My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2020

As always, I'm introducing my television wrap-up list by giving an update on my quest to watch less than 100 shows in a year.  I may have failed in the previous years, but folks, I finally did it.  In 2020, I fully watched -- meaning I saw every episode a series aired in the calendar year -- only 93 shows.  I'd like to thank my dear friend, the novel coronavirus, without whom none of this would be possible.

If you're thinking "93 shows is still too much television," well, you wouldn't be wrong.  That's not even counting the many shows I checked out for one or two episodes and then quit.  Despite some seasons getting pushed back and others getting cut short, there was still an avalanche of television put out this year.  Out of any small crack in the landscape will pop a new streaming service these days, so now along with the usual suspects, we had Peacock originals and HBO Max originals and, for a brief period of time, Quibi originals (RIP).  It's hard to even consider myself a TV expert anymore.  Any time I tell somebody that I watch alot of TV, they'll inevitably say something like "Oh cool, have you seen that new Netflix show about the anthropomorphic cat who's also a depressed sex worker?"  Before you fire up your search engine, that show does not actually exist, but the point is that there's a whole culture of streaming service crate-digging that I'm just not keyed into at all.

Despite my decreasing completionism, my love of the medium hasn't abated.  2020 was an excellent year in television -- it may not have had the depth of previous years, but the sheer breadth of it was refreshing and exciting.  The best of what the year had to offer came in so many different forms, including anime, docuseries, and especially the increasingly popular limited series format.  There was also a great mix of old favorites and new surprises.  In fact, the number one entry on this list was a sensation that nobody saw coming.  What show is that?  Find out below!

The rules: Last year I implemented a new rule to help account for streaming seasons that got dropped at the end of the year, and I'll be continuing that this year.  So for any show whose entire season drops at once, the eligibility window for this list is if that season dropped between December 13, 2019 and December 10, 2020.   So season 2 of You, which Netflix dropped all at once on December 26, 2019, is eligible for this list.  Any streaming season that dropped after December 10th of this year will be eligible for next year's list.  I know it's confusing but that's the only why I can maintain my sanity and not have to catch up on things at the very last minute.  Thankfully the rules are simpler for shows that air weekly.  For those cases, any episode that aired between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2020 are considered for this ranking.

My 15 Favorite Films of 2020

Remember yesterday when I said that my music list was the one that was least impacted by the pandemic?  Well, today's film list is easily the most colored by it.  COVID-19 may very well have killed the theater industry as we know it.

Usually in the intro to this list, I lament the movies that I hadn't been able to see because they were only released at the end of the year for critics and big cities in order to make awards contention.  This time around we're all basically in the same boat, as there's a long list of movies we thought we'd be getting coming into 2020, but were delayed until next year or later.  Dune, Black Widow, A Quiet Place Part II, No Time to Die, F9, Candyman, Top Gun: Maverick, The French Dispatch, Last Night in Soho, West Side Story, the list goes on -- so many big movies that, to varying degrees, had a shot at making this list were shelved.

As a result, my new movie intake dropped dramatically.  I saw a total of 48 new releases in 2020, compared to last year's 75.  The closing of theaters and delay of tentpole films play a large part in that, but I also didn't feel much desire to watch many of the movies that were released directly to VOD during lockdown.  I probably would have seen something like the poorly received Antebellum in theaters for $7 on a Sunday afternoon in a normal year, but it was much harder to justify watching it at home for $20 when there were so many other options to stream.

So I was left with a difficult decision to make regarding this list: Do I buck tradition and not have 20 films on it for the first time?  The films in my 16 through 20 spots are ones that I liked a fair amount, but they just didn't excite me the way movies that usually qualify for the end of the year list do.  Couple that with having to also write up five more honorable mentions and it just felt disingenuous to attempt to work up the enthusiasm to declare merely solid films as being the best of 2020.  Hence, we have 15 films on the official list this year.  Still, despite the smaller playing field there were a handful of films at the top that were truly fantastic.  2020 wasn't a complete wash when it came to cinema, and this list is here to show some reasons why it wasn't.

The rules: Things are a little different this year since most movies didn't get a theatrical release.  So let's make it easy and consider any film that got their first non-festival release in 2020 -- whether that's theatrically, on VOD, or exclusively on a streaming service -- qualifies for this list.

My 20 Favorite Albums of 2020

You can't write an intro to an end of 2020 list without paying some lip service to what a tumultuous year it was, but out of the three lists you'll be seeing over the next three days, this music roundup feels like the one that was affected the least by the pandemic.  Back at the beginning of everything, when most people assumed this whole COVID-19 thing would blow over in a few months (oh, how naive we were), there were some albums that got pushed back a few months, but once everyone realized we were going to be in it for the long haul, even those came out.

