1. Yellowjackets
I'm in the middle of writing a video essay on why this show is so meaningful to me but suffice to say for now this show managed to combine survival horror, teen girl dystopia, folk horror hallucinations, and still have time to be among the most sharp pieces of media about lost youth and wasted potential I've ever seen. The second it started I fell in love. It's rewarded me by not assuming I did and continuing to try and be the best show on TV. It is.
Standout Performance: I mean this show has a true all-timer youth cast: Sophie Thatcher, Sophie Nélisse, Ella Purnell, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Samantha Hanratty, all of them are stupendous as teen girls at the end of their tether. And they grow into the redoubtable likes of Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, and Juliette Lewis, but as usual it's Melanie Lynskey who steals the show. Her world weary rendition of adult Shauna is heartbreaking every episode. While her Heavenly Creatures co-star Kate Winslet was solving crime, she was committing them and covering them up.
2. Black Summer
If I've ever been so frightened by TV as I am by an average Black Summer episode, I can't readily recall when or why. This show leans more into tropes this season (the haunted house, the dystopian gangland society that arises after apocalypse, even cults for a moment) and keeps leaning until they buckle and snap. The directors Jon Hyams and Abram Cox have made such careful use of chaos and silence and the writers have so carefully considered the meaning and use of every single syllable uttered, that every single sound is dangerous. This show had me on edge for the entirety of its runtime. An incredible work of art.
Standout Performance: Jesse Lipscomb did wonders with very little in the way of active development but I think MVP might still be Justin Chu Cary as the impostor Spears. His episode-long parlay with another survivor he can't trust is a series highlight.
3. What We Do in the Shadows
The show ended by teasing an appearance from Taika Waititi, the Lin-Manuel Miranda of comedy, so it's entirely possible this show and I are about to break up, but what a beautiful relationship it's been. Watching this miracle of deadpan horror and twisted performances is like drinking a perfect cocktail. Smooth and beautiful and when it's over you've laughed at everything, maybe a little more so than you think you should have. This season saw the vampires flinch at responsibility they didn't really ask for and learn that life on earth is pointless. Like Futurama it's a show about the boundless cynicism and uncaring indifference of your supposed best friends in the world. This was the funniest the show has ever been.
Standout Performance: Matt Berry, as much as I have a crush on everyone in the cast, from demure Harvey Guillén to moody Kayan Novak to preening Natasia Demetriou, the Lady Gaga of comedy. Matt Berry is just one of those people who makes me laugh with every single thing he does and says and the show gets out of his way and lets him do it. "Bat!" still kills me every time.
4. Succession / Pretend It's A City
I'm very flippantly combining two shows about dying New York for simplicity's sake but they do give you a world of too-fast culture with a grouchy lodestar. In Scorsese's docu-series its motormouthed Fran Lebowitz, decrying what her beloved New York has become since her heyday. In Succession it's Brian Cox's aggrieved and dying Logan Roy, who wants so badly to quit except he loves what he does and he loves knowing he's the only one who keeps his billion dollar empire from crumbling. This season was the most uncomfortable yet with everyone going miles out of their way to show their worst self off to everyone who needed to trust them.
Standout Performance: Well I like Scorsese as the off camera greek chorus in Pretend but in Succession it's Kieran Culkin as fuckboi wonder Roman and Matthew Macdadyen as Tom Wombsgans. Culkin gets to do maybe the greatest "trying to sink into the floorboards after embarrassing himself" performance, twice. And then Macfadyen is on another plane of existence on this show, playing Tom like Randy Rhodes played guitar. A true wild card of queer self immolation and google-translated masculine posturing.
5. The Other Two
This is the best show about being "a creative" in the present. This show understands that for people to survive you have to be a brand, and in order to be a brand, you have to know deadening things about the way the world works. Famous people get everything handed to them, dreamers do guest spots on Thrillist TV, complain that they aren't getting more work than their peers, and pray for auditions. You fake being famous and you just might become famous. If the show weren't casually one of the most hysterical half hour comedies in living memory, it would be the saddest thing I've ever seen. Bravo.
Standout Performance: Though I'm probably the world's biggest Drew Tarver fan, I have to say Helene York as stupendously over confident Brooke. She jumps into rooms like a chicken into a cockfight that's just been released by its handler, spraying plumed desperation at everything in arm's reach. The most savage take down of girlboss culture there is, a one-woman People's Choice Awards brunch.
6. Painting with John
Nearly 30 years after John Lurie changed television forever on Fishing with John, he finally got to take his victory lap. Each episode of Painting With John is the most zen half hour of TV you could ask for, just a guy telling stories and painting great work. Deliberately positioning himself as the anti-Bob Ross, Lurie gargles out gorgeous stories about a life in the spotlight, his brushes with the surreality of fame and fortune like little windows into an alternate universe, themselves little paintings of a forgotten milieu. Lurie's still an amiable host even after all that life has put him through and I could watch him paint and fuck around with the debris in his lawn forever.
Standout Performance: John. Good to have you back, John.
