TV Rankings

We’re ranking every TV show of 2022. If you missed the first episode (har har), you can find it here.

95. Los Espookys (HBO, Season 2; 2019 rank: 72 of 101). I feel bad about not enjoying this show. It’s commendably offbeat, and its premise—four friends run a guerrilla business where they use their amateur talents to manufacture supernatural happenings as suits the bizarre needs of their eclectic clientele—is a triumph of bizarre imagination. But the execution is spotty, and some of the oddities are so random that they verge on perverse. (Also, I know he’s a co-creator, but Fred Armisen is absolutely dreadful.) I admire the concept of Los Espookys, because in an artistic landscape glutted with the same old stuff—true-crime dramas, ensemble sitcoms, world-building fantasies—we need more unclassifiable programs. I just need them to be better. Read More

We all know there’s too much TV. But what if TV is under existential threat? One of the programs you won’t find in the upcoming series of posts—which, per annual tradition, will count down every TV show I watched in the prior calendar year, concluding with the top 10 on Friday—is the second season of Raised by Wolves. It’s not that I didn’t want to watch the series; it’s that I couldn’t. To be more precise, I saw the first six episodes of HBO’s weird off-world thriller last February before losing interest, promising myself I’d finish it when I had more time. But last week, when I resolved to power through the rest of the show at long last, I discovered that HBO Max had removed it from its library entirely.

As first-world problems go, this one would seem to be relatively insignificant. But it’s indicative of the broader, troubling trend in which streaming services banish existing programs—some of which have already been produced yet never actually aired—to avoid paying residuals and other associated, incomprehensible costs. This is new, and it’s bad. The utopian conception of the #PeakTV era was a glutted marketplace where viewers had infinite choices, and their only problem was deciding which shows to pluck from the sprawling meadow of lush entertainment. Now that meadow is morphing into a weedy garden, and providers are less interested in planting new seeds than in pruning moldy shrubs which don’t earn their keep. TV shows used to last forever; now, some of them die before they’re born. Read More

We’re nothing around these parts if not generous. Over the past five days, MovieManifesto has ranked every TV show we watched in 2021—all 108 of them—and discussed them in various columns. What follows here is an omnibus piece, detailing the rankings in their entirety. To reach a particular piece for the given tier, just click on the header. Read More

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. Read More