For the latest in micro-budget workarounds, the world turns to Searching, a kidnap thriller with the gimmick that all of its events take place through a webcam or on a screen.  For his debut feature, director Aneesh Chaganty gives himself a high degree of difficulty, ensuring that his film will not exactly be the most cinematic to grace theater screens.  However, thanks to the frayed-nerve desperation of star John Cho and a propulsive script, Searching transcends its technologically-imposed limitations to tell a classic story of a father and daughter drifting apart long before the dramatic events of the film.  The germ of Chaganty’s film would work in a pre-smartphone era, though the gimmick would have to be reconsidered.

​The ‘useless men’ subgenre, best exemplified recently by Elle or Widows, gets more company with Andrew Bujalski’s Support the Girls, a film whose punny title is perfect for its setting.  Set in a ‘breastaurant’ that’s even more grimy and pathetic than the average Hooters, Support the Girls works as a line that the patrons of the central establishment would chuckle at and as a mantra for its harried but dedicated manager, beset on all sides by the tyrannies of the aforementioned useless men she comes into contact with.  Bujalski, best known as an early adopter of mumblecore indie cinema, instills far more life into his latest film than one would expect from a mumblecore devotee, and while that genre has its moments, the success of Support the Girls suggests that he might be better off making films about energetic women instead of introspective men.

As the television landscape gets more segmented and diffuse, how can any one person manage to keep up?  The answer is that they can't, as even the dwindling number of professional critics lament not being able to spend time on a series that's slow to get going.  It's not that great shows don't exist, but it's both hard to find them or to go out on a limb with something new when all of King of the Hill just got added to Hulu, for example.  Nevertheless, the best television of 2018 represents the increased diversity and cinematic daring that so many avenues for storytelling provides.  Certain shows are always going to get overlooked (I continue to fall behind on Better Call Saul and anything on Showtime or Starz is a black hole, to say nothing of oddball streaming shows like Maniac or Homecoming), but these twenty series keep the Golden Age of Television moving into the future.

More Best of 2018 at:
Best Film Scenes
Best Performances
Best Films