Ranking Every TV Show of 2018: #s 70-51

We’re ranking every TV show that we watched in 2018. If you missed Part I, you can find it here. And remember: Despite their relatively low appearance on the year-end rankings, these shows are still pretty good.

70. Jack Ryan (Amazon, Season 1). There’s nothing fancy about Jack Ryan, a hunter-killer thriller starring John Krasinski as Tom Clancy’s heroic CIA “analyst”—previously played on the big screen by Alec Baldwin, Ben Affleck, and of course Harrison Ford—and Wendell Pierce as his no-nonsense boss. It’s a taut, plotty procedural about smart good guys trying to catch smart bad guys. In 2018, there’s something a little icky about yet another story of dastardly Islamic terrorists scheming to cripple the United States, and despite a nuanced portrayal from Ali Suliman as the big bad, Jack Ryan often feels like a coarse campaign ad for foreign-policy hawks. But the show is best viewed through an apolitical lens, and as a suspense piece, it mostly works, with well-choreographed action scenes and a smartly paced story. Unlike its protagonist, Jack Ryan isn’t going to save the world, but it can provide an enjoyable distraction from it.

69. This Is Us (NBC, Seasons 2.5 and 3.0; last year: 63 of 108). Is there a more uneven show on television? When This Is Us is good, it’s downright beautiful, a heartwarming affirmation of family and decency. When it’s bad, it’s screechingly manipulative, with characters constantly reversing themselves as a transparent method of escalating the melodrama. The past year of the series provided plenty of both. In certain moments—a woman singing a cappella in a car while her boyfriend weeps; a stud gently courting a beauty who’s suffered terrible trauma; a daughter coming out to her supportive parents—the show transcended its twisty premise to reveal deep emotional truths. Yet large swaths of the series continue to feel forced, betraying the characters’ true nature as the price of artificially heightening the stakes. This is most apparent in the ghastly subplot involving Sterling K. Brown’s run for councilman, which somehow turned the show’s two most reliable emissaries of its ethos of tenderness into selfish idiots. It’s hard to give up on This Is Us, because there’s always the promise of flickers of magic right around the corner. It’s also hard to envision the show sustaining that magic for any real length of time.

68. The Affair (Showtime, Season 4; 2016 rank: 59 of 88). After a faintly disastrous third season, The Affair rebounds marginally in Season 4, focusing more on its characters’ fragile emotional states than on the engineered plotting designed to make them so miserable. Parts of this show remain numbingly stupid, most notably Dominic West’s second life as a hip high school teacher. (Joshua Jackson’s walkabout to California isn’t exactly sensible either.) But the series does strong work with its female characters, both Ruth Wilson’s attempt to reclaim her life in the face of ugly memories and Maura Tierney’s helpless fight to keep it together as her boyfriend stares down death. (American Gods’ Emily Browning does nice work as a potentially precious neighbor who tries to reintroduce some spice into Tierney’s domesticated life.) Each new season of The Affair never came close to attaining the startling power of its first go-round—and with news that Season 5 will involve a major time jump, it appears as though the showrunners have stopped trying—but there’s enough emotional sensitivity on display here to make it worth diving back into the ocean.

67. Ash vs. Evil Dead (Starz, Season 3; 2016 rank: 43). The curse of diminishing returns struck Ash vs. Evil Dead in its third and final season, which lacks the verve of the first two. That said, there’s still plenty to admire here: Bruce Campbell’s loosey-goosey performance; buckets of blood and gore; a scene of a demented baby wreaking Stoogian havoc. There’s even a faintly moving subplot in which Campbell’s character connects with his long-lost daughter, which the show treats with a tricky combination of skepticism and sincerity. Beyond that, this latest barrage of beheadings and possessions may not have been especially memorable, but Ash vs. Evil Dead was never designed to dig under your skin. It was about the weirdly sweet camaraderie between a band of clueless heroes, and it retained that sweetness right up until it took a shotgun blast to the head.

66. Everything Sucks! (Netflix, Season 1). Sure, it’s no Freaks & Geeks. But for the most part, Everything Sucks! hammers the sweet spot at the intersection of cringe comedy and adolescent angst. And while the plotting is mostly paint-by-numbers, the loosely serialized story of a group of A/V nerds trying to make a movie about aliens is thoroughly disarming. The young cast is predictably uneven, but keep an eye on Sydney Sweeney, who had a very good year (she also guested in two other shows that will be appearing considerably higher on this list). The quick cancelation of this show was inevitable—it doesn’t give us anything we haven’t already seen dozens of times on TV—but it still kind of sucks.

