Ranking Every TV Show of 2019: #s 101-76

Thirty-three different TV shows made my top 10 list this year.

I mean, not really. Math doesn’t work like that. But if placement on a top 10 list is a signifier of excellence, then 2019 offered far too much stellar small-screen programming to be reduced to a mere decade. There was so much greatness, on so many platforms: great Netflix comedies, great HBO thrillers, great Hulu dramas, great Amazon whatsits, great FX miniseries. It was enough to make you both delight and despair—to revel in the extraordinary vastness of modern television, and also to lament all the shows you couldn’t find time to watch.

Speaking of which, here’s a partial list of shows I’d previously consumed but stalled out on this year: The Affair, American Gods, Arrested Development (good riddance), Dark, Happy!, Preacher, Riverdale (doh!), A Series of Unfortunate Events, and The Terror. In a less cruel, more generous world, I might have found time to continue watching all of these series—along with intriguing new shows like The Boys, David Makes Man, and Too Old to Die Young—but today’s jam-packed TV landscape forces you to make tough choices.

As for what I did watch: Today’s list is the opening salvo in our annual weeklong exercise ranking every TV show from the past year that I watched in its entirety; it’ll wrap up with the top 10 on Friday. There are, to put it mildly, a lot of shows on this list. There also isn’t everything; I’ve probably neglected one of your most treasured sitcoms or beloved procedurals. Sue me. When you watch more than a hundred TV shows in a single year, then maybe I’ll grant you the right to complain about the programs that I so grievously ignored. Until then, pipe down.

Or maybe I’ve just ranked your favorite series far too low. Feel free to take that personally. All I’ll say is that, setting aside the arbitrary nature of ranking works of art—an admittedly foolish endeavor which suggests objective rigidity when the realities of preference and quality are far more fluid—the problem with TV’s glut of greatness is that it creates a false impression of relative mediocrity. By which I mean: If I ranked a series as the 53rd best show of the year, how good could it possibly be?

Pretty damn good. I won’t bother trying to encourage you to watch most of the shows on this list, because I’m confident you have neither the time nor the discipline to do so. What I will do is stress that the list isn’t a bell curve; half of the shows included are not below average. The vast majority are worth watching. The challenge—the existential dilemma that plagues viewers of our time—is to decide which shows are worthy of your limited time.

I’ll leave that impossible choice to you. For my part, here’s every show I watched this year, in reverse order of preference:

101. I Think You Should Leave (Netflix, Season 1). Suffice it to say I’m in the minority on this show, which basically won the internet in 2019; everywhere you looked, there were gifs, memes, and references to Tim Robinson in a hot-dog suit. It was, to put it mildly, not my thing.

Now, I know what I’m supposed to say: that comedy is subjective. That sketch comedy in particular is hit-and-miss by nature. That this show wants to make you cringe in agony as you watch it. That even if I personally didn’t respond to its specific brand of humor, I can nevertheless appreciate intellectually how it’s the product of an inventive comic imagination. That my inability to connect with it is my failure rather than the show’s.

Wrong. The six episodes of I Think You Should Leave represent the most unpleasant, unamusing, and intolerable hours of television I experienced all year. Watching it, I felt like the protagonist of a paranoid science-fiction thriller, where everyone else’s brain had been altered by some malevolent force, tricking audiences into thinking they were witnessing brilliance when in actuality they were gorging on nonsense. It’s a terrifying feeling, being so alone in the world, being the only person capable of seeing this dreck for what it is. Maybe someday, the evil dystopian overlords will be defeated, and you’ll all be allowed to wake up and see this for yourself. Until then, I think this show should get the fuck out.

100. The Righteous Gemstones (HBO, Season 1). OK, maybe I just don’t get comedy.

99. The Punisher (Netflix, Season 2; 2017 rank: 76 of 108). Yuck. The first season of The Punisher wasn’t good, exactly, but it at least had an unusual thematic darkness to it, buoyed by Jon Bernthal’s impressively internalized performance. Bernthal is still solid in Season 2, and so is Giorgia Whigham (Shea’s daughter) as the classic girl on the run. But the action sequences are loud and grungy, and their lack of distinction makes the show’s gun fetishism too difficult to ignore.

