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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2018

Almost all of these shows—even the most joyfully escapist among them—seemed preoccupied in 2018 with the forces which make us who we are.

The 25 Best TV Shows of 2018
Photo: Steve Dietl/Netflix

The best television shows of 2018 comprised a bounty of varied perspectives and disparate storytelling styles. Look closely, though, and many of the year’s more rewarding shows were attuned to the rigors of human existence, and curious about the pliable concept of identity—be it the identity of a horny teen on Big Mouth, of New York City on The Deuce, or of subjugated women on The Handmaid’s Tale.

In the second season of GLOW, the eponymous wrestlers struggle for screen time on their show within the show, and simultaneously tangle with the fallout of the characters they craft for themselves in the ring. Despite The Good Place upending its stakes and setting, the show’s relentlessly likeable characters continue to underpin its sunny disposition with an earnest investigation of how our moral identities are forged. And as shows such as Atlanta, Pose, and Dear White People broadened television’s definition of “we” in 2018, one of the medium’s overarching questions seemed to be: “Why are we this way?”

As one answer to that question, The Haunting of Hill House complemented its scares with an equally harrowing portrait of a damaged family. Atlanta and Bojack Horseman found a response in the ceaseless, pummeling nature of everyday life, while Dear White People, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Barry wondered if we are what other people—white people, the patriarchy, exploitative bosses—say we are. Other shows, such as Bob’s Burgers, were delightful reprieves from reality, though one could certainly find poignancy in that show’s portrayal of middle-class America.

This year’s list shares only nine entries with last year, a fact that highlights the breadth of a TV landscape that’s abundant in shows with limited runs. In some cases, shows made a qualitative leap in their second seasons; in others, bold newcomers quickly established themselves among TV’s upper echelon. Almost all of these shows—even the most joyfully escapist among them—seemed preoccupied in 2018 with the forces which make us who we are. Michael Haigis


The Terror

25. The Terror

Based on the true story of a failed British expedition to find the Northwest Passage in the mid-19th century, The Terror explores the toxic combination of arrogance and bravery that fuels the exploratory missions launched by great colonial powers. After getting stuck for a year and a half in Artic ice, the men, weakened by lead poisoning and fighting the elements, set off on foot in search of salvation. The Terror brings those awful facts vividly alive—and then goes further, creating a full-blown horror story by introducing a monster called the Tuunbaq, which looks something like a giant polar bear with a human face. The men divide into two factions, battling one another as well as the monster while dying in increasingly baroque ways. Scenes like a fire that ravages a camp, trapping dozens of people in flaming tents just as the men are having a rare night of celebration, ramp up the sense of claustrophobic terror, which only gets worse when the mad leader of one of the factions begins to cannibalize his enemies. Throughout it all, the Tuunbaq keeps decimating their ranks while growing increasingly weakened by the bullets they empty into him—and, presumably, the lead he ingests when he eats them. Like other classic movie monsters, the Tuunbaq is an unsettling metaphor for the way humans throw nature itself out of balance when we gain too much power. Elise Nakhnikian

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Mosaic

24. Mosaic

Steven Soderbergh understands that he must grab us in this century of endless distraction, and his efforts to hold our attention in Mosaic parallel the characters’ attempts to corral chaos into a functional narrative. In the guise of mounting a murder mystery, the filmmaker attempts to push narrative out of a classical three-act format. Mosaic’s episodes could be watched in any order and they’d still have a dizzying emotional and intellectual effect, suggesting less what we know than what we don’t. As he did in films such as The Limey and Side Effects, Soderbergh fashions found and abstract poetry out of the hard lines of the lairs of the rich and famous. His formalism suggests a wonderfully unlikely fusion of the films of Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni with lurid noir. Mosaic suggests a mammoth world that exists beyond his rigorously structured narrative, as every textured shot and stray bit of humor hints at the wild humanity existing under the controlled institutions and mannerisms that we collectively call society. Chuck Bowen


