18. The Wheel of Time

Created by Rafe Lee Judkins; based on the books by Robert Jordan (Prime Video)

In assembling this list of the year’s best shows I decided not to hold the total number of entries to some arbitrary multiple of five. Any show where I’d say to a loved one “You know what you should watch?” makes the cut. Getting canceled immediately after this season makes The Wheel of Time a tougher series to recommend, which costs it some points through no fault of its own. It’s a shame, because Wheel, aka the High Fantasy That Fucks, had really come into its own. Its ornate, colorful design, high-camp dominatrix villains, increasingly impressive cast (we’re missing out on Shoreh Aghdashloo as a main antagonist!), prog-album-art visuals, and occasional rousing lesbian drinking song about how great the locals’ tits are all made it a show I eagerly anticipated; its pleasures are still worth sampling.

17. A Thousand Blows

Created by Steven Knight (Disney+/Hulu)

My primary memory of watching A Thousand Blows, just one entry in creator Steven Knight’s long list of period crime dramas, is being knocked flat on my back by Erin Doherty. As Mary Carr, leader of the all-women’s gang of thieves the Forty Elephants, she projects a raw need under the viciousness that’s frighteningly intense. (Anthony Boyle wowed similarly in Knight’s House of Guinness.) Stephen Graham and Malachi Kirby are deeply impressive, too, as the bareknuckle boxers whose paths intertwine with Mary’s. You want to see these people win, which is why it’s so compelling to see what they do when they lose.

16. Pluribus

Created by Vince Gilligan (Apple TV)

Particularly on television, where the genre has thrived ever since Lost landed on that island — and its roots can be traced even further back, to The X-Files and Twin Peaks and The Prisoner — the sci-fi mystery combines two genres that invite audience speculation to create a Frankenstein’s monster of theory-mongering. For a critic who prefers to write about what’s on screen now instead of what might end up on screen several episodes or seasons later, these shows are frustrating, particularly when all the speculating requires one to overlook holes in the here and now. But after creator Vince Gilligan shook off the broad comedy that tends to mark his shows’ early going and drilled into just how deranging being one of the Last People On Earth would be, the juice finally seemed worth the squeeze. The show is augmented immeasurably by its million-dollar visual, its bold use of composition and color, and the work of Rhea Seehorn, who can make a deliberately insufferable character easy to spend time with.

15. Last Samurai Standing

Created by Kento Yamaguchi and Michihito Fujii; based on the book by Shogo Imamura; Creative Director: Junichi Okada (Netflix)

Are you a fan of Takashi Miike samurai films like 13 Assassins and Blade of the Immortal? How do you feel about end-of-the-Old-West stories like The Wild Bunch and Red Dead Redemption 2? What about the way Yuen Woo-Ping rewrote the rules of on-screen combat in The Matrix, Kill Bill, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? If any of this sounds intriguing to you, let alone a combination of all three, make a point of seeking out this stellar samurai series. Choreographed by star Junichi Okada, every fight and battle is completely different from its predecessors, and somehow better. As a bonus, it’s the kind of rousing action-adventure story you can sell to the non-sickos in your family over the break.

14. The Pitt

Created by R. Scott Gemill (HBO Max)

More stylistically and narratively straightforward — more downright broadcast-networkian, even — than anything else on this list, The Pitt was a tough sell for me at first. It was only a matter of a few episodes. Once the show gets past the unavoidable surfeit of “Here’s this doctor or nurse and here’s their name and here’s their deal” dialogue and digs deep into the physical and psychological labor involved in keeping both a hospital emergency room and its traumatized staff up and running, its game cast and real-time gimmick make it nigh irresistible viewing.

13. Task

Created by Brad Ingelsby (HBO)

Everything everyone else saw in Mare of Easttown, Brad Ingelsby’s previous drama/thriller about crime in the downwardly mobile Philadelphia suburbs, I saw here. Tom Pelphrey, perhaps the single most endearing actor working today, plays a small timer who draws big heat by trying to do the right thing after a home invasion goes horribly wrong; Tom Ruffalo, Fabien Frankel, and Alison Oliver are among the messy, endearing cops (sorry) trying to track him down. Directors Jeremiah Zagar and Salli Richardson Whitfield shoot the woods of DelCo as if drawing forth their very life force, creating a mood best labeled fentanyl transcendentalism.

