The 'peak TV' bubble hasn't burst yet, but 2019 kind of felt like a turning point year, when the number of competing streaming services doubled or tripled, and people all kind of saw the crappy new landscape emerging. As the guy who watches virtually everything, even I had to tap out: I passed on signing up for Disney+ or Apple+ last month, so whatever shows on those services or CBS All Access or the half dozen other upcoming streaming services are just gonna remain a mystery to me. But of course, that still leaves me with a shit ton of options. A normal person would still have more to watch than they'd ever need if all they had were the shows on Netflix that are actually good. So as crazy as people thought I was when I started doing lists of 50, I'm doing it, I'm going for 100 for at least one year. It just kind of felt right, there are a lot of shows I really enjoyed that just didn't fit in the top 50 because they maybe had better seasons in the past but I still wanted to mention them.

Here's the previous year-end TV lists I did for 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

1. Russian Doll (Netflix)
I've always loved Groundhog Day, and if you'd told me years ago that it'd one day become its own subgenre, which it basically did this year with the release of Russian Doll and the second Happy Death Day movie, I'd be happy to hear it. But I don't think that I would've expected a story of someone living in a time loop of the same day over and over to work as well over 8 episodes of a series as it does in a 90-minute movie. But Russian Doll made it work by virtue of Natasha Lyonne's hilarious performance, Leslye Headland's sharp dialogue, and the unpredictable story that didn't even introduce the second protagonist until the end of the third episode.

2. Fleabag (Amazon)
I loved the first season of Fleabag, but since British television isn't centered around milking every successful series for 8 seasons, I didn't get my hopes up too much about it returning. And if Phoebe Waller-Bridge never makes a third season, I'll be fine with that, she's got a lot of other projects in the pipeline. But I'm so glad she brought this character back at least once, it made me laugh out loud even more than the first season.

3. Succession (HBO)
I was amused to see a tweet the other day favorably compare Succession to "watching The Bold & The Beautiful with my grandma," there really is something familiarly tawdry about the bickering and power struggles of the Roy family. It's that somewhat unusual combination of tone and packaging, the Veep software running on the prestige drama hardware, that rankles some and delights others. But where Adam McKay's movies about the real life rich cunts running the world sometimes seem kind of glib, the McKay-produced Succession took creator Jesse Armstrong's abandoned script about the Murdoch empire and creates a fictionalized world that feels lived and resonant while also exactly as ridiculous as our own reality, brought to life by one of the best casts on television in recent memory.

4. Jett (Cinemax)
In the crowded field of summer cable TV, Jett was the little-watched show that I found myself evangelizing to people about the most. Creator Sebastian Gutierrez has adapted Elmore Leonard on multiple occasions and Jett has a little of his playful neo noir vibe. But Jett is also probably the most complex role of Carla Gugino's career, and the back half of the show's first season went on a few incredible tangents that felt like their own standalone movies but still contributed to a satisfying whole. In a genre where graphic violence can come off kind of casual and cavalier, Jett was full of moments of pain or death or torture that were excruciating to watch and are seared in my brain months later, a stylish and stylized crime drama that had an unusual grim sense of gravity to it.

5. Veronica Mars (Hulu)
I am not someone who gnashes my teeth and writes letters when shows I enjoy get canceled, and I have been largely indifferent about the trend of beloved old shows being brought back from the dead for new episodes. But Veronica Mars always felt to me like it still had some gas in the tank when it was canceled after season 3, and the season 4 we finally got 12 years later met and exceeded my expectations, with the series' most engrossing mystery to date as well as a lot of the old cast's chemistry still intact. Arguably nobody had a better 2019 than Kristen Bell, who had a sequel to Frozen, began the final season of The Good Place, and returned to her greatest role.

6. Lodge 49 (AMC)
The second season of Lodge 49 got off to a slow start for me and I wondered if it still had the unique magic I saw in it last year. But by the end of the season, the show's gentle whimsy, resonant depictions of workaday life, and eerie air of mystery came to a crescendo of hilarity and surprisingly emotional denouement. And executive producer Paul Giamatti, who had a fleeting voice cameo in season 1, showed up for an extremely entertaining handful of episodes as the most ludicrous personality in Lodge 49's colorful cast. I don't know if the campaign to get the show picked up elsewhere after AMC's cancellation will be successful, but I'd love to see more and I was also pretty happy with where it left off.