If anything, we got more music due to the pandemic, not less.  After all, Taylor Swift -- previously known for her rigid gaps between release dates -- put out two albums in the last five months.  And it wasn't just her, all over the map we saw artists dropping more music or putting out projects sooner than we expected.  While some used their newfound time due to canceled tours to supplement their income in creative ways, others simply got to work, and we got to reap the rewards.

Musicians weren't the only people with time on their hands either.  Between working remotely minimizing the amount of interruptions I experience during the day, and the lack of TV programming leading to lots of time needing something to occupy my ears while watching NBA games, I had many more opportunities to listen to music in 2020.  I tried to use that time to expand my horizons and listen to genres I've largely bypassed, like electronic music and emo, because I previously just didn't have the bandwidth to dive into a whole new world.  Naturally, this led to me feeling more overwhelmed than ever by the sheer amount of music there is out there just waiting to be heard.  Every year, there are albums I really want to get to that I don't end up spending time with before the deadline for this list, but it seemed to double this year.  Between the 10 million Griselda albums, the weekly deluge of Detroit rappers dropping Youtube loosies, and all the emo bands Ian Cohen recommends on Twitter, there is so much good stuff that didn't get my full attention.  So think of the list you're about to read as less definitive and more like a snapshot of my favorite things I managed to get to.

The rules: Everything is the same as usual.  The window of eligibility for this list is anything released between January 1, 2020 and now.  This list can include albums, mixtapes, EPs, and anything in between.  As always, I'm praying that nothing substantial comes out in the twilight hours of the year.

75 Songs I Liked in 2020

 

On December 29th, I'll be starting off my end of the year lists with my 20 favorite albums of 2020.  But there's so much great music out there that my album post will only cover a very tiny portion of the stuff that's worth listening to.  So this list is an additional rundown, one that highlights songs from albums that won't be appearing on the top 20 in a few days.  I'm including songs from my five honorable mention albums, so if you see something on here from an album you love, who knows, maybe that album is ranked somewhere between 21 and 25 for me!  Because I listened to and liked more songs this year, I've expanded this list to be 75 tracks instead of the usual 50.  Even this doesn't fully cover the quality that the year had to offer, but it's a good representation of what I generally enjoyed in 2020.

Dispatches from elsewhere: A review of Taylor Swift's "folklore"

For a while if you were a Taylor Swift fan, there was one certainty in life: a new album of hers would come out in the fall of an even-numbered year.  And though that pattern was finally broken during the three-year break between 2014's 1989 and 2017's Reputation, the two-year gap returned with the release of Lover last year.  The general idea seemed to be that if you wanted a new Taylor Swift album, you'd need to wait at least two years.  That's why it was particularly shocking to wake up on July 23, 2020 to a social media post from her announcing that not only was she dropping a new album, but that it was coming out at midnight.  Now that folklore has been in the world for a little over a week, it's finally time to plumb its depths.

It's an interesting time in Swift's life, as she's now 30 years old, a milestone that can cause anyone to spiral, let alone a former teen star whose appeal has often been centered around her youthfulness and prodigy status.  We also happen to be living in a complicated time in the United States, suffering the worst effects of a global pandemic and going stir crazy from months of self-isolation.  This personal upheaval and a larger global upheaval both appear to have contributed to the themes and stark black-and-white aesthetic of folklore, which seems to be written from the perspective of someone who's finally letting the sheer accumulation of life dawn on them.  Album opener "the 1" serves as a tone-setter in that regard, as she sorts through thoughts about a former partner and ponders how things could have been different between them.  "You know the greatest films of all time were never made," she sings at one point, which feels like a key to understanding the whole album.  It's a record obsessed with sliding doors, what ifs, and lost time.  The longer you're on this earth, the more there are lives unlived that branch out from your path of reality, and it's a concept she reflects on often in these 16 new tracks.

Folklore embraces the idea of its title in the literal sense, offering up tales of the nouveau riche, visions of war, and ballads about mournful ghosts. On these tracks, she plays the role of a raconteur with a 360 degree view of everything, taking these creative writing exercises and transforming them into vivid, compassionate narratives.  But as always, she also finds a way to turn things inward.  This is an album filled with totems and memories, and Swift weaves them all together into the idea that our personal history is a form of folklore itself.

