Ranking Every TV Show of 2021: #s 20-11

Our rankings of every TV show of 2021 are nearing their conclusion. For past installments, check out the following links:

#s 108-95 (tiers 11 and 10)
#s 94-84 (tier 9)
#s 83-61 (tiers 8 and 7)
#s 60-41 (tiers 6 and 5)
#s 40-31 (tier 4)
#s 30-21 (tier 3)

Tier 2: The alternative top 10
20. Hanna (Amazon, Season 3; last year: 36 of 124). This is lunacy. Like, how did this happen? The first season of Hanna was enjoyable but insignificant, failing to distinguish itself from Joe Wright’s superior movie. Season 2 jumped dramatically, carving out its own identity and delivering a surprisingly heady mix of genre thrills and emotional sophistication. Now, the final season completes the ascent. It only runs six episodes, but there’s an urgency to the storytelling, a sense of genuine stakes. And while the new romance is a tad forced, the real love story of Hanna has always been the strange, mutating relationship between Esme Creed-Miles’ titular assassin and Mireille Enos’ stealthy manipulator. Neither actor is as gifted as their big-screen counterpart— Enos can’t hope to match Cate Blanchett’s sly snarl, and nobody can compare to Saoirse Ronan—but by this point in the show, they don’t need to be; obligatory comparisons have melted away, and they’ve instead created their own complex characters, roiling with intensity, suspicion, and affection. The set pieces, meanwhile, have vigor and snap, sharply orchestrated blurs of punchy violence and graceful athleticism. Still, it’s the personal progression that really shocked me. I’ll be thinking about the beautiful last shot of this shockingly beautiful series for a long time.

19. Kevin Can Fuck Himself (AMC, Season 1). A great premise doesn’t necessarily equate to a great show, but the premise for Kevin Can Fuck Himself is pretty damn great. It’s essentially two series in one. Part of it unfolds as a classic, male-centered sitcom, with harshly lit multi-camera sets, a groaning laugh track, and cheerfully misogynistic jokes. But when the camera follows Annie Murphy’s thinly smiling spouse away from the main stage, something weird happens: The visual scheme darkens, the audience’s laughter drops out, and the show transforms into a grim prestige crime drama of feminine entrapment, one in which Murphy’s end-of-her-rope wife plots to kill her infantile husband. (The profane title is an obvious dig at the casually noxious sexism of shows like Kevin Can Wait.) At this point, neither side of the equation is quite operating at full throttle; some of the (intentionally) stale sitcom jabs don’t work as either comedy or parody, while the grittier aspects of the dramatic side aren’t entirely plausible. Still, Kevin Can Fuck Himself is more than just a clever interrogation of sitcom tropes. Murphy brings real heft and desperation to her performance; it’s fascinating to reconcile how her grimacing good sport in the comic scenes can become so utterly overwhelmed as to view murder as her only plausible existential path forward. Just something to keep in mind the next time you force your girlfriend to watch an episode of Last Man Standing.

18. Feel Good (Netflix, Season 2; last year: 16). Feel Good is the quasi-autobiographical creation of Mae Martin, and there are times when its intimacy is downright unnerving, as though you haven’t so much turned on a TV show as wandered into another person’s private life. It’s funny and sweet and sad, but most of all it feels real—not in the sense that its emotions are credible (though they are), but in that it seems to comprise an actual person’s thoughts and experiences. This kind of raw-nerve storytelling can be uncomfortable, but it’s also arresting. Yet Feel Good isn’t valuable exclusively as a visual representation of Martin’s headspace. It’s also a sharply constructed story, one that boldly considers the aftershocks of suppressed trauma while still hitting classical rom-com beats with whimsy and joy. It’s unsettling in its authenticity. It’s also enveloping in its tenderness.

17. The Nevers (HBO, Season 1.0). [afraid to say anything]

But seriously, I hesitate to express my admiration for The Nevers too ardently, because I don’t want my enthusiasm for Joss Whedon the artist to be mistaken as enthusiasm for Joss Whedon the person. For the most part, I’m disturbingly capable of separating art from artist, and I tend to be dogmatic when it comes to evaluating the on-screen result at the expense of the behind-the-scenes process. I also acknowledge that, when viewed in a certain light, accusations of Whedon’s abusive behavior might bleed into how he writes his characters and directs his actors. Nonetheless, my honest response to this half-season of The Nevers (Whedon left midway through production) is that it fucking rules. The dialogue is melodious, the visuals are imaginative, the cast—in particular a fiery Laura Donnelly and a heartbreaking Ann Skelly—is wonderful, and the storytelling is breathtaking in its verve and ambition. Everything crests in the sixth episode, which flips the script (almost literally— Donnelly apparently thought she received pages for the wrong show) so audaciously, it reconstitutes the series’ very DNA while promising a thrillingly uncertain future. Whether succeeding showrunner Philippa Goslett can build on this dynamic sense of possibility remains to be seen, but if the opening salvo of The Nevers is any indication, it’s going to be a bizarre, gorgeous, deliriously entertaining ride.

