Top 10 Favorite TV Shows of 2018
I started my top ten movies and video games articles on a bit of a down note. I said that while there was plenty to celebrate in 2018 on both fronts, neither captured my passion the way they did in years past. So why stop now? I cannot summon as much passion for TV in 2018 as I could last year or even the year before that.
You could take a lot of my video game introduction and apply it here. 2017 was an unusually strong year for TV, even in this “golden age” we find ourselves in, and not every year can reach those highs. (Also, I think we’re a little past the golden age to be honest, but that’s an article for another time.) Plus it’s not every year that one of your favorite shows can end with one of the greatest finales ever made. (The Leftovers. I’m talking about The Leftovers. I miss The Leftovers.)
However, there’s a different angle to the discussion of television in 2018: There weren’t as many strong new shows. Of the eleven entries on this list (which includes the runner-up), only four of them are new. In fact, of the seventeen honorable mentions, only four of those are new as well, and to be perfectly honest, one of them only made it because I always set the bar intentionally low for the honorable mentions to spread as much love as I can. (For the record, I’m talking about Sharp Objects.)
But there comes a point in the previous two introductions where I say something positive to turn the ship around. So here it is: What came back this year came back really strong. Whether it’s a show that I write about every year on this list or a show that’s taken one or two years off, a lot of returning shows didn’t take my love of them for granted, and for that I’m thankful and excited to talk about them.
Writing is hard. Recognizing your weak points is hard. Actually improving on those weak points can be the hardest part of all. So improving and fine tuning go a long way with me, and 2018 is the year of shows I love coming back even stronger.
So let’s talk about them!
HEAVY SPOILERS BELOW!
Runner-up: The Deuce
Every list I write requires a stupid debate between what goes in the runner-up slot and what goes in the number ten spot. (Or one could say the writing lists is stupid to begin with, and, well… you’re not wrong.) I told myself that if it comes down to a stalemate and I can’t make an easy decision, I’ll pick the one I haven’t written about before. So that’s the reason The Deuce is in this slot and not number ten.
Indeed, the second season of The Deuce, at least to me, is a marked improvement on the first. It doesn’t have a big devastating soul crushing event like the one towards the end of season one, but in a way, the tragedy of the lives of those who inhabit the areas surrounding Times Square are much more amplified.
Some of the tragedies of The Deuce are smaller in scale. Paul wants to open a gay friendly bar. Well, really less of a “bar” and more of a sophisticated establishment. And he wants to make it happen without mob money. He gets what he wants, and we think he’s clear of the mob. Then his boyfriend wants to open a community theater, and Paul jumps right back into their pocket.
Eileen wants to make an artistic porn film. She gets to make that film, but she has to suffer every indignity possible on the way, it costs her greatly in her personal life, she’s never taken seriously by the outside establishment, and the effects of her higher status in the porn bleed out in ways that probably haunt her in her dreams. Also, unknown to Eileen, a bunch of her film was financed by mob money. Those of you who have seen Inside Deep Throat know where this might be going.
I realize nothing about either Paul or Eileen’s fate seems “small in scale.” But by the standards of this show, what I mean is that at the end of the day, they’re both still alive. The same cannot be said for Dorothy, a former prostitute under the show’s most deplorable pimp, who begins a new path trying to help other prostitutes leave the business behind and support them in whatever they need if they choose to stay. She winds up murdered for her efforts. Her old pimp C.C. meets the same fate. Not that I’ll ever feel bad for him.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Eileen still gets to make films. Larry Brown’s giving acting a real chance. Darlene leaves prostitution behind seemingly for good. Things do move forward, even if the future of the porn industry doesn’t look great. (In the final episode, a VHS player makes an appearance. Not to keep invoking pop culture, but those of you who have seen Boogie Nights know where this might be going as well.)
It’s still a hard show to watch sometimes. Horrible things happen to the characters we love, and the show asks a lot in spending so much time with some of the most deplorable people on TV. (Rest in piss, C.C..) Moreover, recent news about James Franco undercuts a bit of the impact of a show that spends so much time on the nuances of shitty men who mistreat women.
