The 10 Best TV Shows of 2020
And here we are. Having spent the past week counting down every TV that show we watched in 2020—all 124 of them—we now arrive at the top 10. If you missed any of 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)
#s 20-11 (tier 2)
Tier 1: The top 10
10. Teenage Bounty Hunters (Netflix, Season 1). In empirical terms, there may have been 10 TV shows in 2020 that were better than Teenage Bounty Hunters. But in raw emotional terms—in metrics like “number of times a series made me squeal with glee” or “most scenes that made me leap off of my couch”—this show simply needed to be in my top 10. Sorrowful and joyous, predictable and adventurous, it soars with a combination of traditionalism and modernity, mingling old-fashioned conventionality with new-age vigor. Conceptually, it’s a simple but fun premise: twin sisters (Maddie Phillips and Anjelica Bette Fellini) team up with a grizzled veteran skip tracer (Kadeem Hardison) to track down bail-jumpers—a task they’re bizarrely well-suited for, thanks to their powers of deductive reasoning, technological knowhow, and rich-white-girl access—while also balancing academic duties at their tony prep school. If that sounds ridiculous, it is, but it works, thanks to the actors’ charm and the series’ incandescent joie de vivre. There’s a wonderful warmth to the show, and its relationships—between sisters, between lovers (straight and gay), between confused kids and their helpless parents—brim with deep feeling. Teenage Bounty Hunters may be silly at heart, but its heart is far from silly. Read More