12. The Lowdown

Created by Sterlin Harjo (FX/Hulu)

Unless the Dude himself is involved, sun-baked South/Western neo-noir is generally not my scene. I wear all black all the time, and this is a “guys who wear brown” genre. Oil and water, you know? Imagine my surprise, then, as The Lowdown steadily won me over. As a comedy it’s rock solid, its jokes and sight gags — more often than not at the expense of Ethan Hawk’s Lee Raybon, the good-hearted, down-on-his-luck “truthstorian” investigative reporter at the center of it all — landing with a high hit rate. The supporting cast is killer: Kyle MacLachlan, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Peter Dinklage, Keith David, Tim Blake Nelson, and Paul Sparks, just to name a few. Ethan Hawke plays Lee as what George R.R. Martin might write as hedge knight — a hardscrabble servant of the public good, whether or not he earns either money or appreciation for it (though he’d be happy for either). The Lowdown is a poignant plea to do the right thing in an era that rewards the opposite, even considering the cost.

11. Daredevil: Born Again

Created by Dario Scardapane and Matt Corman & Chris Ord; based on the work of Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Gerry Conway, John Romita Sr., Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, Charles Soule, Christos Gage, Ron Garney, Stefano Landini, and others (Disney+)

Daredevil: Born Again is about a blind vigilante ninja lawyer called Daredevil teaming up with his frenemy, a serial killer called the Punisher, to take down Donald Trump and his army of sociopathic cops. That’s it. That’s what it’s about. It’s as clear as day. It’s the reason Garth Marenghi called writers who use subtext cowards. This show is the best thing Marvel had put out in years, despite its many growing pains during development and production. Arriving early in the year, it was a welcome sign of artistic resistance to fascism via one of the most popular franchises on the planet; in that category, though, it would soon be topped.

10. It: Welcome to Derry

Created by Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs; Showrunners: Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane; based on the work of Stephen King (HBO)

To paraphrase myself talking about the similarly strong start for Nick Antosca’s Channel Zero way back when, the first scene of the first episode of It: Welcome to Derry is grosser, scarier, weirder, more pointedly political, and just plain meaner than everything in director Andy Muschietti’s two It feature films combined. The show almost feels like penance for those movies, in a way — as if Muschietti and his collaborators were determined to get the queasy mix of nostalgia and brutality found in Stephen King’s masterpiece right this time. They succeed in large part thanks to a surprisingly strong lineup of child actors, led by Clara Stack and Matilda Lawler, and, amazingly, an adult cast that can command audience interest just as well as the adorable kids and the killer clown (played once again, and better than ever, by Bill Skarsgård). Jovan Adepo, Taylour Paige, Madeleine Stowe, and especially Chris Chalk as recurring King character Dick Hallorann aren’t acting like they’re in a Halloween haunted house, but rather in a place where their families, sanity, and souls are legitimately at stake. Despite some needlessly Hollywood plotting, it’s a testament to the power of cruelty in art.

9. Monster: The Ed Gein Story

Created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan (Netflix)

Between The People vs. O.J. Simpson, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Dahmer, and Monsters, Ryan Murphy and his collaborators are responsible for the four best true crime dramas I’ve ever seen. Murphy and Ian Brennan’s latest Monster show, about the Wisconsin killer and grave robber Ed Gein, feels less tightly focused than the other four shows, but this is to be expected due to The Ed Gein Story‘s expanded scope. Bluntly gruesome and woven through with surreal flourishes, it really is about the Ed Gein story — not just the killer’s life, his crimes, and the media circus immediately surrounding their discovery, as was the case with O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan and Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers, but the legend that grew up around him. Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and the true-crime industry itself can all be traced, in one way or another, back to Ed’s lonely heart.