Silicon Valley

23. Silicon Valley

Despite losing T.J. Miller as its resident frenemy/douchebro, Silicon Valley successfully maintained its trademark undercurrent of pettiness and macho one-upmanship throughout its fifth season. The new season contained two of the show’s best episodes to date, “Reorientation” and “Fifty-One Percent,” the former a master class in throwing techie shade, the latter so perfectly succinct it could have served as the series finale. As always, Silicon Valley casts a satirical gaze on timely tech topics, with this season focusing on Bitcoin, net neutrality, employee poaching, artificial intelligence, the all-consuming blob called Amazon, and the inexplicable allure of Tesla cars. The writers also took their most biting jabs at Information Technology by offering up a vicious parable on the technological and psychological effects of sexual harassment. Directed by Gillian Robespierre, “Facial Recognition” showed that not even female robots are immune to the whims of horny men in power. Additionally, this season benefitted from the consistently reliable physicality of its lead, Thomas Middleditch. Richard Hendricks continues to grow, applying the things he’s learned in prior seasons while still managing to make the same mistakes. He’s the perfect counterbalance to Martin Starr’s droll-as-always Gilfoyle, a dead-on impersonation of your average programmer and still the show’s secret weapon. Odie Henderson


Pose

22. Pose

This soulful soap operatic drama pays tribute to New York City’s ball culture of the 1980s. Painting in broad, dramatic strokes, the script highlights the factors—racism, homophobia, transphobia, AIDS, and the wealth gap—that inspired these men and women to create their own world and faux families, where they could show one another the love and respect that they couldn’t find anywhere else. Balancing out the show’s earnest speeches and righteous crusades is plenty of sheer, campy joy, much of it provided by the balls that cap off most of the episodes. It’s an endearingly lumpy mix, made even more so by the uneven quality of the acting, but that very lack of polish is a large part of why the series works. Like the original ball scene, with all its homemade fabulosity, Pose aspires to a level of perfection it can’t quite achieve—and wins us over with the sheer heart and humanity of its effort. Nakhnikian


Fauda

21. Fauda

Unlike Homeland, which is based on another Israeli series, Fauda makes no attempt to cover the political debates or social context behind its constant action. Instead, like its main characters, it keeps its head down and its focus tight. The series follows the fictional members of an elite undercover unit of the Israeli army and whichever Palestinian freedom fighter/terrorist that Doron (Lior Raz), a rogue member of the unit, is obsessed with that season, while occasionally checking in with a handful of other Israelis and Palestinians—family members, lovers, or commanding officers—who either affect or are affected by the main characters’ actions. Fauda (Arabic for “chaos”) is particularly good at showing how war, especially one with no end in sight, poisons the lives of everyone—even civilians. While most of the women on the perimeter of the action have relatively modest dreams, just hoping to marry the man they love or keep their children safe, they inevitably get sucked into the maelstrom, losing their peace of mind, their loved ones, and sometimes their lives. Their romances sometimes stretch credulity, particularly this season when, despite actress Laëtitia Eïdo’s excellent work, Shirin, a dedicated Palestinian doctor, risks becoming a mere symbol of suffering as Doron and Shirin’s young militant cousin Walid (Shadi Mar’i) treat her like the rope in a macho game of tug of war. But the way killings and atrocities keep piling up on both sides, creating more trauma and more would-be martyrs by the day, feels all too believable. Nakhnikian

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The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

20. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

It’s always a pleasure when The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, like Mrs. Maisel’s comedy routines, doesn’t take the easy road. Around the midway point of the show’s second season, Midge’s (Rachel Brosnahan) father learns that she’s comedian, during one of her sets. As is her custom, Midge fabulously rolls with the punches, causing Abe (Tony Shaloub) to depressingly pull away from her in ways that are more than a little sad and a whole lot of toxic. But the episode doesn’t end with him putting his foot down. Soon, Abe learns that his son, Noah (Will Brill), is a C.I.A. agent and the government, through fear of repercussion, prevents him from doing onto Noah as he did onto Midge. To be denied the full force of his patriarchal might effectively opens his eyes to the fact that Midge is more talented than the hack comedians that tend to him and all the other bluebloods on the borscht belt. After almost losing his life to free-wheeling Paris, Abe should have known better, but this vivaciously alive and often disarmingly off-color comedy knows that some men, most men actually, need to be reminded more than once of a woman’s worth. Ed Gonzalez


High Maintenance

19. High Maintenance

Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair, the husband-and-wife creators of High Maintenance, have fun regarding the changing character of New York. Theirs is a lightness of spirit that never feels smug, and is evident even in seemingly throwaway gags, like an extended reference to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The highlight of High Maintenance’s new season is “Derech,” because it’s the episode where all of the show’s thematic concerns, along with its flair for misdirection, most effortlessly converge. Centered on an ex-Hasidic man (Luzer Twersky) who’s probably being taken advantage of by a Vice reporter (Ismenia Mendes) for a story, the episode zigs and zags its way to its unexpected conclusion, recontextualizing our view of everyone along the way. And by the time one of the drag performers (Darrell Thorne), who earlier sings “What are you up to, Elisabeth Shue?” in a moment of stoned bliss, swoops in to save the day, High Maintenance has again digressively arrived at a familiar and comforting place. Here and elsewhere, the series attests with great compassion to the revitalizing effects of living in a place where, while more homogeneous than it once was, pockets of resistance remain—and where people are nothing if not alive to the power of difference. Gonzalez


