10. “We Are Who We Are” (Luca Guadagnino, Paolo Giordano, Francesca Manieri, Sean Conway)
One of my least favorite viewing experiences of last year was “Euphoria,” which turned out to be a tawdry piece of Youth-Gone-Wrong trash that was lethally bogged down by a self-consciously aggressive visual style, not to mention a procession of one-dimensionally self-destructive adolescent characters who were neither believable nor that interesting to begin with. I’d like to think that Luca Guadagnino’s “We Are Who We Are” — a meandering and beautifully transfixing eight-part odyssey about community, identity, and the magnetic allure of a lost European summer — exists as a gentler corrective to that other, overpraised HBO teen melodrama. Guadagnino’s perspective on youth is a great deal more whimsical than “Euphoria,” certainly more sui-generis, and less plainly interested in shock for shock’s sake. In “We Are Who We Are,” Guadagnino proves, as if there was any doubt, that he would rather bask in the sweltering, hypnotic summertime ambiance of a day at the beach, or an all-night house party at an abandoned Italian villa, than unload played-out music-video pyrotechnics on his audience. The “Call Me By Your Name” director, as always, remains focused primarily on mood, which means “We Are Who We Are” ends up being about Vibes first and foremost. This has led to a small but vocal of faction of critics to claim that the show is indulgent, or that it “doesn’t know what it is yet.” I would argue that a show like “We Are Who We Are” should be indulgent, and exploratory at least in a narrative sense: the wandering, sun-kissed military brats of Guadagnino’s humanist drama have no idea who they are at this very tremulous juncture in their lives, so to impose any false sense of narrative “clarity” on their burgeoning coming-of-age feels disingenuous. Guadagnino clearly enjoyed jerry-rigging the loose-fitting tapestry of “We Are Who We Are” with beguiling visual and thematic contradictions: a mercurial, at times deeply unlikable lead character who looks like Justin Bieber and seems to harbor a rather disturbing penchant for drinking and violent temper tantrums, a Black military dad who’s a MAGA-loving Trumper, an entrancing original score from Blood Orange’s very own Dev Hynes, plus witty, esoteric music supervision that makes room for everything from Prince to Europop to “Devil in a Blue Dress” by Kanye West. In a sense, Guadagnino appears to be reveling in our discombobulation, as he undeniably did in his blackhearted, hypnotic remake of Dario Argento’s giallo landmark, “Suspiria.” It’s a marvelous sensory indulgence, a reckless swing from the fences from one of our greatest working directors. “We Are Who We Are” is poetic and magnificent, and yet another auteur-driven triumph for the folks at HBO.
9. “Beef House” (Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim)
Chances are, if you were to try to show the defiantly polarizing anti-comedy of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim to your parents or, for whatever reason, your grandparents, chances are they would react with either a.) disgust b.) complete confusion or c.) a desire to call a mental health professional to see if they can help you. Tim and Eric are one of those comedy duos that you either “get” or you don’t. They have no interest in translating their special brand of brain-tickling, Dada-inspired madcap weirdness for you, me, or anyone else. While Heidecker has appeared in movies ranging from “Ant-Man” to last year’s “Us” and Wareheim has become an increasingly irritating bon vivant of the food and wine world since taking a break from Netflix’s “Master of None,” a show like “Beef House” — a collection of deranged, screamingly funny ten-minute nightmare vignettes produced for Adult Swim that is also a work of blasphemously stupid American comedy art seeking to deconstruct the artifice and banality of the traditional American sitcom — proves that they couldn’t be less interested in the idea of traditional crossover appeal. Then again, do we really want Tim and Eric to cross over? “Beef House” may appear, on its intentionally tacky and overlit surface, to be a more conventional work than the outlandish likes of “Bedtime Stories,” or “Tim and Eric Show, Great Job!,” the program that started it all for these boys. Tim and Eric play two “beef boys,” which, in the upside-down world of this show, means they are