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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2019

Our favorite shows of 2019 resist easy categorization, and they attest to a medium in transformation.

The Best TV Shows of 2019
Photo: Amazon

Our favorite television shows of 2019 resist easy categorization, and they attest to a medium in transformation. On our list, the old and new sit side by side, as do the challenging and the inspirational, the urgent and the offbeat. These 25 shows speak to the medium’s consistently stimulating sense of variety, and to the fact that as one golden age of television yields to the demands of an era of endless content, resonant voices and bold ideas can still find their audience. While these shows are diverse in subject matter and style, the best offerings of the year were characterized by clear, well-honed perspectives, often engaging the big questions of our present-day human existence.

The year’s best TV programming gave voice to a breadth of ideas and experiences, even those which might not reasonably be considered “issue-driven.” Consider the Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, which couched a canny indictment of male egoism and fragile masculinity in fart jokes and absurdist cringe humor. Or Pamela Adlon’s Better Things, which launched an incisive and frank portrayal of menopause in its third season. HBO’s Succession, perhaps the only series on the list that might be classified as a reaction to Trumpism, supplanted Game of Thrones as the network’s crown dramatic jewel by offering viewers the repugnant, terrifyingly cut-throat palace intrigue that the latter series long-ago turned its back to.

The immersive Russian Doll operated as an Escher painting turned dramedy, slowly and thoughtfully eroding the affected abrasiveness of its main character. And while that series was just one of the year’s many surprising breakthroughs, 2019 also found well-established shows in peak form, from BoJack Horseman, newly alive with a deep sense of hope for its eponymous character, to Bob’s Burgers, richer and funnier in what it has to tell us about family life. Whether tackling existential issues or providing a reprieve from them, the year’s best shows comprise a multitude of voices, which flowed forth from the most prestigious platforms to the smallest, strangest niches of the medium—all of them demanding, in one way or another, to be heard. Michael Haigis


City on a Hill

25. City on a Hill

When City on a Hill isn’t immersed in pulpy shenanigans, which find Kevin Bacon’s casually racist F.B.I. agent Jackie Rohr doing things like brandishing a fish at an angry old woman who calls him a “white devil,” it aspires to be a Bostonian spin on The Wire. The series, set in the early ’90s and based on an original idea by creator Chuck MacLean and executive producer Ben Affleck, constantly keeps one eye on the systems that contribute to the city’s rot as it moves through a fictionalized account of the “Boston Miracle” police operation that statistically reduced violence in the city. The series excels in the level of detail it brings to its characters, and proves itself as effective at small, interlocking details as it is at purely hammy thrills. Steven Scaife


Years and Years

24. Years and Years

Perhaps the most significant aspect of Years and Years is the compassion with which it considers its characters. It would be easy for a series filled with so many cataclysms, both global and personal—nuclear weapon launches, deaths, infidelities—to err on the side of sadism in its depiction of that turmoil. But it takes no pleasure in the pain of its central family. Instead, Years and Years recognizes that pain is edifying as well as transient, and it accordingly gives the pain that it inflicts space to evolve: to form, to torment, and to pass, like each year that comes and goes, taking more and more away with it. Niv M. Sultan

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On Becoming a God in Central Florida

23. On Becoming a God in Central Florida

Florida water park employee Krystal Stubbs (Kirsten Dunst) earns the nickname “the alligator widow” after her husband, Travis (Alexander Skarsgård), works himself into bleary-eyed exhaustion and, then, gator-inhabited waters. Travis fell victim to a pyramid scheme whose promises of wealth and prosperity prompted him to dump the family’s life savings into the organization’s coffers, leaving Krystal holding both the bag and their baby. As conceived by On Becoming a God in Central Florida, this vision of 1992 America is a morass of hucksters and hollow promises, and the series explores that world with both a sharp eye and a peculiar sense of humor. It keenly captures our dubious relationship with the prospect of wealth; its myriad absurdities are resonant reminders of how tough it is to “get ahead,” and how easy it is to get lost in the labyrinth of capitalism. Scaife


