My Top 100 TV Shows of 2021

 















There are other music critics who listened to over 300 albums this year, and there are other TV critics who watched episodes of over 300 shows this year, but I may be the only person who did both. So yes, I really feel like I needed to go all the way to 100 and I'm complimenting every show that made the list. Shout out to the pandemic and staying inside and whatnot. 
 
1. Hacks (HBO Max)
The constantly changing tastes and sensibilities of mainstream comedy are as swift and unforgiving as popular music, but we rarely really see the generation gap illustrated in a way that doesn’t just make one generation or another the punchline. “Hacks” was created by 3 people who worked on one of the definitive millennial comedies, Broad City, and explores that generation gap in the form of a boomer comedian hiring a young writer to revamp her Vegas act. Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance is sort of a Joan Rivers-ish trailblazing comedienne like the title character in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” but toward the end of her career instead of the beginning. And Smart’s fantastic performance anchors a show that manages to comment on two very different strands of comedy while being funny in both modes.
 
2. What We Do In The Shadows (FX)
“What We Do In The Shadows” is a deeply silly show, but I love how well they’ve incorporated all this mythology into the show that serves the comedy, especially Guillermo’s whole story arc as a servant of vampires who’s secretly a descendant of Van Helsing who has an incredible gift for killing vampires. Donal Logue’s guest spot, playing himself as a vampire, was so great that it almost made me want to forgive FX for canceling “Terriers.”
 
3. South Side (HBO Max)
Bashir Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle’s sitcom about everyday life in Chicago is full of ridiculous characters, none of them more absurd than ostensible authority figures than Officer Goodnight and Alderman Gayle, and I’m amazed over and over by the show’s incredibly dense joke writing, and how every line is more unexpected than the last one.
 
4. I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (Netflix)
Many comedy stars spent a season or 2 on “Saturday Night Live” struggling to get screentime before finding their voice in movies, standup, or sitcoms. But Tim Robinson is arguably the only guy (besides Ben Stiller) who had to make a sketch show of his own to really thrive. And it’s just as well, because it’s hard to imagine most of these sketches working quite as well run through a Lorne Michaels filter, but within days of the second season premiering it felt like you could send half of my friends into hysterics at the mere mention of Dan Flashes or sloppy steaks.
 
5. Succession (HBO)
I’m a big fan of characters that are villains or terrible people but are tremendous fun to watch (Alan Rickman was kind of the king of these, rest in peace). But some people struggle with the cognitive dissonance that causes, and all of them whined that this year that “Succession” is problematic or that people are watching it wrong. But Brian Cox, Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook, Jeremy Strong, Matthew Macfadyen, Alan Ruck and Nicholas Braun do an incredible job of making these rich assholes compelling and hilarious, I could fill another paragraph with the names of supporting players and guest stars that were also incredible on the third season of “Succession.”




 












6. Yellowjackets (Showtime)
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to jump the gun at ranking “Yellowjackets” this high when only half of its first 10 episodes have aired. But it’s hard to imagine it won’t continue to be great, and has already been renewed for a second season. As weary as I am of shows about plane crashes (usually derivative of “Lost”) and shows which have two sets of actors depicting the same characters in different timelines, “Yellowjackets” manages to pull it off with a unique voice and a gripping, unpredictable story. And with Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci, we get a twofer of actresses who made great movies in the ‘90s but had been sorely overdue to land a good prestige TV vehicle.
 
7. Mare of Easttown (HBO)
The post-“Twin Peaks” genre of investigating a teen’s murder in a small town full of secrets has gotten so crowded with bland whodunit miniseries in the last decade that I wasn’t sure “Mare of Easttown” could transcend it, even with a star like Kate Winslet and a director like Craig Zobel, who made my favorite feel-bad movie of the 2010s, Compliance. But “Mare” got all the Pennsylvania accents and local details perfect, made me actually care about characters before they died, kept me guessing with the twists and intertwining tragedies, and held my interest even when some of the most climactic action happened well before the last episode.
 
