When people ask me what I think the best TV of the year is, often what they’re really asking for is a recommendation. So rather than ranking or listing, I organized the best of the year’s TV so far in terms of which series struck me as especially entertaining or thoughtful, the ones I like to suggest to others who are looking to get into something worth their time. Here are 11 things I watched that I’d suggest to anyone looking for a new show to capture their attention.
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Hacks
Anchored by a decadent performance from Jean Smart, Hacks—from Broad City alums Paul W. Downs, Lucia Aniello, and Jen Statsky—is one of my favorite new shows to guide viewers toward. The 10-episode comedy scratches a nasty itch, digging into the fraught but hilarious generation gap between Deborah, a boomer so financially comfortable she’s practically landed gentry, and Ava (Hannah Einbinder), a precarious, dysfunctional Gen Z comedy writer who’s been canceled for getting too spicy about a conservative politician on main.
Behind the character drama the show has a stark, clear-eyed vision of the gender dynamics of comedy, the financial disparities in the entertainment industry, and how hard it is to cultivate intimacy with any human being unless you share the same sense of humor. The first season swanned to a serene, heartrending close, but left plenty of dangling threads for the show to unravel in its already-greenlighted second season.
Mare of Easttown
“Is Jean Smart HBO’s artist in residence?” asked a Twitter wag shortly before Hacks debuted. Because in addition to starring in Hacks and transforming Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen into something with grande dame style, Smart is also a fixture of HBO’s big Sunday offering this spring: Mare of Easttown. On Mare, Smart absently mothers Kate Winslet’s curmudgeonly detective, former basketball star, and literal grandma, Mare Sheehan. Winslet is always charming, but immersed in a Delco accent as a community linchpin unraveling a knot of deception and exploitation, she’s bewitching.
Perhaps Mare’s story zigzags and twists a little more than it needs to, but it makes for a satisfying journey—and being immersed in the community of Easttown offers the viewer a chance to absorb the accents, the cozy interiors, and the aching sense of loss echoing through this little Pennsylvania enclave. As Mare tries to figure out what happened to a few lost girls, we’re faced with the despair and dead-end hopelessness of Easttown, which loses so many young men, in particular, to addiction, violence, or a combination of both, while the women around them toil to keep their families afloat.
Mare is a detective story, which is to say it’s not more than that. But in the best mysteries, the investigator is searching for more than just clues to a specific crime. Mare is investigating the place she’s called home for her whole life, now being overturned and scrutinized as she tries to find the missing puzzle pieces. Mare’s courage in confronting the demons of this town offers up a particularly satisfying kind of catharsis, where women who are paying attention can save each other from the worst sort of bogeyman.
Search Party
Reality is not quite as unstable as it seemed when the show debuted in 2016. But as Search Party reminds us, it is still very weird to be alive right now. Season four of the millennial murder mystery mired Dory (Alia Shawkat) in one of its most disturbing plot twists, subjecting her to the deranged ministrations of a character best known as the Twink (Cole Escola). He locks her in a makeshift prison for several weeks, a hellscape tailor-made to tweak Dory’s worst memories. The show typically doesn’t get so sordid, even when it’s piling up dead bodies—but the genius of Escola’s performance is how it manages to make the character’s psychotic fantasies very scary and also deeply, stupidly funny.
Indeed, Search Party is packed with some of the best performances on television, from John Early’s and Meredith Hagner’s clout-obsessed characters to John Reynolds’s quieter torment as the only person on Search Party with a conscience. Shawkat is always a bit enigmatic at the center of the show, and this season is no exception, ending with a feint that has several versions of Dory facing themselves and one another. Somehow the series strikes a tone both playful and upsetting, because few other shows are so committed to the contemporary seduction of magical thinking—and just how far it can go when it’s easier to commit to artifice than the inconstant imperfection of everyday life. It’s a weird and difficult viewing experience at times, but made borderline brilliant by how Escola and guest stars Griffin Dunne, Susan Sarandon, and Ann Dowd play off of the leads.
Dickinson and Made for Love
While I’m on the topic of millennials and our generational angst, two other shows come to mind: the Apple TV+ original Dickinson and HBO Max’s Made for Love, both headed by female protagonists who are stuck in their circumstances. Instead of the women trying to escape, the shows imagine them trying to live more deeply. Dickinson follows poet Emily Dickinson’s inner, magical life, mostly concluding that it was pretty weird to be alive in the years before the Civil War too—especially when you’re a repressed lesbian who has briefly lost their body, after writing a poem that asked, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” In an imaginative second season, Emily (Hailee Steinfeld) struggles to come to terms with how her beloved Sue (Ella Hunt) has changed as she considers publication in the new local newspaper. In the season’s best episode, she wanders through her neighborhood invisible—walking into Sue’s house to discover an illicit affair, benignly spying on her family, and discovering a dance party held by Amherst’s free Blacks, a riotous room free of restraint compared to the rest of her world. (The addition of Ayo Edebiri to the cast, and the writers room, was a boon.)