longtime friends who reside in a “beef house,” which is really just a flatly-decorated sitcom abode situated somewhere in a nonspecific suburban nowhere. Eric is whiny and repressed; Tim is a fun-loving party animal who writes godawful rock music that he likens to “Robby Zombie.” Their lives are completely devoid of conflict and purpose. Also living in the house are a tough-as-nails female detective played, for whatever reason, by “The Sopranos’” own Jamie-Lynn Siegler, plus a creepy geriatric who is literally named Ben Hur, and a bowl-cutted maniac who goes by the name Tennessee Luke. Heidecker and Wareheim take an almost fetishistic pleasure in recreating the anodyne look and feel of a family-focused television comedy, but the plot lines they’ve dreamt up are as demented as what we’ve come to expect from this brain trust: there are episodes devoted to a psychotic, knife-happy child named Boro, problems with beavers, as well chapters where a constipated Tim starts binge-eating prunes and Eric accidentally kills a bunch of kids after somehow landing a job as a bus driver. If you read that last sentence and laughed, maybe “Beef House” is for you. Just know that “Beef House” isn’t for your parents, your grandparents, or for your purportedly “normal” friends. In this case, that turns out to be a very good thing indeed.
8. “Unorthodox” (Alexa Karolinski)
Orthodox Judaism remains its own kind of shadow culture, which is probably part of the reason why, apart from 2017’s masterful, A24-produced character study “Menashe,” there are still precious few works of film or television art that dare to depict life inside of that very particular subset of the modern-day Jewish diaspora. Enter “Unorthodox,” a quietly spellbinding Netflix drama that tells a story, in four tightly-constructed, resoundingly affecting chapters, of an Orthodox Jewish woman living in modern-day Brooklyn who makes the decision to flee from the life that’s been more or less arranged from her and start from scratch somewhere in Berlin. “Unorthodox” is unique in that it makes very little attempts to hold the viewer’s hand via exposition dumps or narrative convenience. The show makes no concessions to accessibility, never explaining, in any obvious terms, why certain philosophical tenets of the Orthodox Jewish experience are the way they are: Maria Schrader, who directed every episode, and series writers Anna Winger, Alexa Karolinski, and Daniel Hendler merely drop us into the thick of a world that most of us are only glancingly familiar with, and trust us to keep our head above water. It turns out to be a thrilling challenge. Apart from providing a riveting and insightful look at a Jewish woman’s fractured sense of self as it relates to a hermetic, traditionally off-the-grid religious community, “Unorthodox” is also a marvel of storytelling economy: the action primarily trails the gaunt, soft-spoken, nineteen-year old Esty Shapiro (astonishing newcomer Shira Haas) as she goes about forging a brand new identity for herself on foreign shores. Later, the showrunners make time for episodes that take the perspective of Esty’s kind-hearted, befuddled beau-to-be Yanky (Amit Rahav), as well as Yanky’s tough, flinty cousin Moishe (Jeff Wilbusch), Esty’s doting bubbe, and a group of German music academy students whom Esty befriends midway through the season. The slow-burning solemnity and painterly visual classicism of “Unorthodox” (if nothing else, this is one of the best-looking series that Netflix has ever had a hand in) occasionally reminded me of the tremendous arthouse cinema of German director Christian Petzold, who has proven to be an expert observer of people who are adrift between worlds in similarly lush and opaque melodramas like “Barbara” and “Transit.” And yet, while there is undoubtedly some joy in seeing a four-episode Netflix series basically unfold like a contemporary art movie, the creator’s insights into the tangled web of paradoxes that constitute the modern-day Jewish experience is ultimately the reason to watch the show. “Unorthodox” is a show that is, to use popular parlance, “good for the Jews;” and it feels good, as a Jew, to feel seen during a year where anti-Semitism is so virulent on both sides of the political divide. And yet, “Unorthodox” isn’t exclusively for the Jews — it’s also a tragic tale of spiritual rediscovery for anyone who has had to chart a circuitous path to find their way back home.