Big Mouth

22. Big Mouth

Netflix’s Big Mouth is continued evidence against the dubious argument that P.C. culture has made it impossible for comedians to be edgy. As a subject for an animated sitcom, the sex lives of 13-year-olds constitutes an ethical, political, and cultural minefield—one that the graphic and logorrheic Big Mouth gives the impression of approaching blindfolded and in a headlong rush. But there’s a method to its mania: Even while firing an entire volley of cum jokes at viewers every few seconds, the new season covers topics like female masturbation, slut shaming, incel masculinity, biphobia, social media addiction, and the gay teen experience with a heartening frankness that belies its apparent irreverence. Pat Brown


Euphoria

21. Euphoria

Sam Levinson’s Euphoria depicts teenage hedonism in frank, explicit terms: a high school world awash in pills, sex, and nude photos thrown to the winds of social media. The series finds its character-driven groove by turning an empathetic eye toward the inner lives of its principal teens, observing their listlessness and small moments of solace as much as their outward pain. It tempers some of its heavier material with an often laidback atmosphere, a world of deep shadows drenched in multi-colored hues and dreamy hip-hop beats that belie the darkness in its corners. If the universe is falling apart around the characters’ ears, the result is that Euphoria’s characters see little reason to consider what encroaching adulthood will mean, to ruminate on what will come next when there might as well be no “next.” There’s only the all-encompassing “now.” Scaife


Superstore

20. Superstore

Over its run, Superstore has morphed from workplace comedy to one of the most radical shows on TV, and while still remaining a workplace comedy. As broadly, effortlessly representative as ever, the series is still full of insightful gags about the underpaid labor beneath a corporation that definitely doesn’t care about you, and which is in service of customers who care perhaps slightly more than that. But for its fourth and fifth season, this perspective extends even further, naturally giving way to storylines about establishing a union, what happens when you ostensibly become the boss, and union-busting attempts from corporate that culminate in an ICE raid. While most shows tend to coast on chemistry (which Superstore still has in spades) this far into their run, the series is more astute than ever at capturing what it means to struggle under capitalism. Scaife

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Bob’s Burgers

19. Bob’s Burgers

“The Ring (But Not Scary)” was a fitting premiere for the new season of Bob’s Burgers. The stakes of the Belchers’ hijinks may vary across its history, but the show’s sympathetic view of this working-class family remains unwavering. And as with so many Bob’s Burgers standouts, that surprisingly suspenseful episode, in which the Belcher kids lose the upgraded wedding ring that Bob finally got for Linda is elevated by colorful peripheral characters and a sympathetic recognition of Bob’s love for—and dogged frustration with—his family. Other season highlights—from “Motor, She Boat,” which delves into Bob’s perception of his own fatherly ineptitude, to “Pig Trouble in Little Tina,” in which Tina’s receives a spooky lesson about peer pressure—reinforce the show’s uniquely resonant take on family dynamics, so sweet and well-observed in its realism and, of course, riotously funny whenever it catches its characters flirting with the absurd. Haigis


Evil

18. Evil

Robert and Michele King’s Evil is a sort of X-Files centered around religion and exorcisms, and not just because it pairs a true believer with a devout skeptic. It takes that show’s institutional skepticism and points it (on network television, no less!) at the Catholic Church, whose motives are as rooted in belief as they are in upholding a status quo. The series slyly tweaks its case-of-the-week structure, refusing to definitively answer all the questions it raises. Sometimes there’s a logical explanation rooted in our post-truth era of technological fakery, and sometimes there isn’t. As it slides further into outright horror, Evil subverts its seemingly old-fashioned construction and concept to reveal itself as one of the year’s most relevant shows. Scaife


The Deuce

17. The Deuce

Season three of The Deuce provides typically revealing insights into elements of ’80s New York City that are underserved even in other texts which seek to lionize the era. The show’s presentation of Times Square entails a kind of shadow history, about everything from cops harassing building owners to the nascent AIDS crisis. The Deuce positions its prostitutes, porn stars, mobsters, and bohemians as dinosaurs, mostly unaware of their looming extinction, from disease, the advent of home video, and the real estate boom. By continuing to confine its totemic New York figures—the mobsters, barmen, and sleaze-balls—to plodding and static storylines, the series demythologizes them, suggesting that the cultural touchstones of New York history were just subjects to the fiscal whims of the city’s influential, faceless money movers. Haigis


