Ranking Every TV Show of 2018: #s 50-31

Our rankings of every 2018 TV show continue below. For prior installments, check out the following links:

#s 93-71
#s 70-51

50. Legion (FX, Season 2; last year: 29 of 108). Following a fascinating first season that attempted to turn standard superhero entertainments inside out, Legion feels a bit too self-important in its second go-round, too focused on touting its originality without actually advancing a compelling story. It also marginalizes its greatest asset—Aubrey Plaza’s magnificently off-kilter performance—while simultaneously padding out the season with a number of episodes that never really go anywhere. Still, this remains a staggeringly impressive show, with bracing technique and a bold command of lighting, framing, and music. The storyline doesn’t always work, and as gifted an artist as Noah Hawley is, he’d be well-served to tighten things up going forward. But even when it’s nonsensical, Legion always offers something to see.

49. Escape at Dannemora (Showtime, Season 1). Arguably Legion’s narrative and aesthetic opposite, Ben Stiller’s true-crime tale is rigorously straightforward, charting the particular series of events that led to the escape of two convicts from a maximum-security prison. It’s interesting, even if it’s also a little slow; busting out of jail is hard work, and Stiller chronicles the arduous process—the clandestine obtaining of illicit materials, the late-night sawing, the careful studying of blueprints—with a methodical patience that verges on sleepy. (Only once, in a thrilling long take that opens the fifth episode, does Stiller really announce his directorial presence.) Beyond morbid fascination—just how did this happen?—Escape at Dannemora is most notable for its acting. Benicio del Toro delivers a thoroughly bizarre performance as a pitiless killer—one of his demented line readings is destined to become the stuff of internet legend—while Patricia Arquette is shockingly despicable as the corrupt worker who facilitated the breakout. But the best turn comes from Paul Dano as the other escapee. Unlike del Toro, Dano’s performance is unshowy, grounded in realism, specificity, and hard work. Those same qualities make Escape at Dannemora worth watching.

48. The Good Place (NBC, Season 3; last year: 32). The Good Place remains relentlessly clever in Season 3, continuing to use philosophical dilemmas as a source of imaginative metaphysical comedy. So why can’t I embrace it as an instant classic the way so many critics have? I suppose my issue is that the show, for all its intelligence and wit, is more about its concept than its characters. Watching each episode, you can almost hear the gears grinding, the sense that Michael Schur is carefully engineering everything, and that holds the series back from true greatness. That said, the entire cast is excellent, particularly the women; Kristen Bell’s casual brilliance is probably underrated at this point, while Jameela Jamil and D’Arcy Carden are perfectly calibrated laugh-generating machines. And the show remains impressively committed to its peculiar hybrid of intellectual exploration and misfit comedy. It may not be heavenly, but it still achieves moments of bliss.

47. Maniac (Netflix, Season 1). Terrible and beautiful, stupefying and captivating, Maniac embodies the best and worst things about #PeakTV. Directed and co-created by Cary Joji Fukunaga (True Detective), it’s an utterly ridiculous show, with a garbled storyline and a needless surfeit of weirdness. But the series is its own, and there’s something admirable about its absolute commitment. Fukunaga brings his formidable craft to bear; Maniac has a striking visual palette, along with some truly inventive production design that’s like a cross between The Matrix and Brazil. It also has Emma Stone, a crucial ingredient, given her ability to wring pathos out of absurdity. As her co-star, Jonah Hill is less successful when asked to carry things himself—he’s too overtly withdrawn, like he’s trying to underact—but Stone lifts him up in their scenes together, and on occasion Maniac transcends its nutty origins and becomes the mind-bogglingly beguiling show that it so clearly wanted to be. And even when it fails—often when it revolves around Justin Theroux’s decidedly unglamorous turn as a flailing innovator—it fails interestingly. In an era where so many entertainments feel mass-produced, this one stands alone, for better and for worse.

46. Love (Netflix, Season 3; last year: 44). Nothing really changes in the final season of Love, which is the right approach; this series was fully formed from the get-go, and there was no need to radically alter its sweet-and-sour dynamic. Of course, this consistency also means that the show’s key weakness—an insistence on separating its two main characters for far too many episodes—remains in place, resulting in the usual unevenness. But when Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust share the screen, Love is wonderful: messy, honest, funny, and pure. Throw in more stupendous supporting work from Claudia O’Doherty, scene-stealer par excellence, and this show remained winning, right up until its wistful, poignant end.