8. The Chair Company

Created by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin (HBO)

The original concept behind Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard’s comic book series The Walking Dead — which I liked quite a bit, as opposed to the TV show — was simple: What if a zombie movie never ended? “What if an I Think You Should Leave sketch never ended?” works well as a description of The Chair Company. ITYSL creators Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin trap Robinson’s senior-manager everyman Ron Trosper in a labyrinth of fraud and corruption that he uncovers more or less by being monomaniacally insufferable. I get the impression from the season’s cliffhanger ending that the plan here is to follow the original roadmap for Twin Peaks, whose creators David Lynch and Mark Frost never intended to solve their central mystery, using it instead to draw us deeper and deeper into their weird world. Will Ron ever get to the bottom of why that chair fell out from under him? Does it matter?

7. Foundation

Created by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman; based on the books by Isaac Asimov (Apple TV)

There’s no other…okay, there’s one other science fiction show on television that looks as good as Foundation. (More on that in a bit.) Everything from space travel to psychic powers to genocidal superweapons are rendered as kaleidoscopic and beautiful, while owing very little to the obvious genre antecedents. There’s heroism and sadism, derring-do and body horror. There’s mid-century SF’s usual obsession with scientifically measuring and predicting the broad movements of human society. There’s sex appeal galore. Right at the apex of it all are the strange, engrossing performances of Lee Pace, Terrence Mann, and Laura Birn as the immortals cursed with the burden of Empire, turned into monsters by wielding more power than any being should hold. There’s a lesson here about personalist regimes that’s too loud, and often too blackly funny, to ignore.

6. Murdaugh: Death in the Family

Created by Michael D. Fuller and Erin Lee Carr; based on the podcast by Mandy Matney (Hulu)

I’ve deliberately avoided using the word “mesmerizing” during any of these write-ups so far, despite it being a go-to superlative for someone in my line of work. (Well, for me anyway.) This is because there is one performance out of everything I watched this year that deserves “mesmerizing,” and it’s Jason Clarke as Alex Murdaugh in this true-crime drama from under the Nick Antosca umbrella. With his Christmas-ham face, his good ol’ boy charm, and his mountain of criminal secrets, his dynamic with his kind but enabling wife Maggie (Patricia Arquette, proving the weakness of her work on Severance is just a writing issue) resembles nothing so much as that of Tony and Carmela Soprano. Both stories are about the insatiable maw at the heart of the American dream, and who gets fed into it, and by whom. A sharp, tight, sensational show.

5. Alien: Earth

Created by Noah Hawley; based on the screenplay by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett (FX/Hulu)

An unconscious man with an alien parasite attached to his face, hastily stashed under a child’s bed. A sheep with one bulbous eye, gazing coolly at its surroundings. An android with a shock of white hair, observing the sheep-creature right back. A wide-eyed billionaire manchild, vibrating with sociopathic glee. A child in a woman’s body, cooing at an apex predator from outer space. A glowering working stiff with nothing left to live for, and no morality to govern that life, save the completion of his mission. A xenomorph in full flower, running through the forest canopy, basking in the hot sun like a jungle cat. By stitching together memorable images in an almost ruminative way while never skimping on the all-out monster action, Noah Hawley has added a third entry to the Alien canon, behind only Ridley Scott and James Cameron in the originality and impact of his vision of the creature and the world it invades.

4. The White Lotus

Created by Mike White (HBO)

From the moment the show’s new and improved theme song began playing, it was clear something different was going on with The White Lotus this season. I’d previously found its broad satire of the leisure class smug and insufferable, but this season it opened up its tonal range to its great benefit. There’s a grand doomed love affair. There are characters who aim to do the right thing as much as there are who take the easy way out. There’s an astonishing monologue about the nature of desire by Sam Rockwell that has a decent claim on being the scene of the year. Lavish shots of the natural world and its animal inhabitants serve as the lifeblood of the thing, flowing between scenes and lending the whole sordid thing an air of mystery and danger.