8. Only Murders In The Building (Hulu)
After a few decades of film, standup, music, books and plays, creating and starring in a TV series was just about the only thing Steve Martin hadn’t done. But at 76 years old, Martin managed to make a very of-the-moment sitcom that satirizes the true crime podcast craze while managing to be a pretty clever murder mystery in its own right.
 
9. Ted Lasso (Apple TV+)
Bill Lawrence makes great television, shows where the comedy is silly and sweet but occasionally sharp and surprising, and the dramatic moments are always well earned and character-driven. But his shows like “Scrubs” and “Cougartown” were never really cool critical darlings until “Ted Lasso” became the sleeper hit of 2020. And in 2021 it felt like people caught onto the fact that “Ted Lasso” is not a cool show and there was this backlash alleging that it fell off in season 2 or was never any good to begin with. But Ted Lasso is and remains excellent television, and instead of trying to keep the fish-out-of-water premise going indefinitely, they let Jason Sudeikis’s title character and his place in the show evolve, while also making Nate Shelley, Roy Kent, Sam Obisanya, and even Jamie Tartt into far more complex characters than they were in the early episodes. Hell, they might even make Dani Rojas into a 3-dimensional character eventually.
 
10. The Beatles: Get Back (Disney+)
The boom of docuseries and non-fiction television over the last few years finally turned into a bumper crop of great shows about pop music in 2021, breathing life into even hoary subject matter like Beatles nostalgia with “Get Back” and Hulu’s “McCartney 3, 2, 1” (also worth checking out - “1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything,” “Watch The Sound,” and “This Is Pop”). There are times when John, Paul, George and Ringo embody their public personas so fully that it almost feels like you’re watching scenes written by an AI algorithm or a satirist, but it's really them, being funny and obnoxious and as brilliant as any songwriting team has ever been. 




 













11. Girls5Eva (Peacock)
In addition to all the great music docs on TV this year, there was a surprising amount of enjoyable scripted shows that were about music or featured frequent breaks into song, including “We Are Lady Parts,” “Schmigadoon!,” “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, “Central Park,” and “Queens,” which is kind of like an “Empire”-style soap opera version of “Girls5Eva,” which is about a ‘90s girl group that reunites as middle-aged women. I’ve enjoyed most of the shows Tina Fey has exec produced over the last few years, but “Girls5Eva” may be the one that best captures the loopy comic rhythms and absurdist showbiz satire of “30 Rock” the best. And between “Girls5Eva” and “A.P. Bio,” Paula Pell is the queen of Peacock’s surprisingly strong comedy slate.
 
12. Love Life (HBO Max)
I really enjoyed the first season of “Love Life,” and the way it upended romcom conventions by giving you a charming and sentimental but fairly existential warts-and-all look at one protagonist’s romantic history, with no One True Pairing at the center of everything. The second season kind of gave in and gave William Jackson Harper a love interest you rooted for from the very beginning in Jessica Williams. But all the bumps in the road before they finally get a chance at a relationship together make the whole thing work about as beautifully as a modern When Harry Met Sally.
 
13. Servant (Apple TV+)
“Servant”’s combination of suspenseful horror and lovingly filmed gourmet cuisine makes me kind of nostalgic for “Hannibal.” But it’s otherwise a fascinatingly original show where exec producer M. Night Shyamalan’s signature slow, deliberate tone, Philadelphia setting, and bizarre twists make for surprisingly good series television, with Lauren Ambrose and Nell Tiger Free giving incredible performances as two very different women who have both completely lost their grip of reality.
 
14. Made For Love (HBO Max)
Cristin Milioti, Ray Romano, and Patti Harrison gave three of my favorite performances of the year in “Made For Love,” a subtly weird near-future sci-fi story with all sorts of little unexplained things that are just slightly off, like unrelated characters named Jeff, Biff, Fiff, and Judiff. The ending kind of pissed me off, but they got renewed so hopefully they can redeem that choice in season 2.
 
