Year-end lists are fun and contentious pieces of writing, but most of the fun takes place outside the list itself. The process of list-making is a weird act of trying to balance personal responses with some imagined objective measurement, and while lists are about the year in culture, they’re also portraits of the people who wrote them. Once again, we’re posting not just our lists but also a conversation among critics Jen Chaney, Roxana Hadadi, and Kathryn VanArendonk about how we made them, what this year in TV was like, and what we’re furious we had to leave off.
Kathryn VanArendonk: It’s the end of the year — a time of reflection, of reconsideration, of looking back on the last several months of our lives and thinking, Oh holy God, what did I even watch this year? Every year I try to keep a list of everything I’ve watched because otherwise I will simply forget. This time, looking back on that list felt more like a memory trip than usual. In particular, there are a few months where everything I watched felt about 70 percent as catchy or appealing as it should’ve been. There was an onslaught of Emmy-bait projects this spring (see: The Girl From Plainville, Gaslit, The Staircase, The Essex Serpent, Candy), all of which seemed to be straining for culture-defining relevance. And yet so many of them landed with an “eh.â€
Roxana Hadadi: It was a weird, disordered year. We had that mad dash of Emmy wannabes in the spring, summer sort of calmed down (er, for two weeks) before The Boys and Stranger Things came back, and then the fall IP onslaught hit: Andor, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and House of the Dragon. When I started drafting my best-of-TV list for this year, I had an immediate top-two slot. There was no second-guessing my choices. It was more difficult to fill in numbers three through ten. There are a number of shows I liked because of their performances, but the writing felt inconsistent, or raised interesting questions the narrative didn’t ultimately deliver on. Or the pacing was stilted, and that colored the whole project a certain way. The latter was the case with one of my runners-up, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. And while Ms. Marvel might be my favorite thing the MCU has done in a long time, it had a villain problem, in that I watched this whole show and I do not remember the villains.
Jen Chaney: Roxana, you mentioned the fall IP onslaught, but I feel like this whole year was about IP in all kinds of forms in that so many shows were based on stories that were already familiar thanks to podcasts, docuseries, and magazine articles. The Dropout, The Watcher, The Staircase, Inventing Anna: These are just a few examples of “true crime,†a term I am using broadly here, that was repackaged into scripted form. Sometimes those shows were very well done. But the heavy lean in that direction made me more inclined to honor as many original stories as possible on my list. Everything I’ve been reading and hearing suggests there’s less of an appetite for the wholly new from networks and streamers at a time when I am hungrier than ever for something fresh.
KV: I loved The Dropout. I really enjoyed Julia. House of the Dragon, whatever else it might be, did successfully capture some of the conversational airspace this fall, so kudos to it. But yes, all of those shows feel like a conservative TV move, banking on the safe reliability of a story that’s already been told. It’s part of why I think all three of us were so taken with Andor, even though it’s also clearly in the realm of the giant franchise title. Andor feels like a Star Wars show made by someone who’s enjoying taking some risks with what it means to be a Star Wars show. It’s got an unusual structure, with several multi-episode arcs built into the season. It features very few previously known characters or locations. (Yes, I know, the titular character comes from Rogue One, but it’s almost shockingly easy to forget that.) Clearly it’s possible to make an IP-thirst show that makes fascinating creative choices. The other big example for me this year was my beloved Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which works by being as deliberately throwback-y as it can possibly manage.
That said, some of the shows that could’ve played in this space did not seem to get a lot of attention. I’m thinking especially of Pachinko, which has all those markers — buzzy book adaptation, gorgeous production values, even a little behind-the-scenes drama — but it never felt like a show that was moving the discourse. I’m still not sure why!