3. Chief of War

Created by Thomas Pa’a Sibbett and Jason Momoa; showrunner: Doug Jung (Apple TV)

Jason Momoa, man. Jason goddamn Momoa. Star, co-creator, co-writer of every episode, director of its absolutely breathtaking finale, a landmark achievement in screen combat — watch Chief of War and you’ll find his achievements nearly as impressive as those of Ka’iana, the painfully ethical warlord of the show’s title. Torn between two women, at war with two kings on behalf of another — and all these characters are fully fleshed out to the point where you feel they could sustain the show as the lead themselves — Ka’iana is a real-life figure turned legendary. That’s Momoa and Thomas Pa’a Sibbett’s overall approach to the material: a myth for the Hawaiian Islands, an answer to King David or King Arthur. Appropriately, the visuals are mythic in scope, using greens and reds and yellows in painterly fashion; Momoa does things with digitially color-graded orange in the finale I’ve simply never seen on screen before, the way Danny Boyle put new shades of green on camera in 28 Years Later. It’s that kind of story, almost, right down to the presence of a Bone Temple. The finale delivers the climactic battle the show’s been promising all along, too — no false advertising here. An epic like few others.

2. Adolescence

Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (Netflix)

You forget about the stunt aspect. That’s the highest compliment I can pay Adolescence, considering how impressive the stunt aspect is. Director Philip Baratini shoots each of the show’s four episodes as a single continuous take, immersing us in the lives of a Liverpool family being detonated by their young son’s shocking, misogynistic crime. A Thousand Blows stars Stephen Graham (the show’s co-creator and co-writer) and Erin Doherty knocked me out once already; in this they’re almost too luminous with the terrible truth of their characters’ circumstances to look at. Owen Cooper, who plays the boy at the heart of it all with precocious power, is the acting find of the year. This show is a triumph.

1. Andor

Created by Tony Gilroy; based on the work of George Lucas and others (Disney+)

“Andor,” I wrote on Bluesky partway through watching the show’s second season via advance screener copies provided to me by the Mouse, “is a stone cold masterpiece. There’s stuff in Andor Season 2, images, moments, as good as anything on television ever. Not grading on the Mandalorian curve, grading on the Mad Men curve.” I stand by every word, and I’ll go further. Andor isn’t just the best show of the year, it’s one of the ten best television shows ever made.

I believe Andor is the most expensive television series ever made, and every penny is visible on screen. Tony Gilroy and his collaborators have created a fully fleshed out society from the sketched out structure left behind by George Lucas as the bridge between his prequel trilogy and the original films. He crafts a bright, shiny dystopia of propaganda, ecocide, and genocide — one that countless viewers were all too able to recognize as our own — then examines what enforcing that regime, or fighting back against it, would really look like.

The result is a Star Wars show that treats the existence of something called the Death Star as the moral obscenity it really is. It explores the strangely compelling sexual neuroses of fascist apparatchiks, and is unsparing about the kind of sexual violence the servants of the Empire would inflict on civilians. It tells a terrifying story of genocide from start to finish. It shows the sacrifice of personal happiness inherent in a life lived for the cause. When it finally introduces the Force, a subject from which the series stays away for nearly its duration, the concept regains its power as the animus within all living things. “Life will defeat you,” Winston Smith insisted to the Party in 1984; Andor says the same thing, and means it. Vital, elegiac, magnificent.

There is an audience — a massive one, as Sinners proves — for forceful fuck-yous to fascism, racism, willful ignorance, gleeful sociopathy. There’s nothing delicate, nothing safe about any of it, either. People want to see antivax moms get yelled at by the guy from ER. People want a supervillainous politician as openly awful as the people currently occupying the White House and Gracie Mansion, and they want heroes who’ll take the fight right to him and his goose-stepping thugs. (You would be shocked at the sheer number of uniformed NYPD the Punisher murders alone.) They want to watch the Empire go down in flames not just at the hands of sword-wielding space wizards, but regular people who said enough of this shit and had the courage to walk the talk.

They want to see the Klan dead, and they want to see it happen at a Black man’s hands. They’re rewarding the movie that serves this up as its grand finale with history-making amounts of money. 

I wrote about Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, as well as Andor, Daredevil: Born Again, and The Pitt, in a new piece for Welcome to Hell World on audiences’ voracious hunger for watching cool tough people stomp fascism into the dirt.

