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.

It’s so easy to write of the wrong done to others as just that, wrong done to others. But evil doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every stone thrown at goodness and justice and love has ripples that spread out over the surface of the whole of society. This is what makes living in times like these so agonizing: So many are suffering, and so many more will suffer because of that suffering, and there’s so little any one of us can do beyond stilling the waters that directly surround us. Brad Ingelsby’s project is dramatizing this ripple effect in the form of cop thrillers set in Pennsylvania. After this engrossing, moving season of television, it’s a project with my full support. 

I reviewed the finale of Task for Decider.

Eighteen minutes of cat-and-mouse action open this episode of Task. Actually, it’s more like cat-and-mouse-and-cat-and-mouse-and-cat-and-mouse-and-cat-and-mouse action. Working from creator Brad Ingelsby’s script, director Salli Richardson Whitfield expertly maneuvers a dozen armed and dangerous players through dense woods and empty cabins as they chase each other down, beat each other up, blow each other’s brains out, stab each other’s guts out, and run each other down in the road. Two of the show’s kindliest characters don’t make it out alive — but man, what a run.

I reviewed this weekend’s Task for Decider.

I just want to state for the record that the least interesting thing you could possibly talk about regarding Task is the accents. Are they good, bad, indifferent? I honestly can’t imagine caring! Think of how many shows set in England or some fantasy equivalent thereof you watch, with actors from America and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and Ireland or just other regions of England on them. You think all of them are constantly nailing it? I doubt it! But if you made me list the 300 most interesting things in Game of Thrones, “Peter Dinklage’s accent was so-so” wouldn’t make the cut. Believe it or not, they’re not actually stabbing each other with swords either. Go with the flow a bit!

What is more interesting to talk about than that? Oh, I don’t know. Robbie insisting they listen to the radio during an abduction. Perry slamming the door in his girlfriend’s face to hide the wounds he incurred during the struggle with Eryn hard enough to give her a lump on the head. Director Jeremiah Zagar spotlighting some of the local flora and fauna like this is a season of The White Lotus set in Delaware County.

The grin on Freddy Frias’s lying face. The way Tom poorly fakes peeing by pouring the remnants of a half-drunk can of Pepsi into the toilet, one plop at a time. Robbie pulling over to piss in an echo of the earlier scene. The closeup on Eryn’s eyes as she sees Jayson come home covered in blood. Everyone, including the bad guys, seemingly genuinely interested in making sure Sam doesn’t get killed. Kath pigging out during the hunt for Tom, getting called on it, and claiming to be “an emotional eater.”

My favorite? Tom literally finding his way out of the woods and back to civilization. No, not civilization — community. What he finds at that beach are families and couples laughing, playing, enjoying nature and each other. When you abandon your calling for love, then that love is ended by your own adopted son, then you find solace in a bottle, then you’re called out of semi-retirement to find a missing kid, then you’re held at gunpoint fully expecting to die — when all that happens, imagine how hard the sight of a child laughing in her mother’s arms in the sunlight would hit. Because Task is the show it is, you don’t really have to imagine.

I reviewed last night’s Task for Decider.

On a happier note, Grasso and Stover finally fall into bed…sorta. After drinking and dancing to Gwen Stefani’s “The Sweet Escape,” with Stover relentlessly hammering away at the far smoother Grasso’s anti-cringe reflexes, they go back to her place. But when Grasso realizes they’re about to have sex in her “marital bed,” he can’t go through with it. The good Catholic boy strikes again.

The use of found music is realistic and astute throughout the episode, actually. No one’s trying to impress anyone with cratedigging here; the idea is to show you the musical taste of a bunch of regular people. When Robbie and Billy take their families down to the swimming hole, in a flashback that’s positively glowing with the characters’ affection for one another, they listen to “Melissa” by the Allman Brothers. When Robbie wants to play suave and charming for his daughter on the even of a father/daughter dance he knows he’ll never make, he plays “More Than This” by Roxy Music. 

The throughline for all these songs is a sweet, smiling romanticism that the characters themselves have to fight tooth and nail to reach in their real lives. And when they do — boy, with this cast you’re really pulling for them, aren’t you? Robbie, Billy, Eryn, Grasso, Stover — they’re all charming and beautiful, and seeing them happy is infectious, however fleeting that happiness is.

I reviewed this week’s Task for Decider.

If you know actor Tom Pelphrey at all, it’s likely because of a single scene: a monologue he delivers in the back of an Uber on Ozark, desperately explaining to a person who doesn’t care why he’s almost certainly crossed the wrong person and gotten himself and, possibly, his sister and her family killed. But of course there’s hope around the corner, a light at the end of the tunnel, if he can just…keep…going. Despite the scene’s almost unwatchably painful naturalism, Pelphrey has said he didn’t improvise a word. 

But he’s such a good actor that it feels like he’s making it up as he goes along, even as he sticks to the script’s chapter and verse. His dialogue seems to come from within his body, not his head. So when Robbie repeated himself during this pivotal scene, over and over and over, my first instinct was to give Pelphrey the credit. But if his process remains the same as it once was, writer-creator Brad Ingelsby is responsible for this revealing detail. If you’ve ever wondered why I like Task so much better than Mare of Easttown, this kind of thing is why. 

I reviewed this weekend’s Task for Decider.

Though we’re only two episodes in, so far Task is an improvement over Ingelsby’s stylistically and thematically similar Mare of Easttown in almost every conceivable way. Naturally I miss the inimitable presence of Kate Winslet, but such is the power of Tom Pelphrey and his seemingly bottomless fuel tank of pathos that this show has it covered. It’s aided additionally by Jeremiah Zagar’s superb direction, which takes care to match the characters’ piercing emotions with equally striking shot compositions and lingering, well-framed closeups. Gliding over all is the gloriously goes-to-eleven score by Dan Deacon, who like so many others — Danny Elfman, Mark Mothersbaugh, Trent Reznor, Mica Levi, Daniel Lopatin — proves that the art-rock weirdo to superlative film composer pipeline is real and flowing freely. Task is not a happy show, but it’s one I’m happy to recommend.

I reviewed last weekend’s Task for Decider. Sorry I’m just linking to it now!

Gritty, realistic, down-to-earth: If you read much about Task, the new crime drama from Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby, those are the kinds of adjectives you can expect to see. You won’t see them used about the show’s music, though, that’s for sure. Composed by Baltimore electronic musician Dan Deacon, Task’s score soars, it sizzles, it screeches, it screams. It’s an insanely overheated sonic signature for the show, making anything from fixing a morning coffee to brushing dead leaves off a porch sound like Oppenheimer waiting for the bomb to go off. 

I love that for Task, personally. And I love how much director Jeremiah Zagar echoes that energy in his shot compositions — men framed in colorful doorways, masked monsters pass in slow silence across every axis of the frame. There’s a charge to how this thing looks and sounds that I couldn’t find in Mare outside of Kate Winslet’s lead performance. It feels like a big leap forward.

I reviewed the series premiere of Task for Decider.