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It’s always hard to find room for everything I love in my best-shows-of-the-year list. In 2021, it’s felt especially difficult, because as the streamers vie to outdo each other, they’re creating shows that overlap. Sometimes that’s delightful. My ongoing affection for elderly, cranky comedians takes me from the 15th season of our old standby Curb Your Enthusiasm, from Larry David, to Pretend It’s a City and Only Murders in the Building, both of which take elder statespeople of comedy and put them in fresh formats—Fran Lebowitz as Martin Scorsese’s favorite dinner guest; Steve Martin and Martin Short as true-crime podcast hosts. Sometimes it’s less delightful—like when a dozen of our favorite books or old shows are flipped into big adaptations for streaming services, leaving TV littered with big and flawed remakes that aren’t exactly bad but feel harvested of whatever made the source material magical.
This year, as many of the productions delayed by COVID-19 were dropped on us at once, it became a little easier to think of shows as the categories they fit into. Even in my top 10 list I see a lot of overlap: shows about the bad behavior of the very rich, characters haunted by past trauma, murder mysteries with unique settings, costume dramas with a flair for retelling history, and—my personal favorite highly niche subcategory—the coming of age of young South Asian femmes. But maybe this is how TV works now that it’s molded by algorithms—the inevitable effect of the “because you liked…” recommendation engine. At any rate, here are the shows that rose to the top for me this year.
From creators Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, this offbeat comedy set on an Oklahoma Indian reservation follows a group of four teenagers trying to hustle their way out of the place they grew up. They’re truants and thieves, but underneath their tough exteriors, they’re haunted by the narrow scope of rez life, the failures of the adults in their lives, and most of all, the rending tragedy of the recent suicide of the fifth of their group. The four work together to amass cash for a move to California, but in this droll, magical meander through rez life, nothing is quite predictable. Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) begins to see visions of a dead warrior from the Battle of Little Bighorn (Dallas Goldtooth), a figure more comical than heroic, while Cheese (Lane Factor) strikes up an unexpected alliance with the reservation’s cop, Big (Zahn McClarnon). The most striking character is Elora, played by Devery Jacobs, who moves from the periphery of the story to the center as her grief becomes an accelerant to change her life forever. The season is almost too slight to be a full story, but the season, filmed entirely in Oklahoma, is too fascinating to be ignored.
13. Invincible
Beneath the deceptively simple animation of Amazon’s Invincible is a blisteringly cynical superhero story that at its core has one of the most brilliantly cast and emotionally tortured family dynamics on television: Steven Yeun as teen superhero Invincible, Sandra Oh as his non-superhero mom, and J.K. Simmons as Omni-Man, his dad—the strongest being on Earth, and a clear Superman analogue—who has decided to crush everything that stands between him and total worldwide domination. The story doles out revelations piecemeal until the last few episodes of the first season, when everything slams into the central triad like a ton of bricks. We’ve seen Simmons do superhero work before, but hearing Yeun and Oh go after the operatic range of heroism and villainy is astounding, and Invincible brings both characters to the brink. In a world saturated with superhero stories, Invincible, like sister show The Boys, offers a bracing corrective to the technicolor heroics of masked men. Additional talent includes voice-performance fixture Jason Mantzoukas, comedy darling Gillian Jacobs, and Atlanta breakout star Zazie Beetz.
The six-episode Peacock series follows five Muslim London girls in a punk band. Writer, director, and even songwriter Nida Manzoor is a newcomer, but you wouldn’t guess it from the well-oiled, tightly edited season, which hinges together religion, tradition, feminism, and anger with the unifying power of instruments played very loudly. Manzoor’s show offers the audience a ton of range within the narrow category of Muslim women, quadrupling the types of Muslim women you see onscreen in one fell swoop as the five leads cobble together their talents. Starring Sarah Kameela Impey as the raging guitarist, Faith Omole as the earth-mother bassist, Lucie Shorthouse as the enigmatic band manager, Juliette Motamed as the suave and stylish drummer, and Anjana Vasan as the painfully shy student about to discover her inner lead singer.
11. The Great
Hulu’s The Great, Tony McNamara’s tongue-in-cheek interpretation of the early reign of Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning), projects the tension between a modern woman and a moldering social order onto Catherine’s Russian court. It’s a similar mode to Dickinson, but almost in direct opposition—where Dickinson is interior, The Great pushes all of these tensions out into the world around Catherine. Together they make a fascinating double feature, where two unconventional women strive within their domestic sphere for things they’re not supposed to want. War comes to haunt Catherine too: This season, after winning the war against her husband, Peter (Nicholas Hoult), Catherine has to navigate a testy relationship with the Ottoman empire. Meanwhile she reigns supreme, while pregnant with the next czar of Russia, giving the show room to experiment with stories about family and parenthood as it swathes all the characters in the trappings of ill-gotten luxury. The Great takes big swings with tone and story, and some of its flights work better than others. But with a flexible ensemble and imaginative retelling of history, The Great is a lighthearted romp through the not-so-lighthearted moral ambiguities of absolute power.
