The 10 Best TV Shows of 2020

And here we are. Having spent the past week counting down every TV that show we watched in 2020—all 124 of them—we now arrive at the top 10. If you missed any of the prior installments, you can find them at the following links:

#s 124-110 (tiers 12 and 11)
#s 109-85 (tiers 10 and 9)
#s 84-61 (tiers 8 and 7)
#s 60-41 (tiers 6 and 5)
#s 40-31 (tier 4)
#s 30-21 (tier 3)
#s 20-11 (tier 2)

Tier 1: The top 10
10. Teenage Bounty Hunters (Netflix, Season 1). In empirical terms, there may have been 10 TV shows in 2020 that were better than Teenage Bounty Hunters. But in raw emotional terms—in metrics like “number of times a series made me squeal with glee” or “most scenes that made me leap off of my couch”—this show simply needed to be in my top 10. Sorrowful and joyous, predictable and adventurous, it soars with a combination of traditionalism and modernity, mingling old-fashioned conventionality with new-age vigor. Conceptually, it’s a simple but fun premise: twin sisters (Maddie Phillips and Anjelica Bette Fellini) team up with a grizzled veteran skip tracer (Kadeem Hardison) to track down bail-jumpers—a task they’re bizarrely well-suited for, thanks to their powers of deductive reasoning, technological knowhow, and rich-white-girl access—while also balancing academic duties at their tony prep school. If that sounds ridiculous, it is, but it works, thanks to the actors’ charm and the series’ incandescent joie de vivre. There’s a wonderful warmth to the show, and its relationships—between sisters, between lovers (straight and gay), between confused kids and their helpless parents—brim with deep feeling. Teenage Bounty Hunters may be silly at heart, but its heart is far from silly.

9. BoJack Horseman (Netflix, Season 6.5; last year: 27 of 101). Netflix’s decision (made pre-pandemic!) to split the last 16 episodes of BoJack Horseman into two halves hampered the start of Season 6, preventing it from accumulating the series’ usual bone-crushing momentum. But if that’s what it took to deliver this kind of finish, then maybe it was worth it. There’s something sharper about these final eight half-hours, which don’t so much resemble a return to form as an ultimate reckoning. I don’t mean that they were especially intense. Instead, BoJack Horseman wrapped up by honing what made it great in the first place, adding even greater weight to its inimitable kaleidoscopic versatility. It was funny and clever, sure, but also contemplative and elegiac, and it grappled seriously with notions of male power and celebrity entitlement. (Its penultimate episode, “The View from Halfway Down,” joins the pantheon of the series’ finest entries—a nerve-jangling dreamscape bristling with anxiety and imagination.) Yet it wasn’t truly dark, at least not in a grim or despairing sort of way. For a series that was fundamentally about depression and addiction, BoJack concluded with a ray of hope, a reminder that the strongest quality of this weird and wacky show—which was loaded with zippy dialogue, ingenious sight gags, and (at times) disturbing cruelty—was its tenderness.

8. A Teacher (FX on Hulu, Season 1). Yikes. There’s a deceptive restraint to A Teacher; it doesn’t have a ton of Big Moments, and early on, its unassuming style portends a gentle tone with a modest impact. Yet this series, starring Kate Mara as an educator who sleeps with a student (Nick Robinson), proves devastating as a chronicle of trauma. Told with a slow but riveting burn, it examines the prosaic nature of abuse, and how it can create cracks that gradually splinter over years. It’s visually straightforward but structurally bold, often leaping ahead months or years at a time, and using each short-but-spiky episode to uncover a new facet of the incident’s countless reverberations. Most daringly, it exhibits a modicum of sympathy toward Mara’s predator, a sliver of humanity that only makes her actions all the more monstrous. The conceit of the sexy teacher—an object of desire, a fantasy of male conquest—has percolated in pop culture for ages. With cool discipline and quiet fury, this show turns that notion to ash.

