning a kind of unctuous, upper-middle class mendacity, gave my favorite performance on the show), as well as the ill-fated trip to New Mexico that resulted in a broken nose, lots of hurt feelings, and the one Roy child who’s a drug addict falling back off the wagon.
This was also a resoundingly well-acted series from top to bottom, whether it was Brian Cox delivering unprintable profanities in his haughty Scottish brogue, Sarah Snook as Shiv, the youngest and by far most sensible of the Roy children, Eric Bogosian doing a Bernie Sanders riff, or the inimitatable Nicholas Braun Cousin Greg: a sweet, childlike, endlessly dense corporate dolt who begins the season by vomiting in public after a particularly brutal hangover and ends it by revealing himself as just another conniving schemer in this deadly nest of vipers. Timid viewers may not be able to stomach much of this family’s monstrous, selfish behavior, but good luck looking away from any of it. Mid-to-late 2018 was a stretch of HBO programming dominated by a frustrating procession of near-hits and noble failures — the botched denouement of “Sharp Objects” has prevented it from being included in this list, and “Westworld” is moderately more tolerable, even if it’s still as smugly cold as ever before — “Succession” restores a sense of urgent pathos to the network’s hour-long dramatic slot. Long live the Roys, in all their foul-mouthed, horrible glory.
- “Atlanta: Robbin’ Season” (Donald Glover)
Not since “Louie” — the boundary-dissolving FX sitcom created by disgraced onetime “genius” and now-infamous sexual predator, Louis C.K. — has a half-hour comedy had as much of an effect on the broader television landscape as “Atlanta”. Even those who, in the past, had been tempted to write creator Donald Glover off as some kind of overcompensating new-school wunderkind could not deny the fierce originality and surplus of weird, dreamy soul that this show seemed to exude like some kind of alien cologne.
The subtitle for “Atlanta’s” second act, as it were — a gut-busting, haunted-feeling, and ultimately near-perfect season of television that veers from nightmarish surreality to hard-edged naturalism on a whim — is “Robbin’ Season”. In Atlanta, “Robbin’ Season” refers to the time around the holidays when property crime takes a sharp uptick. For all the shaggy-dog detours it takes and the seemingly free-form nature of its storytelling, “Atlanta” has always been a show with an adroit moral compass, and a sardonic understanding of how life works on society’s bottom rung. “If you’re not out there taking, you’re gonna get took,” the show seems to be saying. It makes sense, then, that “Robbin’ Season” was about as bleak as “Atlanta” is capable of getting, opening with a shocking and senseless robbery at a fast food drive-thru before graduating to acts of degradation that are a great deal more unsettling than anything in the show’s comparatively upbeat first season. Of course, this is still “Atlanta” we’re talking about here, and the show’s tone never strays too far away from its now-trademark melancholy whimsy. Season two also boasted some of the show’s most affecting bottle episodes to date: there was “Barbershop,” a Jarmuschian one-off where Alfred Miles — better known as aspiring local trap artist Paper Boi, played with real gravitas by the great Brian Tyree Henry — attempts to get a haircut and ends up on a wild-goose chase through the suburbs with a chatty and suspicious barber. There was also “Woods,” a more mournful chapter where Alfred is brutally assaulted and sent on a meandering, ominously Lynchian sojourn through an increasingly forbidding wilderness. In “Champagne Papi,” Van (the compelling Zazie Beetz) kills time with her girls at a lavish, somewhat unreal-seeming mansion party where they’re told the Six God himself (Canadian rapper Drake) will be in attendance, thus suggesting “Atlanta’s” answer to Luis Bunuel, or even “Waiting for Godot”.
If “Atlanta’s” first season was responsible for alerting suburban moms and Emmy viewers to the pleasures of Migos’ music, season two will be remembered for accomplishing the previously unthinkable task of allowing Katt Williams to win a well-deserved Emmy (for his disarming dramatic work in the season premiere, “Alligator Man”). If anything, “Robbin’ Season” was light on episodes that focused on Glover’s noncommittal, cash-strapped protagonist Earn Marks, though it must be said that Lakeith Stanfield is still giving one of the small screen’s most watchably weird performances as Darius, first-generation Nigerian-American and full-time A-town visionary. That’s just as well, though: with “Robbin’ Season,” Glover seems to have found his home behind the scenes of the epochal, genre-defying show he’s created. He’s the sly puppet master, dreaming and scheming behind the scenes, making sure all the guests at his wild and well-attended party are having the time of their lives. Though “Robbin’ Season” lacks the light touch of season one, it’s a more mature and thoughtful collection of episodes on the whole, and one that can only make us wonder what Glover means when he compares “Atlanta’s” third season to Kanye West’s “Graduation”.
