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
More Best of 2018 at:
Best Film Scenes
Best Performances
Best Films
 Masterchef Jr. Gordon Ramsay's lighter-side cooking competition show for the under-13 set contains all the annoying tropes of its genre. With its artificially elongated runtimes and its constant repetition of what a big deal the prize is, Masterchef Jr is the perfect show to watch while also playing a game on one's computer (Civilization VI these days). It gets on the best of the year list due to the contestants, who one suspects are heavily coached fame-bots whose parents found them a niche, but then the pressure and the stakes overwhelm them and they become sad children. Truth isn't something one associates with reality TV, but an otherwise cocky kid giving a desperate hug after his surprise elimination or the reaction of two sisters after one gets sent home while the other stays makes a person pause their quest for global domination and reach for a tissue. | 20 |
19 |  Atypical Netflix's second season dramedy about an autistic teen and his family toned down what was annoying in its first season and ramped up its strengths to great effect. Powered by Keir Gilchrist's affecting lead performance, Atypical gave over more time to his Sam and Bridgett Lundy-Paine's sister Casey while back-burnering the parental drama between Michael Rapaport and Jennifer Jason-Leigh and calibrating Sam's previously intolerable horndog friend, played by Nik Dodani. When Gilchrist's face is churning over some fresh panic or Lundy-Paine is painfully adapting to new circumstances, Atypical is at its best. |
 Silicon Valley Series MVP Zach Woods didn't get as much of a spotlight on Mike Judge's tech satire in its fifth season, but Silicon Valley made up for this omission by sharpening its view toward the corporate behemoths that drive so much of Silicon Valley's conflict, fitting for a year when everyone collectively took a second glance at the role these companies play in our lives. The show's rise-and-fall, just-in-time plotting is getting a little tired, but when Silicon Valley's Google-equivalent is bankrupting towns thanks to absurd tax incentives and bargaining with Chinese companies to plunder American intellectual property, Judge is conjuring an all-too-contemporary vision of the world and showing how morally bankrupt these companies are, contrary to their perception of themselves as benevolent disruptors. | 18 |
17 |  Dirty Money Prolific documentarian Alex Gibney turns his focus to corporate crimes in Netflix's anthology series Dirty Money, a complex and digestible tour of boardroom corruption and greed. Gibney directs the first outing about Volkswagon's lies about its diesel engines, and other accomplished directors follow with tales of drug price gouging, money laundering, and maple syrup cartels before the series culminates by actually saying something new about the grifter-in-chief, Donald Trump. Dirty Money should be required viewing for a country increasingly captured by corporate interests and the deceptive marketing they engage in to snow a distracted populace. |
 Dear White People Personal pet peeve of casting actors to play roles far beyond their believable age range aside, Dear White People's second season keeps this viewer coming back despite the obvious presence of people in their mid-30's attempting to pass themselves off as college sophomores. With the introduction of an alt-right backlash and constant reminders of the show's fake Ivy college's long history with racism, Justin Simien's ensemble drama continued to humanize characters whose real-world equivalents are dismissed as safe-space needing crybabies always taking offense. The show also got experimental with an excellent bottle episode and brought back rising star Tessa Thompson, who played the lead in the source movie, for a show-stoppping finale. When the writing is as propulsive and bracing as it is on Dear White People, one can look the other way when a college senior's gray hairs start showing. | 16 |
15 |  American Vandal Having moved on from the timeless question of 'who drew the dicks,' the little Sarah Koenig's of American Vandal went around the corner to where the fudge is made in their second season. In pursuit of the Turd Burglar, they also traveled into the high strata of the wealthy in their investigation, trading the California public school of the first season for a Washington private school. American Vandal always manages to surprise, drawing viewers in with its pitch-perfect aping of true-crime nonfiction and a filthy hook before pivoting into an honest exploration of teenage friendship and economic class. There's also a lot of poop flying through the air. |
 The Good Place Michael Schur's fourth series is also far and away his most ambitious, assembling a massive cosmology that, in its third season, has traversed the entirety of its own version of The Divine Comedy. Amidst the cartoonish torture chambers of hell and the purgatorial cabin of Mindy St. Clair exists a real exploration of what it means for a person to be good, in addition to digressions on what 'good' really means in the first place. Of the many reset buttons the series has hit over its three seasons, returning its human characters to the real world to try and get their lives right has sustained itself for much of the third season, and wherever the show goes next, there's little reason to suspect a new location won't generate successful results. | 14 |