7. “The Good Place” (Michael Schur)
It’s rare that a show — a thirty-minute, single-camera sitcom, at that — manages to offer devastating philosophical insights about the nature of personhood, sentience, and moral obligation whilst ending its heartbreakingly lovely final episode with the words “take it sleazy,” but forking shirt balls, that’s exactly what Michael Schur’s miraculous “The Good Place” did season after season, all the way up until its near-perfect climactic run. “The Good Place” was the best comedy on television for a while, but no one could have predicted how intellectually daunting and emotionally trenchant the show would become, all while never losing the playful, mischievous, audience-friendly sense of fun that once secured it a prime slot on NBC. What’s more is that the show’s central quintet — the chipper narcissist Eleanor Shellstrop (a peerless Kristen Bell), a self-described “trash bag from Arizona,” perpetually indecisive ethics professor Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper, the show’s secret weapon), the vain, wealthy, impossibly elegant Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil), mush-brained Jacksonville party animal Jason Mendoza (Manny Jacinto), and Michael (Ted Danson, riffing on pretty much every part he’s ever played), the architect of The Good Place who is, in fact, a snappily-dressed demon who yearns for the simple pleasures of human existence — began as archetypes and ended the series as five of the most believable, fully-developed individuals on any television show, network or not. The dilemma at the core of “The Good Place,” no matter how many far-flung, zany cosmic sojourns it took its audience on, was always how much being a good person matters, at the end of the day: after all, if Eleanor, a world-class screw-up and head case, can end up in the same afterlife as a tortured goody two-shoes like Chidi, is there actually hope for any of us? What’s the point of leading a “examined” life, if that’s the case? One of the big draws of “The Good Place” was its insistently sunny comedic tone, which clearly took some of its central thematic design from Albert Brooks’ underheralded “Defending Your Life” — another exquisite comic examination of the strange things that may or may not happen after we die — but was otherwise completely and utterly itself. How many other NBC sitcoms can say that? What’s more is that the show never took cheap shots, and never made fun of or looked down upon its characters, even when they behaved like idiots. “The Good Place” was always, unquestionably, never anything less than itself, and that alone makes it one of the most radiant and radical situational comedies in the history of the medium. Anyone who overlooks this show for its supposed frivolity is missing out. To those folks, I say this: “ya basic.”
6. “Pen15” (Maya Erskine, Anna Konkle, Sam Zvibleman)
If you’re a 90’s kid, like me, than last year’s “Pen15” probably hit you like a ton of bricks, and you may have found yourself unhealthily obsessed with the show ever since. While we all know what a dangerous drug nostalgia can be, there was, at the end of the day, nothing particularly rosy about the time warp offered by this gloriously cringey, emotionally cogent comedy of adolescent friendship and feminine yearning. “Pen15” was pitiless in its almost Darwinian observations about the microscopic horrors and humiliations of middle school, and the bracing nature of its humor was largely palatable because the show, at its best, offers the sweetest and funniest look at teenaged codependency since “Freaks and Geeks.” “Pen15’s” second season isn’t only a noticeably assured improvement over its first batch of episodes — it’s one of the finest television comedies of the year, full stop. It’s also a slightly darker, more stylistically audacious show this time around: its creators have rolled the dice on a tonal gamble that’s afforded a marvelous showcase in episodes like the first installment, which re-creates a seminal tracking shot from Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Boogie Nights” at a wincingly familiar after-school pool party, or “Vendy Wiccany,” arguably the best installment of this show to date, in which our two hormonal and adorably awkward protagonists use witchcraft as a conduit through which they engage with tough issues like marital separation, parental neglect and unrequited romantic feelings. “Pen15” has a habit of sneaking its most sincere ruminations into its goofiest episodes, but this is also a show that can be watched as a time capsule, to when “Getting’ Jiggy With It” was on the radio and Ruff Ryders polo shirts were all the rage. Season two of “Pen15” is also moodier and more comfortable with drama than it was in its first season; even if the show never seems anything less than light on its feet, this is a batch of episodes that nimbly dissects divorce, peer pressure, toxic friendships, and unrealistic romantic affections with a candor that is both blunt and refreshing. Erskine and Konkle clearly give all of themselves to this show, although they are ably assisted in pretty much every category, from the believably unformed supporting cast to the note-perfect needle drops, which will no doubt trigger a deep-seated longing for those who were raised on a steady diet of Total Request Live (the White Zombie cue in the first episode had me in stitches). “Pen15” is a show about the agony of being yourself at all costs, and the final two episodes of this mini-season — in which Maya discovers hitherto-untapped gifts as a thespian, and Anna unearths a newfound sense of hard-won confidence — hint that the show may very well be funnier, raunchier, sillier, more heartbreaking, and even more conceptually ambitious in its upcoming season.