It’s a blue rose case.

The opening image of this week’s Daredevil: Born Again is taken straight from the iconography of David Lynch, in the form of the blue-colored flower used to designate paranormal investigations in the world of Twin Peaks. When the image resolves, we see it’s a flower in a garden, but that the garden is surrounded by the bars and towers of a prison yard. This feels like a play on another famous Lynch image, that of the verminous insects writhing beneath the pristine red roses and green lawns of the all-American suburb in Blue Velvet. This time, however, the darkness is on top. Maybe that’s appropriate these days.

This isn’t the only Lynchian moment in the episode. Several times, as we follow the mass-murdering marksman nicknamed Bullseye as he’s transferred to general population in prison, escapes, and arrives at Mayor Fisk’s black-and-white ball, the screen takes on a blue tint. When Matt Murdock takes the bullet Bullseye intended for Fisk, the screen is hypersaturated with red. It’s reminiscent of Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway, respectively. 

Lynch’s work ties to what writers Jesse Wigutow and Dario Scardapane and directors Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead are up to in this episode only in the loosest possible sense. Maybe you could stretch and say the dual personae of both Murdock/Daredevil and Fisk/Kingpin are just the superhero genre’s way of exploring the same fissures in identity that Lynch’s Hitchcockian doubles did in the two aforementioned horror masterpieces. Or maybe Vincent D’Onofrio’s raspy stop-and-start voice reminds you of Robert Loggia growling his way through Lost Highway as the similarly, let’s say, romantically possessive gangster Mr. Eddy in Lost Highway. 

But I don’t think you need to be doing the same kinds of things David Lynch did to borrow the tools he used to do them with. Indeed, that’s where many soi-disant “Lynchian” films and TV shows go wrong — aiming for his thoughtful, sensual surrealism and landing somewhere in the neighborhood of “whoa, that was weird” at best. Why not stick a blue rose at the beginning of a TV show about a blind lawyer’s blood feud with both a gangster the size of Shaquille O’Neal and an assassin who can spit out his own tooth hard enough to put an eye out with it? Why not do big beautiful things with color just because they’re big and beautiful things you can do?

I reviewed this week’s Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

In the episode’s final sequence — set in an Italian restaurant lit by director of photography Hillary Fyfe Spera in as effective a simulation of Gordon Willis gold as I’ve seen in a long time — Buck executes the boss of the Irish mob, whom Vanessa cannily determined was out to overthrow Wilson using herself as a proxy. The whole bit is soundtracked by “Please Stay” by the Cryin’ Shames, an eerie slice of early Northern Soul, an inspired choice that emulates the throwback sound of a Martin Scorsese gangster film without aping it outright. Why does this sequence whip as much ass as it does? No reason other than “because it can” that I can determine, but that’s reason enough.

Also there’s a Charlie Cox shower scene. Again, “because they can” is reason enough.

I reviewed this week’s Daredevil for Decider.

Well, that’s more like it! After a pointless 40-minute detour into a shockingly uneventful bank robbery, Daredevil: Born Again is back to being, well, Daredevil: Born Again. Cops are evil and can’t be trusted. Interview segments from BB Urich’s YouTube show pop up between scenes. The supporting cast is in it. There’s a real fight scene. No superhero’s dad shows off their Funko Pop like Wayne and Garth shilling Reebok and Pepsi. I don’t know why the show was briefly turned into a mid MCU TV show for a minute there, but it seems to be over for now.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

It’s become moderately popular in certain online circles to claim to miss the “filler episode.” In this age of short streaming-TV seasons that often arrive years apart from one another, the thinking goes, writers can’t afford to pause the overarching story to do something different and low-stakes for an hour. A 22-episode season, by contrast, has room for all those great little side quests and hang-outs and diversions and distractions that can come when, y’know, the characters all go on a road trip, or they get snowed in, or they have to spend Halloween in a haunted house, or Hurley and Sawyer and Charlie and Jin fix the van on Lost or whatever.