7. Santa Clarita Diet (Netflix)
Santa Clarita Diet's third season ended in a way that would've set up a great 4th season, but in a way it was a good ending because it implied a future where Sheila and Joel stay together forever. And for such an absurd horror comedy, what I really found myself loving about Santa Clarita Diet was how much it ended up being a show about a loving family, about people getting into a crisis together and it bringing them closer.

8. Barry (HBO)
To the extent that a show as unpredictable and creative as Barry has a formula, there is the recurring motif of Barry Block dealing tense life-or-death situations or getting a terrifying phone call just before having to do a scene in a trivial acting class or performance. Sometimes he channels that into a brilliant display of emotion, sometimes he lets it overwhelm him and shuts down. But those beats are kind of an organizing structure of an increasingly chaotic story, where longtime funny guys like Bill Hader, Stephen Root, and Henry Winkler prove surprisingly convincing at selling the show's grislier and more emotional moments.

9. Los Espookys (HBO)
As Netflix has gotten pretty high quality dubbed dialogue for most of his foreign language shows, I've gotten even lazier about not wanting to watch shows with subtitles. But Los Espookys is one show where I'll gladly keep my eyes glued to the screen to avoid missing a single line of dialogue, Julio Torres and Ana Fabrega say hysterical things about as often as any 30 Rock character ever has.

10. Brooklyn Nine-Nine (NBC)
Few shows get as far as 6 seasons keeping an ensemble cast of 9 actors together, so it was inevitable that someone would exit Brooklyn Nine-Nine after it jumped from FOX to NBC and got a new lease on life. And Chelsea Peretti is an acceptable loss, although she was great in her last season on the show and will be missed.



















11. Evil (CBS)
I love that Robert and Michelle King have used their clout at CBS from creating The Good Wife to convince the stodgiest most old-fashioned of the broadcast networks to run some extremely strange shows like BrainDead and Evil. And whereas BrainDead only lasted one summer, Evil has enough of a familiar procedural bent to its investigations of possessions and miracles that it's been renewed for a second season.

12. Watchmen (HBO)
Watchmen's season finale airs in a few days and I feel like how that goes could move this show a few spots up the list or a lot of spots down the list, but it's definitely on it. That Damon Lindelof says he's only doing these 9 episodes, regardless of whether HBO orders more seasons, and I already wish there was more of it -- the episodes that centered around Jean Smart, Tim Blake Nelson, and Hong Chau each could've been several great episodes of television. But all the compressed action and intriguing, barely explained glimpses not at the future but at a very different 2019 have made Watchmen one of the rare shows I really find myself thinking about even when I'm not watching it.

13. The Boys (Amazon)
The comic book that The Boys is based on was created about 2 decades after the Watchmen graphic novel, and I have to imagine that its dark vision of superheroes in the 'real world' was influenced by what came before, or perhaps gave The Boys some direction in the sense of what not to repeat or copy. So in some ways The Boys is a simpler or more straightforward approach to some of the same themes as Watchmen, and it's a very different show, more cynically satirical and jarringly violent. But it's also really entertaining and well made, and Antony Starr as the Homelander was one of 2019's most memorable and impressive performances, an extremely charming and extremely dangerous and duplicitous superman.

14. Catch-22 (Hulu)
Hulu has always been kind of the dark horse of streaming TV, and even after the success of The Handmaid's Tale, it kind of feels like their smaller and more consistent slate of programming lives in the shadow of Netflix and other competitors. Catch-22, a 6-episode adaptation of the classic Joseph Heller novel with a cast that included George Clooney and Hugh Laurie, is the exact kind of thing that would've gotten a lot of awards recognition back when there weren't quite so many prestigious miniseries, or even now if it was on a bigger platform like HBO. But it didn't get a single Emmy nomination this year, which is a shame, because I thought it was really excellent, capturing the satirical voice of the book with a great ensemble cast and a distinctive visual sensibility that didn't look quite like the million other World War II period pieces. Was happy to see Catch-22 and lead actor Chistopher Abbott get a couple Golden Globe noms this week, though.