5. “The Last Dance” (Jason Hehir)
If you grew up watching the Chicago Bulls in their 90’s glory days, you knew what it was to witness greatness happening in real time. There have been many formidable athletic dynasties since the heyday of the Bulls, but few teams since have since matched the Windy City titans for their sustained run of sheer dominance. “The Last Dance,” unquestionably the best sports-world doc since 2016’s “O.J.: Made in America,” another superlative work of docu-journalism from ESPN, is, at its core, about the price of greatness, and what it means, on a human level, to attain greatness. It’s also a show about legacy, about brotherhood, and about what it means to live something approximating a normal life after your life has changed forever and the wonder years fade to a dim, melancholic glow. “The Last Dance” spends much of its time orbiting around the colossal life and times of Michael Jordan, inarguably, in his prime, the Bulls’ best player, although those who wish to relive the demented, punk-rock glory days of Dennis Rodman, or attempt to see behind the inscrutable mask of the famously difficult-to-read Scottie Pippen, the resilient and ruthless number two to Jordan’s swaggering alpha-male team captain, will have plenty to chew on here. In a year that has been depressingly bereft of real sports save for a particularly joyous Lakers championship and the Dodgers winning the World Series for the first time since 1988, “The Last Dance” restores a sense of mythic grandeur to the game of basketball itself, even as it refuses to sanitize or whitewash stories of Jordan and his notoriously massive ego. The sheer amount of ground covered in “The Last Dance” is impressive enough; what’s even more impressive is that the ten engrossing, information-packed episodes never sag in terms of pace or momentum. Like watching a 90’s Bull’s game, this thing moves. While the retro sports trivia offered up by “The Last Dance” is irresistible, whether the filmmakers are looking into Jordan’s infamous “flu game” in the ’97 NBA finals, or the star’s Howard Ratner-level gambling habits, it’s ultimately much deeper and more nuanced in its investigation than 90% of what we see in these sorts of documentaries. For Los Angeles basketball fans, this year was the loss of Kobe Bryant, a giant of the game, and someone who could be considered, along with Lebron James, to be the natural heir to Jordan’s title as the Greatest Of All Time. Kobe was a flawed and imperfect man, but as the personification of victory at all costs, he was an embodiment of the same ethos that “The Last Dance” examines with such impassioned detail. For basketball nuts, “The Last Dance” was one of 2020’s great obsessions, and gave us plenty of reason to look forward to the next major documentary work from the folks at ESPN.