The Good Place

18. The Good Place

The Good Place has always partially deconstructed the sitcom format, with the amiable Bad Place demon Michael (Ted Danson) acting as a writer-creator who places his deceased subjects in uncomfortable situations and watches them wriggle. Owing to Michael’s ability to shape reality for the show’s other characters, The Good Place can alter its own premise from season to season—sometimes from episode to episode. In its third season, The Good Place capitalized on that flexibility by having Michael bring his ragtag group of subjects back to Earth, where they ostensibly have another shot at entering The Good Place. At least, that is, until they don’t. The Good Place uses its fluid internal logic to manifest hilarious sight gags, poke fun at locales as disparate as Australia and Jacksonville, and heighten the stakes for its characters: The show’s central question is no longer whether the misanthropic Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) and her motley crew belong in The Good Place, but whether humans are inherently capable of substantial self-improvement. Ultimately, The Good Place has faith in both its characters’ budding altruism and human capacity for change, which—along with keen observational humor and a limitless format—turns the show’s quietly heady investigation of ethics into an optimistic salve. Haigis


Barry

17. Barry

Bill Hader and Alec Berg, the creators of HBO’s dark comedy Barry, mine a considerable amount of heartfelt insight from their show’s farcical premise: Barry (Hader) is a depressed hitman who falls in love with acting after stumbling into an acting class while on a mission in Los Angeles. The universe of Barry is marked by a style of absurdism and surrealism that recalls FX’s Atlanta, another comedy about a man struggling to improve his station in life. The series has an absorbing, dreamlike quality that, when punctuated with extreme violence, appears nightmarish. Events occur in Barry’s life that defy logic: The police, investigating a series of crimes connected to Barry, bumble along as though they’ve never handled an investigation before, and after Barry’s partner in a brief romantic fling becomes mysteriously distant, his overreaction is no less inexplicable. Such moments service the show’s convoluted plot, which operates as a comedy of errors. Hader and Berg appear uninterested in revealing more about Barry’s personal history than what is communicated by their catchy premise, seemingly figuring that watching Barry navigate the criminal underworld and the cutthroat acting world will remain interesting and entertaining enough. And for the most part, they’re right. Haigis

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The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story

16. The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story

Like most shows from the Ryan Murphy traveling circus, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story—or as I like to call it, American Horror Story: Irréversible—slowly sinks its teeth into you. First it confronts us with the unbearable horror of Andrew Cunanan’s (Darren Criss) rage against one of his victims, then backtracks in time to reveal the sadness and frustration of both victim and victimizer, so as to make sense of what initially feels so absolutely senseless. Which is to say, everything that the news didn’t tell you during Cunanan’s three-month killing spree in mid-1997. In one episode, David Madson (Cody Fern) locks eyes with a woman who regards him with a contempt that’s wrenching, numbing him to the certainty of his death. And that’s just one of many instances of how this show harrowingly depicts the psychological and physical toll of the tyranny of the closet. Gonzalez


Random Acts of Flyness

15. Random Acts of Flyness

In the first episode of his Afrofuturist-ish HBO sketch show, creator, director, and star Terence Nance says Random Acts of Flyness is “about the beauty and ugliness of contemporary American life.” That broad frame allows Nance to download a multiverse of thoughts and ideas, from pointed observations about casual misogyny to a satiric skewering of “white thoughts.” Building on his work in films like An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, Nance invents his own kaleidoscopic audiovisual language. Images switch frequently between realistic and surrealistic live action, obscure archival footage, and various styles of animation. Words blossom in myriad forms: as near-subliminal messages, as text exchanges that break into the action to comment on it, as fast-talking monologues or probing conversations. The end result may be dense to the point of impenetrable at times, but Random Acts of Flyness can be gloriously straightforward too. A recurring bit with the characteristically ambiguous title of “Blackface” consists of a parade of beautiful dark-skinned faces, each perfectly lit against a black backdrop and gazing at the camera in lingering close-up. A celebration of black American creativity, intelligence, and beauty, Random Acts of Flyness is an act of creative generosity: an open invitation to wake the fuck up and smell the delicious coffee—but don’t let it burn you. Nakhnikian