RH: Let me add to that list, Kathryn, with other shows I loved but that no one else seemed to be watching: Gaslit, Girls5eva, We Own This City, Archive 81, Tokyo Vice, Flatbush Misdemeanors, Dark Winds, This Fool — a lot of things fell through the cracks, and unfortunately for some of them (Archive 81 and Flatbush Misdemeanors), that meant cancellation. Pachinko and Severance are both on Apple TV+; both had exceptional performances and multilayered writing and strong production design. Why did the latter captivate so many people, and the former have such a muted reception? Is it just that people really don’t want to read subtitles? Same question with Reservation Dogs and The Bear, which are both on FX on Hulu, and told nuanced stories about the ways relatives can either fuel us or fuck us up. Did The Bear really grab everyone’s attention because of how Jeremy Allen White looked in that T-shirt?
In formulating the rest of my list, then, I tried to walk the line of, “How much did I really love this show, on its own terms?†and “Am I putting this show on my list because I’m irritated no one else seemed to love it as much as I did?†Sometimes those two motivations aligned and sometimes they didn’t.
JC: If there’s a dominating theme among my picks, it’s that they are all about people having what feel like authentic struggles. Take The Last Movie Stars, which is about surfacing the humanity and hardship beneath the magical celebrity aura of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s relationship. I found I was in even less of a mood than usual for things that were trying too hard to seem authentic or felt too gimmicky. I couldn’t get past the first episode of Reboot, a show with a cast I adore, because it felt like it was pulling several muscles in its effort to be meta and clever. I don’t know if this counts among the worst shows of the year, but I watched the first episode of Blockbuster — a Netflix series nostalgic for a thing its platform actually led to the demise of — and it felt so overly earnest and off that I just never continued.
KV: And yet, so often this year I felt perversely more excited to watch something truly, inexplicably bad. When I found The Time Traveler’s Wife, I hated every minute, but also could not look away. To get so many of its wires crossed, to make such a sad story feel so trivial and silly and full of assholes, to place a set of severed feet in the middle of an alleyway and expect its audience to gasp rather than giggle … it’s bad, but I will always treasure our time together. The experience of list-making every year is nearly as gut-based as my response to that very bad show. Reservation Dogs was incredible this season and so much of my response to it is somatic. It makes the hair on my neck stand up.
Honing your favorites in a given year can also be an act of autobiography. What performance really resonated with me? Lizzy Caplan in Fleishman is in Trouble, is, like me, a magazine writer who lives with her kids in suburban New Jersey. What show did I watch at a time when I really needed a show exactly like that? The Bear, and This Fool, and this show called Players from the creators of American Vandal that only I watched and that tickled me to no end. That’s not the only thing that feeds into how I pick my shows of the year, but it is part of that equation. If a show didn’t make me completely obsessed with it in a way that at least slightly short-circuited my ability to be a reasonable person, it’s probably not going to make the top of the list. The top slot is about trying to combine that giddy excitement with some context about what’s happening in the year of TV more broadly. What type of TV do I really want to celebrate? What seems like a vibrant movement in creative TV-making I want to emphasize? It’s why Reservation Dogs is my No. 1 this year. I think it’s incredible and I want to see all kinds of TV taking lessons from how that show works and what makes it feel so special.
RH: I also went with a show that I simply would not shut up about — apologies to everyone who received a text, Slack message, DM, or, you know, in-person conversation about this — and that’s how my top choice became Andor. It is basically Michael Clayton in space, an exploration of war, sacrifice, imperialism, and rebellion that I honestly did not know television could pull off, let alone Star Wars television. I basically pumped my fist and wept during every hour, and that wide emotional sprawl (plus that one particular glaring look Diego Luna does so well) really stuck with me.
JC: I chose Severance because it was something brand-new and instantly fascinating, created by a new voice in the business (Dan Erickson), telling a story that, while evocative of previous dystopian and sci-fi fare, hit me like something I had not seen before. By accident of timing, it also felt incredibly relevant in a year when employers and employees engaged in tugs-of-war about whether to return to the office. It was also masterful in its capacity to answer certain questions and leave others dangling in a way that was compelling rather than frustrating. Its finale made me urgently need more episodes, and that was what really catapulted it to the top of my list. During the peakiest of peak TV years, when the last thing I possibly could conceive of was yearning for additional quantities of anything, it proved that some television can still make us want more.