10. Dickinson
Apple TV+ offered us not just one but two seasons of Dickinson in 2021, bringing the series to an end by following the poet Emily Dickinson (Hailee Steinfeld) into the Civil War, where the show argues Dickinson can be classified as a war poet too. The half hour historical fiction follows poet Emily Dickinson’s inner, magical life, weaving together a snapshot of her world with flights of fancy about her creative life. At home with her family—father Toby Huss, mother Jane Krakowski, and sister Anna Baryshnikov—Dickinson turns domestic life in Amherst into a crèche for her artistic growth. Intimate, grounded, and charmingly silly, Dickinson’s final season leaves us a bit abruptly, but the show remains a remarkable gem.
9. Love Life
The second season of this HBO Max dramedy stars William Jackson Harper as a book editor trying to find his way in life, spanning several years of dating and drama in a picturesque, sun-dappled snapshot of the city. The chief object of his affection is Jessica Williams, a friend, or sometimes maybe more, with her own baggage and hangups. Harper, who has been on the rise since his breakout in NBC’s The Good Place, is absolutely magnetic as the romantic lead, and the chemistry between him and Williams sizzles with anticipation. The show wraps together Harper’s romances, friendships, and self-respect into a broader portrait of what it means to love and to live, which turns Love Life into a story about how to become a more whole person. For all its sexy trappings, Love Life reveals itself to be achingly sweet.
8. Sort Of
This slim coming-of-age story from HBO Max and the CBC nearly slipped under my radar when it debuted in early November. From Pakistani Canadian creator and star Bilal Baig and cocreator Fab Filippo, Sort Of follows Sabi (Baig), a nonbinary nanny who is considering leaving their service job for a stint in Berlin when a family emergency draws Sabi even closer to the family they’re working for. With a disarmingly light touch, Sort Of examines Sabi’s world—the class differences, the dead-end romances, and the unsaid words between them and their parents—as Sabi finds a way toward a better understanding of themselves. Baig has a generous, compelling screen presence that makes uncanny use of silence, easing the viewer into the many ambiguities they live within. Meanwhile the world around Baig is rendered with gentle contours, presenting the many overlapping threads between the worlds Sabi lives between. With a standout supporting performance by Amanda Cordner as Sabi’s best friend, “7ven.”
7. Station Eleven
The raw, deeply moving story follows the unfolding and aftermath of a flu pandemic that ends the world as we know it, turning its survivors into refugees that scavenge out of the wreckage of the past as they try to build a future. Showrunner Patrick Somerville and series director Hiro Murai adapted Emily St. John Mandel’s searing novel on HBO Max, with Mackenzie Davis in the lead role. In their hands the poignant power of Mandel’s story comes to life, depicting a fallen world of survivors clinging to Shakespeare and symphony to get through the grueling and treacherous postapocalyptic world. As is to be expected from Murai’s work, the drama captivates with its scenes that are so real they seem tangible—including the sequences when the characters commit wholeheartedly to retelling stories that comfort them. The story’s conscience lingers on the children—on the terrors of having and raising children in such a flawed world, where doctors are scarce and opportunists are numerous, and on the imprint of trauma borne by the children who have to witness the end of the world and keep moving forward anyway. The result is a story that is both harrowing and fundamentally life-affirming, a case for hope amidst what seems to be unceasing darkness. Amidst the large and talented cast keep an eye out for a funny and generous supporting performance from Lori Petty, as the leader of a band of arty vagabonds called the Traveling Symphony.
Anchored by a decadent performance from Jean Smart, HBO Max’s Hacks digs into the fraught but hilarious generation gap between Deborah, a boomer so financially comfortable she’s practically landed gentry, and Ava (Hannah Einbinder), a precarious, dysfunctional Gen Z comedy writer who’s been canceled for getting too spicy about a conservative politician on main. Behind the character drama the show has a stark, clear-eyed vision of the gender dynamics of comedy, the financial disparities in the entertainment industry, and how hard it is to cultivate intimacy with any human being unless you share the same sense of humor. The first season swanned to a serene, heartrending close as the friendship between Deborah and Ava burgeoned and then was tested. Fortunately, the story’s left plenty of dangling threads for the show to unravel in its upcoming second season.
Mike White offered up murderous satire at a resort in one of the most beautiful places on earth, attended to by a cast of humorously dysfunctional tourists and the long-suffering support staff that sees them come and go. Much of the delights of HBO’s The White Lotus came in uncovering each of these characters—Jennifer Coolidge’s self-involved grief, Steve Zahn’s tortured manhood, Jake Lacy’s inability to let go of a reservation request—but all together, The White Lotus is a clear-eyed satire on the hypocrisies and frailties of the privileged, which stand in stark contrast to the devastating (and often ignored) beauty of the Hawaiian islands. To be sure, the show itself suffers from some of that privilege, which might leave the viewer with a bit of a sour taste. But a conclusion laced with bitterness seems right for a show in which the biggest blowhards end up victorious, while the most hapless—including Murray Bartlett and Natasha Rothwell in two excellent performances—are punished for their brief slivers of hope. Slowly unfolding murder mysteries were a crucial component of HBO’s programming this year; The White Lotus went past cliché and comfort to offer a multifaceted portrait of white entitlement in the middle of paradise.