45. The Bold Type (Freeform, Season 2). There’s a glimmer of a great show lurking in The Bold Type, a series that advances its message of feminine empowerment while also deepening the emotional bonds between its characters. It isn’t there yet. There are a few too many contrivances, as well as a tentativeness to really establish its own identity beyond a general wokeness. But this show, about three staffers at a women’s magazine, is still worthwhile, with a strong voice and a rich portrait of female friendship. As the lead, Katie Stevens can be frustratingly self-absorbed, but that’s arguably in keeping with the tunnel vision of her privileged character; as her friends and colleagues, Aisha Dee and Meghann Fahy are both excellent, splicing confidence with self-doubt. The Bold Type may never reach its potential, but that it’s even developed that potential is an achievement in itself.

44. Ozark (Netflix, Season 2; last year: 59). Sure, this show will never entirely evade the long shadow cast by Breaking Bad, and its prestige-drama execution suffers from the usual problems (slow pacing, poor lighting, too many characters). But Ozark’s story of a family constantly on the precipice of collapse is just too compelling to ignore. Jason Bateman continues to do steady work as the increasingly helpless patriarch, while Julia Garner remains devastating as a local who’s desperate to escape her family’s legacy of criminality. Throw in the welcome appearance of Janet McTeer as an amoral cartel lawyer, and the series is entertaining almost by default. Eventually, you’d think the central family’s multiplying misdeeds would catch up to them, but at this point, their peril is our gain.

43. Altered Carbon (Netflix, Season 1). Despite watching a ton of TV, I tend to be very bad at deciphering complicated plots. (This may be because I refuse to binge-watch series, meaning I invariably end up watching a half-dozen different shows in a single night.) That’s never been more true than in Altered Carbon, a Blade Runner-ish thriller that traffics in body-switching, human cloning, digital consciousness downloading, and all other manner of sci-fi tropes. Maybe it’s just my addled, television-saturated brain, but I suspect that even the most diligent viewers struggled to track this series’ byzantine narrative, with its betrayals and flashbacks and fakeouts and false identities. But that doesn’t matter in the slightest, because as a piece of craft, this show is a stunner, with eye-poppingly detailed environments and a pulsating sense of innovation. It also smartly uses its heady concepts for pulp entertainment; a fight scene at the end of the eighth episode, in which a dozen copies of the same person burst from within glass encasements, is both imaginative and exciting, while a reveal in the following hour—when a woman rises majestically from a bath and delivers one of the line readings of the year—encapsulates the show’s twisted grandeur. A jacked-up Joel Kinnaman is solid as the beleaguered hero, but the standout is Martha Higareda as a green cop in way over her head. Altered Carbon’s story may be a mess, but its breathtaking aesthetic is a story all its own.

42. Big Mouth (Netflix, Season 2; last year: 75). Big Mouth’s premise—basically, Freak & Geeks but filthy—isn’t anything special, and its animation is unexceptional. But in its second season, the show develops a sweetness that both complements and overpowers its extreme raunch. Yes, there are times when its outrageousness—ugh, is he still fucking that pillow?—becomes too much to bear. But unlike its flailing characters, Big Mouth has grown more comfortable with itself, and that newfound confidence lends it a fluidity that it lacked last year. That’s never more evident than in “The Planned Parenthood Show”, a bravura episode about sex and abortion that’s illuminating, powerful, and hilarious. Big Mouth’s absurdist approach isn’t for everybody, but with a series this secretly empathetic, maybe it should be.

41. Patriot (Amazon, Season 2; last year: 45). The weird gets weirder in Season 2 of Patriot, a truly bizarre show whose existence alone is cause for celebration. This series takes place in its own reality, a world of outsized double-speak and ingenious detectives and undercover metallurgists. It is so strange, and yet it’s so poised in its own strangeness that it somehow becomes entirely plausible, given that it proceeds according to its own rigorous, invented logic. And while its lunacy can sometimes feel removed, it can also be hugely entertaining, particularly whenever Michael Dorman starts to sing; multiple episodes supply exquisite long takes set to his subtitled crooning, the camera tracking his ridiculous exploits with dispassionate agility. As a story, Patriot is difficult to take seriously. As a work of artistic self-possession, it’s impossible to dismiss.