Runner Ups: Sam Esmail’s “Homecoming” was a spectacular, unexpected late-in-the-year treat, retaining the cucumber-cool paranoid menace and exacting Fincherian aesthetic from “Mr. Robot” while wisely jettisoning that earlier show’s “Fight Club for Dummies” voiceover. Esmail’s robust, endlessly rewatchable Amazon drama — which hearkens back to shadowy, slow-burning conspiracy thrillers of yore, the ones directed by Francis Ford Coppola (“The Conversation”) and Alan J. Pakula (“The Parallax View”) — is a welcome aide-mémoire of how great Julia Roberts can be in the right role, as well as an opportune reminder that the impeccably grizzled Shea Whigham is and was an American treasure, and a character actor for the ages. “The Little Drummer Girl,” an AMC miniseries directed by Park Chan-Wook (“Oldboy,” “The Handmaiden”) is a similarly stylish deep-dive into espionage and treachery, though the show’s swooningly gorgeous retro-aesthetic pleasures are often the scaffolding that uplift its distractingly convoluted narrative.
The mind-scrambling (and unfortunately spare) highlights of the Cary Fukunaga-directed “Maniac” are weird enough for me to almost want include it on this list, even if the end result is an arch, over-stylized mess (the less said about the episode where Jonah Hills dons SoundCloud rapper braids and a gold grill, the better). “The Good Place,” of course, is every bit as brilliant as you’ve heard. The Netflix reboot of “Queer Eye” brought some honest love and light into the darkness of 2018, and “Sharp Objects,” directed by “Big Little Lies” helmer Jean-Marc Vallee, began as one of the year’s most assuredly grim procedurals before spinning out into incomprehensibility in its final episode. “The Deuce” continues to be a show that buries thoughtful performances and promising subtext about capitalism and sex work under an acrid mountain of sleaze (and I’m not even talking about James Franco), and “American Vandal” has somehow gotten smuttier, smarter, and more confident in its shameless, true-crime-skewering second season, which depicts the nefarious high-school misdeeds of the aptly named “Turd Burglar”. “Wild, Wild Country” was one of the year’s more impossible-to-believe and addictive true crime docs, and “Pose” is the first Ryan Murphy show in a long time that’s straight-up watchable, with zero caveats: it’s the Ryan Murphy show for people who hate Ryan Murphy shows!
“Glow’s” second season was guileful and suitably diverting, though it couldn’t hold a candle to the emotional complexity and black-and-blue laughs of season one. The Duplass Brothers-produced “Room 104” delivered a pair of memorable episodes this season: one being an icky body-horror comedy directed by “Creep” helmer Patrick Brice, the other starring “Atlanta” and “Widows” breakout Brian Tyree Henry in a lovely 30-minute musical detailing one man’s raucous night out that turns unexpectedly tragic in its final frames. “Silicon Valley” has somehow managed to flourish in T.J. Miller’s absence, though the sour taste of his departure still hangs over a few episodes. Matthew Weiner’s follow-up to “Mad Men,” “The Romanoffs,” was a tedious treatise on privilege and lineage; although the first season’s feverish, giallo-inspired third chapter is admittedly a classic Matt Weiner Dream Episode. In its first season, “The Chi” proved itself to be one of the most vivacious, stylistically bombastic new shows of the year. “Mozart in the Jungle” is still a brittle delight that checks all my erudite hipster pleasure points, while “The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling” afforded viewers a needling and occasionally uncomfortable look inside the mind of a conflicted comedic genius. “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is still good for a few tasteless belly laughs, even if it’s lost some of its sense of purpose in its anarchic thirteen season, while Amazon’s “Goliath” is still a shamelessly watchable guilty pleasure, particularly when it focuses on a sozzled, indelible Billy Bob Thornton in one of his finer late-career performances.
That’s all I got for this year, people. See you all in 2019 — NL.