Bob’s Burgers

14. Bob’s Burgers

The Belcher kids, as whip-smart as they are, will believe anything as long as what they’re told is as anarchic as their inner spirits. “That all checks out,” says Louise, after a chauffeur informs her that “Thomas Hanks” was paid $12,000 after fans of Big were decapitated en masse after sticking their heads out of limousine roofs. Of course, sometimes only seeing is believing. Case in point: “The Trouble with Doubles,” an uproarious and poignant ode to the vividness of our fears, which sees Tina (Dan Mintz), Louise (Kristen Schaal), and Gene (Eugene Mirman) hosting a movie night that ends with their friends more than a little shaken—and in the case of Rudy (Brian Huskey), hilariously out of breath. The moment is enough for Tina to take charge, conquering a private fear by busting out the “legendary Tina-singing-to-her-poop tape.” The sentimental and the anarchic continue to walk gloriously hand in hand on Bob’s Burgers, which understands that desperate times often all for deeply embarrassing measures. Gonzalez


Better Call Saul

13. Better Call Saul

After four seasons, Better Call Saul has more than established itself as a devious inversion of the series that originated it. Audiences once took pleasure in seeing Walter White break bad, traveling down his predetermined—and over-quoted—path of going from Mr. Chips to Scarface. There’s comparatively little pleasure in Jimmy McGill’s equally predetermined descent into the shoes of criminal lawyer Saul Goodman. For what fun montages and schemes may crop up along the way (the Free Will Baptist Church con is an all-timer), there’s a real dread in knowing how he ends up. The series has simply been too good at showing his heart, at giving a glimpse of the man who might have been; we don’t want to let go. But Better Call Saul has let go. In the aftermath of the previous season, Jimmy slips into a hole of resentment and discontent from which he may never emerge. Here he finally is, the lauded male antihero at the center of TV’s golden age. Buy his poster. Wear his t-shirt. After all, isn’t he what we’ve all waited for? Steven Scaife

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The Americans

12. The Americans

How quickly things change. The fifth season of The Americans ended with Elizabeth (Keri Russell) tacitly accepting that she’s bought the fantasy of the American capitalist dream. Flash-forward a year to the morally uneasy finale of the series and Elizabeth looks out of over a Russian skyline and utters, “We’ll get used to it.” We may never know if she actually believes that to be true. More certain is that, some 20 minutes into the episode, The Americans pulled off its greatest coup. Inside a parking garage, the world collapsing around them, Elizabeth and Philip (Matthew Rhys) are confronted by Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), and for the next 10 minutes Philip pulls a perfect high-wire act that puts the Jennings’ almost eight-year-long gaslighting of their neighbor into dazzlingly broad context. Philip’s bravura, a brilliantly controlled articulation of everything that was real and less than real about his friendship to Stan, is at once stinging and vulnerable—and the perfect distillation of everything that made The Americans one of the greatest modern-day television shows. Gonzalez


The Handmaid’s Tale

11. The Handmaid’s Tale

Few television shows can match the commitment of The Handmaid’s Tale to withholding catharsis from audiences. The series, which maintains a visual lyricism that both clashes with and magnifies the brutality on screen, is most heartbreaking during moments of doubt, when Elisabeth Moss’s June appears resigned to her fate. Yet it consistently obscures her true motivation, mining mystery from her submissiveness: Is it genuine, or another tactic? When she’s able to seize, however briefly, the upper hand from her tormentors, the series offers tantalizing glimpses of their chagrin. For a moment, we’re prompted to envision that chagrin morphing into sorrow, shame, maybe even fear. That would spell some kind of catharsis, but until it actually arrives, The Handmaid’s Tale remains intellectually nourishing, easy to admire, and difficult to endure. It’s a beautiful test of stamina, offering only small reprieves from June’s suffering. It embeds us alongside her, and remains dedicated to illustrating how exactly the villains can win. Haigis