98. Jack Ryan (Amazon, Season 2; last year: 70 of 93). Speaking of fetishism. The militaristic, might-is-right jingoism of Jack Ryan didn’t bother me all that much in its inaugural season, when it was tethered to some high-octane set pieces and meticulous procedural intelligence-gathering. Both of those elements have fallen off in Season 2, which makes the show’s depiction of evil foreigners taste a little sour. It’s always nice to see Noomi Rapace, but John Krasinski is too talented to settle for playing brawny heroic types. Jim Halpert would arch an eyebrow at this show, and he isn’t the only one

97. The Widow (Amazon, Season 1). In 2003, this would have been a killer miniseries. Today, its bundle of geopolitical intrigue and outrageous plot twists feels old hat. And while Kate Beckinsale proved in Love & Friendship that she can be a brilliant comic actor, the role of glum-but-resolute heroine just isn’t her game.

96. Castle Rock (Hulu, Season 2; last year: 77). The first season of Castle Rock, while largely overplotted and filled with pointless easter eggs, had two terrific episodes. This season had one, and it didn’t even take place in Castle Rock. (Note to showrunners: If you’re going to kill off characters played by both Paul Sparks and Sarah Gadon, and you then bring one of them back to life, don’t resurrect the one played by Sparks.) It’s great to see Lizzy Caplan playing against type, and I’m intrigued to see what Elsie Fisher does with her career following Eighth Grade (she’s fine but not electric in this). And maybe I’m just not fluent enough in Stephen King lore to appreciate everything that’s going on here. But the supernatural mystery is dull, and the encroaching sense of dread isn’t creepy enough to compensate for the flat characters and lazy writing.

95. Silicon Valley (HBO, Season 6; last year: 76). Netflix has recently taken to canceling some of its acclaimed shows after their third or fourth seasons, a ruthless commercial decision that has led some critics to despair, because it’s reducing the likelihood of series reaching the great heights of past shows that ran six seasons or more. (Mad Men is the obvious paradigm, though others might point to The Sopranos or Lost.) I understand that concern. At the same time, keeping a show consistently good for years and years is very difficult. This concludes my summary of the final season of Silicon Valley.

94. 13 Reasons Why (Netflix, Season 3; last year: 32). Ouch. I adored the first season of 13 Reasons Why, and while the second tumbled steeply in quality, it still retained a deep level of empathy that made it moving. But the series has plainly run its course. This show was never meant to be a murder mystery, and turning its thoughtful study of teenage dynamics into a game of “guess the killer” disserves both its characters and its audience. 13 Reasons Why still has meaningful things to say about friendship and decency, and its frank examination of sexual assault and its traumatic consequences can’t be entirely ignored. But the show has already said these things with greater nuance and clarity. Now it’s just cannibalizing itself.

93. Legion (FX, Season 3; last year: 50). I’m sensing a pattern here. Legion is such a visually interesting show, it’s impossible to dismiss entirely; there’s an episode in Season 3 about giant blue catlike creatures called time demons who seem to move between the broadcast’s frames. That’s really cool. But in its last and least season, Noah Hawley’s twisted comic-book-adjacent series became too self-indulgent and nonsensical to be worth deciphering. Aubrey Plaza, once the show’s star attraction, got sidelined, making room for bizarre digressions and tedious exposition. I’ll always appreciate this show’s life—Hawley brought undeniable craft and style to a medium that often ignores such aesthetic values—but I won’t mourn its death.