65. One Day at a Time (Netflix, Season 2; last year: 66). Virtually nothing changes in Season 2 of One Day at a Time, which features the same cast, the same sets, and the same general mode of storytelling. This means that it also features the same strengths and weaknesses. As a comedy, One Day at a Time is terribly spotty, with some real clunkers and a weak hit-to-miss ratio, plus an insufferable laugh track whose only real function is to appeal to viewers’ nostalgia for old sitcoms. But as an ensemble piece with a rewarding focus on political issues, the show tends to work beautifully, with strong characters and a refreshingly opinionated point of view. Its comedy may be stuck in the ’90s, but this series is very much a product—and a powerful critique—of America in 2018.

64. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Amazon, Season 1). One of the cool things about #PeakTV is that it makes room for new approaches to the medium, both narratively and visually. As a story, Picnic at Hanging Rock—which adapts Joan Lindsay’s novel about three female students who mysteriously disappear from their Australian boarding school in 1900—isn’t especially interesting, and the attempts to expand the plot beyond what Peter Weir relayed in his 1975 film adaptation mostly fall flat. But the presentation of this show is flat-out gorgeous, with stunning costumes, verdant locations, and a generally swoony atmosphere. Natalie Dormer is ice-chilled as the provocative headmistress, while Lily Sullivan makes a major impression as the most precocious of the missing youths. The peculiar enigma at the center of Picnic at Hanging Rock may be unknowable, but the show’s stylistic achievement is undeniable.

63. Atlanta (FX, Season 2; 2016 rank: 62). Uh oh. Look, if you insist that this show is historic and seminal and truly one of a kind, that’s fine; I’m not going to, like, fight you or anything. And even as a white critic with limited exposure to black culture, I can appreciate the authenticity of Atlanta’s milieu, along with the way it centers on the experience of being black in America (an existence that far too many TV shows ignore entirely). But while I can admire Atlanta’s attempt to do something different, large chunks of this show simply do not work for me. The shaggy-dog storytelling is just so aimless, and Donald Glover’s lead performance is withdrawn to the point of vacancy. Even “Teddy Perkins”, which many critics hailed as the best single episode of television in 2018, left me cold, an awkward horror whatsit that was all setup, no payoff. I’m happy that this show exists, and I look forward to the possibility of future seasons, if for no other reason than Brian Tyree Henry’s perfectly modulated performance. Perhaps it will eventually speak to me the way it’s clearly spoken to so many others. But for now, I’m left cold.

62. The Expanse (Syfy, Season 3; last year: 55). I don’t really know what the hell is going on in this show. Its hard sci-fi approach tends to leave me baffled, as does all of the frantic chatter about ion beams or spectral gravitational fields or whatever. But despite a still-stiff Steven Strait in the lead, the characters in The Expanse are generally well-drawn, and the interpersonal dynamics are intriguing enough to compensate for the incomprehensible plotting. The other members of the Rocinante, in particular Wes Chatham as a blockheaded military type who’s smarter than he lets on, are all fun to hang around with, but my favorite pairing in Season 3 is that between recurring guest stars Cara Gee and David Strathairn as two commanders with weird accents and dueling agendas. A bottle-ish episode where they spend the entire hour immobilized, jabbering and offending and collaborating, highlights what The Expanse does well. With luck, as this show ventures farther and farther from Earth, it will remember to retain its human center.

61. Bodyguard (Netflix, Season 1). Similar to Jack Ryan, this show navigates the somewhat-awkward territory of building a season around the threat of religious fanatics from the Middle East. But Bodyguard is smarter about it, grappling with the unpleasantness of a hawkish politician (a very good Keeley Hawes) who constantly touts national security concerns, no matter how many human rights get trampled in the process. Of course, this isn’t really a political show but a thriller, centering around an extremely lethal, extremely frazzled security expert, played by none other than Robb Stark himself (aka Richard Madden). Bodyguard’s labyrinthine conspiracy is tough to follow, but it’s also beside the point; the real pleasure here is watching Madden stumble into one cataclysmic dilemma after another, concluding with an unspeakably tense set piece involving a bomb, a dead man’s switch, and a perilously fatiguing thumb. The show cheats on occasion (did he really just… no, he didn’t), but its genre thrills are largely secure.