13 |  Killing Eve Phoebe Waller-Bridge's incredibly stylish spy thriller Killing Eve forces its plot forward much faster than a practiced viewer of prestige drama would think, but its true surprise is Jody Comer as the assassin Villanelle. The other half of the cat-and-mouse game at Killing Eve's core, Sandra Oh's intelligence analyst, is no shirker, but Comer's deliriously psychotic killer is irresistible, a joyous celebration of violence and death-dealing with enough mysterious charisma to retain some shred of audience sympathy. No look has been as chilling as the one she throws a man from across a nightclub floor, a warm smile that anoints her as an angel of death who loves her work. |
 GLOW Netflix's period drama about female wrestlers got both sillier and more serious in its second season, devoting an episode to an actual recreation of a campy GLOW outing while also showcasing contemporary, evergreen issues like sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace. Betty Gilpin's protrayal of her newly-single mom and star wrestler gave the actress what should be a star-making vehicle as she went to dark places over the course of the season. The series hasn't quite figured out how to handle its ensemble cast, but with Gilpin and co-lead Alison Brie, the show has a clear grasp of what's working best. | 12 |
11 |  Atlanta Donald Glover's auteurist, surreal exploration of a particular corner of black America took a page out of Jordan Peele's book and framed the black experience in horror movie terms. Glover and mainstay director Hiro Murai turned over several episodes, especially the deeply strange Teddy Perkins, to rising tension, with the sharp left turns that the series previously used for absurdism now given over to fear. Atlanta has always partly been about the way that stakes can instantaneously escalate for African-Americans, and this subtext became chilling text in the second season. |
 Bob's Burgers Now in its ninth season, TV's most pleasant show has demonstrated no signs of weakening. Grounded by the Belcher family's omnipresent love for each other, Bob's Burgers continuously leaves the viewer with a smile on their face as the credits roll. The series' latest masterstroke involves the incorporation of power ballads into the oft-musical goings-on, a melding that makes perfect sense due to the series' earnestness. Louise and Bob belting out a Meat Loaf scorcher or Gene singing a Heart song to his new best friend is can't-miss television. | 10 |
9 |  The Handmaid's Tale A larger series order for a show that has exhausted all of its source material doesn't seem like the best path forward for 2017's best show. A female-centric series run by a man is another potential nail in the coffin, but when The Handmaid's Tale is at its best, few shows are as powerful. In conjunction with a year spent reading historical nonfiction about resistance to or complicity with tyranny, the series was pitched squarely at this viewer as the characters stuck in Gilead dealt with the same things. On the resistance front, small gestures rattled to the core, while those complicit in the series' theo-fascist regime begin to show earned cracks in their previously solid facades. A little wheel-spinning in the season's beginning and a head-scratcher cliffhanger can be excused when something as simple as introducing oneself is so, so powerful. |
 Big Mouth The filthy, obscene, genuine, and heartfelt animated comedy Big Mouth could easily have rested on its magnificent laurels and essentially repeated itself in its second season. Anyone who's heard Maya Rudolph's Hormone Monstress say 'bubble bath' would've welcomed this, but Nick Kroll and his fellow creators instead expanded the universe and deepened the emotions of the characters. With the former, the introduction of the nefarious Shame Wizard afflicted everyone with his Cockney whispers, and in the latter, adolescent depression and toe-curling embarrassment were consistent partners with the show's rapid-fire stream of gags. Big Mouth is a show that loves its characters so much that prompting the viewer to do the same is the most natural thing in the world. | 8 |
7 |  Bojack Horseman Netflix's other brilliant animated comedy has less love for its characters than hope, in that the show witnesses their terrible actions and hopes that they'll learn from their mistakes. After five seasons that have steadily improved year after year, that hope is still present even as the possibility of actual self-betterment is getting smaller and smaller. The show business satire and vehicle for animal-based puns puts its protagonist in the world of prestige drama, and creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg is skillfully comparing the difficult-man trope of those kinds of shows with the off-camera behavior of the difficult horseman that his show is centered around. Though Bojack Horseman is deeply silly in its subplots, it's also deadly serious about how public figures are viewed and how much leeway their fans give to them. |