15. WandaVision (Disney+)
The tragic love story of Scarlet Witch and Vision was a boring wet blanket in the Marvel movies, so I was shocked that those characters became the stars of the MCU’s best series so far, something that actually used the full range of Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany’s talents and gave Kathryn Hahn a long overdue star turn.




 















16. Invincible (Amazon)
In the age of wall-to-wall Marvel and D.C. movies as well as plentiful dark prestige TV superhero shows like “The Boys” and “Watchmen,” it should probably be hard for a show like “Invincible” to stand out, especially as an animated show. But so many incredibly fucked up things happen in “Invincible” that I’m glad it’s not a live action show, it would be a lot harder to watch some of the action scenes, but as is, I can appreciate what a totally insane story it is.
 
17. Mythic Quest (Apple TV+)
“Community” writer Megan Ganz and a couple of “It’s Always Sunny” guys created this “Silicon Valley”-style sitcom about workplace dysfunction in a video game studio. And with that pedigree, “Mythic Quest” is one of the best sitcoms in recent memory about unlikable people arguing all the time, and even the weird one-off episodes like the flashback to the origins of C.W. Longbottom’s writing career are pulled off really well.
 
18. Reservation Dogs (FX)
On one of the biggest hits on television right now, “Yellowstone,” the most prominent Native American character is played by an Asian-American actress who lied about having Cherokee heritage, and The CW’s “Trickster” was canceled this year after the show’s creator was found to have lied about her indigenous ancestry. In that context, the indigenous casts and creators of “Reservation Dogs” and “Rutherford Falls” are a symbolic victory, but they’re also a creative victory, with “Reservation Dogs” giving a weird, funny, poignant look at life in rural Oklahoma.
 
19. Midnight Mass (Netflix)
I had mixed feelings about Mike Flanagan’s first two Netflix miniseries “The Haunting of Hill House” and “The Haunting of Bly Manor.” But his follow-up was an overdue step away from sad ghost stories, and I love that it took a few episodes to really even find out what “Midnight Mass” was about, so I’m not gonna spoil that for you, just watch it. I’ve been a fan of Hamish Linklater for a long time and he gave probably the two most intense and memorable performances of his career this year in “Midnight Mass” and Amazon’s “Tell Me Your Secrets.”
 
20. The Sex Lives of College Girls (HBO Max)
The working title “College Girls” would’ve been functional yet bland, but the more sensationalized title they went with instead just highlights that while this is a show about college freshmen hooking up and falling in love and getting their hearts broken, it’s also a really charming and relatable show that at times feels more like “Freaks & Geeks” with college students than “Undeclared” ever was.



 











21. The Morning Show (Apple TV+)
Shows directly based on true stories with real names of public figures, like this year’s pretty worthless “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” increasingly feel like an artistic dead end, full of stilted expository dialogue and bad celebrity impressions. But shows like “Succession” and ‘The Morning Show,” where the real life inspirations are obvious but the writers have the freedom to flesh out fictional characters and tell different stories with them, seem to have a lot more life in them. And there’s something kind of entertainingly meta about “The Morning Show” populating its alternate universe “Today Show” with primetime NBC stares of yore like Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell, and Julianna Margulies. “The Morning Show” lost the plot a little at some points in the second season, particularly with how they ended Carell’s arc (although it was necessary, they’d done all they could do with the character), but it remained great television, an Aaron Sorkin-style behind-the-scenes show without all the compulsive Sorkinisms that have derailed his last couple series.
 
22. Billions (Showtime)
“Billions” would be higher on this list if they hadn’t only aired the 5 episodes this year of the season that was interrupted by the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. But it was great to see all the wheels that had been set in motion in the story finally come to a climax, and set up the final season that starts in a few weeks.  
 
23. Ghosts (CBS)
For five seasons on “iZombie,” Rose McIver brilliantly played a zombie who solved murders by eating the brains of victims and being able to inherit some of their personality traits and skills. And now on “Ghosts,” McIver plays a woman who once again speaks for the dead, when she becomes the only person who can see the dozen ghosts that live in her house. What a weird career niche, and what wonderfully strange shows they both are.  
 