7. Reservation Dogs
Standout Performance: How do you choose? I'm tempted to say Devery Jacobs, one of the greatest actresses under 30, the epitome of cool, or the always great Zahn McClarnon as clueless deputy Big, but Paulina Alexis stole my heart in "Hunting," the episode where she and her dad finally open up about a mutual loss. She's effortlessly sad and winning as she tries to keep from crying for shame of messing up her war paint.
8. Servant
M. Night Shyamalan's been having the coolest comeback of any artist in visual media right now, making one passion project movie after another while producing and occasionally directing the gorgeous rip-shit Servant, which treats the pervert hall of fame (Brian De Palma, Alfred Hitchcock, Walerian Borowczyk, Dario Argento) as ingredients for a decadent confit. The second season took a leap into the occult and I needed a bib I was so ravenous for its immaculately photographed twists and turns.
Standout Performance: The main cast all do consistently wonky work (I mean that as a compliment, I wouldn't change a note) but it was a true joy to see Rainer Werner Fassbinder's final muse Barbara Sukowa show up as deranged Aunt Josephine for a few episodes. This show has such slick and sick lineage and I greatly appreciated Shyamalan pulling out the big guns for his perverted audience.
9. The Expanse
Saying goodbye to The Expanse was levied only somewhat by the fact that they so clearly leave open the possibility that we'll see the crew of the Rocinante again. God I hope so. It took some doing to get over the preening and overly cute neo-noir bent of the earliest episodes
(I love Thomas Jane but someone has to smack that fuckin hat off his head, it's been ten motherfuckin years of that thing) but by the end of season 2 I was all in on this show's space-fairing seriousness. It helped of course that they introduced Bobbie Draper (Frankie Adams), the bruiser from Mars, one of my favourite creations on any show. The final truncated season left me desperate for more, but the ending was tidy in all the right ways. I gripped the arm of my seat more than a few times, hoping to see my heroes get their happy ending. Beltalowda til next time.
Standout Performance: Adams is my favorite, but she has stiff competition as always from Shohreh Agdashloo as sly Avasarala, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. And then there's Wes Chatham as no-nonsense mechanic Amos. Those three represent the show at its best: quietly undoing stock types through exciting, exacting performance. I was very pleased to see someone got my fan mail and left a "maybe" sized hole in the question of whether Draper and Amos got down to business.
10. 30 Coins
How it took this long to give Alex De La Iglesia a television show I'll never know but literally the opening credits are argument enough that it was the smartest decision anyone's ever made. 30 Coins is a broiling Satantic brew, complete with machine gun-toting priests, cow-born spider babies, and an impending apocalypse.
Standout Performance: Eduard Fernández, by a broken nose. He attacks his role as a warrior for god with ferocity, bringing grave intensity to the wonderfully silly doings.
11. Superstore
No show this honest about the crimes done to the American labor force could stay on the air forever. Superstore could be cute and sentimental but largely this was just a seventeen car pile up of indignity done to people who would rather be at home but can't pay rent unless you buy a TV or some ugly clothes from them. Masquerading as a sitcom, this was quietly a powerful tool of radical praxis, showing how difficult it is to get a workforce to unionize and how easily corporate will threaten you with deportation if you don't comply with their insane demands.
Standout Performance: Again, how do you choose, everybody was stupendous, but I will miss Nichole Sakura's dizzy Cheyenne quite a bit. Something about her earnest admissions of taking the path of least resistance were always funny.
12. Dr. Brain
Kim Jee-Woon got a blank check and made a delirious little genre bender about spying on dead people's unconscious minds to solve crime. Dr. Sewon Koh is at the bottom of a conspiracy involving multiple murder, dastardly surgery, and the gaslighting of dozens of bereaved parents for the sake of a monomaniacal quest for immortality. Every few seconds a new generic idea is introduced and subverted by the mad scientist at the helm of this very ambitious detective story.
Standout Performance: Hee-soon Park as Sewon's ghostly sidekick, a grinning monster of id who learns to like being dead.
13. I Think You Should Leave
Not every I Think You Should Leave sketch is created equally but that isn't because there's bad craftsmanship at work. It's because the sketches that really work are the funniest three minutes of TV you feel like you've ever seen. Tim Robinson and his farm team of improvisers, writers, actors, and comedians sometimes hit on an idea so funny you think your heart might stop. Whether it's at the man who literally doesn't know how to drive, the guy who's having a lovely dinner until he has to pay, the prank show host with an elaborate make-up job, or Coffin Flop, you'll be laughing like an infant at something.
Standout Performance: Patti Harrison. She's been proving her mettle as a comedian for a while now (look up how she lost her twitter account), but ITYSL lets her be an absolute freak for a few glorious minutes a season. The way she says "They're so dirty!" almost secured me an appearance on Coffin Flop. She's quite simply the funniest person in America.
14. The Mosquito Coast
I was suspicious of the very idea of making a new Mosquito Coast, considering how much I adore the original adaptation but the name Rupert Wyatt got me on board right quick. The director of The Escapist and The Gambler knows well how to fine tune a shopworn premise and sure enough this show about a family of fugitives fleeing to South America hits the ground running.