92. True Detective (HBO, Season 3; 2015 rank: 45 of 62). In general, mystery shows are more interesting for the journey than the destination. But man, True Detective sure stinks at wrapping things up; even its much-celebrated first season ended with a banal finale. That didn’t matter all that much when the series was so soaked with atmosphere and tension, but this time around, the tedious “here’s how it all went down” reveal is less forgivable, given that it caps a vague and desultory narrative. Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff are both excellent, and every now and then Nic Pizzolatto’s convoluted script will touch on some meaningful notes about aging and grief. But for the most part, this is just a slog, full of pointless red herrings and needless time-hopping. The only real mystery is why this new season even exists.

91. Dear White People (Netflix, Season 3; last year: 23). Well this was a bummer. To my understanding, there wasn’t a major behind-the-scenes shake-up between Seasons 2 and 3 of Dear White People, but the third season represents such a dramatic dip in quality, it feels like the product of creative turnover. In any event, what once felt so urgent and bracing now plays as tired and repetitive. The humor is limp, the characters receive only a facsimile of depth, and the serialized storyline is flat-out dull. When Giancarlo Esposito shows up and your series somehow gets worse, you have truly failed.

90. Friends from College (Netflix, Season 2; 2017 rank: 95).
89. Stumptown (ABC, Season 1).
I didn’t plan on ranking these shows back-to-back, but it’s a bit of serendipity as I develop my book, “How Television Failed Cobie Smulders.” Everyone’s favorite Sam Jackson lieutenant is a talented actor, so it’s frustrating that Friends from College has no idea how to use her. To be fair, the star-studded comedy improved slightly in its second season, with sharper jokes and more inspired shenanigans. But it remains aggressively unmemorable, with painful contrivances and an overall lack of focus.

Stumptown is a different kind of whiff, because it tries to do right by Smulders. It casts her as the lead, and as an acerbic booze-swilling private investigator to boot. She’s perfect in it. And yet the series—which follows a case-of-the-week format as Smulders’ gumshoe solves a new mystery each episode—feels completely, utterly false. Maybe I’ve just seen too many David Simon shows, but it’s painful to watch Stumptown pose as hard-boiled without possessing any verisimilitude whatsoever. Like, Jake Johnson plays an ex-con who’s forced to go undercover and infiltrate a gang of car thieves, and come on. I might be able to forgive it if the dialogue were funnier or if the chemistry were sexier, but despite Smulders’ performance, there just isn’t enough color to distract from the series’ phoniness. She deserved her own show; now, she deserves a better one.

88. Peaky Blinders (Netflix, Season 5; 2017 rank: 70). Peaky Blinders has never been a great show, but it’s almost always been a fun one. So it’s weird that the latest season of the gangster drama is so glum and unpleasant. Anya Taylor-Joy shows up, which is never a bad thing, while Sam Claflin oozes malevolence as a louche politician. (Claflin also gets to deliver perhaps the year’s most deliciously filthy double entendre.) And yet, while it makes some conceptual sense to contemplate the demons that have come to haunt Cillian Murphy’s rogue during his life of crime, it isn’t especially enjoyable. This is a series about stylish gangsters coolly dispatching their enemies to the sounds of post-punk. Forgive me for indulging in surface pleasure, but let’s just stick with that, shall we?

87. Lodge 49 (AMC, Season 2; last year: 81). This show is critically beloved, and I kind of get it. It has its own weirdo personality, and it’s genuinely heartfelt in the way it explores the lives of fumbling characters. Plus, Paul Giamatti turns up for a few episodes, enlivening things with his swagger and pathetic bravado. But while I appreciate Lodge 49’s tonal sweetness, I can’t say the same for its plotting, which is simply boring. Things do happen on this show, more this season than in its first. But the narrative is alternately too silly and too slack to hold my interest. I wish I liked this show as much as most critics do, but some fraternities, no matter how closely knit, aren’t for everyone.

