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 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 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2019

Loyal fans have been waiting for a whole year to get to this day.  Not to see my actual list, but to hear me chronicle my crippling addiction to television and see whether or not I was able to limit myself to following less than 100 shows this year.  Well I've got some bad news for you: if we're counting the shows I watched every airing episode of this year, that number reached 102.  I know, I really thought I was going to meet my goal in 2019.  And I was so close!  I know I said this last year, but I really am quitting more shows and not starting more altogether, they just keep making more of them every year.  Those numbers simply can't be beat.

One thing I've noticed with my list this year is that it feels a little different than previous years, and I can't tell if that's due to a change in my taste or a change in the trend of what gets made.  But I will say this year there's less Very Serious Drama For Very Serious People (your Mad Mens, your Americans) and more stuff, especially in the top 10, that might make you say "huh"?  The idea that great TV comes in all shapes and sizes is a mantra I've repeated alot over the years, and we would all do well to remember that as the landscape transforms a bit in the next decade.

My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2018

I was a bad little boy in 2018.  For the past few years I've used the intro of this list to chronicle my efforts to decrease the amount of TV shows I watch every year, my small but futile way to protest the content wave of Peak TV.  (Truthfully, it's just an effort to clear out space to watch more movies and older TV shows, so I'm no hero.)  And I had been making good progress, progressing from around 130 shows per year when I started doing these lists to last year's 100.  Watching less than 100 shows seems pretty simple, right?

Well...about that.

I watched a total of 103 shows in 2018.  But hear me out!  I really do think I did a better job of managing my TV intake, getting much better at not continuing with shows that I don't like, and even cutting out long-running shows that I still somewhat like but have gotten a little bored with (sorry, Bob's Burgers).  Even my torturous efforts to watch every network pilot are far behind me.  All of this has led to more time for older shows and movies.  After all, I watched more new films than ever this year and I devoted half of this year to watching all 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone.  Still, it's just that the amount of new scripted content keeps growing like a tumor, so even though I most likely watched a lower percentage of shows in existence out there this year, the actual number still ended up being higher.

So while I'm here and still watching too much TV, I might as well sort out the best of the best and give you my favorites from the year.  Really, I do this all for you guys, not to fuel my own sick addiction.  No, not at all.

The rules: Shows are considered for this list based on the episodes they aired in 2018.  This is a pretty plain and simple rule for cable dramas, where full seasons usually air within a single calendar year.  However, it gets slightly messy when considering network shows, which usually air the first half of their season in the fall and the second half starting January of the next year.  So something like, say, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend would be judged based on the second half of its third season (which aired at the beginning of the year) and the first half of its fourth and final season (which started in the fall of this year).  As for what constitutes a TV show, anything that airs on, you know, a TV station counts.  But shows that air exclusively on streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon count too.  Movies that exclusively appear on those services like say, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, do not count.  I give it a few years before all of these definitions become completely meaningless though.  No TV, no movies, just #Content.

My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2017

It's that time of year again.  You know the drill by now, so say it with me folks: There's Too Much TV.  In an effort to spread the wealth a little bit more when it came to my media consumption, last year I made a conscious decision to not play the Peak TV game and try to watch less new TV.  I've continued that effort in 2017, watching a total of 100 shows in full, which is still a ton, but less than the 115 I watched in 2016 and the 125 in 2015.  I've gotten more ruthless about quitting shows that don't move the meter for me, and I felt less inclined to watch a show I don't like simply because TV Twitter loves it.  So if you're feeling imprisoned by the Too Much TV era, I recommend watching less.  It's very freeing!

The one issue that became a bigger deal in 2017 was the glut of streaming shows.  Everyone has joked about it in the past, but this year it really did seem like there was a new Netflix show premiering every Friday.  On top of that, there's all the content coming out on Hulu, Amazon, Crackle, and whatever new streaming network decides to sprout up -- it all amounts to alot of shows having their entire seasons dropped in an instant.  I can handle tons of weekly shows, but that streaming dump model doesn't work well for me, a person who can't really binge a whole season of a show in one sitting.

For that reason, this was the first year where there were a handful of shows that I just wasn't able to get to in time to be considered for this list, and they were all from streaming services.  That's what happens when these services populate like rabbits and you let their content pile up until the end of the year.  Even without those few shows being eligible, there's a wonderful array of television on display in the list below.  2017 proved once again that TV is the best subcategory of pop culture.

The rules: Shows are considered for this list based on the episodes they aired in 2017.  This is a pretty plain and simple rule for cable dramas, where full seasons usually air within a single calendar year.  However, it gets slightly messy when considering network shows, which usually air the first half of their season in the fall and the second half starting January of the next year.  So something like, say, The Good Place would be judged based on the second half of its first season (which aired at the beginning of the year) and the first half of its second season (which started in the fall of this year).  As for what constitutes a TV show, anything that airs on, you know, a TV station counts.  But shows that air exclusively on streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon count too.  Last year I made the note that YouTube webseries didn't count, but with the growing popularity of YouTube Red, that distinction can't hold.  But don't expect any YouTube Red shows on here, because I didn't watch any of them.