 Barry Anti-hero shows have been around so long now that animated comedies can spend whole seasons satirizing and lacerating them, but Barry demonstrates why the genre has had such legs. Bill Hader's titular character joins such camouflaged monsters as Walter White and Vic Mackey, a man who can seamlessly blend into regular society and not be suspected of the malevolence he enacts when no one is looking. Another bleak and black show masquerading as a comedy, Barry finds its laughs in its lead trying out a second career as an actor, but it's at its strongest in Barry's true calling, an assassin for hire. Beneath the high-concept interior is a bleak inversion of the Disney canard about following your dreams. What if the thing you're best at makes you miserable and the thing you want to do is beyond the reach of your capabilities? | 6 |
5 |  Adventure Time The long-running Cartoon Network series only aired a handful of its almost 300 episodes in 2018, but within those few, Adventure Time delivered an epic series finale featuring pitched battles, chaos gods, and glimpses into the far off future. Amidst the spectacle, the oft-musical series gave off the year's most tear-jerking sequence, as B-Mo, a conscious video-game system, sang a song so affecting that it credibly thwarted the most powerful being in the universe. B-Mo's exclamation that his art is a weapon is a true one, and the series that spawned him goes down as one of the great ones of the era, animated or otherwise. |
 Succession The year's most addictive drama works as an outgrowth of Adam McKay's The Big Short. Whereas that Oscar-winning film looked at outsiders in the financial world, Succession focuses on the ultimate insiders within the world of media conglomerates. The family at the center, the Roy's, are a mishmash of the Murdocks, the Redstones, and the Trumps, scheming monsters who wield NDA's as excuses to act badly. Run by Jesse Armstrong, a disciple of master satirist Armando Ianucci, Succession puts the Roys through a gauntlet of their own making as they cover up crimes, lose track of their capabilities, and contaminate everyone they come in contact with. They desperately cling to their money despite the obvious fact that it's poisoned them and turned them into tyrants, drug addicts, and unfeeling sharks, none of which precludes them and their ilk from being eminently watchable. | 4 |
3 |  End of the Fucking World As other series bloat past the point of narrative necessity, The End of the Fucking World got all it needed to say in at about the length of a big summer blockbuster. Losing nothing in its brevity, this teen road trip black comedy places two misfits who thinks they know exactly who they are in a world that's all too willing to prove them wrong. Alex Lawther's James fancies himself a budding psychopath and Jessica Barden's Alyssa, desperate to get away from her suffocating home life, is hungry for an adventure. The former finds actual psychopaths in contrast to his teenaged imaginings while the latter gets more excitement than she anticipated. Together, they work marvelously as a stunted pair of mismatched friends, with their inner monologues giving heartfelt voice to what their actual voices can't bring themselves to say. |
 Sharp Objects HBO, master of the miniseries, teams up with Big Little Lies' Jean-Marc Vallee, Marti Noxon, Gillian Flynn, and Amy Adams for the summer's brilliant concoction of vodka, ivory, and trauma. A Gothic mystery and a sweaty psychodrama, Sharp Objects effortlessly disoriented the viewer with woozy cuts and half-remembered sense memories, putting them in the same head space as Adams' damaged protagonist upon her return to her Ozark hometown and the source of her greatest damage. Adams' barely contained panic and neediness and disgust was amazing to watch, as was Patricia Clarkson's imperiousness as her mother and the town matriarch, and Vallee transforms their pas de deux into the year's most cinematic experience on the small screen. | 2 |
1 |  The Americans The end of The Americans signifies perhaps the last great series of the Golden Age of Television, or at least the phase that was dominated by AMC and FX, the latter of which aired The Americans' six seasons of cumulative, cancerous compromise amongst its cast of 1980's spymasters on both sides of the Cold War. A series that has gotten deeper and more tragic with each episode, the final season is the one that wholly converted this viewer into singing the show's praises as forcefully as Bono belts out the crescendo of With or Without You, a song that played over one of an indelible series' most indelible moments. The constant heaviness of The Americans can easily push viewers away, but when a series is as in tune with who its characters are as this one, the mental agony hurts so good. |
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