She's able to accomplish this because she is one of the most cogent communicators of emotion out there, able to put a finger on complex, tangled thoughts and translate them into fragrant phrases that bore into your brain.  Here she is on "this is me trying," describing a lost love she can't stop thinking about: "You're a flashback in a film reel on the one screen in my town."  On "seven," reflecting back on the freedom of childhood: "Please picture me in the weeds / Before I learned civility / I used to scream ferociously / Any time I wanted."  The imagery on "august" is so rich you can basically feel the heat of an endless summer day and being "twisted in bedsheets."  And she always knows how to add the perfect descriptors to make a line really pop.  It's not just a high, it's a "dwindling, mercurial high."  The wedding wasn't just charming, it was "charming, if a little gauche."

Swift's gift as a lyricist is nothing new, but some of the sounds she's playing with this time around are.  When the shock of the surprise album announcement wore off, the next biggest thing to process was the fact that 11 of the 16 songs on folklore would be co-produced by The National's Aaron Dessner.  His signature plaintive piano, stately guitar lines, and gently stirring strings are all over this album, to the point where it basically sounds like a new National album if Taylor Swift were the lead singer instead of Matt Berninger.  Swift has had an unlimited budget since around 2010, but even still, her music has never sounded as good as it does in Dessner's hands.  Regular collaborator Jack Antonoff contributes production on the other five songs, and even though he plays a smaller role, it's still crucial.  He knows the contours of her strengths so well at this point that he's able to coax her trademarks out of her when Dessner is busy pushing her to new territory.  And though you can usually differentiate the Dessner songs (usually from the piano sounds) from the Antonoff ones (typically by the way he adds reverb to the vocals), the styles mesh surprisingly well.

If anything, though, the work that these two producers do on this only prove the skills we've known to be possessed by the person at the center all along.  Folklore is The Taylor Swift Show through and through.  At the end of the day good songwriting always prevails, and she's able to graft her crafty song construction and playful language games over just about any sound.  She brings her sense memory-evoking skills to the Cranberries-esque "august," shows her talent for wringing out the head-spinning feeling of being in love through an off-kilter metaphor on "mirrorball," and spills naked emotions all over the bluesy "peace."  The album is astonishing in its sheer amount of killer songs, including some of the best she's ever written, like "invisible string," a gorgeous, tightly written rumination on the vagaries of life that bring us together.

I used to wonder what Taylor Swift's music would look like once she got older, and even had a little bit of doubt about she whether she could sustain herself creatively past 30.  But of course, the signs were always there that she was more of musical chameleon than anybody gave her credit for.  If she could sound like herself over moon-eyed country ballads like "Tim McGraw," dubstep drops on "I Knew You Were Trouble," and the 80s nostalgia pop of "I Wish You Would," it makes sense that she would continue to evolve without much struggle. And her last two albums have shown that her ability to render universal thoughts and feelings aren't exclusive to teen emotions.  This time around her musings don't have the raw immediacy of her early work, but they've been replaced by a cooler, top-down perspective that's different, yet just as interesting.  Last year's Lover proved that she's hadn't lost her pop songwriting abilities, but folklore finds herself stretching in fascinating ways.  If it's any indication, this next decade of Taylor Swift music is going to be thrilling.

(Also if you'd like to read my ranking of each song on folklore, check out this Letterboxd post.)

Better Call Saul finds another gear in its fifth and best season

It's hard to imagine feeling so right now, but Better Call Saul seemed like a monumentally bad idea when it was first announced.  Spinoffs are, more often than not, creatively bankrupt cash grabs and making one for a beloved series like Breaking Bad ran the risk of souring people on the whole franchise.  Luckily, the series has proven that no matter what challenge you put in front of this creative team they'll churn out great television.

Though while it was always terrific on a purely technical and objective level, the show never was able to engender the kind of intense fervor that its predecessor was able to for me.  I've always really liked Better Call Saul, but I loved Breaking Bad.  All of that changed in the former's excellent fifth season, which just concluded its thrilling ride earlier this week.

Saul has always been two shows in one, with Jimmy and Kim living out their morality plays in one corner and Mike and Gus embroiled in the power plays of the Albuquerque drug trade in another corner.  Both were pretty compelling, though the drug half often suffered from prequel-itis more than its counterpart, simply going through the motions to put things in the place of Breaking Bad's starting point.  Now that those two halves have merged, season five felt like the series was finally humming along and realizing its full potential.  Previously the show's two modes conversed with each other only on a thematic level -- the entire universe is populated by people chiseling away at the list of things they are unwilling to do -- but it's way more electric when they're actually intertwining on a literal level.