60. Insecure (HBO, Season 3; last year: 47). Unlike its characters, this show is deeply comfortable in its own skin, with a relaxed vibe and a strong sense of identity. It’s also gotten a little bit boring. As a writer, Issa Rae has an impressive command of language and human behavior, but there’s also a slackness to her storytelling that maybe mirrors her character’s aimlessness a bit too effectively. Insecure is more successful in Season 3 when it focuses on Yvonne Orji’s Molly, who struggles to assert herself in a male-dominant workplace; Molly’s story is both relatable and specific, with a degree of momentum that Issa’s own arc lacks. Insecure is too well-observed to be disposable, but much like its heroine, it could use a jolt of energy.

59. The Romanoffs (Amazon, Season 1). Matthew Weiner’s follow-up to Mad Men was always going to be a losing battle, so let’s do both him and ourselves a favor and treat The Romanoffs as its own series rather than The Show That Followed Man Men. With that in mind, this show is undoubtedly a mess. But it’s an interesting mess, with a degree of creative control that only comes after you’ve shepherded a property to critical and commercial stardom. (Whoops, there I go again.) In embracing the anthology format, Weiner gives himself the freedom to tell stories with different styles and tones; naturally, some of these are much better than others. (The one thing threading them together: the bracing title sequence, which begins with classical music before suddenly transitioning to a blast of Tom Petty.) Several of these—a mother who becomes suspicious that her kids’ piano teacher is a pedophile; a journalist seeking to uncover corruption at a Mexico City clinic—are strained and uninvolving. But others, such as an episode where Amanda Peet plays a privileged housewife with lingering regrets, are powerful in their execution. The high point is the one episode that actually takes place in Russia, where a couple (Kathryn Hahn and Mad Men’s Jay R. Ferguson) coordinate with a bureaucrat (Annet Mahendru, aka NINA!) and attempt to adopt a baby. That installment is spare and intimate, stripping away Weiner’s auteurist pretensions and simply telling a painful human story. The Romanoffs swung and missed a lot, but it also demonstrated the rewards of swinging big.

58. Vida (Starz, Season 1). It’s fitting that this show appears immediately after The Romanoffs, because it’s difficult to imagine two series more different in scope and approach. At just six half-hour episodes, Vida is modest in scale and style, telling the seemingly unremarkable story of two sisters who return home to deal with the drudging logistics after their mother dies. The show doesn’t try to push too far outside its comfort zone, but it does examine the sisters’ relationships—both with others and with each other—with tenderness and insight. Not a ton of plot develops, but the story unfolds organically, with a verisimilitude that helps offset the otherwise slow pacing. After death, life goes on. Hopefully, so will this show.

57. Goliath (Amazon, Season 2; 2016 rank: 47). There’s no scarred and naked William Hurt wandering the halls in Season 2 of Goliath, which is a bit of a bummer. But this David E. Kelley show is still mostly a hoot, with fun performances from Billy Bob Thornton, Nina Arianda (somebody please give her a movie), Mark Duplass, and most of all Ana de la Reguera as a striving mayoral candidate with a dark past. As a legal thriller, Goliath is mostly nonsense, but it’s fun nonsense, never more so than in a bottle episode where Thornton’s alcoholic litigator wakes up from a bender and finds himself locked in a house full of bored assassins. There’s a layer of sleaze here that’s irresistible, with the show weaving a web of hopeless corruption that eventually ensnares everyone. That includes you.

56. Kidding (Showtime, Season 1). Well, this is different. I don’t know that Kidding is a good show—not because I think it’s bad, but because I’m not sure that traditional qualitative analysis can even apply to such a bizarre series. Starring Jim Carrey as a beloved children’s-show host in the midst of a nervous breakdown after his son’s death, Kidding is exceedingly strange, with all sorts of surreal subplots and oddball characters. But it’s also in control of its own strangeness, proceeding with a confidence that prevents it from disintegrating into an avalanche of randomness. Carrey commits to the part completely, while Frank Langella is beautifully restrained as his exasperated father. It doesn’t always work, but it’s always something. This is the rare show that you should watch simply to confirm that it exists.