7. Brockmire (IFC, Season 4; last year: 26). Brockmire was never shy about reinventing itself, but for its fourth and final season, it truly goes all-out, jumping 10 years into the future and imagining a dystopian landscape where global warming has ravaged the world (the Southwest is now know as “the disputed lands”), and where a yellow, wedge-shaped AI named Limón is acquiring Skynet-level power. Naturally, Brockmire uses this insanity as mere scaffolding, a way to accentuate the acerbic humor and sweaty desperation that have always been its wonderfully demented calling cards. And while this is technically still a show about baseball, its casual sports acumen is secondary to its characters, who are now more lovingly and pathetically drawn than ever. Hank Azaria and Amanda Peet have always showcased wonderfully toxic chemistry, but in adding Reina Hardesty as Azaria’s long-lost daughter, the show finds a way to drive home its secret sweetness without ever feeling too sugary. Conceptually ambitious, effortlessly intelligent, and delightfully strange, Brockmire finished its run on a torrid hot streak, displaying absolute confidence in its storytelling and brandishing its distinctive personality with fearless verve. Home run.

6. The Haunting of Bly Manor (Netflix, Season 2; 2018 rank: 8 of 93). As compared to the utterly terrifying Haunting of Hill House, this second season of Mike Flanagan’s horror smash isn’t all that scary. To be clear, the contrast is relative; in a vacuum, The Haunting of Bly Manor is still plenty creepy, with a smartly calibrated balance between classic jump scares and more ominously encroaching dread. But the exact fear quotient isn’t really relevant, because horror isn’t the series’ primary goal. Instead, it’s a byproduct of the show’s preoccupation with sadness, isolation, and loss; the terror is designed to deepen the characters, not batter them. And even as it creates an impressively spooky atmosphere, Bly Manor makes sure to center its relationships, delivering a story that is by turns disturbing, mournful, and tender. The entire ensemble is quite good—in particular Rahul Kohli as a cheerful chef and T’Nia Miller as a watchful housekeeper—but the anchor is Victoria Pedretti, who holds everything together with a quietly heartbreaking performance. With her pensive eyes, tremulous voice, and steely body language, she brings you, not entirely against your will, into this dark and beautiful world, which is at once deeply foreboding and—in the end—perfectly splendid.

5. The Plot Against America (HBO, Season 1). Philip Roth wrote The Plot Against America in 2004, and I’m sure that if David Simon and Ed Burns had adapted it into a miniseries then, it would have been plenty unsettling. But watching it in 2020—amid phony cries of voter fraud and legitimate reports of foreign electoral interference—it felt downright cataclysmic. Yet while the series’ political resonance is undeniable, it’s also a richly engrossing family drama, featuring strong characters, bittersweet affection, and exemplary period detail. There’s an immaculate depth to the show that both belies and augments its unnerving allegory; yes, it’s a study of the eerily plausible way in which a demagogue can ride the winds of deep-seated bigotry and seize power (why I never!), but it’s also an intimate story about a proud uncle and prouder nephew bickering over political tactics, and about two devoted sisters who suddenly find themselves living worlds apart, both geographically and philosophically. A current of fierce intelligence runs through The Plot Against America, but it’s too urgent to feel dry or sterile. That’s thanks in part to the cast, most notably Zoe Kazan, who delivers a shattering performance as a resilient woman desperate to protect her loved ones. This show is powerful, persuasive, and chilling. Good thing it’s fiction, huh?

4. The Great (Hulu, Season 1). This is a show about the abject cruelty that a young tyrant casually afflicted on his people, and it’s… hilarious? I don’t mean to suggest that The Great underplays the horrors of Russian feudalism, because that’s very much its focus. But good lord, is it funny. (I suppose I shouldn’t be that surprised, given that showrunner Tony McNamara co-wrote The Favourite.) Nicholas Hoult plays his obscene emperor with such relaxed entitlement and genuine bafflement, you practically root for him; everything that comes out of his mouth is hysterical. Of course, The Great is more than just a humorous assemblage of antique atrocities, and its emotional backbone belongs to Elle Fanning, who conveys her character’s gradual shift from hopelessly deluded to intensely committed with remarkable acuity. There’s an underlying melancholy to this show, as well as a steely seriousness that is applied so delicately, it’s almost invisible. Yet even as The Great acquires thematic and dramatic force, it never stops being funny, and its elusive blend of gravity and comedy makes it utterly fascinating. The title feels less like a summary than an understatement.