Watchmen

16. Watchmen

HBO’s Watchmen expands its source material in fascinating ways, weaving a dense, bizarre mythology and richly conceived world. The sprawling pilot episode in particular introduces various complicated ideas, drawing clear lines to fascism in the actions of the police and vigilantes. As thorny as the show’s handling of politics can be, though, it offers a nonetheless intriguing rebuttal of the graphic novel. Even the boundless cynicism of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s mega-hit had its potential rays of light, the idea that prejudice might look small once everyone recognized the futility of crying out to be better dead than Red. Watchmen argues the ways injustice might persist, and in that sense, its alternate history doesn’t look so alien after all. Scaife

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Mob Psycho 100

15. Mob Psycho 100

Though Shigeo Kageyama, a.k.a. Mob, a.k.a. White-T Poison, is one of the most powerful psychics around, that prowess hardly brings him fulfillment. The quiet, awkward middle-schooler grapples with the emotions he’s learned to suppress through attempts to impress his crush, his (often unfortunate) participation in the riotously supportive Body Improvement Club, and his part-time exorcist job working for blowhard, kind-hearted conman Reigen Arataka. The series is an outpouring of humanity, a brilliant juxtaposition of the bizarre and the mundane that examines what it means to function in a society and the importance of other people. We see the narcissistic paths Mob might have traveled down if he wasn’t so committed to being a regular guy. And as in the show’s last season, it’s such a pleasure to see the distinctively crude art of pseudonymous manga artist ONE transformed into something so staggeringly gorgeous and intricate by anime studio Bones. With frequent art style shifts to complement its already idiosyncratic designs, Mob Psycho 100 practically radiates with the infectious excitement of being animated. Scaife


Dear White People

14. Dear White People

Although Dear White People reformulates its narrative emphases in season three, the show’s buoyant humor and dynamic visual flair remain consistent. A restless camera follows the students of the Armstrong-Parker House as they move swiftly through campus spaces and lob witticisms at one another, almost as if they were on an Aaron Sorkin show. All of them continue to speak with a voluminous knowledge of pop culture and capacity for barbed quips. Their cleverness and cultural knowledge would be easier to dismiss as aspirational flourishes designed to reflect creator Justin Simeon’s ideals if the heady repartee between students didn’t ensconce even the show’s most trenchant critiques in ebullience and communicate them with clarity. Despite never attaining its usual insistent thrust, however, Dear White People locates poignancy in characters who, after fighting unwieldy, important battles for two years, confront their own waning momentum—and begin to wonder if personal fulfillment and cultural progress aren’t, necessarily, correlated. Haigis


Undone

13. Undone

Rotoscope animation gives Amazon’s Undone an appropriately in-between feel, its not-quite-animated yet not-quite-live-action style a metaphor for protagonist Alma’s (Rosa Salazar) state of mind. Following a car crash, she becomes unmoored in time, seeming to travel to the past and go through life events out of order. Whether due to schizophrenia or because she’s some sort of time wizard, the point of the series is that Alma isn’t in total control. Undone, the brainchild of Bojack Horseman writers Kate Purdy and Raphael Bob-Waksberg, is certainly complicated, but it makes for an unexpectedly rich character piece about processing mental illness and the way it affects those around us. Scaife


I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson

12. I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson

Social discomfort leaks out of each and every sketch of I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, as characters constantly double down, then triple down, then quadruple down on their inane schemes and insecurities. Throughout, already bizarre situations escalate to truly profound degrees of obstinance and delusion: denying responsibility for a crashed hot dog car while dressed in a hot dog costume, incessantly responding to a “honk if you’re horny” bumper sticker, vowing revenge on a magician who publicly humiliated you, attempting to assassinate baby bad boy Bart Harley Jarvis, and defiantly, inexplicably singing about the reanimation of some skeletons. The series reaches such dizzying, quotable absurdity that it seems to inhabit an abrasive and uncomfortable universe all its own. Scaife

