Ranking Every TV Show of 2021: #s 40-31

Our rankings of every TV show of 2021 continue apace. For prior 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)

Tier 4: Steadily approaching greatness
40. What We Do in the Shadows (FX, Season 3; last year: 25 of 124). It’s still funny. The third season of this vampire comedy isn’t quite as restlessly imaginative as the prior go-round, but it doesn’t require reinvention. It’s firmly established its identity, and the actors now inhabit their goofy characters with absolute authority. What We Do in the Shadows is sneakily sweet, too, whether it’s charting the wounded alienation of Kayvan Novak’s sulky Nandor or following the strange, burgeoning friendship between Matt Berry’s hedonistic Laszlo and the buttoned-up Colin Robinson. (I know that the latter is played by Mark Proksch, but it really just seems like Colin Robinson is a character who sprang from the earth rather than one who’s portrayed by an actor.) The ostensible curse of vampirism is that after spending hundreds of year undead, life loses its meaning. That may be, but as of now, this effortlessly enjoyable series remains comfortably, vibrantly alive.

39. Scenes from a Marriage (HBO, Season 1). “Did we need this?” is generally a pointless question when it comes to art (though it’s less noxious than its sneering cousin, “Who asked for this?”), but it can be fair game in regard to remakes. It’s been nearly half a century since Ingmar Bergman’s brutal excavation of a fraught and unhappy union, and in the years since, the original has lost none of its scabrous vitality. So, no, HBO’s decision to recreate Scenes from a Marriage for American audiences wasn’t strictly necessary, and was maybe even ill-advised. Nevertheless, the end result is smart and canny, retaining the original’s basic template—it again runs the gamut from niggling dissatisfaction to wrecking-ball infidelity to ugly procedural squabbling to cautious reconciliation—while modernizing the characters and rewriting most of the dialogue. Its most obvious and ingenious maneuver is to flip the genders; now, it’s the woman who cheats and leaves, while the stunned and bereft man is the responsible child-rearer. That adds some juice, even if this new Scenes from a Marriage functions primarily as a technical exercise for the actors. That sounds like a complaint, but when those actors are Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac, it turns into a commendation; watching these gifted performers navigate raw, open wounds with subtle technique is oddly exhilarating. The subject matter remains bruising, but the execution is a balm.

38. Pen15 (Hulu, Season 2.5; last year: 29). There’s a line between admiration and adoration, and for the most part, I respond to Pen15 with the former. This is an incredibly well-made show, with an unnervingly precise understanding of adolescent misery. That precision also makes it difficult to enjoy; it’s hard to like a series when you spend half your time watching it with your hands over your eyes. The one exception in this (presumably) final batch of episodes is “Yuki”, a tender, elegiac mini-adventure that centers on Maya Erskine’s real-life mother, Mutsuko. It’s the one moment where Pen15 transcends its persistent awkwardness and achieves a power that’s undiluted by its signature sense of embarrassment. Otherwise, the show continues to do what it does—reenact mortifying childhood touchstones, now focusing on nightmarish sexual fumbling—with disturbing veracity. That’s why it’s good, and also why it’s tough to swallow.

37. Evil (Paramount, Season 2). What even is this show? An academic study of the tension between science and faith? A supernatural police procedural without the cops? An exploration of the challenges of motherhood and the difficulties of marriage? That Evil traffics in all of these avenues is commendable; that it does so while swinging wildly from one tone to the next is strange, and also fascinating. I’m not convinced that the series is in complete control of its themes and ideas, but its lack of discipline can also be thrilling, resulting in a giddy unpredictability. Sometimes, as in a mostly silent episode set at a remote abbey, everything coalesces with the perfect blend of suspenseful intrigue, emotional credibility, and artistic audacity. And sometimes, shit just gets weird. Like, why is Christine Lahti suddenly bathing in blood that she seems to have procured from predatory men whom she ensnares in her spiderish web? I have no idea, but I certainly wasn’t bored watching it. I’m not convinced Evil will ever elegantly tie all of its bizarre threads together. I’m also not sure I want it to.

36. Made for Love (HBO, Season 1). Returning to the concept of necessity, we certainly didn’t need another show about an evil billionaire tech-bro genius. You know what we needed? A show about Cristin Milioti escaping the clutches of an evil billionaire tech-bro genius. The first season of Made for Love is hardly perfect; some of the subplots are a little awkward, and the writing isn’t as sharp as it could be. But Milioti is electric as a wayward woman seeking to reclaim her agency, while Billy Magnussen is legitimately hilarious as her socially clueless captor. The series also acquires surprising emotional heft with a brilliant finale that upends our expectations and forces us to question everything we thought we knew about the characters. It’s unclear how it proceeds from here, but I’ll certainly be watching, because sometimes it seems like this show was made for me.

