TV Rankings

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. Read More

In the year of Our Lord, two thousand eighteen, I stopped watching The Walking Dead.

Now, as sinful confessions go, that may not seem all that damning. But as someone who’s spent the past five years of his life watching an inordinate amount of television, it seems significant that I at long last bailed on a program where I’d invested so much time (107 episodes!). And looking back on my TV viewing of 2018, I’m not sure what’s more disturbing: that I watched 93 different series in their entirety, or that this figure represented a 14% decrease from the 108 shows that I watched in 2017. It seems absurd that I can feel apologetic for failing to hit triple digits for the second straight year, but in the era of #PeakTV, too much is never enough.

The Walking Dead wasn’t the only casualty of my newfound choosiness. Typically, once I start a series, I stick with it until it dies, but this year I failed to make time for new seasons of a handful of floundering shows, including Hap and Leonard, House of Cards, Iron Fist, The Man in the High Castle, Outcast (ugh, Cinemax), The Path, and (most regrettably) Harlots. I also started watching a handful of new series—The Alienist, Black Lightning, Electric Dreams—only to stall out after 3–4 episodes. I wish I could have seen all of these, but #PeakTV has a cruel way of making time speed up; there are so many shows, and so few hours in which to watch them. Read More

We’re ranking every show we watched in 2017. You can find the prior installments in our rankings at the following links:
#s 108-81
#s 80-51
#s 50-31

Note that, because #PeakTV is so insanely glutted with good shows, every series listed from here on out is excellent, and you should watch them all.

30. The Magicians (Syfy, Season 2). Good lord is this show fun. Season 1 of The Magicians was enjoyable, but it had to do so much heavy lifting in terms of world-building that it could sometimes feel laborious. Now, with the rules and characters firmly established, the series can relax and ease into its Buffy-inspired brand of storytelling, a blend of irreverent humor, big feelings, and intricate mythology. Despite being a show about a bunch of college students who cast spells, The Magicians isn’t childish, but it isn’t overly glum either, instead delving into its calamitous storylines—everyone always seem to be on the verge of death or disaster—with a delightfully impish sense of mischief. (It helps that two of the show’s formerly buttoned-up female characters literally lose their souls this year, allowing Stella Maeve and Olivia Taylor Dudley to really let loose.) Certain sequences—a bank heist, a negotiation with a dragon, an impromptu performance of a Les Miserables song—are downright delirious, a reminder that unbridled joy can be its own form of magic. Read More