TV of 2018

As the year winds to its close and TV critics have tried to sum it up, a narrative has emerged. 2018 was the year when TV (by which I mean mostly scripted, narrative TV, the kind I pay attention to) hasn’t so much Peaked as become exhausting. A year in which quantity largely overwhelmed quality. A year in which there were lots of good shows, but few great ones. That’s been my personal experience too. I watched a ton of TV in 2018, but my list of best shows of the year isn’t very long. More tellingly, there are nearly as many honorable mentions as there are best shows, because it was a lot easier to find promising, interesting shows with no small amount of stuff wrong with them than it was to find genuine masterpieces. Nevertheless, here is my list. Feel free to call me a wronghead in the comments and/or offer your own alternatives.

(To forestall two obvious comments: I love Better Call Saul and think it’s far superior to Breaking Bad, but season four, though extremely well-made, just didn’t have the narrative heft or urgency of the brilliant season three, and it spent far too much time with Gus and Mike. Much as I enjoyed it, I just couldn’t find a place for it on this list. Secondly, I spent six seasons admiring but not loving The Americans and the final stretch of episodes was no exception. I’m glad the show existed but there’s no way it would ever have ended up on my best-of list.)

Best Show of the Year (tie): Atlanta and The Terror

A lot of the attention paid to Atlanta in 2018 focused on the bizarre, brilliant, Get-Out-on-acid bottle episode “Teddy Perkins”. In the heat of all that praise a lot of people seemed to forget how much the second season of Donald Glover’s Twin Peaks-esque exercise in surreal Americana was a complete unit of work, a coherent narrative in which Glover’s wannabe music manager Earn, his client and cousin Albert, his girlfriend Van, and their friend Darius kept trying to escape the gravity well of having been born poor and black in America. Jordan Peele’s Get Out hangs over the season, which steps up its use of horror elements, but this time the trap isn’t a particular white enclave but an entire country and system, and the price that has to be paid for escape is both higher and more wrenching. It’s as brilliant a piece of work as American culture has produced this year. (I wrote a longer essay about the second season and how it uses elements of horror to tells its story on my blog. It’s one of my favorite pieces of writing from 2018.)

The Terror is almost the exact opposite of Atlanta. Instead of a modern story about underprivileged people of color, it’s a historical piece about some of the most privileged people in an era that taught them to consider their race and sex not just superior, but the natural masters of the earth. Dramatizing the doomed Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage (via the 2007 novel by Dan Simmons), The Terror could easily have been little more than a tale of white male hubris meeting its match. Instead it’s far stranger and more meditative, a starkly beautiful story of men finding their truest selves, for better and worse, before the inevitable comes for them anyway. Simmons added a villain and a supernatural menace to the story, but the TV version recognizes that what’s terrifying about it are the futile—and therefore, even more meaningful—gestures the sailors make to try to preserve their humanity and camaraderie under terrible conditions, and what happens when those efforts finally break down.

Rest of the Best:

A Very English Scandal

This BBC/Amazon miniseries, written by Russell T. Davies, is an uproariously funny telling of a story that is at once sad and ridiculous. Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw play an up-and-coming British MP in the 70s, and the ex-lover who hounds him for some recognition of their relationship after being discarded, and whom Grant ultimately decides to have killed. The crime itself is too absurd and ham-handed to take seriously (the only death was that of a dog), but underlying it, as Davies reveals, was real pain. He uses the case and the scandal that erupted around it to examine the lives of mid-century gay men, at a time when their sexuality was no longer illegal, but absolutely precluded them from having a normal life or enjoying the full protection of the law, and follows that contradiction to its inevitable conclusion.