Last season saw Jimmy finally adopting the Saul Goodman moniker, and this year his slide into the inevitable accelerated at a rapid pace, becoming a "friend of the cartel" and getting tangled up with wildcard Lalo Salamanca.  The intersection of the legal and cartel hemispheres of the world led to one of the season's best episodes, "Bagman," where Jimmy's mission to pick up Lalo's seven million dollars of bail money turns into a grisly shootout, followed by a long sojourn in the desert with Mike.  It's an episode that recalled Breaking Bad's classic "4 Days Out" -- surely not a coincidence that Vince Gilligan, who has ceded day-to-day control of Saul to Peter Gould, returned to direct this hour -- blending all of this creative team's strengths together.  It's at once full of nailbiting tension, atmospheric patience, and ingenious plotting.  One of the things that's admirable about Better Call Saul is that it has thoroughly staked out its own identity, so it almost feels wrong to praise the show for injecting some more Breaking Bad into its veins, but it's hard to deny that it sings when working in that style.

The fact that it's a prequel has always loomed over the show narratively.  At the end of the day, we know where the show's going to end up.  A problem that frequently plagues prequels is that it's hard to invest in what you're watching since it's all in service of a known endpoint.  Better Call Saul has circumvented this in two ways.  The first is simple: it has made the audience savor the journey through its sheer craft and leaning into the clockwork fatalism that was even baked into Breaking Bad instead of running away from it.  But more importantly, it knows that because we're largely aware of how things end, it can wring out tension and emotion from homing in on the unknown variables in the equation.

It's not a surprise that this season Kim, Nacho, and Lalo were the most compelling characters to follow.  We know the broad strokes of what can and can't happen to the likes of Jimmy, Gus and Mike, which makes the open possibilities of anything involving Kim, Nacho, Lalo feel all the more gutwrenching.  Lalo's status as a chaos agent is amplified by the fact that he's an invention of Better Call Saul and we therefore have no idea what he'll do next.  Meanwhile, Nacho's role as a double agent and his desire to get out of the game has even higher stakes knowing that he may not be long for this world.

Where this pays the biggest dividends, however, is with Kim.  She's been the show's best character from the outset, partially because it's hard not to be when Rhea Seehorn is giving a pantheon performance playing her, but Kim's only gotten more fascinating as the show has gone on and toyed with our perception of how things could turn out for her.  Most people just assumed in the beginning that things would eventually end poorly between her and Jimmy once his full evolution into Saul Goodman was complete.  What season five did was reveal a failure of imagination within all of us.  From suggesting that she and Jimmy get married once he gets involved with the cartel to her confronting Lalo head-on when he imposes on them in their home, Kim was constantly upending our expectations.  It seemed as if truly anything could happen with her in these 10 episodes.  Would she leave Jimmy after he finally did something to cross the line?  Would she get killed right on the spot when Lalo shows up at their doorstep?

The actual answer is simpler and more tragic.  Though she's always found thrills in Jimmy's grifting game, Kim has also been the closest thing the show had to a moral center.  But really, when we thought we were watching Jimmy's process of "breaking bad," this whole time we were slowly watching Kim's.  That feeling that something very obvious is being revealed before our eyes is what makes the scene where she's suggesting to Jimmy that they illegally sabotage Howard to force a resolution to the Sandpiper case makes it so heartbreaking, even more so because Jimmy seems to understand she's past the point of no return too.  The moral corrosion was always within her, Jimmy just provided the activation energy.

With next season being the show's final one, this year was the ideal penultimate season, perfectly ramping things up and setting everything in motion for an exciting conclusion.  And with the end nearing, Saul is pulling out all the stops.  We thought we were going into this show with a full map, but the brilliance of it is that it has proceeded to reveal all sorts of hidden rooms and passages we never could have imagined.

2020 Academy Award predictions

Every year I feel more and more out of touch with the temperature of the Oscar race, so these predictions could be a disaster.  I think it will be a pretty big night for 1917, but I could be wrong.  For the sake of my ballot I'm hoping for a predictable Academy Awards, but for the sake of chaos I want a ton of surprises.

My 50 Favorite Television Shows of the Decade: 2010-2019

There was a problem facing television as a medium in the 2010s, and if you've been online or reading my year-end lists then you know what I'm talking about: there's too much damn TV.  It's been an outright epidemic over the last 10 years, with new shows and delivery systems for those shows popping up at a rapid rate, far past anyone's ability to keep up with it all.  Somebody once aptly described a TV critic's role as being more like a book critic's nowadays -- there's too much for one person to consume, so you have to make peace with that and curate your experience by finding a niche.