40. Sneaky Pete (Amazon, Season 2; last year: 15). The first season of Sneaky Pete was revitalizing, a blast of intricate plotting and playful grifting, complete with juicy treats like a seven-minute monologue from Bryan Cranston. Season 2 isn’t quite as lively; the cons aren’t as exciting, the suspense isn’t as gripping. (Cranston is also gone, which doesn’t help.) But the show still has a verisimilitude that makes it engrossing, pulling us into its orbit of deception with the light-fingered touch of a scam artist. That doesn’t mean the pleasures are false. The cast is uniformly strong (Jane Adams is a predictably great addition), while the looming possibility of our protagonist getting found out lends the series a vertiginous sense of danger. Sneaky Pete may not be as delightful as it used to be, but it can still be fun getting taken for a ride.

39. American Vandal (Netflix, Season 2; last year: 35). Having shaken the earth with its first season, American Vandal doesn’t bother reinventing the wheel for Season 2, instead largely following the same blueprint: applying the investigative rigor of a true-crime procedural to a fictional case of monumental stupidity. Naturally, there are diminishing returns; things aren’t quite as fresh this time around, and despite some coy lampshading, the series can’t outrun its own past. But this remains a fiendishly clever show, and it retains the stealthy focus on character that made Season 1 so quietly moving. That’s most true when relaying the trials and tribulations of a local basketball star (Melvin Gregg, in a star-making performance) who fights to avoid being pigeonholed as the dumb jock. And while American Vandal may no longer be an internet sensation, in examining the appeals and hazards of the internet—which it does with a seriousness that is both hilarious and insightful—it holds up a mirror to ourselves.

38. Howards End (Starz, Season 1). I know what you’re thinking: Great, another stuffy British period piece. Wrong. Sure, this adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel—with a teleplay by Kenneth Lonergan that was directed by Hettie Macdonald—is appropriately sumptuous, with evocative costumes and a meticulous sense of time and place. But there’s a spikiness to the storytelling here that undercuts the genteel setting. There is also Hayley Atwell, delivering a pitch-perfect performance as a woman of uncommon decency who is constantly underestimated and overlooked. The same was true of Howards End, which told a terrible tale of institutional prejudice and thwarted affection with dignity and grace.

37. The Terror (AMC, Season 1). Challenging, uncompromising, and brutal, The Terror tends to mirror the frigid arctic lands where it takes place. This is rarely a fun show; it’s engulfed by human ugliness and despair, and its grim locations and unpleasant characters can feel punishing. But there’s still an undercurrent of pulp entertainment running through things, and that—along with some superlative craftsmanship—prevents the series from feeling too cold. Over time, the characters sharpen into focus, thanks in part to astute performances from Jared Harris, Adam Nagaitis, and Ciarán Hinds. The Terror may be a show about a mythically evil bear run amok, but it’s also about the disintegration of the bonds of humanity, and it charts its course with clinical precision. The real terror, of course, is us.

36. Homeland (Showtime, Season 7; last year: 92). Well that was unexpected. Following a dreadful sixth season, I’d basically given up on Homeland, so of course it bounced back with arguably its most successful slate of episodes since its inaugural run all those years ago. Some sly plotting helps; our heroine is beset by corruption on all sides, particularly within the White House. There are some dastardly Russian villains and even an actual fake-news storyline, complete with a chilling campaign of propaganda and disinformation. (It helps that it’s led by Costa Ronin, aka Oleg.) Most importantly, the show seems to have reacquired its sense of purpose, something beyond the vague “tell fearmonger-y stories about foreigners who want to hurt us” ethos that submarined it in the past. At its best, Homeland is about the inherent tension between the personal and the professional, and Season 7 homes in on that conflict, which allows Claire Danes to do some of her best work. If this moribund show can come back from the brink, who knows? Maybe there’s hope for America, too.

35. iZombie (The CW, Season 4; last year: 40). The CW is the wokest of all networks, but iZombie REALLY goes for it in Season 4, constructing the entire season as an allegorical rebuke of the Trumpian scare tactics surrounding illegal immigration. It’s a laudable effort that doesn’t quite work; the mythology is too slapdash to really drive the political point home. But that doesn’t really matter, because like any decent supernatural series (cough, Buffy), iZombie has always been more about its characters than anything else. And those characters are winners, in particular Rose McIver’s Liv, a medical examiner with a craving for brains. McIver continues to knock things out of the park, and the show continues to explore its premise—Liv takes on the traits of whichever corpse she just chowed down on—with playfulness and smarts. Season 4 didn’t perfectly mesh its monster-of-the-week concept with its broader storyline, but it’s just so damn enjoyable, with terrific repartee across the entire cast, most notably McIver, Rahul Kohli, and Aly Michalka. Agenda item for Season 5: a half-decent love interest for Liv, as distinct from the usual goobers she dates.

