My Top 12 TV Shows of 2018

With the year ending, I've binged everything I was able to squeeze in, and so now it's time for my Top 12 TV Shows of 2018.

A couple disclaimers: it's Peak TV so I certainly can't see EVERYTHING. I haven't yet gotten to see the new season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, so if you're wondering how it disappeared from this year's list, that's why. One Day at a Time remains unfinished, and there was really no point this year that I felt ready for The Handmaid's Tale, so if any of those obvious omissions bugs you, you now know why.

Onto the countdown!

12) Forever - Upon release, critics were asked not to reveal the concept of this afterlife-set series, an odd prohibition considering this show semi-reinvented itself in each of the first three episodes. Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen play a married couple reunited in the afterlife and find that the malaise that their marriage has become might mean there's a reason the vows say "till death do us part." Not really a comedy or a drama, but something in between, the show had its own unique feel and some solid, lived-in performances from the leads.

11) Homecoming - Julia Roberts comes to TV! Or at least Amazon. At times, this story of a woman helping returning servicemen deal with PTSD got a bit too showy with its storytelling, but this slow-burn thriller deployed its mystery well and built the central relationship between Roberts and Stephen James's veteran even better. At a time when too many streaming shows have one hour or longer episodes that feel even longer, it was a delight to find eight episodes that clocked in at thirty minutes each and never had time to bore.

10) Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - Most of this year's short 6-episode run were on-par for the show, that is to say, wacky and delightful, but the third episode was the true standout. Done in the style of a true-crime documentary, we get the history of Jon Hamm's Richard Wayne Gary Wayne, and the idea of applying the Making a Murderer motif to this story feels so obvious in retrospect, it's a wonder it wasn't done sooner. I'm gonna miss this show.

9) Counterpart - As I haven't seen season 2, this ranking is based only on season one. Though the shows deliberate pace occasionally felt TOO deliberate, most weeks this was an enthralling Cold War-type story that was an excellent showcase in how subtly J.K. Simmons could distinguish his identical characters without giving one of them a scar, a beard or overt facial tick. The show boasts a two of my favorite tropes - actors convincingly playing dual roles and actors showing off how they can have Character A play their identical Character B and get it JUST wrong enough that it reads as one character imitating another. Simmons's work aside, another notable episode is episode 7, which agonizingly reveals the history of how one character from the other side came to murder and replace their double on our side.

8) Brooklyn Nine-Nine - In its sixth season, the show finally got around to the HOMICIDE in-joke we were all waiting for and put Andre Braugher in an episode-long interrogation. Even better, the perp was THIS IS US's Sterling K. Brown. It was a highlight of a generally strong season. Cancelled by Fox, the show got a reprieve less than 24 hours later from NBC, where it will hopefully reign for many years to come. I want more teasers like this:


7) DC's Legends of Tomorrow - The most off-beat of the CW superhero shows really hit its stride this year. There's not a single drama on TV less afraid to be goofy and that kind of swing for the fences mentality ends up hitting a lot more than it misses. Where else can you have a time-traveling talking gorilla try to kill Barak Obama in college? Or how about when our heroes realize the disembodied voice of their demon enemy sounds like John Noble, so they hatch a plan to go back in time to the set of Lord of the Rings and, disguised as PAs, get John Noble to record dialogue that will let them manipulate their foes? By the way, both of these crazy developments happen in the SAME episode

6) The Haunting of Hill House - a completely unsettling experience elevated even further by a couple standout hours. On every level - casting, directing, performing, production design - this show hit the mark and then some. The resemblance between the child actors and their adult counterparts was uncanny, to say nothing of the siblings' resemblance to each other. The series most intense hour revealed the truth of the "Bent-Neck Woman" and followed that with a stunning episode full of long-takes that managed to tell the story more than drawing unnecessary attention to each other. (Pay attention, HOMECOMING.) This is one I can't wait to revisit in a few months.

5) Barry - A dark comedy that wasn't afraid to get REALLY dark. Just when it started to feel like the bread and butter of the show was making fun of vapid acting classes and the people who frequent them, the series took a hard right with a violent subplot that culminated in one of the best scenes of the year - Barry showing us that no matter how much we'd laughed at his acting dream, there was still a ruthless killer lurking in there. Bill Hader gave one of the best performances of the year, perfectly balanced by Henry Winkler's acting coach. I can't wait to see how season two moves forward.