86. Catch-22 (Hulu, Season 1). A satire of the American military at a time of political reckoning in the country, with Kyle Chandler, Hugh Laurie, and George Clooney in supporting roles? That sounds like a slam dunk. Yet there’s something stale about this adaptation’s humor; for every lacerating mishap (like the cataclysmic effect of moving a piece of string on a map), there are multiple threads that flounder, lacking true bite. It’s curious that the series’ most memorable character isn’t Christopher Abbott’s Yossarian but Daniel David Stewart’s Milo, the entrepreneurial mess officer who exploits war as an opportunity to build a thriving global business. That’s clever, but it also exposes the emptiness of this enterprise. If your whole point is that war is senseless, then do you really have a point?

85. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Netflix, Season 2; last year: 54). Shouldn’t this show be better? Kiernan Shipka plays a witch! Miranda Otto and Lucy Davis are her witchy aunts! There are devils and spells and swords and dungeons! Yet while Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is entertaining in moments, it’s yet to develop a strong narrative hook; the main premise, about Sabrina being torn between two worlds, is too familiar to be interesting. The pieces are still in place for this show to take off, but as of now, it’s still searching for that spark of magic.

84. The Bold Type (Freeform, Season 3; last year: 45). Dammit, I wish this show were good. Its characters are so sweet and its themes are so relevant and its messaging is so laudable and it repeatedly says things that people need to hear—about gender, race, sexuality, class, technology, love. And yet, much like Stumptown, as a piece of drama, The Bold Type is wildly unpersuasive. Each of its workplace environments—a woman’s magazine, a photography studio, a political campaign—feels wholly unconvincing. The conflict is engineered, the payoffs unearned. There is real heart behind this show. But with execution this sloppy, heart can only do so much.

83. Snowfall (FX, Season 3; last year: 78). Every season, Snowfall starts out slow and blurry, and I consider giving up on it. And every season, it picks up some momentum toward the end and convinces me to start thinking, “Hey, maybe next year…” Season 3 did itself no favors by dispatching the show’s second-best character (played by Emily Rios), then spending far too much time (as usual) on geopolitical intrigue involving the Nicaraguan contras. But in its seventh episode, the show suddenly dropped the hammer, delivering a chilling day-in-the-life odyssey of a newly minted addict craving her next fix. It’s the kind of gripping, immersive storytelling that makes you demand more from this series, which, despite strong performances and a detailed milieu, stubbornly refuses to come together. Hey, maybe next year.

82. Good Omens (Amazon, Season 1). It’s pretty much impossible to waste an on-screen partnership between Michael Sheen and David Tennant—playing angels, no less—but this adaptation of the Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman novel does its best. To be fair, it conjures the novel’s cleverly imagined world convincingly, and Sheen and Tennant are of course a blast together; also, keep your eye on Adria Arjona, who helps ground the show with well-timed pinches of exasperation. But Good Omens is a bit too restlessly inventive for its own good; it takes such pleasure in quirky playfulness that it never really stops to develop its characters, or to streamline its outlandish narrative. I can’t actively dislike a series that casts Frances McDormand as God, Mireille Enos as “War”, and Jon Hamm as an angel who loudly announces, “I am here to buy pornography!” But rather than feeling heavenly, Good Omens leaves an all-too-earthy aftertaste of wasted potential.

81. Hanna (Amazon, Season 1). Joe Wright’s Hanna, a movie starring Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, and Cate Blanchett, is a splendid piece of genre entertainment. This new Hanna, a series inspired by Wright’s film, is not. The actors, while capable— Esme Creed-Miles plays the titular enigma, while Joel Kinnaman and Mireille Enos (again!) fulfill the Bana/Blanchett roles—can hardly compare to their big-screen counterparts. And stretching the conceit of Wright’s picture across eight episodes is a dubious proposition. At the same time, if you can banish comparisons to the feature from your brain, this Hanna is consistently watchable. It teases at a world full of corporate malfeasance and governmental overreach, and while it doesn’t articulate its universe with a ton of detail, there are enough spiky action sequences and engaging spycraft to hold your interest. There was no need for this show to be made, and I’m absolutely looking forward to its second season. If you’re intrigued by that apparent contradiction, you’ll be right at home in this world full of duplicity and doublespeak.