16. Hacks (HBO, Season 1). Sneaky, this one. In its early going, Hacks—about the odd professional partnership between a legendary, fading Vegas comedienne and a talented but flailing young writer—doesn’t seem to be taking full advantage of the great Jean Smart, functioning instead as a coming-out party for the appealing Hannah Einbinder. Turns out the series is playing the long game, taking its time in exploiting Smart’s dyspeptic charisma. Yet while it builds to a chain of escalating payoffs—Smart’s dressing-down of an oafish stand-up is a particular highlight—Hacks hardly centers the destination at the expense of the journey. It’s too finely scaled for that, bustling with sharp writing and rich characters. It also, naturally, has Something To Say about women in modern comedy, and it makes its points with a spiky humor that only strengthens its ferocity. It’s a spry, sexy illustration of an obvious truth: that gifted female artists need to be heard as well as seen.

15. Brand New Cherry Flavor (Netflix, Season 1). Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the most underrated TV show of the year! That perception is doubly subjective, of course—everyone lives online in their own self-constructed bubble—but from my particular vantage, virtually nobody talked about Brand New Cherry Flavor. And that’s a real shame, because this baby absolutely rips. A ’90s-set L.A. noir about a promising young director (the always-watchable Rosa Salazar), it seethes with Lynchian intrigue, Cronenbergian body horror, and supernatural strangeness, all wrapped in a neon-glazed aesthetic that amplifies its seductive magnetism. There’s a demented sex scene in the fourth episode that’s one of the most fascinatingly twisted things I’ve ever seen on TV. And I haven’t even mentioned Catherine Keener, swanning about the proceedings (while flanked by undead bodyguards) with sublime superiority; it’s unclear whether she has a devil-may-care attitude or is actually the devil. What’s the difference? Brand New Cherry Flavor may be a slick product of its influences, but with its giddy perversity and restless imagination, it more than earns its title.

14. We Are Lady Parts (Peacock, Season 1). Advances in representation in art are important, but they don’t automatically make the art good. That is, I don’t like We Are Lady Parts strictly because it’s a show about four Muslim women in London who aspire to start a punk-rock band. I like it because it’s awesome. This isn’t to say the series is about striving musicians who just happen to be Muslim women, because it’s very much about how cultural and religious markers interplay with the challenges of artistic creation, especially in an industry that’s still lorded over by white Judeo-Christian men. But it isn’t just about that. It’s also about the fear of isolation and the bliss of belonging, and the very particular struggles of its incredibly well-defined characters. Edited with aggressive flair and performed with exquisite immediacy—Anjana Vasan is wonderfully helpless as a meek guitarist, while Sarah Kameela Impey is her ideal foil as a no-nonsense front woman—We Are Lady Parts does more than just tell a relatable story with gratifying specificity; it does so with style, compassion, and joy. Rock on.

13. It’s a Sin (HBO, Season 1). I know what you’re thinking. That a miniseries about the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in 1980s London will be an overpoweringly miserable affair, full of anguish and misery and loss. To be sure, It’s a Sin doesn’t skimp on suffering; its rigorous honesty requires it to conjure the stench of death that pervades the latter episodes. Yet the marvel of this show is how alive it feels—how vibrant and hopeful and joyful. In following a cluster of (mostly) queer activists—including a divine Olly Alexander and a very fine Lydia West—it appreciates the difficulty and the excitement of fighting back against the established social order. But what really makes It’s a Sin sing is its tender depiction of chosen family, of showing how decent people can find one another and make a home together. Simple scenes set in a putative boarding house glow with camaraderie and community, and this warmth both intensifies and softens the inevitable sadness. There’s so much sorrow in the world, and in this show. There is also quite a bit of love.

12. The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, Season 4; 2019 rank: 19 of 101). Is it weird that I think this show is underrated? It keeps getting nominated for awards, so it isn’t as though it’s been forgotten completely, but the consensus vibe that I perceive around it is basically, “Great first season, pity about the rest.” And that’s weird, because The Handmaid’s Tale remains a gripping piece of television, fusing urgent melodramatic storytelling with superlative craft. It’s evolved thematically, too: No longer simply a feverish quest for survival under the yoke of an oppressive regime, it’s become more thorny, tackling complex issues of justice, revenge, and forgiveness on scales both political and personal. Elisabeth Moss directs three episode in Season 4, and she demonstrates her technical chops, with memorable images and sure camerawork. She also remains one hell of an actor, capable of holding an intense close-up for ages but also cutting her righteous rage with dashes of predatory guile. That blurring of the once-clear line between hero and villain is characteristic of the newfound knottiness of The Handmaid’s Tale, which recognizes that salvation doesn’t always translate to happiness. Greatness, on the other hand, has a sticky way of staying great.

11. The White Lotus (HBO, Season 1). Is it a murder mystery? A cringe comedy? A polemical diatribe? A family drama? Obviously, The White Lotus is all of these things, but what makes it special is its cohesion. It doesn’t so much shift between different tones and modes as create a unifying miasma—a saturated cloud in which the brittle humor, sulky rage, and helpless longing all fluidly intermingle, creating a perfect storm of combusting chaos. The show is very… well, it’s essentially very everything: very funny, very sad, very angry. (And also very well-acted; the entire 10-person ensemble is outstanding, to the point where it feels rude to highlight individual performers.) This degree of extremity might suggest a series that splits at the seams, but The White Lotus is too expertly calibrated to feel hectic or overstuffed. It’s precisely scaled to the behavior of its characters, which is to say it heaves with agony and bursts with hilarity. You can check out of this strange, intoxicating show any time you like, but its beguiling wonders—its syncopated rhythms, its boisterous comedy, its melancholic despair—will never leave you.

Coming tomorrow: the top ten.