Killing Eve

10. Killing Eve

Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s affinity for girls behaving badly was at the center of her last project for the BBC, Fleabag, in which the female protagonist steals, seduces, and cracks rape jokes. With Killing Eve—which Waller-Bridge adapted from author Luke Jennings’s Villanelle series—she uses the same whip-smart voice to explore women whose bad behavior extends beyond the limits of rapacious sexuality and crass humor: specifically, to murderous psychopaths. The series suggests a delightfully demented, considerably more violent spin on Broad City, Insecure, and Waller-Bridge’s own Fleabag. Those programs are wryly comical and sexually frank, with complex female relationships at their center, and Killing Eve brings us all those attributes in the guise of a crackerjack mystery. The series combines a dry comedy’s affection for the mundane with the slick look and tone of a psychosexual thriller, and the result is something wholly original, suspenseful, and caustically funny. Julia Selinger


Legion

9. Legion

As much as any series this year, Legion underscored the role of television as a forum for risk-taking. Noah Hawley’s comic-book freak-out uses boldly off-kilter visuals and an occasionally challenging narrative to elevate what is essentially standard superhero fare. In its second season, the series maintains focus on the showdown between David (Dan Stevens) and The Shadow King (Navid Negahban), a conflict that seems as fundamentally simplistic as any good-versus-evil tale. Yet Legion, by employing stylistic flourishes which reflect David’s fractured psyche and telepathic powers, turns a basic story into a byzantine maze which leads to a genuine shock. After embedding the viewer in David’s highly unreliable perspective, the second season ends with a twist that suggests we might have been subjected more to his delusions than once seemed possible. When the nominal hero commits an unforgivable violation in the season’s surprising finale, Legion morphs into a rumination on egoism, entitlement, and toxic masculinity. Legion is a superhero story that does more than merely excite, and maintains a healthy skepticism toward would-be heroes with unchecked power. Haigis

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Homecoming

8. Homecoming

Homecoming’s visual ambition is complemented by intellectual curiosity, with creator and director Sam Esmail using the show’s titular facility—a therapeutic treatment facility designed to help returning American veterans acclimate to civilian life—to impugn the motivations of the military industrial complex and its profiteering contractors. In the tight span of 10 easily digestibly half-hour episodes, the show’s writers highlight the tenuous relationship between memory and reality, and demonstrate the dehumanizing nature of combat. As Heidi, an under-experienced social worker played by Julia Roberts, circles the dark truth of what happened at Homecoming, the series explores the emotional fallout of the soldiers’ most tragic experiences, and underlines the way the men’s emotions inform their very realities. Homecoming manages to both thrill and propose a grim hypothetical: that the earnest practice of soldier rehabilitation and the economic rigors of the war business may not be able to coexist. Haigis


BoJack Horseman

7. BoJack Horseman

More than any other of modern television’s prestige offerings, BoJack Horseman is at once edifying and infantile. It tosses out literary witticisms with ease and dots its assiduously composed backgrounds with visual and linguistic larks that will have you reaching for the pause button. And yet, for all its trenchant banter and adroit wordplay, it’s the Netflix show’s painful earnestness that makes it brilliant—the way it uses fantasy to address reality and its many barbarities, the unescapable consequences of selfishness, the collateral damage of self-destruction, the corrosive effects of mental illness. But the latest season of the series isn’t all ennui and agony. It’s also slathered with sex jokes and groan-inducing euphemisms, unrepentantly childish and deftly delivered. It’s a serious show, but not self-serious. Greg Cwik


The Deuce

6. The Deuce

In its second season, HBO’s sprawling, richly detailed series jumps forward to 1978 in order to arrive at another inflection point—one marked by the nascent feminist movement, emerging punk culture, and the complete commodification of porn. With this temporal leap, creators David Simon and George Pelecanos maintain the sensation that New York is perpetually on the brink of transformation, and create tension by intertwining the destinies of the show’s characters with the fate of the changing city. The series focuses on the far-reaching effects of urban transformation, and asks who benefits the most from urban renewal. In Simon’s work, change is calamitous for a city’s marginalized characters, those figures who are barred from the insulated corridors of power—and those figures toward which, including even the villainous and predatory pimps, Simon is clearly most sympathetic. For the club owners and porn stars in The Deuce, 1978 is a boom. Yet Simon, so focused on renewal and decay, is rarely coy about foreshowing the bust. Season two amounts to a halcyon recollection, overshadowed by impending tragedy that will likely come as a shock, and represent the end of the good old days, which were deteriorating from the moment they began. Haigis