But like the first season, it still has a fundamental hope in humanity, even if it doesn’t seem like it at first. No matter what it does to the more sympathetic characters, it’s clear that the show cares for them. It’s a quality present in all of David Simon’s shows, and it’s one we don’t talk about enough.
Favorite Episodes: “Seven-Fifty,” “We’re All Beasts,” “Inside the Pretend”
10. GLOW
There’s a criticism to be made about season two of GLOW, and indeed, plenty of people have made it. (I feel it was best made by Sonia Saraiya at Vanity Fair.) The criticism goes something like this: For a show about a women’s wrestling league with a mostly female cast that is, in part, about the tidal wave of bullshit women have to put up with on a near constant basis, there’s something off-putting about the fact that Sam, a man, has the biggest arc of the season. Or if you don’t agree that he has the “biggest” arc, then you can at least see how Sam getting way more screen time and nuance than a lot of the show’s female cast can be a little bit of a problem.
It’s a criticism that occurred to me while watching the second season, which, by the way, I binged in one sitting. At spots, season two felt very much like Sam’s season, and that struck me as a little odd.
It’s not hard to understand why the show went in that direction. Sam is a fascinating and complex character, and Marc Maron was born to play him. And I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be a whole lot of emphasis on Sam. The problem, however, is that this time in the spotlight comes at the expense of the female cast members in a show about women. As compelling as Sam is, plenty of those women have just as much potential. (For example, I have a particular fondness for Tammé, and Kia Stevens’s performance of her.)
And yet, despite all of this, I still feel an incredible amount of warmth when I think about this season.
I was recently listening to an interview with Michael Schur, the creator of The Good Place, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and a writer on many an adored television show. During the interview, they discuss his approach to character dynamics. Specifically, how if you’ve watched any of his shows, you’ll notice that the source of conflict in any given episode or story arc is rarely between the main characters, but from an outside opposing force. In Parks and Rec, for example, it’s often the Parks Department “versus” the citizens of Pawnee or Dennis Feinstein or the Recall Leslie Knope movement. In Brooklyn Nine-Nine, it’s the 99th precinct versus The Vulture or Doug Judy or the criminals of NY. Schur’s characters often bicker, but at the end of the day, they’re fundamentally on each other’s side.
GLOW does not adhere to that philosophy. After all, this is a season where Debbie leverages her position against the other wrestlers to get a producer credit, yells at Ruth for not allowing herself to be sexually harassed by a TV manager, and breaks Ruth’s ankle while high on cocaine.
However, season two feels like a season that maneuvers itself to be a Schur style show. Of course, some tensions still linger. But it feels like a season about people learning to accept and support one another, and for me at least, that has a lot of impact. It feels like an unburdening of the feuds the plague the group so they can focus on creating something special together, and I needed that in 2018.
Favorite Episodes: “Mother of All Matches,” “Nothing Shattered,” “The Good Twin”
9. The Venture Bros.
There doesn’t appear to be a season seven poster, so I had to use the one for season six. Which is fine by me because this poster’s fantastic. However, Squarespace is insisting on saturating the fuck out of all the colors, so the actual poster looks even better.
Guys. The Venture Bros. came back in 2018! The fuckin’ Venture Bros., man! And it came back with one of its best seasons ever!
For those of you who don’t understand why this is cause for excitement, it’s because seasons of The Venture Bros. can be a little far between. And by “a little far between” I mean it’s not uncommon to have to wait two or three years between seasons. (Meanwhile Rick and Morty fans flip out if they miss one year.) Not that I’m bitter about it though. All I want is a good show, and I’d rather the creators and their team take their time and release something they feel proud of than feel like they have to rush new episodes out. I feel that way about all shows, in fact.