15. American Princess (Lifetime)
I check out a lot of new shows with my wife after we put the kids to bed, and I check out a lot of new shows by myself when she's not around. And it's relatively rare that I get a few episodes into a show and realize that Jen would love it and go back to rewatch it with her, but that's what I had to do with American Princess, and we devoured the show's first and only season in about a week.

16. The Magicians (SyFy)
The Magicians is a show about uh magic and death isn't always final -- one character's body died in the 3rd season but we still saw them on the astral plane in every episode. But the 4th season, as deliriously creative and occasionally hilarious as ever, ended with a truly surprising death of a major character that signaled something more final, a real exit from the story, and it really felt earned and genuinely heartbreaking.

17. Pose (FX)
The first season of Pose gave a lot of screentime to a trio of white yuppies played by Evan Peters, Kate Mara and James Van Der Beek that I suppose was a necessary concession to get a show like this on primetime TV. But in the second season, those characters disappeared and Billy Porter and Dominique Jackson and the rest of the cast stepped up to take full control of the spotlight and make Pose into the show it was probably always meant to be, and it was glorious and moving.

18. Dead To Me (Netflix)
Dead To Me has a bit of the same cat-and-mouse game as Barry, of someone trying to have real friendships with people they genuinely like while hiding a terrible secret that could destroy that relationship. But instead of a bloody action comedy, Dead To Me is sweet and sad in a way that made the suspense and uncertainty all the more unnerving. Christina Applegate has been consistently great over the years, with Dead To Me as one of her finest performances yet, but it's crazy that it took 19 years for Linda Cardellini to get another role as complex and compelling as Freaks & Geeks.

19. Billions (Showtime)
Every season of Billions, the writers find a way to hit the reset button and set the characters against each other in new alliances and power struggles. And the 4th season was the one where Chuck and Axe finally wound up on the same side with a common enemy, and as implausible as it may have seemed in the show's earlier years, it totally felt right and led to a lot of great moments in the show's perpetual cat-and-mouse games of high finance and political power plays.

20. What We Do In The Shadows (FX)
Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement don't reprise their roles from the 2014 movie What We Do In The Shadows in the series of the same name. Instead, they wrote and directed a show that follows a different set of vampires based in Staten Island in the same style as the movie, and it's frequently just as hilarious, with Matt Berry heading up a cast so good that I don't mind that Waititi and Clement stay off-camera.






























21. The Other Two (Comedy Central)
Comedy Central has a scattered history with live action sitcoms, in some ways it's their biggest weakness, but every now again they knock it out of the park, and The Other Two is the best one they've put on the air since Broad City. It's a cruel and ridiculous satire of fame and being the semifamous hangers-on to a celebrity in ways that Entourage couldn't be in its wildest dreams.

22. Workin' Moms (Netflix)
I probably spent more time watching Workin' Moms this year than almost any other, mainly because Netflix picked up the show that had been airing in Canada since 2017 and released all three seasons in America over the course of 2019. Catherine Reitman's sitcom really is good enough to watch in large quantities, though, great cast and a tone that veers between bawdy and melancholy and bittersweet.

23. Bob's Burgers (FOX)
Bob's Burgers is now 180 episodes deep into its run with a virtually unblemished record of good to great shows. By this point The Simpsons had already had a few divisive moments like "Homer's Enemy." Maybe in 5 years I'll hate what Bob's Burgers has become, but for now I'll just assume that their consistency has no end in sight.

24. Rick And Morty (Cartoon Network)
This year Rick And Morty returned from a 2-year wait with just 5 new episodes (4 of which have aired so far) and a promise of more to come next year. If they're turning to a Venture Bros.-style production schedule, with longer hiatuses and fewer episodes, just to keep the density and creativity of the writing at the high bar they've set, I would be fine with that. Bob's Burgers is the exception, most animated shows that go into hundreds of episodes turn Animation has plenty of quantity over quality, shows that useless go into hundreds of episodes just to get worse and worse and write themselves into a corner, so I don't care if Rick And Morty never does all 70 episodes they recently signed up to do or just keep trickling out really good ones.