4) Dear White People - a nuanced look at racial issues through the experiences of the black population at an Ivy League college. I was late in getting to the show, but once I started, I binged through both seasons in less than a week and a half. Even when the characters are directly confronting racism and cultural tension, it never feels preachy. That's a credit to the deeply-drawn and richly portrayed characters. The show can do an episode that's essentially just two characters in a room debating their perspectives on race and all of it comes from character.

3) Better Call Saul - Hands down, the show's best season so far finally gave Rhea Seehorn's Kim a lot of material to sink her teeth into while Bob Odenkirk took Jimmy close to the final transformation into Saul Goodman. In a season that got much closer to completing the bridge to BREAKING BAD, it ironically felt even more capable of standing on its own.

2) American Vandal - Season two was less outright funny than season one, but proved even more adept than it's predecessor at mining the loneliness and challenges of teenage life for story material. VANDAL again proves to be one of the most thoughtful depictions of high school and the different faces modern teens wear in order to survive in it. Who would have thought a mockumentary about the hunt for a laxative-spiking prankster called the Turd Burglar would have so much complexity to it?

1) The Good Place - Until the show's most recent episode a few weeks ago, THE GOOD PLACE was sitting at #3 on this list. Then came the story that required D'Arcy Carden to play all four major characters, sometimes without even the aid of different clothes and styling to distinguish among the characters. It was an Emmy-worthy episode and one that hopefully won't be forgotten more than half a year from now.

Beyond that, no show on TV is more fearless about reinventing itself. Every season has seen a massive change in the status quo and usually even that status quo gets blown up by midseason. Every season feels like it should be the show's last, and yet the writers keep finding ingenious ways of exploring these characters and the inner workings of the afterlife. I want this show to go on forever, so long as it keeps up the work of not overstaying its welcome. There is no show I look forward to more each week.

My Top 10 TV Shows of 2017

The end of the year brings Top 10 Lists! I'm still catching up on my 2017 feature releases, so expect that around the middle of January, but I've watched more than enough TV to put out a list of my Top 10 TV Shows for 2017. No one reads these intros anyway, so let's get right to it:

1) American Vandal - The first time I saw a trailer for American Vandal, I was convinced it was a fake trailer. Even when I realized it was posted by Netflix, I remained open to the possibility that they had decided to have a little fun making a fake trailer applying the MAKING A MURDERER formula to the story of a high school documentary determined to find out who spray-painted dicks on the cars in the faculty lounge. In other words, my expectations that this joke could sustain a single installment, much less 8 episodes, were very low. I could not have been more wrong. American Vandal blew past those expectations and even beyond any best-case-scenario I could have conceived.

There are few savvier moves in television this year than the story turn in Episode 5 where we learn that the mockumentary has gone public and the rest of the show becomes not just about the investigation, but the impact of the documentary on the people it examines. The creators pulled off an incredible high-wire act here that elevated this beyond almost any mockumentary I've ever seen. Far more than a goof, this is a series about voyeurism, the media, and the regular trials of just getting through life in a typical high school. My biggest regret is that I watched this at a time when I wasn't available to give this a 5 or 10 part examination on my blog.

2) The Good Place - The best thing network TV did last year. Last year's finale (which aired in January) completely upended the entire series with a reveal that worked all the better because we barely knew a mystery existed. Learning that Eleanor and her friends ALL were in The Bad Place not only let Ted Danson do some fabulous scenery chewing, but it positioned the series for a total reset in Season 2. It seemed like the creators could only disappoint from there, but amazingly, the second season quickly moved past the expected repeated beats and blew up the show again. I have NO idea the state we'll leave the show in with this year's finale and I love watching a show where it feels like anything can happen.

3) 13 Reasons Why - I wrote 13 (actually 14, really) posts about why I was hit so hard by this series about the events that led a teenage girl to take her own life, and many months later, I stand by all of it. Katherine Langford gave the breakout performance of the year as the gradually unraveling Hannah Baker, who leaves behind cassette tapes addressed to each person she says put her on the road to her death. The episode focusing on Clay's tape is still one of the most heartbreaking episodes of TV I saw this year, and Dylan Minnette deserves just as much praise as Langford for anchoring this series.