But the important part is the “one of its best seasons ever” bit. This was the show’s seventh season. (Its first airing in 2004. For those of you doing the mental math, I told you that there can be a long time between seasons.) The sixth season was not it’s best received season ever, and while I don’t think it’s a “bad” season by any stretch, I tend to agree. It started well, what with the show blowing itself up and reseting everything as it always does. (I’d go into specifically what it did, but that would require eighty billion pages of summary.) Moreover, the show went into a more serialized form that it usually does. But that serialization sort of peters out, and the season just sort of ended without resolving anything.
I was bummed for a while. But I’m a big nerd who listens to DVD commentaries, and in the season six commentaries, the show’s creators Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick explain that this wasn’t their intent. Things came down to a choice: Either build out the story they had intended to be the finale into a bigger thing but end season six on a middling note, or squander that story and make a more satisfying finale.
They chose the former, and this is what became the first three episodes of season seven. For me at least, it was worth it.
To go through everything that happens this season would be a fool’s errand. As we’ve talked about briefly before, this show has the ability to cram what is easily an hour’s worth of story into twenty minutes, and if you take that and apply it to the length of a ten episode season of television, you have a lot to cover.
Suffice to say that it’s a season that somehow finds more ways of adding to its already infinite lore while also advancing and evolving its characters. Rusty invents actual world changing technology, only to have it taken from him by the government. The Monarch and Gary rise through the Guild of Calamitous Intent. (Villainy in the Venture Bros. universe is unionized.) Dean gets himself further away from the toxic influence of his family only to become a worse person somehow. Hank is… Hank. (And may he always be.)
Things evolve. Things devolve. The pieces on the board shift, as well as the definition of what the show “is.”
All in all, its a season of The Venture Bros. doing what it does best. I know I wasn’t as specific and focused as I should’ve been, particularly if my goal was to get you to watch this show. But The Venture Bros. is a uniquely and almost comically difficult show to describe the specifics of if you don’t have a deep knowledge of the lore and everything that’s happened so far. (A catch-up video that aired before season five is nearly ten minutes, and doesn’t cover everything.) It’s the show on TV that most resembles comic books in that way, and not just because it deals with superheroes and villains.
Or if that doesn’t appeal to you, maybe this will: It has the best use of Clancy Brown ever:
Favorite Episodes: The Morphic Trilogy (eps 1-3, yes I’m cheating), “The Terminus Mandate,” “The Saphrax Protocol”
8. Killing Eve
I’ve had a bone to pick with the spy genre for a while now.
It’s a genre I’ve turned to less and less as I’ve gotten older, but it’s a genre I get sentimental about as the James Bond movies were one my defining fandoms as a child. At a certain point in the 2000s, the “cool” thing to do in the spy genre, at least from a movie standpoint, was to do everything the opposite of James Bond. It’s a perfectly understandable direction to go. After all, I’m not going to sit here and pretend that a high percentage of Bond films aren’t total shit. However, for everything these subsequent spy movies and TV shows gain from dropping the Bond stuff has been lost in a sea of drabness.
I’m not saying these movies and shows are “bad,” and I’m not saying all spy fiction needs to be like James Bond. But at least the Bond movies had some degree of charisma. If I described to you a movie or a show about, say, a middle aged man working for a spy branch somewhere in Europe where it’s cold and grey who goes to lots of dead drops, wears the occasional disguise, drinks a lot, and prevents an assassination or two while brooding about whatever tragedies occurred in his past, I could be describing a lot of show movies and shows.
Too much Bond and things get too dumb. Too much le Carré (or more specifically, people trying to be like le Carré), and things get too sterile. What we need is a healthy injection of both, and that’s why Killing Eve earned a very special place in my heart.
Our protagonist, Eve, comes from the le Carré world. Eve is not a super model super spy, nor is she George Smiley. She’s a bored competent enough analyst at MI5 who lives a boring life with a boring husband. Or at least she thinks her life is boring. (And most people would find her husband Niko to be great company.) Eve spends her free time tracking female assassins, and secretly obsessing over them. So one could see why she finds her life boring if the ideal one is going around the world, visiting exotic locations, and killing people.