25. Future Man (Hulu)
Future Man is, like Rick And Morty, a voraciously inventive sci-fi comedy where the rules of how the universe works can change at the drop of a hat, whether it's in service of the plot or just a joke. In the course of its second season it's already flown off pretty far from the first season's premise, and I'm glad they're gonna get to do it one more time with a third and final season in 2020. Derek Wilson, who'd previously been little seen outside of guest arcs on Preacher and Rectify, gives an absolutely incredible comic performance on Future Man as Wolf, a grizzled apocalyptic warrior from the year 2162 who then spent several years in 1970s and '80s becoming an L.A. douchebag.

26. The Good Place (NBC)
The Good Place is another high concept sitcom where the rules of the universe can and do change often -- at this point there are as many comedies I find complex and hard to follow as there are dramas. But my brain hasn't cramped up too much watching The Good Place's final season, and I'm pretty hopeful that they'll stick the landing and find a good ending to the story after all the twists and turns. And Ben Koldyke was a really quality addition to the ensemble for some of the recent episodes.

27. Good Omens (Amazon)
I read Good Omens when I was maybe 14 and really enjoyed it then and dreamed of how good a movie of it would be someday. Finally seeing it onscreen decades later, Neil Gaiman fulfilling one of Terry Pratchett's dying wishes, I felt sometimes like I was trying to go back and see it through 14-year-old eyes to enjoy it as much as I would've then, but it was still pretty great and David Tennant seemed to be having just the best time playing a demon.

28. Preacher (AMC)
I haven't finished the final season of Preacher yet, I think I may have apocalypse fatigue from watching Good Omens and, uh, the news. But I'm still enjoying the show's big, weird, expanding universe and savoring every moment of Ruth Negga's always great performance.

29. Living With Yourself (Netflix)
A show with 2 Paul Rudds, one a misanthropic and bitter Paul Rudd like the one in This Is 40 and one the charming funny Paul Rudd like the ones in every other movie, is kind of a great concept right out of the box. But Living With Yourself took the idea of a man meeting his clone and made it as ordinary as possible, like cloning really was secretly invented by a mysterious spa, and let a beloved movie star who's probably a better actor than he usually gets credit for really test himself and stretch one character as far as he could in two opposite directions.

30. This Way Up (Hulu)
Aisling Bea was very good as the female lead in Living With Yourself, but she had limited opportunities to really herself be funny in it. So I'm glad she also created and started in This Way Up, and got to be the hilarious and troubled character at the center of her own story.





























31. Unbelievable (Netflix)
Toni Collette and Merritt Wever are about as good a pair of lead actors a miniseries could ask for, and I kind of felt a righteous thrill as they finally met and joined forces at the end of the second episode of Unbelievable, two tough detectives from different Colorado jurisdictions solving possibly linked rape cases together. And then, they meet, and at first they do not get along, they do not share information with each other easily, they make withering glances and sarcastic comments at each other, and it's so much more engrossing than if it was just a simple tale of good cops getting the bad guy.

32. Better Things (FX)
There was a lot of collateral damage when Louis C.K.'s career deservedly suffered repercussions for him being a gross piece of shit, a lot of good or promising projects involving talented people that got canceled or shelved or rearranged because C.K. was the biggest name involved. Thankfully, when the smoke cleared, his longtime collaborator Pamela Adlon's show Better Things emerged relatively unscathed as Adlon and other writers made the third season without C.K., and the show's funny and poignant vignettes about show business and parenthood were as entertaining as ever.

33. Mindhunter (Netflix)
Mindhunter isn't entirely about its brief interviews with hideous men, and there's carefully plotted connective tissue between the scenes where Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany sit down and speak to serial killers. But those interviews, where time seems to stop and you can't stop watching an actor take on the role of an imprisoned psychopath, toying with and deceiving FBI profilers, are certainly where the show really pops. And season 2 had plenty of those moments, I think my favorite of which was Michael Filipowich as William Pierce, Jr.