4. “Bojack Horseman” (Bob Raphael-Waksberg)
It was always going to be tough saying goodbye to “Bojack Horseman,” just as it was never destined to end well for the show’s tormented titular colt, who has gone on to become one of Peak T.V.’s most unexpected and iconic antiheroes. “Bojack” is a show that has been setting a high bar for animated adult comedy since it premiered on Netflix in 2014, although its first season undeniably took its time in finding its footing. This oddball hero’s journey has maintained such a high level of quality throughout its run that the first half of the show’s sixth and final season — which aired in October of last year, before the world as we knew it went to hell — felt disappointing only when compared to the near-perfect seasons that had preceded it. The overriding, common complaint that was leveled at that aforementioned collection of episodes was that it essentially amounted to a needlessly protracted buildup to Bojack’s inevitable, unalterable bottoming-out, and that the second half of the final season would promise a moral reckoning more dire than anything the show had dared to depict up until that point. And while this conclusive chapter of the hysterically funny, curiously quixotic, and emotionally shattering tale of “Bojack Horseman” saw Bob-Raphael Waksberg’s animated equine tragicomedy at its most unsparing, the final episodes also afforded a measure of catharsis to its characters that was, in many ways, long overdue. This extension of authorial kindness rendered Bojack’s arc until that point not only poignant, but somehow, deeply necessary. In this last leg of “Bojack,” Bojack himself — voiced, as always, with an adroitly calibrated blend of smarm, self-loathing and wicked self-awareness by Will Arnett — has nowhere left to run. He’s burnt all the remaining bridges in his life. His few remaining friends have abandoned him; he is no longer able to mask his bone-deep inadequacy with narcotic binges or alcohol dependency. In other words, there is no option for further self-sabotage, no getaway plan; nothing left to do but to face the music. Of course, I’m making this epilogue of “Bojack Horseman” sound quite grim; lest we forget this is a show populated by a bizarro universe of snarky, eloquent, pun-deploying anthropomorphized animals (put it this way: it’s a world where the primary cop character is a kitten named Officer Meow Meow Fuzzyface), so that meant there was a healthy deal of absurdity to buoy all the sorrow and self-discovery, and it wouldn’t be “Bojack” if that weren’t the case. I suppose the best thing I can say about “Bojack Horseman,” now that it’s gone, is that it left the room the same way it entered: as a true original.
3. “I May Destroy You” (Michaela Coel)
Neoliberalism often prioritizes civility and performative (i.e. meaningless) courtesy above actionable change. This is largely because, as we all know, change is messy. Change is contentious. It is sometimes violent. Change is also, for many and without fail, an uncomfortable experience. I was not aware of Michaela Coel, the dazzlingly talented multi-hyphenate behind HBO’s “I May Destroy You,” before this year, but after digesting all twelve episodes of her show, which underlines the necessity of discomfort as it relates to social change, I will be paying rapt attention to whatever she decides to tackle next. “I May Destroy You” defies not only “genre,” but also tropes and conventions that have long been peddled by hack screenwriting teachers. It is a work of real-deal T.V. art that all but spits in the face of your fake, polite neoliberal “civility.” The show is designed to make the viewer deeply uncomfortable, and that’s why it’s one of the best and most essential new dramas of this year. Coel’s show resists being put into a box, and it shape-shifts from episode to episode, constantly keeping its audience on edge, in a state of frazzled, dumbfounded awe and panic. As a storyteller, Coel is interested in boundaries, and what happens when those boundaries are violated. It’s not just that the show is concerned with sexual assault, issues of consent and coercion, and the public dissemination of traumatic events that have the power to destroy lives and propel others to a kind of vanguard of social-media celebrity. Here, Coel is chafing against the timid and schematic boundaries of television storytelling itself, in a fashion that I haven’t seen since the creative zenith of FX’s “Atlanta” in its second season (and this show, it must be said, resolutely avoids the nice-boy male gaze that is the regrettable byproduct of Donald Glover’s general artistic temperament). There was never telling what you would get when you were turning into “I May Destroy You”: at times, the argot-heavy dialogue had a kind of Andrea Arnold flavor to it, where it’s not so much about the words being spoken but how they’re being spoken; other times, the show threw convention to the wind and dared to plunge audiences inside the torrential, surreal, fragmented mindscapes of its characters. “I May Destroy You” is far from escapism, but it made some of us feel seen during this otherwise calamitous year, if for no other reason than it implored us to look at our own complicity, as a culture, in sexual, romantic, platonic, and workplace abuse. Michaela Coel is one of those generational voices we’ll be hearing about for a while, and while it’s a pleasure to know that “I May Destroy You” is only the beginning, it throws down such a considerable gauntlet that I’m all but giddy at the prospect of where she may go from here.