Our antagonist is an assassin very much out of the James Bond school of spy fiction, what with her name literally being Villanelle. She’s hyper skilled, hyper fashionable, and leads the life that Eve spends her private time worshipping. Except for the part where she’s almost completely out of her mind.
The two become obsessed with one another. For Eve, it’s more that she projects all her aspirations and fantasies onto this young killer who gets to live the kind of lifestyle she so desperately wants. For Villanelle, I think, it’s more purely sexual and in a weird way, emotional. After all, I think on some level, Villanelle knows that Eve is the only person who feels anything for her that isn’t also using her to an end.
It’s a dynamic that the show deftly explores. It’s also a very silly show filled with bored incompetent spies chasing after the most competent assassin on the planet. Those who lean towards the workman philosophy of the spy genre probably don’t jive with how illogical some of the decisions made by Eve and the other spies may be. But I’d argue that the show is aware of this ineptitude, and I think that’s part of the point. It’s one thing to want the life of a super spy. It’s another to actually be one.
Ultimately, what Killing Eve has that most spy shows don’t is a sense of vitality. Again, I like many of the contemporary spy shows and movies. But rarely are they this much fun.
Favorite Episodes: “Nice Face,” “Don’t I Know You?” “God, I’m Tired”
7. American Vandal
In my top ten favorite films of 2018 article, I wrote about Eighth Grade. I talked about how it uses your knowledge of school film tropes, as well as your expectations of how movies like that work, against you. I was so busy making that point that I forgot to write about something important: The film’s treatment of social media and the internet.
One of the many aspects of Eighth Grade that make it a great film was that it took social media seriously. It has something to say about how we use Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or your platform of choice that goes beyond “Hey, look how stupid and shallow these kids are for wanting to be on the internet” that we’ve heard time after time after time after time. It’s not that works critical of social media don’t have a point. It’s that they all seem to have the same point: The desire to be on social media = bad.
I, for one, am over that message. People will always want to communicate over the internet, and there’s no point in getting mad about it. (If you want to direct your wrath about social media in a healthy and productive direction, I would start with the platforms themselves that sell out your data or tacitly endorse harassment, but that’s just me.) There’s a desire social media quenches, one that reaches down to our core. I’d rather we begin to explore that desire. “Instagram is stupid” is too easy.
Eighth Grade understands that. As does season two of American Vandal.
The internet certainly had a presence in the first season, but more as an interwoven part of the reality of how teenagers live in the modern era. It’s there because of course it’s there. It’s the 21st century. Season two, however, is a season long deep dive into the internet, exploring how all this technology in our pockets can be wielded both as an instrument for self-expression and as a weapon we use to tear each other down and be assholes.
Specifically, it shows how Kevin McClain, basically the high school version of a lot of the people I would end up going to college with in my fancy liberal arts school (pinky’s up), can create a persona of faux sophistication and pomposity. How we project certain traits onto him because if we were to look him up online, we’d see videos of him discussing tea and performing with his pseudo arty electronic band. We also eventually see how, because of this persona, he can be mocked and bullied and never entirely know it. We also see how this persona is used against him in such a way that could ruin his life.
We see this process play out with all the other kids as well, be it star basketball player DeMarcus Tillman, or rich girl Jenna Hawthorne, or any number of the kids who attend St. Bernadine, a wealthy Catholic private school in Washington. With the possible exception of Eighth Grade, it might be the most nuanced exploration of social media I’ve seen so far.
And that same sense of care goes not only into the central message of the season, but its characters as well. It was easy to describe season one’s characters, specifically its main subject Dylan Maxwell. He’s the dumb stoner kid. We slowly learn that there’s more to him than that, but for the sake of recommending the show to somebody who doesn’t know about it, it’ll do. It’s not as easy to do with the kids of St. Bernadine, and that’s a testament to how these characters are conceived and performed.
I’m not sure season two is as funny as season one. But I do think it’s a better season of television.
And yes, it’s still an incredibly funny mockumentary about people shitting their pants.