Sure, sometimes this feels like pointless wheel-spinning, or the pejorative term “filler episode” wouldn’t have been devised in the first place. The aforementioned Lost made television history by bargaining with the network to shorten their seasons and end their overall run in order to avoid making more filler episodes.But the idea is that since they can give you the chance to get to know the characters better by seeing them cut loose from the norm a bit, the tradeoff is worth it.

I have one question for people who think this way: Where’s your God now, Moses?

I reviewed the fifth episode of Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

Daredevil: Born Again feels improbable, like the filmmakers are getting away with something, in the same way really great superhero comic-book storylines have always felt. It’s everything I want out of a superhero show.

I reviewed this week’s Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

In this week’s episode of Daredevil: Born Again, Mayor Wilson Fisk, a man with multiple felony convictions recently elected to powerful office, says “The rule of law must prevail.” Meanwhile, (presumably) a crooked cop sporting the Punisher skull murders a politically inconvenient man (who’s Puerto Rican by the way) on Fisk’s orders. By this point in the episode cops have already tried to murder a witness (twice) and successfully frighten him out of testifying when that fails. And oh yeah, the interview is given to an influencer, not the New York Times, mentioned and rejected by name in the influencer’s favor. 

In other words, if you were wondering whether the first two episodes were a fluke and the rest of the series wouldn’t scream IT’S ABOUT TRUMP AND MAGA at you at full volume, wonder no longer.

I reviewed this week’s Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

No one who didn’t watch it ever believes me when I tell them, but the Netflix Punisher show felt like it was designed specifically to upset people with Blue Lives Matter American Flag Punisher decals on their F-350s. All of the main villains were either ex-military who’d gone capitalist or criminal to make money by killing people, corrupt cops, or right-wing politicians bought off by Russian oligarchs — a who’s who of the kind of people that people who are really into the Punisher logo love. 

It’s always been odd that the Punisher TV show is harder on these people than the company that owns the character. Disney has never seriously objected to the co-option of one of their marquee superheroes’ symbol by fascists, even as they’re willing to block grieving parents with Spider-Man stuff on their child’s gravestone. For one reason or another — and I leave it to you, fair reader, to learn a bit about the historical relationship between capitalists, corporations, and fascists and decide that reason for yourself — the Mouse has been bizarrely gloves-off on the issue.

This is the reason why, when I saw that one of the corrupt and murderous cops being beaten up by an enraged you-left-me-no-choice Matt Murdock had a Punisher skull tattoo, my notes read simply “ARE YOU FUCKIN’ KIDDING?!?

I reviewed the second episode of Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.

“I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” When Garth Marenghi — author, dreamweaver, visionary, plus actor — uttered these words, he spoke as a prophet. We live an era that has made the subtext text. This country re-elected a billionaire who’d previously, publicly tried to overthrow the government to once again run the government. He brought in an even richer billionaire, the scion of an evil foreign government (apartheid South Africa), to rule it for him; sometimes this second billionaire wields a chainsaw. They’re firing people for being women or Black or queer and not really pretending there’s another reason for it. They’re trying to legislate an entire minority group, trans people, out of existence. They’re handing over your Social Security and IRS data to neo-Nazi teenagers. The big billionaire gave a Nazi salute on stage, twice. These are all things that have happened or are happening now, in real life. Every conspiracist’s fever dream about America’s fall to sinister oligarchic forces has come to pass; most of those conspiracists just happened to vote for the oligarch(s) in question. No subtext required!

I say all this because, as a long-time writer about superheroes (comics, films, television), I used to think the “supervillain pretends to be nice and is allowed to take over the government” storylines were idiotic. “But Norman Osborn is the Green Goblin and everyone knows it,” I said about twenty years ago, during Marvel’s Dark Reign storyline. “I don’t care if he fired the killshot on the leader of a Skrull invasion and improved his public image — they wouldn’t just let him take over a major intelligence organization and turn it on his enemies. He’s a serial killer who dresses up in a Halloween costume and throws molotov cocktails at college students. He’s admitted it. If Charles Manson killed Osama bin Laden on live TV tomorrow, they still wouldn’t put him in charge of the CIA.”

Whoops!

I reviewed the season premiere of Daredevil: Born Again for Decider.