4. You
Sera Gamble’s delicious Netflix melodrama about a serial killer with a love for literature reached new heights in its third season when Joe (Penn Badgley), his new wife, Love (Victoria Pedretti), and their newborn son move to a wealthy suburb of San Francisco in a doomed attempt to live a somewhat normal life. As always, Joe narrates his own journey through the story, which each season fixates on one love-object so obsessively that several people end up dead by the end. But in an impressive twist of the knife, the third season of You takes on the pervasive, bland mommy culture that currently saturates social media; its satire of domestic life cuts so keenly that you end up taking the side of the charming murderers more than once. If there’s any show taking a look at the status of the straights, it’s You—and it’s finding a lot of darkness underneath our cheery Instagram facades. Pedretti, who joined the cast last season as a murderous romantic who could go toe-to-toe with Joe, is especially fascinating here as a capable woman squeezed to death by the confinement of what her neighbors (including a fantastic Shalita Grant) consider appropriate family life; sure she’s prone to killing people spontaneously, but she’s just as vulnerable to the insecurities of being a first-time mom as anyone. And Badgley, who continues to seduce the audience in his literary, faux-confessional narration, continues to deftly thread an impossible needle by being both the hero and the villain of his own story. You is not without an air of the ridiculous to it—above all, it hopes to thrill the viewer into sticking around for more—but as a result, the show’s engineered to near-perfection, offering twists, betrayals, and humorous side adventures on the happy couple’s attempt at domestic bliss.
3. Saturday Night Live
Tuning into the storied NBC variety show has once again become a highlight of the week. It’s true that I am a sucker for the throbbing energy of a live performance. But this year it’s become obvious that the ensemble has come into their own, aided by strong hiring choices and the maturation of many of its regular cast members. Cecily Strong has long been a linchpin of the show, and it feels as if now the show knows it too; Bowen Yang has immediately become indispensable; and Colin Jost and Michael Che’s Weekend Update, has become one of the strongest segments of the show. As TV becomes increasingly fragmented, Saturday Night Live’s classic format has become even more valuable. And though I do wish that SNL wouldn’t debase itself with stunt casting nonperformers like Elon Musk as the host, I must agree that the current crowd in studio 8H has proven themselves to be immensely capable of turning nearly any host into someone worth watching.
2. Yellowjackets
Led by incredible, textured performances from Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, and a deeply disturbing Christina Ricci, Showtime’s Yellowjackets examines how the past bears down on the present in telling the story of a team of high school soccer players who crash-land in the wilderness—killing some, maiming others, and leaving the rest to fend for themselves. At the same time, the story unfolds the events of 25 years later, following the survivors who are enmeshed in their adult lives but cannot stop the pull of the tragedies of the past. Cocreators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson developed the idea as a female take on Lord of the Flies, and in the troupe of girls left to fend for themselves on the island, Yellowjackets finds desperation, malice, lust, and hunger, along with the unexpected contours of community, faith, and hope. As might be expected from a series executive produced by Karyn Kusama (she directed the pilot), there’s a bloody beating heart underneath the action, a creeping dread infusing their day-to-day lives, a constant threat of impending harm that can’t be shaken off. At the margins of what they know, the beleaguered teens are beset by disturbing dreams and paranoiac visions; in the present, the surviving Yellowjackets discover that someone is hunting down their secrets. The show doesn’t give anyone a break, least of all the audience, as it excavates these seemingly ordinary women and the horrors that haunt them.
There’s no other show that’s as dramatically compelling or twistedly funny as HBO’s big hit Succession. Three seasons in, as the characters have moved past their initial sketches, the drama has found a way to tighten the screws; this season, Kieran Culkin and Matthew Macfadyen have been standouts, bringing Roman and Tom to new heights and depths as the world of the show staggers on, heedless of what it takes down in its wake. Succession remains the best showcase of performances on television in its view of wealth and power through a timeless lens: the close-range intimacy of a family drama. It’s hard not to reach for hyperbole when talking about how Succession makes the viewer feel, because the show utilizes its interpersonal drama—almost always, the relationship between a child and their father—to dig into the reach and power of big money, embodied in the show by the titanic and offensive personality of patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox). The stranglehold that extreme wealth has on everything—on all of our lives—is demonstrated by how the Succession cast dances like puppets to his tune, battered by his indifference but easily manipulated by his charm. Thanks to top-notch performances and deft satire, Succession has become an indispensable fixture of the landscape—a balm that makes the widening wealth gap humorous instead of, you know, a harbinger of the end of days.
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