We’ve done it. We’ve managed to make it to the end of another year in the era of Peak TV. Congrats. Now, in a tried and true tradition, we gather and decide what was the best stuff we watched in the last 12 months. It used to feel easier, right? We had a manageable amount of content to sort through annually, not the constant inundation of shows from the likes of Disney+ and Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and HBO and other networks. Making any top 10 list is remarkably thorny in 2021, but I’ve gone and done it. (Also, I’ve watched it all, people.)
If any single performer deserves a shout out, it’s hard to argue that it’s been anything less than The Year of Jean Smart. There was Hacks and The Mare of Easttown, plus the awards campaign around Jean Smart. Sheer brilliance. But you can’t rely on one incredible character actress alone, so neither of those titles claimed the top spot. There were also wonderful miniseries, like High on the Hog and The White Lotus, that captivated audiences—myself, included. And reality shows that shined an unexpected, smart light on our current surroundings. Of course, there was also Ted Lasso just… bein’ Ted Lasso.
All in all, the best of 2021’s TV revealed something about who we are as a people, right now. I suppose that’s what the art of pop culture is supposed to do: stand as a caricatured photo of the people we were, the people we are, and the people we could become. Cheesy? Yeah, I’ll give you that. Blame it on Ted Lasso.
Honorable Mention: Reservation Dogs
Don’t sleep on FX/Hulu’s powerful partnership. The two came together this year to release a perfect dramedy-turned-sleeper-hit in Reservation Dogs, which follows four Indigenous teens in Oklahoma who fill their listless days on the reservation plotting their escapes. How so? Oh, doing petty crime to try and raise the money to get out. What makes the show so lovable—but even moreso, knowing—is that the series is penned by an all Indigenous writers’ room. Renewed for a second run of episodes earlier this fall, we have a feeling this won’t be the series’ last time on this list.
Watch Now
Honorable Mention: Schmigadoon!
The name is certifiable, yes. The premise is just as wacky. And if you don’t fancy yourself a person who likes musicals, then this may seem, understandably, all a bit intimidating. But Schmigadoon! is worth a watch. I promise. The miniseries is fronted by Cecily Strong and Keegan Michael Key, two actors who would likely admit that they aren’t singers by nature. That lends to the charm. In fact, what makes the show so damn irresistible is that it leans into its faults, crafting a heartfelt story of an estranged couple who fall into a magical, musical world that they can only escape after finding true love, along the way.
Watch Now
Honorable Mention: Big Brother
Big Brother is a surprising addition, sure… especially after 23 seasons on the air. But this installment—the first to air with CBS’s diversity initiative for casting in full swing—was an absolutely fascinating reinvention of the historically overly-white competition series. With the formation of “The Cookout” alliance, six Black contestants gamed the season to make it to the final six, eventually crowning the series’ first Black winner. That’s a worthy note, but the most compelling through-line was watching that group discuss the complex issues of race, misogyny, and loyalty in unrehearsed, layman terms.
Watch Now
Like any other series that came out early this fall, Maid got swallowed up by the Squid Game fanfare. But lingering in the Top 10 of Netflix around the same time was a little drama with one hell of a story. The miniseries stars Margaret Qualley as a domestic abuse survivor struggling to escape her relationship and create a livable existence for her and her child. (Bonus points for including the oft-undervalued Andie Macdowell, who happens to be Qualley’s real life mother.) No series in recent memory has shed such a thoughtful light on socioeconomic issues like these and the barriers to entry that plague millions of Americans as they attempt to better their lives.
Watch Now
9. What We Do in the Shadows
What We Do in the Shadows is one of those series that everyone should be watching, even if it’s not constantly at the top of the Hot TV chatter. It doesn’t star Kate Winslet, nor does it feature gruesome murder, or a cult, but three seasons deep, you’d be hard pressed to find a series with more heart, chemistry, and sharp writing. Also, laughs. WWDITS will have you wishing that you, too, shared a New York home with a dysfunctional batch of hundreds-years-old vampires.
Watch Now
There has been Online Discourse™ about whether we can, collectively, handle the heavy dose of optimism that Ted Lasso has to offer, but those spending time fighting have not been paying attention to what really matters. As in, the show. If Season One was about introducing us to eternal optimism, Season Two meditated on how skin deep that kind of attitude is. Wading into topics like mental health and toxic masculinity, Ted Lasso is a brave look at what it takes to be positive in our ever-worrying world. Sometimes, all you have to do is Believe.