American Vandal

I wrote a longer piece about Netflix’s brilliant true crime parody earlier this year, so I’ll just repeat myself a little from there: the genius of American Vandal is that it is at once a pitch-perfect parody of the self-serious investigative documentaries it spoofs, and a clever, twisty mystery in its own right. In the second season, high school sleuths Peter and Sam travel to a prestigious Catholic school to determine who was behind a series of scatological pranks, and treat their investigation with all the seriousness of a serial murder case. The show’s profound generosity towards its teenage characters, and its intuitive understanding of how technology has changed the way teens interact and perceive the world, remain a core strength of its storytelling, but at its heart this is simply an incredibly smart, incredibly funny mystery that just happens to be about poop.

The Good Place

Michael Schur’s brilliant romp about ethics, philosophy, and how to outrun eternal damnation continued its tradition of reinventing itself in 2018. Not all those reinventions worked—a long stretch in which the characters regain their lives on Earth didn’t feel like the best use of the show’s premise. But along the way, we also got Michael’s moral awakening, the gang’s trip to the Bad Place, Maya Rudolph’s Gen, the ultimate arbiter of reality, D’Arcy Carden playing five different members of the cast, and three different first kisses between Chidi and Eleanor. I really don’t know what else you could ask for from one of the smartest, most exciting shows on TV.

My Brilliant Friend

It’s easy to see why HBO’s Sharp Objects was the female-oriented show that got more attention and plaudits in 2018. It has the big stars, a lurid murder investigation to shape its plot, and it isn’t in Italian dialect. But this adaptation of the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet deserves so much more acclaim than it got. Quietly and with perfect execution, it tells an extremely rare type of story, a coming of age narrative about girls, in which the brutality, misogyny, and conformity of their community are decried as traps that they will have to struggle mightily to escape. My Brilliant Friend refuses to romanticize its working class setting, but it also makes it clear how its heroines, Lenú and Lila, are trapped by national and global political currents they aren’t even aware of. In a media landscape that tends to treat the stories of women as insipid or beside the point, this show argues that they are essential, and becomes essential in its own right.

Patrick Melrose

I wasn’t expecting to love this miniseries, a five-part adaptation of the autobiographical novel sequence by  Edward St Aubyn. What interest could I have in the self-destructive adventures of an upper middle class fop played by Benedict Cumberbatch? But Patrick Melrose turned out to be a great deal more moving and humane than I was expecting. Its title character spends a dissipated youth bouncing between continents, stuffing every sort of controlled substance into his body, and using his education and manners as shields against the world, before finally revealing that he was repeatedly raped by his father during his childhood. What Patrick finally realizes is that his smartest-guy-in-the-room act is literally killing him, and that in order to survive and live a worthwhile life, he has to find people who are willing to be open, kind, and decent, and learn to emulate them. It feels like a deliberate refutation of the kind of roles Cumberbatch built his career on, chiefly Sherlock—an affirmation that class and wit don’t make you a better person, and that you need to drop those defenses in order to live a good life.

Honorable Mentions:

American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace – There was a lot of extraneous material in this season, chiefly the focus on Versace and his family. But the story of Andrew Cunanan and his less-famous victims was a brilliant examination of the lives of American gay men in the 80s and 90s, and a portrait of a monster that was both sympathetic and clear-eyed about his failings.

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow – The most bonkers show in the Berlantiverse truly became the Doctor Who-esque romp it was always trying to be in 2018, diving headlong into zaniness (highlights include a demon being defeated by a giant plush doll and John Noble playing himself on the Lord of the Rings set), and along the way maintaining a core of compassion towards heroes and villains alike.

The Haunting of Hill House – I had a lot of problems with this adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel, as I wrote in my review, but the early episodes of the season are some of the most accomplished horror storytelling of the year, and even at its worst the show maintains a balance between terror and sorrow that has lingered with me much longer than its flaws.

Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger – Marvel’s TV experiments continue to deliver mixed results, but this teen-focused show was a breath of fresh air, combining real-life politics, black New Orleans culture, and winning central performances with solid comics storytelling.