24. The Great (Hulu)
One of my favorite things is when someone who’s been trying really hard to establish themselves as a serious dramatic actor finally decides to do a little comedy and just blossoms into a totally different kind of performer. Nicholas Hoult has been a bland leading man type for a while now, but on “The Great” he seems to be just having the time of his life with the show’s deranged ahistorical version of Emperor Peter III.
 
25. Mr. Corman (Apple TV+)
Apple TV+ launched a little over two years ago, and seems to still be in that honeymoon period where almost everything gets renewed whether anyone seems to like it or not. But now that they’ve got a pretty full lineup and an actual hit in “Ted Lasso,” they’re finally starting to cancel some shows, and “Mr. Corman” was the first thing to get the axe after just one season. And while I’m not surprised that Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s weird, ambitious little show about a musician-turned-elementary teacher, which never seemed to figure out if it was a comedy or a drama or some kind of weird philosophical series of vignettes, never found an audience, I found it unique enough to watch every episode. It’s an interesting failure, and in television most failures are anything but interesting.
 
 


 
 
 













26. Heels (Starz)
27. Why Are You Like This (Netflix)
28. Hellbound (Netflix)
29. Starstruck (HBO Max)
30. For All Mankind (Apple TV+)
31. MacGruber (Peacock)
32. Scenes From A Marriage (HBO)
33. Flatbush Misdemeanors (Showtime)
34. Modern Love (Amazon)
35. Sky Rojo (Netflix)
36. The Other Two (HBO Max)
37. Rutherford Falls (Peacock)
38. Snowfall (FX)
39. Wakefield (Showtime)
40. Squid Game (Netflix)
41. Bob's Burgers (FOX)
42. The White Lotus (HBO)
43. Superstore (NBC)
44. Dickinson (Apple TV+)
45. Wellington Paranormal (HBO Max)
46. Physical (Apple TV+)
47. The Mysterious Benedict Society (Disney+)
48. 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything (Apple TV+)
49. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
50. Calls (Apple TV+)
51. We Are Lady Parts (Peacock)
52. Everything's Gonna Be Okay (Freeform)
53. Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist (NBC)
54. Schmigadoon! (Apple TV+)
55. Work In Progress (Showtime)
56. In The Dark (The CW)
57. Doogie Kamealoha, M.D. (Disney+)
58. Brooklyn Nine-Nine (NBC)
59. Miracle Workers: Oregon Trail (TBS)
60. Special (Netflix)
61. Workin' Moms (Netflix)
62. Maya And The Three (Netflix) 
63. Search Party (HBO Max)
64. Breeders (FX)
65. A.P. Bio (Peacock)
66. Black Monday (Showtime)
67. Maid (Netflix)
68. This Way Up (Hulu)
69. Watch The Sound (Apple TV+)
70. Mr. Mayor (NBC)
71. Pose (FX)
72. Grace & Frankie (Netflix)
73. Cruel Summer (Freeform)
74. Trying (Apple TV+)
75. Generation (HBO Max)
76. Blindspotting (Starz)
77. Good Girls (NBC)
78. Stanley Tucci: Searching For Italy (CNN)
79. Valeria (Netflix)
80. American Gods (Starz)
81. The Hustler (ABC)
82. Little Birds (Starz)
83. Infinity Train (HBO Max)
84. This Is Pop (Netflix)
85. Wynonna Earp (SyFy)
86. Dead Pixels (The CW)
87. Home Economics (ABC)
88. Rick And Morty (Cartoon Network)
89. The Shrink Next Door (Apple TV+)
90. The Big Leap (FOX)
91. Insecure (HBO)
92. Ginny & Georgia (Netflix)
93. Resident Alien (SyFy)
94. Saturday Night Live (NBC)
95. Tear Along The Dotted Line (Netflix)
96. Inside Job (Netflix)
97. Kevin Can Fuck Himself (AMC)
98. You (Netflix)
99. McCartney 3, 2, 1 (Hulu)
100. Frank Of Ireland (Amazon)
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