Watch Now
The four part docuseries from Netflix is some of the best food—nay, general—TV content that’s come out in years. Food writer and host Stephen Satterfield paces the series perfectly as he traces the lineage of American gastronomy from West Africa to the United States. Critically, he allows the people who know better than him to tell their own stories themselves, adding important new angles to our shared history, all through the lens of food.
Watch Now
**Trigger warning for those who work in higher education: Mentions of overzealous students, poorly-researched debate skills, Jay Duplass.**
The Chair is an outstanding, bite-sized comedy on Netflix starring Sandra Oh as the first female chair of an English department at a “low-tier Ivy.” The series, dark and biting, skewers the irreverence of college administrators, divorced from the world of their students. But it doesn’t let its coeds off without a bit of snarky commentary on a generation more influenced by a social media post than actual action (or facts).
Watch Now
Mike White, you clever bastard. With his latest creation, the show-runner delivered the year’s most watchable and most scathing criticism of wealth and privilege—and my friends… it stings. Starring everyone (more specifically, Connie Britton, Steve Zahn, Natasha Rothwell, Jennifer Coolidge, and more), HBO’s summer miniseries is so well crafted it’s actually incredibly grating. That is the point, though. A bit of cringe. A bit of irreverence. And a bit of murder. Whoa, sorry, murder? Is this still a satire we’re talking about??? The series, set across a week at a Hawaiian resort, skewers woke-ness as well as it does the upper class, landing a wobbly and unjust finale that, ironically enough, makes a bigger point than if justice had actually been served.
Watch Now
When the Queer Eye reboot debuted a few years back, the series was beloved by critics and viewers alike, selling the ideas of acceptance, self-love, and a (not) good French tuck. Maybe it’s not fair to compare Queer Eye and We’re Here, but I don’t care. What the former does is make the non-LGBTQIA lot comfortable with the LGBTQIA world. What We’re Here has done, brilliantly, in its second season is to make its audience look at a corner of the world they don’t know about earnestly. It puts them in it. Hosted by three drag queens, the HBO docuseries follows three subjects each episode as they try drag, often for the first time. It allows them, and viewers, see a colorful perspective of the community that rarely gets a spotlight.
Watch Now
It’s the K-drama that broke Netflix. Following a young man who enters a battle royale-style competition for $45.6 billion, the title has become one of the biggest shows of the fall. Actually, of all time. The demented premise, the horrific gore, the human nature at the center of the madness? It all plays a part in making Squid Game an unforgettable watch. It also marks an incredible moment for American pop culture as, arguably, the moment when Korean pop culture and its power permeated the stateside TV space so completely.
Watch Now
Debuting mid-April, Mare of Easttown gave us the genuine Pennsylvania accent we didn’t know we needed. Kate Winslet leads the series as the steely titular Mare and the focus is on a small town reckoning with a brutal murder. Mind you, while Winslet’s character is dealing with that, she’s also doing her best to keep her own life together. It’s the best that the actress has been in years, and while that’s saying a lot, I stand by it. There’s something about her everywoman approach—her willingness to sit in the sadness and grief of Mare—that made the miniseries absolutely electric.
Watch Now
Let me tell it to you straight: there is no show that encapsulates the past year better than WandaVision. Following Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany in their respective roles as Wanda and Vision, what started as Marvel’s first made-for-TV outing ended up being a beautiful meditation on grief and sadness. Also, one hell of a nod to TV history. But beyond the surface level compliments (and the much-deserved praise of the brilliant Kathryn Hahn), WandaVision takes the top spot because it captured a piece of our humanity that we haven’t quite been able to fully vocalize on our own as we deal with These Times.
Coming off the events of Endgame, Olsen’s Wanda offers a look into a society rebounding from the mass grief of having life as it was known twisted apart. We get that. We’ve lost loved ones. We were pushed through trauma. We buried our sadness in the comfort of television, and at times, we distanced ourselves from the world we regularly inhabit, simply so that we could adequately take care of ourselves. In the future, WandaVision will be a conduit into our own psyches, and the pitch perfect performances from Bettany, Hahn, and Olsen will remind us of a time when it was more comfortable to look into the TV than it was out of our own windows. When TV has the capacity to tell our stories better than we know how, you know something poignantly special has happened.
Watch Now
This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io
