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
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
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
We’re continuing with our ranking of every TV show of 2020. For prior entries, check out 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)
Tier 3: Are we sure this isn’t the top 10?
30. Mrs. America (FX on Hulu, Season 1). The premise sounds suspiciously like bothsidesism: Mrs. America explores not only the women who fought to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, but also the women who mobilized against it. But this series doesn’t purport to be an apolitical piece of storytelling, even if it proceeds with consummate rigor and exceptional detail. What animates Mrs. America isn’t so much the struggle of the women’s liberation movement (though that’s surely part of it) but the more abstract process of political organizing. It examines how the pursuit of a common goal can transmogrify into a squabble over competing interests, and how advocacy can splinter people apart as well as bring them together. Structurally, the show is astute, with each episode focusing on a specific character while gradually deepening the larger schisms at work. It’s buoyed by a top-flight cast, led by Cate Blanchett (who owns the series’ final, most devastating image) but also featuring Rose Byrne, Uzo Aduba, Sarah Paulson, and a characteristically wonderful Margo Martindale. If Mrs. America isn’t always satisfying, that’s because dissatisfaction is baked in to the zero-sum game of contemporary politics. It recognizes, with dispiriting clarity, everyone’s equal right to be disappointed. Read More
Our countdown of every TV show of 2020 continues. Prior installments can be found 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)
Tier 4: Imperfect, but spicy
40. Giri/Haji (Netflix, Season 1). Narratively, Giri/Haji is reasonably entertaining but fairly familiar—a shopworn genre exercise loaded with double crosses, corrupt cops, and loathsome gangsters. But stylistically, this show is exquisite. Directed by a pair of relatively unknown TV veterans (including one who worked on Entourage, of all things), it’s deliriously experimental, regularly deploying changes in color scheme and aspect ratio, and these flourishes enhance the pulpy vibe rather than distract from it. (Also, Kelly Macdonald!) The finale features an operatic rooftop sequence that’s an absolute showstopper, a bravura fusion of action and ballet that practically demands an instant rewind. Does it make sense? Not really. Is it riveting? Unquestionably. Read More