34. Daredevil (Netflix, Season 3; 2016 rank: 71 of 88). Well that was unexpected. Wait, I just did that two blurbs ago. But while Daredevil’s return to relevance is a bitter pill to swallow—just as it got good again, it got canceled—Season 3 reminded us that TV shows based on comics can be deeply rewarding. Sure, this season was longer than it needed to be, and its portrayal of the journalism industry remains dubious. But when Daredevil gets down to business—when it focuses on Matt Murdock’s crisis of faith and Wilson Fisk’s lust for power—it just clicks. It also sports the best action sequences of any comic-book show on television, and maybe of any Marvel property, period; the already-famous prison riot in this season’s fourth episode, an exhilarating 11-minute oner full of spurting blood and snapping bones, is arguably a high point for the medium. And yet the season’s best episode, “Karen,” is largely removed from its broader universe entirely, instead centering on Deborah Ann Woll’s traumatic past. Daredevil was never a perfect show, but with its final season, it showed us what comic-book stories could do.

33. Counterpart (Starz, Seasons 1 and 2). Here we have yet another series where I struggle to piece together the many fragments of plot into a coherent whole. Yet one of the draws of Counterpart is that everybody is confused, or at least, everyone has their world turned upside down. Or maybe I should say “worlds”; the show’s irresistible hook is that, at some point in the 1980s, the universe replicated itself and started proceeding along parallel tracks, only to suffer gradual divergences along the way. That’s a heady premise, one laden with potential, but it’s the show’s execution that really shines. For example, it reveals its conceit when J.K. Simmons walks into a meeting and finds himself face-to-face with… J.K. Simmons. And while Simmons’ dual performance as a humdrum analyst (or is it a duplicitous spy?) is a reliable highlight, Counterpart exhibits a versatility that doesn’t rely on his talents as a crutch; in fact, the series’ two best episodes—one involving Nazanin Boniadi’s soul-crushing journey from one world to the other, the other showing us just how the split occurred and the terrible ramifications that followed—don’t feature Simmons’ character at all. The show doesn’t always fit together as neatly as I’d like (as of this writing, the second season still has three episodes left to go), but it tackles its high-concept ideas with both intelligence and energy. There’s no need to split the difference.

32. 13 Reasons Why (Netflix, Season 2; last year: 3). Let’s get this out of the way: Following a near-perfect first season, there was absolutely no need for 13 Reasons Why to come back, and the existence of this new batch of episodes is more motivated by commercial considerations than artistic ones. Whatever. This is still a startlingly empathetic show, and it’s still telling valuable stories about friendship, bullying, and the general messiness of teenage life. Sure, Katherine Langford’s return as a ghost is a little hackneyed, and sure, there are some dubious retcons. But watching Langford and Dylan Minnette share the screen remains heartwarming, as does watching the series’ delicate evocation of the complex relationships between kids and their parents. We may not have needed more of 13 Reasons Why. We should still treasure what we have.

31. The Assassination of Gianni Versace (FX, Season 1). Yikes. The People v. O.J. Simpson was a fundamentally fun show—politically charged and factually fascinating, sure, but at its core entertaining. This follow-up in FX’s “American Crime Story” label is… not that. Yes, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is impressively made, with convincing period recreations and (naturally) some gorgeous costumes. But its primary sensation is one of terror. And that terror stems entirely from Darren Criss’ riveting, unholy performance as Andrew Cunanan, the serial killer who assassinated, well, you know. Cunanan has a rotted soul, and Criss reveals his absolute emptiness with chilling meticulousness, crafting a figure of pure evil without resorting to hammy shtick. And in a thrilling structural gambit, the show actually begins with the murder (well, one of its murders) before proceeding in reverse, allowing us to glimpse just how this remorseless monster was formed. (Perhaps for this reason, the series’ finale, which returns to the aftermath of the killing, is its weakest episode.) When it shifts its focus to its fallen artist, The Assassination of Gianni Versace is sturdy but not especially compelling. But when Criss is on the screen, it becomes downright paralyzing. You will not like what you see; you also will not look away.

Coming tomorrow: Western gunslingers, wealthy clowns, enterprising pimps, alcoholic reporters, and other flattering career choices.