Beyond all that, it was nice to have a Netflix show where each episode felt like a distinct chapter as opposed to being part of a "13-hour movie." I don't dispute a couple middle chapters lagged, more for their lack of present-day momentum than for the Hannah-focused material. (Episode 7 being the worst offender in that regard). But the show finished strong and despite the near impossibility of continuing this arc in a satisfying way, I'm as eager for Season 2 as I am for the next Star Wars. Like American Vandal, this series really seems to capture the authenticity of teenage life today, and manages to do so with a fairly diverse cast.

4) Master of None - I've seen a lot of lists single out the series for the short-film quality of standalone eps like "New York, I Love You," but that overlooks how cohesive the show feels despite these "art project" forays. The standout episode of the season is "Thanksgiving," which doesn't center on Aziz Ansari's Dev, but rather co-writer and supporting player Lena Waithe's Denise, as we follow her journey of coming out across several years. Waithe and Ansari deservedly won an Emmy for this episode, and I want you to imagine any other similar comedy series pulling off the trick of building an entire episode around a character who was absent from more eps than she appeared in and have it STILL feel like a true half-hour of the series. Could Curb Your Enthusiasm get away with a Jeff-focused or a Funkhauser-focused installment?

Not everything about this season was a home run for me, but the running thread of Dev's Cupcake Wars series and the finale's left turn into a sexual harassment story brought to mind how the best seasons of Seinfeld kept a standalone feel even with season-long storylines.

5) The Handmaid's Tale -This series had the timing of the century coming on the heels of Trump's arrival in the White House. The openly oppressive and misogynistic society it depicts feels like something out of a Mike Pence wet dream. That timing adds a fresh sense of horror to the story of Elizabeth Moss's June/Offred, a handmaid assigned to the home of one of the new society's leaders. No show or movie this year made me HATE its villains as much as this series dead. Yvonne Strahovski's Serena Joy had brief moments of empathy through the season which made her truly despicable actions in the finale even more potent and infuriating.

I also REALLY hope that Ann Dowd's Aunt Lydia, the woman whose job it is to basically break and brainwash the handmaids, comes to a really nasty end before the season is over. Dowd has created one of the great villains of television, and all of this gives Moss some really great material to play against. And in the "we didn't know you had it in you" category, former Rory Gilmore actress Alexis Bledel showed of some incredible chops in her Emmy-winning showcase episode. The universally powerful acting smoothed over a couple of the slower episodes that felt like they were there to build out the world for future seasons. I'm curious to see how season two expands the world and the story of the Resistance, or if retreats to the more intimate drama and tension that was more often the show's strength this year.

6) Better Call Saul - Even as the show added Breaking Bad antagonist Gus Fring to the mix, it seemed to stake out more of its identity as being its own show completely independent of its "parent." It's interesting that - like 13 Reasons Why, in a way - this series mines a lot of tension out of the drive to a sad conclusion the audience likely keeps trying to will out of existence. We've had a lot of time to fall for Jimmy McGill, enough that it's gonna be hard to have him taken away from us when he completes his transformation into the much more amoral Saul Goodman. This is essentially a series about the battle for Jimmy's soul and we've known from the start that he loses. What we didn't know was that he had this much of a good heart to begin with.

This season gave us plenty of charming moments with our favorite shyster, but the real power came from the final conflict between Jimmy and his brother Chuck (Michael McKean.) The episode where Jimmy fully outwits Chuck and destroys his reputation in the process was a heartbreaker. We root for Jimmy because the series is empathetic to his point of view and because Chuck is a dick - but Chuck isn't all wrong in his criticisms of Jimmy and it feels like next season, we'll see more of that validated, even as Chuck has been taken off the board.

7) Bates Motel - When this series was announced, I didn't think they could pull it off. Then after watching season one, I still doubted a series based on PSYCHO could work, but Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore were doing such great work that it outshone the often weak plotting with regard to the local town mythology. The big moment of season two for me was when we saw the birth of the Mother persona and it still felt like a genuine shock, as the lead actors had managed to separate their work so completely from the Hitchcock production. The final two or three seasons were the strongest, with this season finally sending Norman into total madness and becoming the deranged young man we met in the film. Ingeniously, the creators threw a curve ball when they introduced Marion Crane and upended all expectations. It could have sunk the series, but by then, we'd accepted this Norman Bates as a different animal from Anthony Perkins's iconic performance. Sometimes, bad ideas can be executed really well and I never thought I'd be eager to see a weekly Norman Bates hour.