2. “I Know This Much Is True” (Derek Cianfrance)
What Futura font and Bill Murray are to Wes Anderson movies, tragedy and despair are to the works of Derek Cianfrance: this is, after all, a brilliant director who is chiefly interested in punishing and propulsive tales of human sorrow. I often think of his unforgettable tale of doomed romance, “Blue Valentine,” and sometimes even his “The Place Beyond The Pines,” a turgid, superbly acted crime movie triptych that ultimately buckles under the weight of its own colossal ambitions, but never for lack of grace. Alas, when it comes to a sheer onslaught of misery, “I Know This Much Is True” has Cianfrance’s entire filmography beat, and then some. On its surface, this is another one of the director’s studies of familial dysfunction, and the trickle-down legacies of pain and abuse. While “I Know This Much Is True” is primarily a story about brothers whose bond is consecrated by mental illness, the script, adapted from a 900-page, Oprah-endorsed novel by author Wally Lamb, leaves no misfortune unearthed. There is cancer, gross mistreatment of children, rape, the death of an infant, a harrowing visit to one of the most terrifying fictional mental health facilities I’ve ever seen, and a character severing his own hand as a sacrifice to God. Cianfrance’s recurring authorial focus on how, in spite of how much we try, we often cannot escape the crippling imperfections of our own family, is what holds all of this dour businesses together. With so much gloom in the world right now, why would anyone in their right mind want to watch “I Know This Much Is True?” Why is this one of the year’s great shows? I’ll tell you why. This is easily Cianfrance’s most masterful and accomplished effort behind the camera since the unforgettable “Blue Valentine,” the most emotionally affecting T.V. show of 2020, and a poignant, insistently human reminder of what an empathic constructor of naturalist drama this director can be when he’s operating at the peak of his powers. It’s a work that has a great deal to say about us, the viewers: as people, lovers, parents, children, and friends. Cianfrance’s six-part tragedy also contains what might be Mark Ruffalo’s greatest performance since the glory days of “Zodiac” and “You Can Count On Me,” and I do not say that lightly. The fact that Ruffalo physically transforms himself to play the two beleaguered brothers at the center of this wrenching narrative only makes the individual gradations and shades of each respective performance all the more impressive (another astonishing actor, Philip Ettinger, plays the brothers in flashbacks, but each member of this outstanding ensemble deserves their own write-up). The world may be a gigantic toilet right now, but hopefully some viewers will find replenishing catharsis in “I Know This Much Is True’s” depiction of ordinary people searching for hope in a hopeless situation. In a year when we’ve lost so much, to see such an honest and unflinching acceptance of that loss is not only humbling, it’s an act of profound creative sympathy.