34. Alternatino With Arturo Castro (Comedy Central)
Saturday Night Live is about as bad as it's ever been, but it feels like more and more opportunities are opening up for sketch comedy on TV and a lot of it is good to great. Arturo Castro played one mildly amusing supporting character well on Broad City for years, but I'm really impressed by his range and creativity on Alternatino, which is hilarious

35. I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson (Netflix)
I was always a little ambivalent about Tom Robinson's short-lived Comedy Central sitcom Detroiters, where it felt like they'd just kind of cut loose with absurdity here and there but keep things reined in a little too much. I Think You Should Leave is Robinson completely cutting in every sketch, even if he sometimes plays the straight man and lets other actors, some known and some unknown, be the oddball in some of the given scenarios. The entire first season is less than 2 hours long, highly recommended to breeze through once or twice.

36. The Righteous Gemstones (HBO)
In the past I've never been able to fully embrace Danny McBride's shows, there was always something about them that rubbed me the wrong way or got old fast. But he got together his best cast and his best story for The Righteous Gemstones and managed not to get in his own way for once, with Edi Patterson affirming the status she earned on Vice Principals as a particularly fearless MVP of McBride's repertory.

37. Grace And Frankie (Netflix)
In 2 years, Grace And Frankie will release its 7th and final season and tiptoe ahead of Orange Is The New Black to become Netflix's longest-running show. But I don't wanna think about the end too much, I just wanna enjoy these hilarious octogenarians while they're still making great TV and getting arrested at climate protests.

38. Brockmire (IFC)
Hank Azaria took Jim Brockmire's rock bottom of addiction and self-destruction to such an extreme in the show's second season that it was a little refreshing to see the character clean up his act in the latest season without sacrificing the colorful swearing that really defines the show's character. Between Counterpart, Veronica Mars, and Brockmire, 2019 was a very good year for seeing J.K. Simmons on television.

39. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (The CW)
Rachel Bloom always tiptoed on a highwire with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, building a weekly musical comedy around an absurd number of original songs, while also pushing the story and its characters to breaking points and daring to do storylines about things like suicidal depression and then bounce back into jokes and songs. The last 10 episodes of the final season that aired this year took even more risks in how they landed the plane, including bringing back a major character with a completely new actor and it actually working out pretty well. It wasn't my favorite era of the show, but I still really enjoyed and respected how they pulled it off.

40. The End Of The F***ing World (Netflix)
Episodes of The End Of The F***ing World are as short as 19 minutes and are such oddly digestible bite-sized stories of murder and depravity. There are shades of American Psycho in the way the British teenagers in the show tell us via voiceover how dark and twisted they are, but for the most part it's a stangely funny show that's not quite like anything I've seen before.



















41. State of the Union (Sundance)
If The End of the F***ing World's episodes are bite-sized, then State Of The Union was just a nibble, 10 quick little 10-minute installments that could feel more like webisodes than one act plays if the troubled couple meeting before therapy every week weren't played so compellingly by Rosamund Pike and Chris O'Dowd. This show would've been good as a standard 30-minute series, but I don't think it would've been as good without its fleet get-to-the-point format.

42. Corporate (Comedy Central)
I dismissed Corporate in its first season as a 'dark Dilbert' of predictable observational workplace humor, but the show really came into its own in its 2nd season with increasingly vicious satire and episodes that felt like deep dives into different aspects of workplace culture from every possible angle that could be exploited for humor.

43. Stumptown (ABC)
Portland, Oregon just spent a few years on TV as the whimsical hipster utopia Portlandia, so it's fun to see the city depicted so differently in a neo noir detective show. I always thought Cobie Smulders had a lot of potential to play an action movie heroine, but her recurring role as Agent Maria Hill in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has turned into a thankless series of pointless cameos, so Dex in Stumptown is finally her chance to really be a badass.

44. Speechless (ABC)
Speechless is another show that was willing to portray a character with a disability and their relationships with others in much more frank and nuanced ways than I'd seen before. It was also probably the best family network sitcom of the last 5 years, and I'm really pissed that ABC let it go after just 3 seasons, as complete and satisfying as the finale was.

45. Killing Eve (BBC America)
It would be absurd to say that the Emmys and the Golden Globes always get things right, but one area in which they tend to make good decisions is when the spotlight shifts from one actor in a show to another. Sandra Oh rightfully was in the awards show spotlight for the first season of Killing Eve, and continued to do great work in the second season, but the spotlight shifted deservingly to Jodie Comer for season two, when Villanelle changed identities and charmed and deceived over and over to keep killing and evade capture.