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BoJack Horseman

11. BoJack Horseman

BoJack Horseman (Will Arnett) is changing, or he finally seems as if he’s sincerely attempting to change. The misanthrope appears seized by a certain earnestness, which brings a magnetic resonance to the first half of BoJack Horseman’s final season. The series keeps up its high bar for clever visual gags and incisive Hollywood satire, and sidelining BoJack in recovery allows it to showcase its deep roster of characters. Various episodes focus primarily on Diane, Princess Carolyn, Mister Peanut Butter, and others, even as they fiercely get at how BoJack’s tumultuous past has affected each of them. And while the show still cannily observes the pitfalls of BoJack’s addictions and narcissism, after five seasons of generating mostly pity for its equine protagonist, BoJack Horseman is finally hopeful that he may just shake off his demons. Haigis


Ramy

10. Ramy

It’s the tension between Ramy’s (Ramy Youssef) secular and spiritual leanings that serves as the thrust of the Hulu series that bears his name, as he considers what kind of person—what kind of Muslim, son, and man—he wants to be. Intensely critical of himself, Ramy recognizes that he’s done much self-mythologizing, mostly in regard to his religious observance, and acutely feels his lapses in judgment, and Ramy derives its soulfulness from the ruins of the myths that Ramy and his family and friends tell themselves and those around them. There’s profound pain to be found amid the rubble. And, maybe, peace. Sultan


Too Old to Die Young

9. Too Old to Die Young

It’s plain to see why Amazon had precisely zero confidence in Too Old to Die Young and shooed it out the door with little fanfare, like it was something to be ashamed of. Caked in neon, slathered with synths, and riddled with near-parodically long, languid shots of silence and solemn dialogue exchanges, it’s Nicholas Winding Refn at his most Nicholas Winding Refn. But that’s also what makes the series so enthralling: the uncompromising clarity of his overpowering vision, a biting satire of modern America conceived with writer Ed Brubaker. The America of the show is lit mainly by signs, streetlamps, and stars, and it feels like the end of the world, overrun as it is by bad, creepy cops who can dream only of further ways to impose their will. It’s Refn’s best work since Drive, painting the country as a series of freeways and headlights that stretch onward into an infinite abyss, to the empty absolution sought by people well into the final stages of moral decay. Scaife


Chernobyl

8. Chernobyl

Though Chernobyl isn’t without the familiar, awkward elements of docudrama—strained exposition, summary speeches—it successfully drowns out the clanging gears of historical reenactment through the sheer quality of its construction. This is less a miniseries as five-hour movie than episodic television, with new narrative wrinkles introduced each week. It’s unrelentingly grim material—one episode shows the men assigned to kill the irradiated pets that evacuees from the Chernobyl nuclear accident had left behind—as well as totally engrossing, a deadly puzzle solved piece by piece with unorthodox solutions that give way to potentially ruinous complications. In exploring the context around the disaster’s response, Chernobyl finds empathy for the affected as well as outrage for the human failures that led to the explosion—the hubris, greed, the ignorance, and the clear preference for believing nothing is wrong. Scaife

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Russian Doll

7. Russian Doll

The premise of Netflix’s Russian Doll, in which Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) keeps dying during her 36th birthday party only to awaken each time at the start of the night, suggests a playfully morbid Escher painting. The fact that the series doesn’t address the specific root of Nadia’s predicament, though, invites a number of interpretations. And by glossing over the precise details of its central mystery, it resists reducing Nadia’s quest to a simplistic morality tale. Without ever suggesting that she must alter herself to meet the expectations of others, Russian Doll maintains an astute understanding of which aspects of Nadia are permanent and which are malleable. It suggests that the parts of her that need changing, like her self-loathing and emotional numbness, relate primarily to her own happiness rather than virtue or goodness. The series seems to make the case that morality is relative, amorphous, and immaterial. Haigis