8) Better Things - Pamela Adlon is an actress usually called upon to play straight-talking, no-bullshit voices of reason. One of the savvy things Better Things does is take that persona and put her in situations where it's often impotent, like trying to be single mother to her three daughters. Technically the show is a comedy, but for me it often plays more as a drama with funny parts. This season tried the "short film each week" approach possibly to an even more aggressive degree than Master of None. It makes for occasionally frustrating viewing if you're expecting immediate follow-up to dangling plotlines, but somehow it's effective to feel like we're sometimes getting incomplete pieces of Adlon's Sam and her life, with us having to figure out the offscreen journey from A to B via context. Perhaps more than any of the other shows on this list, I've found this is one that you can't explain to people - you just have to get them to watch it.

Also, this is possibly one of my favorite scenes from the year, with Adlon cycling through every possible line reading of "No!"



9) Big Little Lies - Some writers have such potent voices that you can pick them out instantly, despite any attempts to vary the tone or the subject matter. No matter the TV or movie script, Sorkin always sounds like Sorkin, Amy Sherman-Palladino will ALWAYS sound like Amy Sherman-Palladino, and David E. Kelley will always be identifiable by his quirkiness and monologues. Or so I thought. This is the most un-David E. Kelley show that David E. Kelley could have done.

Though it's framed by a murder investigation, the series really is the story of several affluent women in Monterey, who spend most of their time teaming up to work with and against each other in all manner of school-related drama that involves each of their first-graders. With actors like Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern, the series is a compelling exploration of the difficult lives they lead beneath their privilege. (I realize that makes this sound like American Beauty, but I assure you the series is much, much better.) One has an abusive husband and needs to understand that before she has any hope of leaving him, one finds herself tempted to stray in her marriage, another initially presents as a Queen Bee monster before revealing a softer side, and another is finally ready to confront the sexual assault that conceived her child.

I'll be honest, I wasn't too compelled by the framing mystery. It was the characters and their storylines that brought me back for each episode, not the desire to find out who had been killed and who was the murderer. The eventual reveal that Kidman's husband was the same character who raped Shailene Woodley's character also seemed a bit pat and unnecessary. Maybe on a second viewing I'll notice things that set that up more clearly, but on a first pass, it came out of nowhere. As a showcase for some of the best working actresses, though, BLL is hard to beat.

10) One Day at a Time - I'll admit, this one took a few episodes to fully grow on me. I don't really watch any three-camera shows any more and part of that is that the tone and style feel too artificial for me. (I think this has more to do with the quality of the new series I've seen, as I don't have this issue with reruns of Seinfeld, Cheers and just about any other classic sitcom.) I've never seen the original version so I can't speak to comparisons between the two. Like several other shows on this list, it became more relevant this year than it might have, focusing on a family of Cuban immigrants raised by a single mother who's also a military vet. The show's dealt with PTSD, illegal immigrants, gender bias, religion, homosexuality, and more... all with the same deft touch that co-creator Norman Lear used almost 40 years ago when he created All in the Family and The Jeffersons. It feels authentic instead of preachy and manages to be consistently funny. It's a great era for sitcoms that actually have something to say.

Honorable Mentions:

Veep - a solid season that's only a disappointment when stacked against a couple really strong prior seasons. Julia Louis-Dreyfuss had one of favorite line readings this season when she threatened, "I will destroy you in ways that are so creative they will honor me for it at the Kennedy Center."

Curb Your Enthusiasm - Yes, it didn't produce the number of instant classics that season 7 or 8 did, but this was a very entertaining season nonetheless. "Accidental Text on Purpose" belongs in the Curb Hall-of-Fame and the resolution of Larry's fatwa was actually pretty clever.

GLOW - I love the way that season can be read as Alison Brie's character discovering and embracing that she's the villain of the story. It's a great way of addressing the issue that I and many others had with her likability in the first episode. And how great was Marc Maron?

Great News - Another strong, if underseen, network sitcom. Briga Heelan stars as a young local news producer who has to deal with her smother of a mother becoming the station's new intern, played by comic legend Andrea Martin. The show's got the comic sensibility of 30 Rock (it's from some of the same producers, including Tina Fey) which allows it to do things like deal with sexual harassment in the workplace in oddball ways while still making a legitimate point about gender issues. Nicole Richie has also become a force of comic insanity that rivals Jane Krakowski's Jenna on 30 Rock.

The Goldbergs - Five seasons in and this show is still consistently funny and getting solid work out of its ensemble every week.

BATES MOTEL: Does this story only work because we know the ending?