Favorite Episodes: “Leaving A Mark,” “Wiped Clean,” “The Dump”
6. My Brilliant Friend
Unfortunately, I haven’t had the pleasure of reading the books. And I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not I should.
On one hand, the desire to do so is definitely there for me. Television is a format where you have a limited amount of story you can tell in a limited amount of time. On top of that, there are the obvious budget restraints and technical limitations that come with a medium as expensive and cumbersome as TV and film. (In other words, the CGI train looked shitty.) But in book form, the only limitation, at least from a hypothetical visual standpoint from both the writer and audience’s perspective, is your imagination.
Given the scope of the show, and given the nuances one could imbue in a more internal medium, I’m sure the Neapolitan Novels are fucking incredible. Normally, seeing an adaptation of something will dissuade me from interacting with the source material. (A habit I know I need to break.) But after the first few episodes, I’ve had a burning passion to buy and read the books that I think about at least once a day.
But I haven’t acted on that desire because I’m afraid it’ll undermine my love of the show, and I’m not sure I want to let that go.
On top of the heaps of praise I read about My Brilliant Friend, I also read a lot of dissenting articles about the show. (Like this one, for example.) The gist of most of these articles is that their favorite aspects of the book, whatever that may be, are lost in its adaptation for television. For some, it’s the big sprawling index of characters that they can look up to keep to keep track of who everyone is and how they’re related to each other. For others, like the one I linked to above, it’s Elena’s narration, and the sense that something’s missing when we don’t see everything through her eyes.
I’m probably going to succumb to my desire to read those books. So consider this a time-capsule, so to speak. This is me documenting what I like about it now in case I feel the desire to criticize it later.
What I like about the show is how it has a massive scope, or at least a massive scope in comparison to most TV shows, and still feels like one of the most intimate shows I saw on television in 2018. Not only is the friendship and lives of Lenú and Lila portrayed with an incredible amount of detail and specificity, but so is the toxic beautiful looking cesspool of a town they grow up in. One gets the sense of why both of these young women’s lives have to be like this, and why their friendship is so close and touching, and why you root so hard for them when the inevitability of the tragedy that comes from growing up in a society of unchecked men comes crashing down on them.
There are moments of astounding beauty in My Brilliant Friend, and there are moments of profound ugliness. What the show does best is balance those moments, and at least for me, that’s why I’m not willing to call the show outright depressing or heartbreaking, even though there’s plenty of that to go around.
Maybe it’s just looking at that seaside in the confines of my TV in my apartment in Los Angeles that sheds a more optimistic light than it should probably receive, and how I’ll feel about that balance, if and when I read the books, I don’t know. I also don’t know what happens in the later books. (The omens from the way the season ends are not good.) But for now, as sad as it was, I want to bathe in it.
Favorite Episodes: “I Soldi (The Money),” “L'isola (The Island),” “La Promessa (The Promise)”
5. Barry
I didn’t expect much from Barry.
It’s not that I expected it to be “bad” or anything like that. I love me some Bill Hader and the premise is likable enough. But I’ve seen Hollywood parodies before. In fact, I’ve seen mobster or person involved with or in the nebulous world of “the mob” try to break into Hollywood before, be it Get Shorty or a particular character’s arc in The Sopranos. Barry looked like neither, but based on that and the marketing, I thought it would merely be a competent but not great show that’ll have some violence here and there, but otherwise, stay relatively light hearted. It’s the same tone many a dramedy maintains, and it’s the tone that at this point in television history, I think a lot of us expect.
Barry is not that show. Far from it. Though we live in a time where many comedies walk the line between comedy and drama, Barry goes a little further over that line than most modern dark comedies are willing to go. In fact, a show I thought a lot about while watching Barry was another show about Hollywood that messes with our perception of genre, BoJack Horseman.
Obviously the comparison goes only so far. Barry has no anthropomorphic animals and BoJack is an already famous actor who’s never committed an onscreen murder. What I’m really talking about is the view these shows take on their main characters and the horrible things the they do to the people around them and, to a certain degree, themselves.