Unfortunately, the influx of TV also led to more bad shows.  The rise of streaming and binge-watching has caused series to indulge in being nothing more than formless pieces of content.  Sometimes it can feel like every writer who knows how to construct seasons, episodes, and even scenes died near the end of the previous decade.  But the sheer magnitude of television in this decade means that there was still alot to love about television.  This list chronicles the best of the best from the 2010s.

The rules: These eligibility rules are slightly more complicated than the ones for the other two lists, so read carefully.  In order for a show to be eligible for this list, it has to have aired more than half of its total episodes within this decade.  Also, only those episodes that aired in this decade are taken into consideration when placing and ranking that show.  For example: 30 Rock is eligible for consideration because 72 of its 138 episodes aired after January 1, 2010 -- that's 52% for all the mathematicians out there -- but the only episodes that determine if it can make the top 50 are Season 4 Episode 9 through Season 7 Episode 13 (the episodes that aired in the 2010s).  Also, only continuing series are eligible for the top 50, while miniseries get their own mini list.

My 50 Favorite Films of the Decade: 2010-2019

I was a bit of a latecomer to loving movies.  I first got really interested in film around 2007 when I was a teen, but it wasn't until the start of this decade that I truly started watching films avidly.  And as the definition of who can make movies and how they can make them has expanded, there has been so much cinema to consume, and I've tried my best to soak it all up.  There are still blindspots on my list -- I wish there were more international films on it, as well as films directed by women and people of color -- but I think it still represents many different genres and styles.

The rules: My albums list had a limit of only one album per act, but that felt a little restrictive for films, so I loosened it up to have a maximum of two films per director.  There are a few examples of that on this list.  Did I make the right choice?  Who can say, I love my auteurs!  A small change from my year end lists is that I always use the American theatrical release date of a film to determine its eligibility.  Since that's a little harder to track and remember as time goes by, I'm just going by the year listed on IMDB, which will sometimes be the year before the theatrical release if the movie premiered at a festival.  With that in mind, the eligibility window is a world premiere between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2019.  This doesn't factor in often, but one example is Dogtooth, which had a theatrical release in 2010 but is not eligible because its world premiere was in 2009.

My 50 Favorite Albums of the Decade: 2010-2019

Part of the joy of being one man with a blog and not an important publication is that I don't feel any pressure to make an albums list that contextualizes the decade.  Nobody's reading this, so I don't need to fit anything in because it's "important" or "groundbreaking."  No, this list is only concerned with what "slaps" and "goes hard."  The real criteria was slightly more complicated, but only slightly.  In choosing my favorite albums of the decade, I thought about the records that meant the most to me at the time they came out, but often an album can seem great in the year of its release and then you never return to it.  So I also made sure to give credit to the albums that I returned to most often and the ones that still held up when I did my relistening throughout this year in preparation for this list.

They say that the music somebody listens to in their adolescence is the era that resonates the most with them and for me that's true, because if I had to choose, I'd probably say I enjoyed the music of the 2000s more than I enjoyed what the 2010s had to offer.  But that's not to say I didn't think this was a good music decade.  You could stretch the list you're about to read out to 100 picks and it would still include albums I love.  The early part of the decade saw the bombast of the 2000s give way to sleeker, more electronic based sounds, which led many writers to declare that rock music was dead. But really, it was just that great rock music was coming from different places.  Particularly in the last half of the 2010s, there was a boom of women making excellent DIY, punk, and music indebted to 90s alt-rock.  Meanwhile, as rap became the dominant force in our culture, and pop continued to be embraced more as a genre worthy of serious consideration, both scenes gave us terrific examples of the form.  Music was thriving all around, and it's ultimately a good thing that the wealth is being spread and not coming from the traditional modes of yore.

So let's celebrate all the 2010s had to offer...

The rules: In order to maximize the amount of variety on this list and ensure that certain artists don't clog it up, I've limited myself to one album per act.  If a certain artist made albums under two different projects -- like Julian Casablancas with The Strokes and The Voidz, for example -- they would both be eligible.  For my yearly lists, I usually consider EPs, but for this decade list I didn't really include EPs into consideration.  There is one exception, but that EP feels so massive and made such a splash that it's basically an album.  And in this day and age, a mixtape is the same thing as an album so naturally those are included.  Other than that, the window of eligibility includes anything released between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2019.