The “Well, If You Must” Award for Shows Everyone Loved and I Thought Were Just OK (tie): Homecoming and Killing Eve

Both of these shows feel like a triumph of style over substance. Killing Eve has two amazing central performances from Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer, not to mention a million killer looks. But its story is pure idiot plotting (I dare you to explain to me what Carolyn Martens is trying to accomplish; go on, seriously) that would fall apart in a second if it didn’t have the chemistry between Oh and Comer to prop it up. And Homecoming is the Sam Esmail special—gorgeous, distinctive visuals that stress the alienating nature of modern living, all propping up a cynicism so all-consuming that it circles right back to naivete. They’re both a lot of fun to watch, but their presence on nearly every year’s best list this months has left me scratching my head.

The “What the Hell Happened There” Award for Worst Follow-Up to a Previously Promising Debut Season: The Handmaid’s Tale

Despite a lot of qualms about its project to move past the events of the Margaret Atwood novel it’s based on, The Handmaid’s Tale got a lot of things right in its second season. It seemed plugged into the moment in a way that belied its production schedule. Heroine June discovered evidence of a slaughter in a newsroom only a few months before the Capital Gazette shooting; her lover Nick was rewarded with a docile child bride just a few days after Jordan Peterson introduced the vile concept of redistribution of sex into our lives; and her daughter was ripped from her arms just as images of the same happening to immigrant children were plastered all over the news. Why, then, would writers seemingly so attuned to the multifarious forms of fascism dedicate so much of the second half of their season to the examination and soft-pedaling of Serena Joy, a woman who not only voted for the leopards-eating-faces party, but who orchestrated the violent overthrow of government in order to establish a permanent leopards-eating-faces dictatorship? When June changed the name of her newborn daughter from Holly (in honor of her mother, a lifelong feminist activist murdered by Serena Joy’s ideal society) to Nicole (the name chosen by the woman who literally held June down as she was being raped), I think the show wanted me to see it as a promising moment of female solidarity, but I was too busy fighting back vomit. When Serena Joy finally experienced some tiny fraction of the horror she’s unleashed on countless women and gay people, losing a finger for the crime of reading in public, June reacted in sympathetic horror. My only thought was “well, it’s a start”.

The “I’m Sure One More Episode Will Clear It Up” Award for a Show That I’ve Been Watching for Two Seasons Without Figuring Out Whether I Love It or Hate It: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is one of the most impeccably made shows on TV. Every frame and set looks amazing. Every camera angle is gorgeous and engrossing. Its use of music is inspired, and its costuming is mouth-watering. It’s smart and funny, and has one of the finest casts in the business, which it uses to the hilt: Rachel Brosnahan is never less than stunning as the title character, a 1950s Jewish-American princess trying to break into stand-up comedy, but she’s more than matched by the rest of the cast, chiefly Tony Shalhoub as her imperious father. And yet I often find myself, while watching the show, wanting to set the entire cast of overprivileged, self-absorbed characters on fire. It’s as if creator Amy Sherman-Palladino took the worst traits of the three Gilmore women—Emily’s snobbishness, Rory’s whiny entitlement, Lorelai’s tendency to run roughshod over people and then use her charm and wit to get away with it—combined them in a single heroine, and surrounded her with people who only enable those qualities. Oh well, at least we’ll always have the second season’s hilariously unnecessary, lingering shot of full-frontal male nudity to remind us of the mentality operating behind the scenes.

Most Redemptive Single Episode in an Otherwise Sucky Show: “Rm9sbG93ZXJz”, The X-Files

The X-Files revival was unnecessary in its tenth season, and tragically awful in its eleventh (and hopefully final) one. But the one bright spot was this episode, a nearly-wordless hour in which Mulder and Scully are hounded and tormented by automated services and smart appliances. It’s a Black Mirror-esque concept that could easily have devolved into technophobia, but the humor of the writing (and the warmth between these two beloved characters) makes it a story about human folly jumping the gap and infecting our machine creations. It’s a total standalone too, so you can watch it on its own and pretend to have discovered a lost episode from when this show was appointment viewing.