Dear White People

5. Dear White People

Dear White People’s sophomore season urgently formulates a trenchant assessment of America’s deteriorating national dialogue. Last season proposed discourse as a bridge between whites and blacks, but as Twitter trolls and insurgent white nationalists plunge the fictional Winchester University into unrest, Dear White People now questions whether such a discourse is possible at all. Writer-creator Justin Simien is adept at asking questions without purporting to have any answers. The show’s mostly black students have individual and unique reactions to the events of last season, but they’re united by a crisis of confidence. Student union meetings across campus are clouded with uncertainty, as students struggle to move forward while Winchester is increasingly divided along racial lines. Despite being as quick and witty as ever, the characters’ conversations unfold with a demoralizing sense of fatalism. The series offers a dim view of communication in an increasingly tribal world. Haigis

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GLOW

4. GLOW

Season two of GLOW maintained the show’s masterful balance of camp, breezy humor, and weighty drama, while offering deepened insight into how its striving characters relate to the patriarchal systems in their professional and personal lives. As they struggle to keep their show on the air, Ruth (Alison Brie), Debbie (Betty Gilpin), and the rest of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling compete with one another for the opportunity to stage matches that often veer toward exploitation. The fraught relationship between the women’s professional success and personal debasement is one that GLOW’s writers cannily navigate—never more so than when Tammé (Kia Stevens) embarrassedly performs as her wrestling persona, The Welfare Queen, in front of her horrified son (Eli Goree). GLOW reflects her paradoxical emotions in equal measure: Tammé’s pride at having mastered a craft, and her utter shame at having to stoop toward racial caricature for approval. The series is similarly poignant when portraying pitfalls faced by its other female characters, including an encounter between Ruth and a network executive which unflinchingly evokes the #MeToo movement. Just as often, GLOW is airy and accessible, using comedy as a Trojan horse for trenchant observations of the role of women in wrestling, entertainment, and society at large. Haigis


Big Mouth

3. Big Mouth

It feels reductive to call Big Mouth a public service, because no one thinks of public services as being thoughtful, funny, or full of illustrated penises. But the Netflix cartoon’s brazen approach to sexuality is as hilarious as it is heartfelt, a plea to normalize the behavior and bodily functions that society has taught us to hide in shame. To do it for the kids, because the kids of Big Mouth sure could use a more understanding world to grow up in. Puberty for them may have a distinct surplus of hairy monsters and horny ghosts, but their confusion and anxiety rings as unfortunately true as any teen drama ever has. If the first season introduced all the apparitions that symbolized the kids’ new urges and thought processes, the second tasks them with something even more difficult: adjusting to the fact that those things are all here to stay. Even the new addition of the seemingly malevolent dildo connoisseur the Shame Wizard isn’t here to be defeated so much as eventually accommodated. While lives and relationships change, season two of Big Mouth demonstrates how we all learn to survive with those wizards, ghosts, and monsters whispering in our ears. Scaife


The Haunting of Hill House

2. The Haunting of Hill House

Created, written, and directed by Mike Flanagan, who’s unmatched in his ability to tune audiences into the strain and intensity of characters’ tortured psyches, The Haunting of Hill House is less than an adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 gothic horror novel of the same name than an echo of it. The series, at least until its disarmingly hopeful finale, leaves you with a depressing and melancholy impression that there may actually be no escape from whatever it is that’s haunting the Crain family. And there’s a sense that all five of the Crain siblings seem to understand as much, each and every one of them throwing themselves into their work or shrinking into their addictions, sometimes both, as if hoping to discover something to the contrary. It’s as they’re all perpetually standing on a bridge between the real and the ethereal, uncertain of where to go. Gonzalez


Atlanta

1. Atlanta: Robbin’ Season

Atlanta: Robbin’ Season is cloaked in a heavy yet strangely exhilarating veil of dread. Like Twin Peaks: The Return, there’s a sense that anything can happen in this series, as comedy mingles with violence and transcendence with a liquidity that feels simultaneously spontaneous and preordained. The most uncomfortable moments of Atlanta’s first season, such as the killing of a gun-running Uber driver, are the rule in Robbin’ Season rather than the exception. Last season’s lighter, frothier moments—the ones that kept it more or less tethered to the formula of a modern, upscale single-camera TV comedy for erudite young liberals—have been pared away. The characters are chillier and more aloof, defensive, and hostile now. Part of this new discomfort stems from what is murkily implied to have occurred in the characters’ lives since we last saw them. We’re made intensely aware of our limitations as spectators. Donald Trump became president of the United States while Atlanta’s first season was earning critical accolades. The early episodes of Robbin’ Season don’t mention this event, but the show’s anxious atmosphere appears to be a reaction to his divisive politics of hatred and paranoia. Bowen

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