35. Loki (Disney, Season 1). After two decades of comic-book adaptations earnestly striving to operate as relatable stories—insisting that superheroes are just like the rest of us, constantly wrestling with desire and fear and love and loss—Loki has the good sense to take the opposite approach. What if comic-book figures aren’t like normal people at all, but are instead vehicles for the wild imaginations of their creators, an excuse to create strange new worlds and to develop characters who are figuratively and literally alien? I wouldn’t have minded this series making a bit more narrative sense, and for its plotting to feel slightly less haphazard. But the freewheeling sense that anything can happen is part of Loki’s charm, and it’s executed with remarkable color and verve. And while dastardly villains tend to squander their most entertaining qualities when they take center stage, Tom Hiddleston is still having a blast, splicing in pieces of sincerity without relinquishing the impish whimsy that makes the titular scamp so much fun. (Plus, Gugu Mbatha-Raw is in this! Sadly, she’s underserved.) I don’t pretend to understand what’s going on in Loki, but I can still recognize when I’m having a good time.

34. Love Life (HBO, Season 2; last year: 45). For its first few episodes, the second season of Love Life seems like a downgrade. William Jackson Harper is always good, but it’s hard to replace Anna Kendrick, and the romantic and sexual failings on display seem a tad contrived. But much like its hero, as it progresses, Season 2 becomes a more mature and intelligent creature, hitting character beats with honesty and grace rather than brute force. The show also continues to strike a savvy, delicate balance between episodic integrity and serialized storytelling; it builds somewhere, but it does so with punchy rhythm rather than string-along perpetuity. There’s a sincerity to the storytelling that amplifies the emotions; the heartbreak hits harder, the happiness feels sweeter. It’s nice to remember that life, and television, can work out sometimes.

33. Squid Game (Netflix, Season 1). Perhaps you’ve heard of this one? Supposedly Netflix’s most watched series ever (as if we have any real idea), it earns its popularity through pure genre muscularity: bright colors, striking production design and costumes (those shapes on the masks!), and frequent scenes of life-or-death competition that are truly diabolical in their ingenuity and suspense. Where Squid Game falters lies in its strenuous attempts to be About Something—namely, the ruthlessly degrading societal force that is capitalism. I don’t necessarily dispute the notion, but the show’s attempts to fashion a desperate underclass clinging to the bootheel of free-market cruelty are unpersuasive and heavy-handed. They’re also largely irrelevant. As the title suggests, this show is about the game, and when it allows its clunky messaging to recede and simply focuses on the mechanics of dog-eat-dog survival, it’s simply gangbusters. A renewal was inevitable, but it’s difficult to imagine a future season concocting a more electric sequence than the marbles episode, which brilliantly imagines four different mini-tragedies in the span of a single hour. In the contest for episode of the year, that’s game over.

32. Mr. Corman (Apple, Season 1). TV features no shortage of sad-white-guy dramas, but it’s a mistake to disregard Mr. Corman as yet another selfish act of privileged navel-gazing. Sure, this brainchild of Joseph Gordon-Levitt can feel mopey, but it unfolds with a sense of risk and novelty that evades the typical self-pity traps. As an actor, Gordon-Levitt remains a nimble and sympathetic presence, but as a storyteller he proves himself to be a fearless experimenter, dabbling in forms as varied as musical, short story, and even videogame-inspired action. Mr. Corman is also perhaps the most interesting work of 2021 to grapple directly with COVID-19, essentially resetting itself two-thirds of the way through and contemplating the costs and challenges of the pandemic with honesty and clarity. Even if it’s self-centered, it’s also very much about all of us.

31. Wynonna Earp (Syfy, Season 4.5; last year: 28). There are television series that I watch with ruthless objectivity, critiquing their various elements rigorously and dispassionately. And then there are shows like Wynonna Earp, where I stop being an observer and become a participant, laughing and hooting and cheering with every corny one-liner and drop-dead outfit and soaring romantic moment. There are plenty of Buffy clones out there, but how many can deliver an episode about a demon who absorbs people’s brains so it can win at bar trivia, or a seemingly conventional nuptial-centered finale that turns on a haunted wedding dress? This show was never perfect; its budget was too thin for its set pieces to really sing, and though my favorite one-off antagonist makes a triumphant return, its broader villains never matched its heroes. But those heroes were glorious, and their shining character dynamics will live on forever.

Coming later today: visionaries, astronauts, billionaires, and soccer players.