Better Things

6. Better Things

Much of the discussion around Pamela Adlon’s Better Things has, unfortunately, surrounded the ignominious departure of the show’s co-creator, Louis C.K. The series hasn’t merely survived his absence, but actually thrived as a result. The new season largely concerns Sam (Adlon) grappling with the onset of menopause, and the series continues to address her struggles with characteristic frankness. Whether Sam is wrestling to fit into clothes she only recently purchased, or preparing for a colonoscopy (memorably outlined in painstaking detail), Better Things focuses squarely on the impact that routine indignities take on her. But the show is far from a mere lament. As it has in past seasons, Better Things also fixates on the joys and sense of peace—a romantic entanglement with a therapist, a reconciliation with a friend—that she finds even in the midst of enduring life’s hard knocks. The affirming Better Things stares boldly at anxieties as universal as atrophy and regret, and concludes that the daily struggle of life is still worth undertaking. Haigis


Mindhunter

5. Mindhunter

Mindhunter’s first season distinguished itself from other crime shows by offering an origin story, dramatizing how the F.B.I. forged its Behavioral Science Unit. It reminded audiences that institutions and corresponding notions of reality have to be invented and manipulated, and creator Joe Penhall and co-executive producer David Fincher rhymed this social invention with one of a more personal sort. The show’s second season is both epic and intimate in its sprawl, collapsing dozens of famous crime stories together, revealing the intricate intersections between personal and political neuroses. The season is so stirring for showing how murder mysteries reflect every element of society, and are therefore on certain levels almost inherently unsolvable. To understand an element of human nature is to know how truly little one knows. Chuck Bowen


Barry

4. Barry

Surreal flourishes lace the second season of Barry, conveying in precise but poignant fashion how its eponymous character’s trauma has caused him to live in a fugue state. But the show’s dark comedy is still largely derived from stark juxtapositions of violence and humor. While the series portrays its underworld as the province of bumbling and affable lords, its directors frame violence with a matter-of-fact sensibility, emphasizing the yawning gap between whimsy and outright danger in Barry’s world. As he strives to bridge the gap between the person he is and the one he wants to be, the show’s central source of pathos is his (and our) dawning understanding that it may not be possible, and that he may not even deserve it. Haigis

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Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal

3. Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal

Genndy Tartakovsky’s work as an animator is most striking for its embrace of silence. Even in the cacophonous realm of children’s cartoons, the Samurai Jack creator favors wordless moments that lean on the flapping of cloth in the wind or the exaggerated sounds of a clenching fist. Adult Swim’s Primal, then, feels like something Tartakovsky has been building to for much of his career, a dialogue-free miniseries following a caveman and his T. rex partner fighting to survive in a violent, unforgiving world. The show’s violence is a reflection of its characters’ existence, a cycle from which there’s no escape. Children are swallowed whole, prey is devoured on the spot, eyeballs are smashed in by rocks, and dino jaws are smeared in vivid red blood. The story of the caveman and T. rex’s survival, in Tartakovsky’s hands, is totally enthralling, as terrible as it is beautiful. Scaife


Succession

2. Succession

HBO’s Succession derives its acerbic satire from envisioning real-world corporate mergers as hostile takeovers performed by bullies and proxy wars waged between families with the wealth of developing nations. The morally bankrupt, mostly bumbling, but never harmless Roy family constitutes a garish caricature of billionaire excess. In season two, as they attempt to stave off their company’s acquisition by absorbing a news competitor, Succession underlines the moral bankruptcy which flows from the Roys’ unfettered avarice, while simultaneously lamenting the poisonous toll such greed can take. Haigis


Fleabag

1. Fleabag

Fleabag’s messiness is what makes it feel so authentic. The show’s thematic questions are broad, its history is spooned out over time instead of at the most convenient expositional moments, and its characters are at once detailed and vague enough to suggest lives being lived, regardless of whether or not they’re lived on camera. Even the smallest roles are ascribed idiosyncrasies that allude to actual personhood, to say nothing of the depth and understanding displayed through the show’s main characters. With those characters and their histories now mostly clear to the audience, season two moves along a somewhat less bold, more conventional path compared to last season, which constantly doubled back by recontextualizing and reexamining itself. Despite this more straightforward approach, though, the series still boasts creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s unmistakable voice and her witty, resonant characterizations. Scaife

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