I would argue that both shows allow you to feel some degree of pity for them. Both suffer from varying degrees of depression. BoJack achieves fame and success, but never feels an ounce of satisfaction or joy due to the ravages of his childhood and the makeup of his personality. Barry is stuck doing the dangerous illegal job of a hitman that makes him miserable, and add on top of that the mental burdens of whatever he experienced during his time in the military. (We know very little about that time in Barry’s life, but it’s safe to say that given the tone of the show, there’s nothing good there.)
Both of these men also have a desire to change, and they both realize to varying degrees how their self-destructive behavior is making their lives worse.
However, neither show lets them off the hook. Both shows have their titular characters commit horrible acts, and unlike many antihero shows, they don’t have a sympathetic justification for their actions. The main difference between the two, however, is why these characters do the horrid things they do.
BoJack sabotages his friends and causes people who look up to him to relapse and chokes out his co-workers because he’s a selfish miserable drunk propped up by a system that will never hold him accountable. Barry’s horrible acts are driven out desperation, and out of a desire to put his old life behind him so he can be an actor. He kills people for the Armenian mob, all under the delusion that they and his brother will let this be the “last job.” “These are bad people” we hear him say in one way or another several times, so he does the jobs, and hopefully, it’ll all be over. But eventually, Janice figures him out, so he (probably) kills her to keep his dream alive.
Both shows are well aware of what these characters should do if they really wanted to take responsibility. For BoJack, that’s rehab and therapy, and season five ends with BoJack finally committing to at least one of those. For Barry, it’s confessing to his crimes and accepting the consequences, despite his own dreams. Whether he’ll be able to accept that, I don’t know. But Barry is still a young show. Maybe he’ll reach that conclusion one day.
BoJack Horseman, on the grander scale, is about the shitty men of Hollywood, but it’s really about one broken person and what he needs to do to get better. Barry, in a sense, is about all antiheroes. It’s as dark as that sounds. But it’s also hilarious.
Favorite Episodes: “Chapter Two: Use It,” “Chapter Seven: Loud, Fast, and Keep Going,” “Chapter Eight: Know Your Truth”
4. BoJack Horseman
Another year, another top ten article where I have to think of something new to say about BoJack Horseman. Also, I accidentally used the Barry section as an excuse to write about BoJack because that’s how good I am at writing articles. So yeah, I’m a little at a loss here.
If you’ve seen the show, then you already have an opinion. Hopefully, you love it. I might be willing to say it’s my show that’s still ongoing. You also may have read how deftly this season discusses every conceivable angle of the #MeToo movement, how the show has somehow found even further depths for BoJack to plunge, and how incredible Stephanie Beatriz is in her role as Gina Cazador. (She liked my Tweet you guys!)
So I’m not going to belabor the point. If you love BoJack, you already know why. If you haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you with all my heart to watch it. And as for this season, it’s just as funny and heart-wrenching as it’s ever been.
I will say this: I don’t know if this has been the best or funniest season. I’m not saying that because I think any less of it than previous seasons. I mean that in the sense that I genuinely don’t know. I might think it is. I might not.
But what I can say is that I think season five is the most consistent season of the show. Generally speaking, it takes a few episodes for the show to pick up steam, then a little later it starts knocking them out of the park. In season five, it started from the first episode, and even the “weaker” episodes of the season are still pretty damn great.
I think I can say at this point that as long as BoJack airs a solid enough season, based on the emotional and narrative ground this show covers, it’ll be on this list. Maybe next year when it probably comes time to write about it again, I’ll just write the name of the show and not have to say anything else.
Favorite Episodes: “The Dog Days Are Over,” “Free Churro,” “The Showstopper”
3. Pose
Throughout my college days, I had a lot of friends who were into RuPaul and the various drag related shows on and off the internet. Unfortunately, I never partook of these shows, not because I wasn’t interested, but mostly because I was distracted doing other shit or if I wanted to watch with my friends, that would mean leaving my dorm, and god forbid if I ever did that.