3. The Queen’s Gambit (Netflix, Season 1). Chess, being such a cerebral pursuit, doesn’t exactly lend itself to visual dramatization. So it’s impressive that the creators of The Queen’s Gambit (including Scott Frank, who also made Godless) have rendered the game with such dazzling vivacity, such as in an early sequence where a prodigy stares at the ceiling, only for the shadows to suddenly contort into pawns, bishops, and rooks. Yet what’s truly staggering about this series—what elevates it from enjoyable pop curiosity to absolute triumph—is how fully it commits to and understands its heroine. Portrayed with magnificent prickliness by Anya Taylor-Joy, the show’s protagonist is a genius and a fool, a celebrity and a loner, an inspirational figure and an absolute mess. And The Queen’s Gambit, with both cool precision and warm affection, turns her journey into something nigh spiritual; it’s the story of a fearsomely gifted artist who pushes herself past the breaking point, shattering herself in the process, before ultimately finding sanctuary in the balm of companionship. Thanks to Taylor-Joy’s tremendous performance—a mixture of casual glamour, keen intelligence, and blazing passion—it’s a profoundly rewarding experience; there’s a phone call scene in the finale that had me positively whooping with joy. I watch a lot of TV, so I consider myself something of a master in girding against emotional manipulation. But when faced with such a gorgeously mounted and achingly perceptive attack as this, my defenses never stood a chance.

2. Better Call Saul (AMC, Season 5; 2018 rank: 10). I’m not interested in whether it’s better than Breaking Bad, because I long ago reached the point where I consider virtually nothing better than Breaking Bad. The challenge for Better Call Saul has always been whether it could be different from its predecessor, even as it inevitably approached its point of origin. Over its prior two seasons, the series had attempted a delicate balancing act, mostly maintaining its artistic independence while increasingly echoing its forebear; it was always impressive, but it occasionally felt like the victim of internal whiplash, as though it was toggling between two different shows. Happily, Season 5 pulls off something of a magic act, fusing its disparate halves without sacrificing its own identity. It does this largely through brilliant writing, imagining its criminal elements as something like a black hole that can’t help but suck Bob Odenkirk’s unscrupulous lawyer into its vortex. But allowing Odenkirk to regularly share scenes with Jonathan Banks—and also with Tony Dalton, whose lively villainy manages to exist outside of the gigantic shadow of Giancarlo Esposito—is only half the secret. The real coup of this season is its continued development of Rhea Seehorn’s own attorney, whose relationship to Jimmy McGill over the years has shifted from colleague to adversary to lover to accomplice and now to… something else. The unpredictability of their pairing is the show’s strongest asset, and Seehorn’s performance is riveting for the way it stays close to the vest and consistently upends your expectations. And that’s the thing: For a prequel series whose destination is fixed, Better Call Saul has proven itself shockingly malleable and surprising. I’m still fairly confident in where it’s going to end up, but heading into its final season, I have no idea how it’s getting there.

1. Normal People (Hulu, Season 1). This was never going to be close. I’ve already waxed poetic at some length about this series, so I’ll just refer you to that link. All I’ll say in addition is that great art isn’t fleeting; it stays with you, like a friend you lost touch with or a lover you still remember. I’m not going to pretend that watching Normal People changed my life, because I’m too old for that kind of nonsense. But it did allow me to experience the lives of its characters, and to briefly absorb their emotions—to weep with their pain, to hunger with their longing, to soar with their joy. That isn’t normal.

This is a miraculous TV show. It’s also a gift.

(For the complete list of our 2020 TV rankings, click here.)