80. Better Things (FX, Season 3; 2017 rank: 77). Call it the half-hour version of Lodge 49. I admire that this critical favorite marches to its own beat, and that it features authentic relationships between a single mother (Pamela Adlon) and her three daughters, who are varying degrees of headstrong. There are some sweet conversations and some moving scenes. Matthew Broderick shows up; who doesn’t like Matthew Broderick? And yet, entire episodes pass by where I feel nothing. Adlon’s default mode of storytelling is so passive, so resistant to artificiality, that it ends up feeling listless. Better Things may concoct a persuasive portrait of one woman’s personal and professional lives. It’s just not a universe I’m interested in spending any time in.

79. This Is Us (NBC, Seasons 3.5 and 4.0; last year: 69). And on the other end of the emotional manipulation spectrum, we have This Is Us, still charging ahead with its shameless twists and familial clashes. Few shows on television vary as wildly in quality from week to week. The majority of episodes feel overstuffed and cloying. Some of the manufactured skirmishes are idiotic; some of the serialized storylines are insufferable. And yet, every so often—typically when it homes in on one or two of its principals in its increasingly sprawling cast—the series will still deliver a knockout hour, one that’s expertly paced and boldly edited. Much like Milo Ventimiglia’s character, who died and yet still makes regular appearances in flashbacks, This Is Us seems to have gone on long past its natural expiration point. But now and then, it’s still capable of yanking your heartstrings with considerable force.

78. The Spy (Netflix, Season 1). Sacha Baron Cohen is a perfectly competent dramatic actor. And The Spy, which stars Baron Cohen as a file clerk who becomes a Mossad agent, is a perfectly competent show. It has fun gadgets and codes, and there are lots of dangerous encounters and fraught seductions. It’s well done. And yet, there’s a slickness to the series that keeps you at a distance. It’s designed to be a powerful character study about a man who loses himself in his obsessive work, yet it never quite acquires the necessary gravity. The result is a show that’s impressive on the surface but struggles to make an impact. It moves smoothly; it just doesn’t move you.

77. City on a Hill (Showtime, Season 1). It’s a testament to the fertile field of today’s TV dramas that a series like City on a Hill can feel so disposable. Here’s a show about a pair of sibling armored car robbers in Boston being pursued by Kevin Bacon as a racist FBI agent, plus Aldis Hodge as a committed district attorney navigating the waters of a corrupt and prejudiced justice system. That sounds awesome! And parts of it are; Bacon is a gas, while Sarah Shahi is excellent as a cop trying to mask her Persian heritage. Unfortunately, the show never quite finds its footing; it’s too weedy to work as an effective procedural, but it’s too in-the-weeds to work as genre pulp. It’s solidly built and also a house of cards.

76. Rick and Morty (Adult Swim, Season 4; 2017 rank: 67). Sigh. I mean, it’s clever. I’m not denying that. Each episode of Rick and Morty is intricate and intelligent, featuring an inimitable blend of crudity and sophistication. The best half-hour of this season is an ingenious spoof on Ocean’s Eleven and other heist films, and it’s invigorating in the thoroughness of its commitment. And yet, a different episode centers on Rick flying into a rage after someone uses his favorite toilet, then obsessing over how to make his new nemesis’ defecation experience as miserable as possible. Maybe that’s original, but I often find Rick and Morty’s relentlessness—the way it takes an already absurd premise, then stretches it to the breaking point and beyond—to be more tiresome than artistically dedicated. It’s entirely its own thing, and that’s commendable, but it’s also exhausting, and sometimes it feels like trolling. Yes, this show is smarter than I am. I admire its creativity. But occasionally I wish it would just leave me alone.

Coming tomorrow: Zombies, vampires, fairies, demons, superheroes, assassins, lawyers, and other disreputable sorts.