I don't know how I'd manage to recruit a control group for this experiment, but I'd love to know how BATES MOTEL plays to someone completely ignorant of Norman Bates's future. Does it work as a TV show if it has to stand on it's own merits, or do some of its flaws get a pass because the audience gets the thrill of seeing TV Norman take big leaps closer to being everyone's favorite cross-dressing serial killer?

In an ideal world, a prequel would stand as compelling without being propped up by Easter Eggs or callbacks (or is that "call-forwards") to its originating art. BETTER CALL SAUL seems to pull this off quite well, proving completely accessible to people I know who've never watched BREAKING BAD. It'll be intriguing for me to see how this plays out because BCS's Jimmy McGill is much more likable and sympathetic as a human being than his future incarnation Saul Goodman. Will people who root for the success of the scrappy Jimmy be disgusted when he evolves into the slimier, unapologetically ambulance-chasing Saul?

That's not to say that I don't feel like you can see the connection between Jimmy and Saul - just that Saul fans are having a rather different experience from Jimmy fans, and I find it fascinating that thus far, the show seems to work on both levels. The same could be said for the Mike character. On BREAKING BAD he was a villain with an occasional sympathetic side. Here, I really feel for the guy in a way that makes his eventual end feel far more tragic for me. (And if I was experiencing Mike's story chronologically, probably less satisfying.)

But BATES MOTEL... I enjoy it, but I'm not sure if it'd seem cohesive if we didn't know the destination. The season four finale airs tonight and the previous episode ended on what appeared to be the major step in Norman's evolution that we all knew was coming - the murder of his mother. As depicted on the show, it was actually a murder-suicide attempt, with Norman attempting to snuff out both him and his mother with carbon monoxide poisoning. It would have worked, if not for the arrival of the sheriff, who vents the room before Norman succumbs, but can only futilely attempt resuscitation on Norman. 

It doesn't help that BATES MOTEL is not a show without many faults. Going back to season one, I've basically zoned out whenever screentime shifted to "the pot storyline" all about the drug trade in the nearby town. I completely understand why it's there - to get five years of story out of this concept, there needed to be larger mythology. Developing the setting is a natural step, but too much of the drama there has felt incidental to Norman's transformation.

Season one also had a brief phase of what I call the "Norman Bates, Sex God" era. I don't find it inexplicable that he'd be appealing to some women. He's got that "lost scruffy puppy" sort of vibe and I can totally buy that some girls would want to take him home and clean him up. I DON'T buy one of the hottest and most popular girls in school hopping into bed with him. (And if I'm not misremembering, he actually had TWO such conquests in season one!)

It feels weird to say this, but there was a point by the second season where I wasn't watching the show through the lens of it being a PSYCHO prequel. I'm not sure what led me to drop my guard, but I remember being blindsided by a midseason episode where Norman suddenly started acting out and it became clear that he was speaking in the Mother persona. I won't lie - it was genuinely cool to see the birth of the character as we know him/her in the Hitchcock film.

But I have to wonder how many plot turns read as acceptable only because the audience knows where the story HAS to go. Having Norman committed this season was a good start because his erratic behavior through season two and three had gone past the point where one can justify Norma as being in denial about how sick Norman is. Of course, this creates another conundrum - if Norman's mental issues are well-documented does that compromise an outcome where he ends up quietly managing the family hotel, with the locals completely blind to his homicidal tendencies?

Hell, just in the short term it seems strange that Norma's death won't get more serious scrutiny from the police. I'm sure the show will deal with this somehow, but Norman's spent four years leaving behind clues to his psychosis so the real trick is going to be making it credible that none of the authorities piece any of this together.

I'm in for the long haul here, regardless. It's nothing short of criminal that Freddie Highmore and especially Vera Farmiga haven't been Emmy winners for their work here, though Farmiga has been nominated once. The wonderful Olivia Cooke might have started getting more mainstream notice from ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL, but BATES MOTEL had her first. It's not easy to appear alongside Highmore and Farmiga and not get blown off the screen but Cooke holds her own in a quieter role as the one undeniable innocent among the players. That fact is also why I've been dreading the moment the plot requires her death. I've feared the show won't conclude without destroying the last bit of innocence in Norman's world.

As I said, there's a lot I genuinely like about the show, but it's impossible for me to know if I'm rationalizing some of it's larger flaws because of some kind of tunnel vision towards the resolution. Do I have any other BATES MOTEL viewers in my readership? What do you think?