The Magicians: TV's most improved show

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which just celebrated the 20 year anniversary of its series premiere a few weeks ago, is one of my favorite shows of all time.  It's a show that I don't make comparisons to lightly, but it doesn't seem like everyone else is on the same page in that regard.  Any show that's supernatural or fantastical, has a relatively large ensemble, and quippy dialogue -- even if it just has one of those elements -- gets slapped with the "Buffy-esque" tag.  Because I know how much evoking Buffy means to me, I treat it as a sacred cow, so as to not have anyone who go into a show expecting it to give them the same feelings that Buffy did, only to be disappointed when it doesn't live up to those claims.  So it is with great consideration that I make the claim that The Magicians, which is currently nearing the end of its second season on Syfy, is one of the closest shows to capturing Buffy's spirit since it ended in 2003.

The show has overcome the adaptation issues that plagued season one
The Magicians is based on Lev Grossman's bestselling trilogy of novels that were released between 2009 and 2014.  Equal parts Narnia and Harry Potter, the series told the tale of Quentin Coldwater, a high school graduate who gets inducted into a secret and prestigious magic school named Brakebills to learn to become a magician.  Along the way, he and the cast of characters he meets at Brakebills learn that magic is both more difficult and depressing than fantasy stories make it seem, as they're opened up to a whole manner of hardships.  It's a quintessential look at what would happen if kids series tropes were deconstructed through a harsh, adult lens.

Though it's a more grounded version of classic fantasy novels, The Magicians trilogy still has its fair share of the supernatural, so a TV adaptation was always going to make some concessions for budgetary reasons.  The issue with season one of the show, however, was that many of the adaptation choices were simple story and character decisions, very few of which were for the better.  Aging up the protagonists from college to post-graduate age felt arbitrary and completely at odds with many of the coming-of-age themes that were integral to the book series.  And while some of the plot reworking made sense -- taking a character's story from the second book and making it run in parallel with the rest of the throughlines of season one was wise and necessary for contract reasons -- others made the season feel rather disjointed and rushed.

Part of the reason why season two has been so wonderful is that it has been smarter about the way it adapts Grossman's novels.  At this point, it's pretty much past following the storyline of the books, crafting its own narrative that works but still feels in the spirit of the source material.  And yet it also manages to lightly hop back to little details of the books in refreshing and thoughtful ways.  Creators John McNamara and Sera Gamble have proven themselves to be smart adapters, and this season I've found myself consistently surprised by how they're able to weave elements from the source material into the deviated path they've gone on with the story.

It understands what made Buffy great -- the characters
Even in the lesser moments of season one, the show was buoyed by the strength of its ensemble, but that sense of its characters has gotten even stronger in the second season.  Like Buffy, though it has a serialized narrative, The Magicians is basically a hangout show, and an excellent one at that.  Every member of the ensemble is a fleshed-out character with a distinct function in the group, and so much of the joy of each episode is derived from watching them bounce off of each other.

Here's an experiment for you: Think of a TV show, and imagine any two characters on the show being paired off for a storyline.  If every combination is an idea that makes you excited, that's the sign of a great series that has put tremendous thought into sketching out its characters and their dynamics.  Buffy was one of the shining examples of that concept, and The Magicians passes the test as well. The show knows it too, as this season has had more instances of shaking up its usual subgroups and letting unexpected matches play out for a few scenes.  It has even added to the fun by boosting its cast of supporting characters to interact with the core members of the ensemble, which was already at an enjoyably high amount of seven.

What's great is that there's also an understanding that tension within the group is important to the strength of the show.  Though there are external conflicts driving the season, most of the compelling material of the season comes from internecine drama within the gang, where it feels like they're likely to rip each other apart at any moment.  There is so much history and animosity between various characters -- Alice and Quentin, Penny and Kady, Quentin and Penny, almost everybody and Julia -- and this season has had many of those plates spinning at the same time, to great effect.  That's why the best episode of the season so far was the seventh episode, "Plan B," where everybody was forced to come together to plan out a bank heist that would benefit each one of them in different ways.  Not only was it a fun little episodic caper, but it cashed in on the intricate web of infighting that had been weaved over the course of the season.

There's a deft balance of comedy and tragedy
One of the other things that made Buffy so wonderful was its mixture of playfulness and truly devastating emotional content, and The Magicians has followed suit.  It's one of the most fun to watch shows on TV this year, full of quippy banter and oddball fantastical touches.  But it can quickly turn on a dime, forcing characters to make tough decisions in high stakes scenarios that have lasting consequences.  The proportion of laughs and drama never feels improperly weighed in one direction either.  Sometimes it can blend both in at the same time -- villains, gods, and powerful beings have a sense of silliness while still seeming formidable.  It's that difficult balancing act that makes the show so exciting to watch week to week.

In this current age of television, there's so much to watch on a weekly basis that my watchlist tends to pile up quickly.  Much can be gleaned from how I choose to prioritize shows.  And here's what I'll say about The Magicians: it's always the first show I want to watch whenever I have the time.  If the unassailable "how quickly do I want to watch it?" test doesn't convince you of this show's merits, I don't know what will.