- “The Plot Against America” (David Simon, Ed Burns)
On its surface, there was every reason to worry that David Simon and Ed Burns’ scalding miniseries adaptation of Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” — a chilling alternate history that imagines a postwar America where Franklin D. Roosevelt is unseated by Charles Lindbergh, thus precipitating a frightening new rise in publicly acceptable anti-Semitism — would be just another well-manicured HBO period piece like their recent, tepid “Perry Mason,” a drama glossed and gummed up with prestige that is nevertheless lacking the urgency that has defined it’s creator’s most enduring television output to date. How incorrect this assumption turned out to be. “The Plot Against America” is the most socially essential television drama of 2020, offering an unflinching and peerlessly directed look at how Jews remain the exiles of history, and how their assimilation into the United States, while admittedly not blighted by the same mass-scale genocide that occurred in WWII-era Europe, has been fraught with its own set of challenges and setbacks. After all, anti-Semitism hasn’t gone anywhere in the last half-century, and under the presidency of Donald Trump (on the issue of Trump’s demagogue-like ascent, “The Plot Against America” is all too painfully timely), it has practically become its own form of social discourse. Anti-Semitism is one of those few philosophies that has united the far left and the far right; as a Jew, I’ve always been shocked at how easily individuals who otherwise see themselves as “woke” or “enlightened” can slip into anti-Jewish thinking. “The Plot Against America,” apart from being a breathtaking deviation from the streetwise urban-ensemble approach that Simon perfected with “The Wire,” “Treme,” and “The Deuce,” is also an incredible show about a working-class family, and how Jewish families in particular sometimes articulate affection through behavior that gentiles might passive-aggressively describe as abrasive. What “The Plot Against America” understands is that some lost, wayward people are attracted to ideologues: hate speech can provide its own kind of horrendous, unbridled spectacle, one that allows certain ignorant folks to lean into their basest cultural views about perceived “others.” Intolerance is the order of the day in 2020 as much as it was in the 1940’s suburban New Jersey milieu that this show imagines, and “The Plot Against America,” somehow, manages to resist Simons’ occasional weakness for moderate liberal speechifying while drawing career-best performances out of an unbelievable cast that includes seasoned professionals like John Turturro and Winona Ryder, the increasingly interesting Zoe Kazan — who gave the television performance of the year here, as far as I’m concerned — and also remarkable newcomers like Morgan Spector, Anthony Boyle, and “Marriage Story” discovery Azhy Robertson. It feels trite to say that a series feels like it was “made yesterday,” but Simon and Burns aren’t reveling in boomer-nostalgia finger-pointing in “The Plot Against America,” as Aaron Sorkin did in this year’s truly unfortunate “Trial of the Chicago 7.” Instead, Simon and his team have made a show that gestures towards what a grim future we have in store for us if things don’t change soon.
I appreciated the kooky rococo opulence of Netflix’s most recent “Dracula” reimagining, although I also concede that the show got more top-heavy and ridiculous as it progressed through its first season. It’s always a pleasure to have Larry David and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” back, even if Larry’s habit of spiting, alienating and offending everyone in his increasingly small personal circle is starting to show signs of mild fatigue. “Better Call Saul” delivered a taut, mostly excellent preamble to what one can only assume is the forthcoming fall of Jimmy McGill, while “Normal People,” the pointedly earnest and occasionally very touching adaptation of Sally Rooney’s popular romantic novel, was a binge-worthy obsession for many people this year. Wake me up when we’re no longer talking about Connell’s chain, please and thank you.
“Lovecraft Country” was one of the more memorably imaginative shows from this year until it started to go off the rails midway through its first season. Still, I enjoyed that new supernatural revisionist adventure a great deal more than Noah Hawley’s most recent season of “Fargo,” which, in spite of some spirited performances from the likes of Chris Rock, Jason Schwartzman, and Jessie Buckley, largely felt like faux-intellectual fan fiction, thus making that show’s superb second season feel more like a fluke after the back-to-back fizzles of seasons three and four. “The Eric Andre Show” is still funny enough to make you feel like you’re on mushrooms, while “The Queen’s Gambit,” while I didn’t love it, is well-made and superficially handsome enough to justify its status as a binge-worthy Netflix obsession.
“Agents of Chaos” was a terrifying and eye-opening documentary about the byzantine, endlessly toxic and corrupt depths of Donald Trump’s ties to Soviet Russia, while “Haunting of Bly Manor” managed to improve upon its overpraised first season by embracing a traditional Gothic ghost story template, as filtered through a pleasantly watchable, knowingly 80’s, “Stranger Things”-style sensibility. I don’t really know what “The New Pope” was supposed to be, but I know that I had a pretty great time watching it, and FX’s white-rapper comedy “Dave” contained enough puerile, shamefully funny dick jokes to at least merit inclusion in the honorable mention category.