Standout Performance: It's good to see a part worthy of what Melissa George can bring to a role. She's been wasted for years in more anonymous parts but her work as the perpetually put-upon fugitive wife is rather stirring. Next to Justin Theroux as her husband, a man who always acts like he's just been hotwired like a car, her exhaustion makes perfect sense.
15. Swagger
From out of nowhere and coming with the dubiousness of having an athlete sign off on it (Space Jam had just gotten a sequel, you'll forgive my PTSD), I expected nothing from Swagger and got everything. This show is smart and sensitive about the climate assailing the junior athletes headed for greater things; drugs, poverty, sexual abuse, parents too invested or not invested at all. This show presents a thrilling tapestry of every day disappointments in Baltimore while also spinning a believable and exciting story of a kid's journey from golden child to underdog and back again.
Standout Performance: O'Shea Jackson, Jr. As the coach who doesn't want anyone to know how much he cares he keeps the show's heart beating as all around him rage temptation, despair, and violence. He plays Ike like a guy you run into on the street, get one look at and think you know his life story. Magnificent work.
16. Mare of Easttown
Or My Aunt, P.I. This show about growing into your worst self while your friends and family watch from the sidelines is like cigarettes for Christmas. The depressive, Wawa-fueled Pennsylvania procedural was always going to be a smash in my living room if nowhere else, but it seems to have caught on everywhere. Any show about Kate Winslet doing the Delaware County accent, vaping and drinking coffee and just ruining her life (set to Flock of Seagulls, The Killers, and Mannequin Pussy) was always going to speak my broken PA spirit. This is about as good as bad TV gets.
Standout Performance: Kate. I mean it's gotta be Kate. She has to pull up every rock in her yard and realize that everything that's given her comfort is a lie or worse.
17. AP Bio / Mythic Quest
Mike O'Brien's punk rock sitcom A.P. Bio has softened some of its edges since leaving Fox for NBC but it's lost none of its ability to make me giggle. Everyone in the writer's room knows how much we just like all these characters and so no longer adopts the initial arm's reach at which they were all kept to mimic horrified Jack Griffin's (Glenn Howerton) perspective. Now he likes them too so the show can get its hands dirty showing us why.
Meanwhile Howerton's old Always Sunny cohorts did consistently amazing work on Mythic Quest, about a team of game designers staring obsolescence in the face.
Standout Performance: I can't fully explain why I'm so charmed by Mary Sohn above everyone else on this show, but she's just amiably crazed and knowingly trashy in a way I love. To be clear everyone on this show really bites into their roles as some of the worst people on earth, but I do love watching Sohn as a gossipy menace to herself.
As for Mythic Quest it's Charlotte Nicdao, who always seems in danger of disintegrating into her own neuroses but projects a goofy, frantic confidence to everyone as a counter measure (her troubles with driving a fancy car still make me laugh a year later). Marvelous stuff.
18. Philly D.A.
The story of District Attorney Larry Krasner has not been an easy one to watch from afar. People hate that he was even attempting to clean up the justice departments approach to bail, drug offenses, and minimums. Others hate that he doesn't go far enough in trying to stop police from taking out their frustrations on the poorest in Philadelphia. Philly DA is a fascinating and at times horrifying look at his first year in office and the climate of entrenched bureaucracy and a public's loathing for the health of the poor he was up against.
Standout Performance: The story of Latonya Myers is a nail-biting bit of inspiration on a show bookended by the most depressing facts and figures. Myers was in prison at a young age and is now an anti-incarceration activist. Before she can reach for the next important step in her life she has to prove herself in court, and I hope it isn't spoiling anything to say I was grateful for such a beautiful win at this point in the season.
19. Chapelwaite
Though it builds to a conclusion not perfectly supported by what had come before, there is no denying that I was sucked into the stupendously designed Chapelwaite from the word go. This blue-grey tone poem (based on Stephen King's prequel to Salem's Lot) spends a lot of time as a cautionary tale about racism before becoming a much more simple tale of keeping vampires out of your house, but it happens to be a compelling vision of both. Adrien Brody really digs into his performance as a self-loathing alcoholic with dreams he'll never realize.
Standout Performance: Sirena Gulamgaus as Loa, the youngest of Brody's two daughters, does such a fine job conveying her embittered jealousy at the people around her who get to have what they want while she gets so little. She packs so much into her every stare and pout. She comes up against a number of seasoned actors throughout the season and gamely holds her own.
20. Foundation
This show made me very nervous by spending two episodes on little but exposition and stage setting, but episode three kicked everything into high gear and then Foundation never slowed down. This show, based on something of a Holy Grail for a certain sci-fi fan, charts an experiment in civilization far away from the watchful eye of galactic fascism.
Standout Performance: Gotta be my guy Jared Harris. Harris just sets a show like six tons of concrete, he makes you believe everything you see. His version of space prophet Hari Seldon is as a man who's finally getting to enjoy being right about everything. Harris doesn't often get to make full use of that twinkle in his eye, but here he's just the right combination of doomsaying, burdened, and spritely and mischievous.
Simply put, yes to everything. Good job, Boy Critic!
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