TV Rankings

We’re ranking every TV show of 2021. If you missed the first installment, you can find it here.

Tier 9: Possibly marginally interesting
94. The Girlfriend Experience (Starz, Season 3; 2017 rank: 46 of 108). If the first season of The Girlfriend Experience was about demythologizing the mystique of sex work (and proving Riley Keough’s star bona fides) and the two-for-one second season was about the dangerous costs of possessive obsession, Season 3 is about… neural net technology? Data mining? Brunettes posing as blondes? I don’t mean to be glib, but there’s an alarming disregard for narrative coherence on display here, which is maybe meant to be a bold storytelling choice but which really just serves to dilute any thematic impact. Stories of messy relations between sex workers and their clients are always interesting, and Julia Goldani Telles certainly has screen presence, but this latest batch of episodes inspired by the (coughs, overrated) Steven Soderbergh feature is far too detached and off-kilter to hold viewers’ attention. I hope this isn’t the end of this strange, experimental series about body commodification and the literal price of desire, but new showrunner Anja Marquardt (taking over for Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz) has shifted things in a bizarre, thoroughly unpersuasive direction. Sex work is indeed work, but a show about it shouldn’t feel this impersonal and cold. Read More

Need proof that the COVID-19 pandemic is over? I only watched 108 TV shows last year.

OK, I’m kidding, at least on the first part. But as the omicron variant rages and hospital admissions soar troublingly toward their 2020 levels, it’s vaguely comforting to know that television remains, well, there. I’m not interested in (or capable of) qualitatively comparing an entire year of an artistic medium against past annuals, but quantitatively speaking, TV is still a powerhouse. Sure, my total of 108 shows looks a tad inferior compared to the 124 I watched in 2020, but I still think it’s a pretty healthy (i.e., unhealthy) figure.

Were all 108 series good? Of course not. Were most of them watchable? Pretty much. The ensuing list, which will be revealed over the course of the next five days (concluding with the top 10 on Friday), is decidedly not a bell curve; once we reach the top 70 or so, we’re pretty much in “I’m glad I saw that” territory. That, of course, doesn’t make these rankings any less infantile, which is also what makes them fun. So clock out, strap in, and turn on your streaming device of choice as we explore the vast and varied year that was. Read More

This piece is for the cheaters. Over the past five days, we’ve ranked 124 different 2020 TV shows, grouping them into 12 different tiers and eight different columns. Obviously, we encourage you to read all of those, but if you’re feeling lazy and just want to see the complete rankings, then here you are. (To visit the particular piece for each tier, just click on the header.) Read More

We’re nearing the end of our countdown of every TV show of 2020. If you missed 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)

Tier 2: The honorable mentions
20. Away (Netflix, Season 1). For a series about space travel, Away is oddly narrow in scope. There are only a handful of major characters, and roughly half of its action takes place inside the cramped confines of a shuttle. This isn’t necessarily unusual, but what makes the show worthwhile is the depth that it slowly acquires. Each of its first five episodes digs gently into the lives of one of its astronauts, lending them their own particular shading while further complicating the fraught, zig-zagging relationships among the various crewmembers. It’s a fairly conventional approach that nonetheless pays surprising dividends, as does the way the series cuts between perilous cosmic missions—space-walks, retrieval tasks, etc.—and the ground-bound bickering of the command center, where worried engineers attempt to solve problems from millions of miles away, exhibiting both ingenuity and impotence. Hilary Swank is solid as the nominal lead, but no one character really dominates the proceedings, and that feels right, seeing as Away is a show about global cooperation and professional teamwork. It’s a little corny, sure, but it’s executed with terrific steadiness—a precisely calibrated mixture of melodrama, panache, and warmth. Netflix has already cancelled the series, to which I’ll reply with one of my favorite quotes in cinema: Come back. Read More