55. Babylon Berlin (Netflix, Season 1). Netflix has marketed this as a single, 16-episode season, but it’s really two separate seasons that originally aired in Germany. Even that is somewhat misleading, because Babylon Berlin has enough plot for about 10 seasons. It’s a furiously fast-paced show, with loads of intrigue and conspiratorial mumbo-jumbo, and if you happen to suffer from European face blindness (not that I have anyone in mind), it can be highly difficult to keep everything straight. (Thankfully, Netflix does include a “previously on” montage at the beginning of each episode, something it refuses to do with its original properties.) The good news is that the frantic plotting is secondary to the atmosphere and the genre thrills, which the show delivers by the bushel. The cast is enormous, but Liv Lisa Fries is a standout as a prostitute with a nose for detective work. And while the show can be exhausting to follow, some of the set pieces—a dance at a nightclub, a chase on a train, a daring attempt to take reconnaissance photos while falling out of an airplane—are so invigorating that getting hopelessly lost in this universe becomes downright agreeable.

54. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Netflix, Season 1). Despite the reliably appealing presence of Kiernan Shipka, this show gets off to a somewhat bumpy start. But while I hate to do the whole “Stick with it, it gets better!” thing—life is too short for us to force ourselves to watch shows that we aren’t enjoying—trust me, it gets better. Specifically, beginning with its fifth episode, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina finds its rhythm as a Buffy-esque fusion of relatable teen tropes and high-concept supernatural hijinks. It’s admirably dark, too, trafficking in death and loss in ways unusual for a show centered on teenagers. Shipka is the steady anchor, while Richard Coyle, Tati Gabrielle, Mirando Otto, and especially Michelle Gomez do quality work in supporting roles. (Ross Lynch, as Sabrina’s doltish human boyfriend, is rather less good.) Throw in some strong production values, and there’s a lot to like here. Pity about Shipka’s cat allergy, which turned that cute kitty into the most useless familiar any witch has ever had.

53. Santa Clarita Diet (Netflix, Season 2; last year: 85). It’s always gratifying to see a show improve. Santa Clarita Diet doesn’t exactly overhaul things in Season 2—it’s still basically the same show about navigating marriage and parenting, only with zombies—but it’s somehow more poised in its storytelling and presentation, and less eager to prove itself. The entire cast remains terrific, in particular Timothy Olyphant, who’s never been more wonderfully overwhelmed. (A particular delight: his repeated line reading of “Halibut!”) And the plotting is sharper this season, with a more sensible mythology. Santa Clarita Diet can still verge on moronic at times, and one questions just how far it can stretch its wacky premise. But with character dynamics this self-assured, its undead heart just might keep on pumping.

52. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (The CW, Season 4; last year: 43). What happened to the music? Crazy Ex-Girlfriend remains a fun and versatile show in its final season, but what always made it special was its songs, and those have been weirdly lackluster of late. Perhaps Rachel Bloom & Co. are saving their ammo for the big finish—the series still has seven episodes left to air, so I’ll likely consider the back half of Season 4 for the 2019 list—but it’s been strange watching a musical show that seems increasingly disinterested in music. That said, this is still a thoroughly enjoyable show, with a deep bench and an impressive variety of tone. (The most recent episode, a rom-com parody featuring Scott Michael Foster and the always-great Esther Povitsky, was an absolute delight.) And it remains emotionally astute in charting its heroine’s mental state, which has gradually developed from literal tagline to something messier and more realistic. I’d just like more leap-to-your-feet songs, please.

51. Deutschland 86 (Sundance, Season 2; 2015 rank: 27 of 62). Spies! As with Babylon Berlin, I don’t pretend that I perfectly grasped the plot of the second season of this slippery German show. But the climate of Cold War intrigue is really just the scaffolding for some twisty betrayals and fraught decisions. Maria Schrader remains perfectly crisp as a cagey operative, while Lavinia Wilson is a tremendous addition as an alluring intelligence officer with an iron grip. As double crosses ensue and dead bodies pile up and kickass ’80s tunes keep blaring on the soundtrack, Deutschland 86 becomes immersive, trapping you in its bygone era of bulky technology and silky spycraft. Treachery has rarely felt this sexy.

Coming tomorrow: Kristen Bell goes back to Heaven, Emma Stone goes back in time, Joel Kinnaman goes back to the future, Peter Maldonado goes back to the editing room, and Claire Danes goes back to work.