Television was once presented as an escape: Families were perfect and you spent recklessly in Beverly Hills and explored new worlds aboard the USS Enterprise. It looked nothing like your life and that was the appeal.
Some of TV still exists in an alternate universe today, but reality was unavoidable on the small screen in 2019. Of course, some series are still mindless fun. A mix of both stand out on our top 10 list of the best TV shows of 2019.
You’ve probably never even heard of “The Other Two,” but if you’re not watching the Comedy Central show, you’re missing one of the most brilliant comedies on the air right now.
As much a satire of the entertainment industry as of millennials, “The Other Two” — starring Drew Tarver and Heléne Yorke as the older siblings of a 13-year-old thrust into fame after a viral music video — turned a bleak outlook on life into a black comedy where even the throwaway jokes are funnier than the highlights of most shows. If it’s not a sight gag in the form of the video for “Stink” that includes “hardcore grinding,” it’s a season-long joke about mom Pat’s (Molly Shannon) inexplicable rise to fame alongside her teenybopper son Chase (Case Walker).
While most of Apple TV’s initial launches were disappointing, “Dickinson,” starring Hailee Steinfeld as poet Emily Dickinson, went so far out on the ledge that it circled all the way back to phenomenal.
The period comedy-drama introduces Emily as a teen in love with her best friend — and her brother’s fiancée. She’s a troublesome daughter who refuses to learn her mother’s lessons on becoming a dutiful wife. She writes by candlelight at midnight and takes 3 a.m. rides through Massachusetts with Death, played, bewilderingly and yet perfectly, by rapper Wiz Khalifa.
Capitalizing on our overwhelming enjoyment of both watching others squirm and of Gillian Anderson, the British Netflix series about an awkward teen (Asa Butterfield) and his sex therapist mom (Anderson) was purely delightful.
During its first season, Otis Milburn’s (Butterfield) universe grows from just his flamboyant best friend Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) to include the headmaster’s bully son (Connor Swindells), golden boy Jackson (Kedar Williams-Stirling) and the outcast Maeve (Emma Mackey), who teams up with him to start a sex clinic despite his utter lack of experience. The cast, their hiccups and their relationships (platonic and otherwise) are enchanting.
Both the 1987 comic book series that HBO’s “Watchmen” is based on, along with the 2009 film adaption, were a lot. And yet the show that launched in October is even more. But somehow it works.
The superhero-esque show, set in alternate reality present-day Tulsa, Okla., includes a giant squid, a giant sex toy and a giant panda head mask, among any number of baffling plots every week. Add Regina King, Don Johnson and Jeremy Irons to the mix and it should be too much. Sometimes it is. Then “Watchmen” got back to its original point: race relations in the U.S. It’s a tricky watch without knowing the backstory from the original comic, but it’s still a vital look at white supremacy and those who uphold it.
As TV has moved onto streaming services, the importance of the weekly episode has dwindled. We stopped scheduling our nights around favorite shows. A few standouts were exceptions (“Game of Thrones,” “The Good Place”), but waiting until you could binge the whole season on Netflix wasn’t a big deal.
HBO’s “Succession” was the rare show that broke through. Every Sunday, the Roy family went to the end of the world to protect their global media business, no matter who they hurt along the way. None of them deserve to succeed; in fact, most belong behind bars. And their ostentatious spending habits, black hearts and cruel behavior were recipes for disaster. But you couldn’t look away.
That “Schitt’s Creek,” which can be seen in the U.S. on Netflix, is headed into its sixth (and final) season and it still needs to be sold like a new series is both a failure of too many TV options and the show’s own promotion. But the funny, heartwarming, absurd and wealthy Rose family (played by Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Dan Levy and Annie Murphy) is simultaneously the best and worst of what we have to offer.
Over the years, the Roses have gone from privileged and haughty to downtrodden and still haughty, but in a redemptive way that has you rooting for them in this Canadian sitcom. The Roses and surrounding cast of characters, most notably Emily Hampshire’s Stevie and Noah Reid’s Patrick, screw up repeatedly, but you still want them to get it right eventually.
When "Russian Doll” premiered on Netflix in February, the trippy Natasha Lyonne-led Netflix show felt like an easy lock for one of the best shows of the year; its slip down this list is proof of just how good TV was in 2019.
In every episode, sometimes more than once, Nadia Vulvokov (Lyonne) dies. She gets hit by a car, falls down the stairs or freezes to death. Then she resets, back in her friend’s bathroom, to the same song, same birthday party and the same chicken. Again and again. “Russian Doll” was about death, rebirth, life and what you do in between. And about figuring out why and how you’re here.
Based on a 2015 article published by the nonprofits ProPublica and the Marshall Project, this Netflix miniseries was the haunting tale of a teen (Kaitlyn Dever) accused of making up her rape, by police, her foster parents and friends. The story then continues years in the future when the rapist has been attacking women in Washington and Colorado without anyone noticing or caring. Dever’s Marie, a pitiable character who alternates between anger and fear, was never allowed to properly tell her story because she didn’t have DNA evidence and her timeline changed because she was scared.
“Unbelievable,” though, finds even more success in the other half of its story, a buddy-cop show starring Toni Collette and Merritt Wever as two Colorado detectives tracking who they — and no one else — believe is a serial rapist. Either half of the Netflix miniseries would make for a good TV show, and they come together flawlessly in this devastating true-crime story about how people get it wrong, even when they don’t mean to.
Where “Unbelievable” benefited from the light humor afforded by Wever and Collette, “When They See Us,” Ava DuVernay’s retelling of the Central Park 5 case, had no relief. It was dark and depressing from start to finish, thanks to the treatment of the accused: Raymond Santana (Marquis Rodriguez), Yusef Salaam (Ethan Herisse), Kevin Richardson (Asante Blackk), Korey Wise (Jharrel Jerome) and Antron McCray (Caleel Harris).
The miniseries, which premiered in May on Netflix, a month short of 30 years after 28-year-old jogger Trisha Meili was brutally attacked, raped and left for dead in Central Park, follows the case through the trial of the boys, their incarceration and exoneration. Even though you know the ending, it feels impossible to get there, that the justice system will ever be fair to a group of boys who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. “Fair” is generous, but the wrongfully convicted are free now and “When They See Us” was a painful but necessary reminder of how we got there.
Season 2 of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s black comedy about a nameless, directionless London woman was a funny, charming, gutting work of art (and I don’t mean The Hot Priest ... totally). Waller-Bridge didn’t invent heartbreak or breaking the fourth wall, but she perfected both. She may have invented a guinea pig-themed café and she perfected that, too.
Neither Fleabag nor “Fleabag” get a happy ending, but they were never destined to. Her best friend is dead and the hot priest and love of her life (Andrew Scott) chose God instead, just like he always told her he would. “Fleabag’s” truth was dark, hilarious and sexy. It was a love story that didn’t end in happily ever after, and maybe that’s the truest story of all.