All of this is to say that I don’t know as much about drag culture as I should. I’ve seen Paris is Burning (a documentary I highly recommend you watch if you haven’t done so), I know what a “kai kai” is thanks to this video my college friends showed me, and I know what “hunty” means thanks to Gillian Jacobs in the Community commentary for “Advanced Gay.” (How’s that for a deep cut?) That’s it.
Clearly, that’s not enough, because there hasn’t been a show this year that felt so alive and so overflowing with culture and personality than Pose.
I’d argue that the show doesn’t get off to the best of starts. The characters, at least at first, come off as over-the-top and theatrical, and not in the ball sense of “theatrical,” but in the sense that potentially bad TV writing is happening. In other words, I was unsure as to whether this was a part of the culture, or Ryan Murphy being Ryan Murphy. After all, you never know which Ryan Murphy is going to show up whenever a new project appears. Is it going to be the guy who made Nip/Tuck or American Horror Show, two shows that rock violently back and forth between bad trash and glorious trash? Or maybe it’s the guy who The People Vs. OJ or Feud, both incredibly sorrowful and in-depth looks on race and misogyny in America. Who knows.
On top of that, the first episode has some weird pacing and some scenes are executed in a manner I found odd. It’s not that I didn’t like it, but I realized that my expectations for Murphy are now permanently high, and something about it felt a little off.
Then the second episode aired. One of the main storylines of the episode involves Blanca being turned down from an elite gay bar because, essentially, Blanca isn’t a gay white male. She spends the rest of the episode passionately protesting and demanding her rights from the bar.
I should not have been surprised that such discrimination existed. But I was. That may say more about my own ignorance than the show itself, but the result is that I rooted harder for Blanca than I did for her in the premiere, and I fell hook, line, and sinker for the show.
And it only gets better from there. Every episode dives into a particular topic with the same amount of empathy and clarity, whether it be the AIDS crises or gender confirmation surgery or grief or family or crime or the many ways that our institutions constantly let these incredible people down.
But despite how dark the show can get, there are not only moments of profound celebration and joy, but a sense that this show loves its characters, even the ones who act of selfishness or neglect. Equally strong is the sense of how much these characters love each other, even when they’re cutting each other down. It’s a show whose cup runneth over with empathy and caring, and it’s a show I and I’m betting a lot of people needed in 2018.
Also, Billy Porter gave the best performance of the year.
Favorite Episodes: “The Fever,” “Love is the Message,” “Pink Slip”
2. Dear White People
Season two of Dear White People is the most underrated anything that came out in 2018. Forgive me if this is long, and forgive me if I repeat things I’ve already said before too much.
A quick recap of my feelings on the Dear White People franchise: I hated the movie because I thought it was a scattershot story told poorly in both a structural and visual sense, and I thought the first season of the show was everything the movie should’ve been. I mention this because season two goes beyond the realm of what this franchise and this premise could’ve been in its first iteration and goes into what I didn’t even know it could be.
As I said, I have a lot of problems with the movie, but my main one was with the characters. Many of them don’t really operate or function the way I feel characters should, and instead are stand-ins for tropes or certain schools of thinking or cultural concepts. In the movie, Sam is the confrontational political firebrand ashamed of the fact that she’s dating a white guy. Troy is the black man being groomed for leadership. Coco does everything she can to distance herself from her blackness and Lionel is the awkward gay kid who doesn’t fit in. Some have arcs, some don’t. Some get explored (mainly Sam and Lionel) and some fall to the wayside (Coco and Troy).
The first season of the show explores why some of these characters are the way they are. For Coco, it’s because she’s been shamed her whole life for her dark skin, as well as the way she saw her mother treated growing up and her misplaced sense of what she needs to accomplish to reach the heights she wants to reach. Troy is being pushed towards a future he doesn’t want, and his whole life, he’s been pushed to conform to make everybody comfortable as opposed to being himself. Everyone else is either just as fleshed out or revealed to be more flawed than we previously thought. Sam is passionate, but she can be a bad friend and she makes poor decisions. Lionel can still fall back into being a doormat. Reggie, a character from the movie who gets more time to shine in the show, finds his motivations are more tied to his romantic feelings than he may think.