46. The Act (Hulu)
Patricia Arquette did back-to-back fact-based miniseries, playing women who made terrible mistakes in last year's Escape At Dannemora and this year's The Act, and wound up nominated for both at the same Emmys ceremony (winning for the latter). Escape is the better show and the better performance, but Arquette put a lot of layers of fear and deceit and caring and anger into her depiction of Dee Dee Blanchard.

47. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix)
One of the coolest jobs I had this year was working on Titus Burgess's Kennedy Center show, which also featured Jane Krakowski. And it was cool to see these actors pretend to be conceited and absurd divas onstage, much like the characters they played so well on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and then turn off those personas and just be so kind and patient and professional to their stage crew. It gave me a new appreciation for just how fantastic they were on this show.

48. The Passage (FOX)
Almost exactly 2 years after FOX cancelled the excellent Mark-Paul Gosselaar drama Pitch, they canceled another that was almost as good, The Passage. My wife had read the Justin Cronin novels The Passage was based on, and noted the many liberties the show took with the source material, including changing the main antagonist Giles J. Babcock into teenage girl Shauna Babcock. But that flourish turned out to be one of my favorite things about the show, because Brianne Howey was as good at playing a vampire on The Passage as she was at playing a girl possessed by a demon on The Exorcist.

49. A.P. Bio (NBC)
A.P. Bio was a nasty but entertaining little sitcom in its first season, but I felt like it really came into its own this year, particularly when Elizabeth Alderfer entered the picture as a character as a foil and equal to Glenn Howerton's character, who had up until that point kind of run in circles around the more earnest other characters. NBC cancelled A.P. Bio this year, which sucked, but 2 months later they changed their mind and decided to give the show a 3rd season on its upcoming streaming service Peacock, which is at least for me personally worse because there's no way I'm paying for that shit so I'm just going to be annoyed that the show is still going and I'm not watching it.

50. Now Apocalypse (Starz)
There are a lot of shows on cable these days that I could call strange fusions of different genres, but nothing genuinely puzzled me quite like the weirdly mystical sex comedy Now Apocalypse, which had such a unique combination of visual aesthetic, tone, and subject matter that I just watched the whole season waiting for it to cohere into something more familiar. It never did, and in fact the season ended with such a great ridiculous flourish that I'm kind of glad Starz cancelled the show and ended things right there.





















51. Sorry For Your Loss (Facebook Watch)
52. Fosse/Verdon (FX)
53. What Just Happened??! (FOX)
54. In The Dark (The CW)
55. Vida (Starz)
56. Superstore (NBC)
57. Veep (HBO)
58. You're The Worst (FXX)
59. When They See Us (Netflix)
60. The Umbrella Academy (Netflix)
61. Deadly Class (SyFy)
62. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon)
63. iZombie (The CW)
64. Broad City (Comedy Central)
65. Gentleman Jack (HBO)
66. Drunk History (Comedy Central)
67. Black-ish (ABC)
68. American Gods (Starz)
69. I'm Sorry (TruTV)
70. Big Little Lies (HBO)
71. Modern Love (Amazon)
72. Ramy (Hulu)
73. Good Girls (NBC)
74. Mrs. Fletcher (HBO)
75. Single Parents (FOX)
76. Warrior (Cinemax)
77. Counterpart (Starz)
78. Sweetbitter (Starz)
79. Chernobyl (HBO)
80. Documentary Now! (IFC)
81. The Terror: Infamy (FX)
82. Castle Rock (Hulu)
83. GLOW (Netflix)
84. Disenchantment (Netflix)
85. The Tick (Amazon)
86. True Detective (HBO)
87. Jessica Jones (Netflix)
88. Snowfall (FX)
89. Divorce (HBO)
90. Black Monday (Showtime)
91. Miracle Workers (TBS)
92. Killjoys (SyFy)
93. The Rook (Starz)
94. Crashing (HBO)
95. Florida Girls (Pop)
96. The Hot Zone (National Geographic)
97. Bless This Mess (ABC)
98. Perfect Harmony (NBC)
99. The Last O.G. (TBS)
100. The Politician (Netflix)

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 12:42 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.