The characters may become more nuanced in the show, but they can still be easily identified as the X guy or the Y woman. What’s so brilliant about season two is how these characters shed themselves of their labels.
In season one, Troy spends most of his season playing his role. “Trobama,” he’s referred to in both the movie and season one. (Or at least I think someone calls him that in the show.) Troy spends most of this season getting high, fucking, and letting himself be an idiot kid. He’s tired of being molded, particularly as he comes to terms with how said molding has hurt everyone around him. Coco spends season one acting like how she thinks a leader acts. In season two, she actually becomes one, which includes sacrifice and a greater personal toll than she ever knew she was capable of handling. Lionel continues to be awkward and soft spoken, but this season finds him coming out of his shell. In fact, he unshells so hard that he might blow past the guy who pulled him out in the first place. Reggie learns that being so closed off can cost. Joelle goes from being Sam’s sidekick to being her own person who’ll probably be an extraordinary person regardless of whether she’s in Sam’s shadow or not.
And then there’s Sam herself. One of the major plot lines of season two revolves around AltIvyW, an anonymous alt-right Twitter account that takes the campus by storm. In season one, Sam learns what bullshit can come her way with the political engagement she chooses. In season two, that bullshit hits her hard, shaking the once indestructible Sam to her core. She learns how it can ripple to parts of her life she thought untouchable, specifically, the parts outside the realm of her college bubble.
Not only that, but then she meets Rikki Carter, the show’s stand-in for Candace Owens. Throughout the season, we see media clips of Carter extolling the virtues of free speech and railing against identity politics and voicing every tired right wing cliché in the book. Then Sam meets her backstage during her campus visit. It’s supposed to be a confrontation. Instead, it becomes Sam’s worst nightmare. After a conversation reminiscent of a Kubrick movie, Rikki tells Sam it’s only a matter of time before she becomes the left-wing version of her, and sooner or later, she’ll forget her heart when she learns that all that matter is the money.
It’s a scene that not only rocks Sam to her core, but me as well, because on some level, I think we both knew that there’s a scary amount of truth in what Rikki says. So at the end of the season, she says she’s over the radio show. She can’t become like Rikki.
Not only is Dear White People willing to deconstruct itself in this literal sense, but also how these people treat one another. There used to be lines in the sand. Sam and Coco were ideological enemies. Reggie would never hang out with Troy. So on and so on. This season finds Coco, Sam, and Joelle on a trip together and Reggie finding comfort in Troy’s company. It lets the characters breathe. It lets them forget about what they don’t like about each other and lets them get high and play video games. Like college kids.
And it lets them go further than that as well, as season two has them go through experiences that, for better or for worse, go beyond the realm of college. It reminds them that they have to be human beings, with all the joy and pain that comes with that experience. There will always be bullshit, but at the end of the day, they have to remember that they have each other, and that their existence has to mean something beyond the halls of the fictional Winchester University.
It’s a beautiful season of television that widely expands on its premise, experiments with style and structure, and finds its beating heart. I loved everything about it. Even the potentially shark jumpy ass shark jump the season ends on. Please watch it.
Favorite Episodes: “Chapter I,” “Chapter VIII,” “Chapter IX”
1. Atlanta
Teddy Perkins.
Favorite Episodes: “Teddy Perkins,” “Champagne Papi,” “Woods.” Really just about every episode of the season.
Honorable Mentions
American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace
Better Call Saul
Big Mouth
Brockmire
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Corporate
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Forever
The Good Place
Homecoming
Insecure
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
Sharp Objects
Silicon Valley
South Park
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Will Watch Someday
America to Me
The Americans
Bodyguard
Escape at Dannemora
The Haunting of Hill House
Lodge 49
The Terror
There’s plenty of others. There is too much television.