Made for Love, developed from Alissa Nutting’s novel, imagines a not-too-distant future where a tech billionaire’s (Billy Magnussen) intense inability to tolerate intimacy entraps the charming but desperate object of his affection, Hazel (Cristin Milioti), in an ultra-surveilled gilded cage. She runs away and takes refuge with her dad (Ray Romano), who has recently shacked up with an extremely lifelike sex doll named Diane. Hijinks ensue, including fractured father-daughter affections, Patti Harrison as Hazel’s childhood friend Bangles, several scientists running after their fleeing intellectual property, and the recurring question of why an ultra-intelligent dolphin is in the swimming pool. The story is a little less satisfying than the nuances of this *Black Mirror–*inflected sci-fi world, but the huge, depressing twist at the end of season one doesn’t have to be the end of Hazel’s story, if HBO Max chooses to renew the show.
Invincible
Beneath the deceptively simple animation of Invincible is a blisteringly cynical superhero story that at its core has one of the most brilliantly cast and emotionally tortured family dynamics on television: Steven Yeun as teen superhero Invincible, Sandra Oh as his non-superhero mom, and J.K. Simmons as Omni-Man, his dad—the strongest being on Earth, and a clear Superman analogue—who has decided to crush everything that stands between him and total worldwide domination. The story doles out revelations piecemeal until the last few episodes of the first season, when everything slams into the central triad like a ton of bricks.
So often superhero stories do not ask difficult but obvious questions, such as: How does this plot twist make this character’s long-suffering wife feel? Invincible not only asks them, but sometimes pursues the answers beyond what feels comfortable—excavating the romantic relationship between the parents and letting Yeun’s teenage boy howl all of his parental rage. We’ve seen Simmons do superhero work before, but hearing Yeun and Oh go after the operatic range of heroism and villainy is astounding, and Invincible brings both characters to the brink. Additional talent includes voice-performance fixture Jason Mantzoukas, comedy darling Gillian Jacobs, and Atlanta breakout star Zazie Beetz.
For All Mankind
In the era of prestige television, there is always someone pushing a show at you with the irritating caveat that it improves in the second season, as if you have between six and 14 hours to devote to a show that might become better. Unfortunately, I am here to repeat the refrain that I hate—which is that if you have the time to sink into Apple TV+’s For All Mankind, a high-strung, aviation-obsessed space opera that imagines the space race if the Russians landed on the moon first, the second season yields vast rewards.
For All Mankind comes from Battlestar Galactica’s Ronald D. Moore. After a big time-jump at the end of the first season, it refracts the touchstones of American culture in the ’80s through an alternate history that launches Teddy Kennedy into the White House and makes John Lennon a commentator on the crisis in the Panama Canal. And while yes, it’s uncomfortable to exist in the Reagan administration for so many episodes, what For All Mankind really excels at is examining how our workplace relationships can end up being the most flexible and long-running connections throughout our lives. In its depiction of evolving gender norms and an industry inventing itself from the ground up, it hearkens back to cult favorite Halt and Catch Fire. Cast standouts include Krys Marshall as Dani, the first Black astronaut in space, trying to navigate her public image throughout the second season, and Wrenn Schmidt as Margo, the bullheaded, brilliant, and often blinkered head of flight at Houston’s mission control.
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Pretend It’s a City
Early in the year, while still stuck on the sofa due to the pandemic, it was a treat to tune in and out of Fran Lebowitz and Martin Scorsese’s collaboration, Pretend It’s a City: a showcase of iconoclast Lebowitz saying something acerbic and witty and Scorsese laughing uproariously in response. The conversational show celebrates the delights of city living with a flair of nostalgia about how things used to be in the Big Apple, punctuated by Lebowitz’s dry, contrarian banter. She’s always keyed toward making as many people laugh as possible, even and especially when they don’t agree with her. The Lebowitz touch is making her odd, finicky austerity into a certain kind of charm.
Ziwe
You have to watch at least some of Pretend It’s a City to understand the Franaissance of 2021—because then you can watch the premiere episode of Ziwe. Each installment revolves around the titular comedian—who hosted a show called Baited on YouTube and Instagram Live until Showtime came calling—asking barbed questions to celebrity guests. Everything is glittery and bubblegum pink, including the mononymous host herself—an aesthetic choice that cloaks, and indeed heightens, how thoroughly Ziwe dispenses with talk show norms and celebrity ingratiation.
On the show Lebowitz says that Ziwe’s booker relentlessly called Lebowitz until she agreed to be a guest. Somehow Ziwe also booked mayoral candidate Andrew Yang, whose polished political bons mots were no match for Ziwe’s no-nonsense questions. (“What are your favorite racial stereotypes?”) Just a few days ago, she also upset Megyn Kelly. Ziwe’s unsettling style is discomfiting but also very satisfying, like vigorously attacking cobwebs in a forgotten corner of the attic.
Framing Britney Spears and The Crime of the Century
Television has become such a popular medium for delivering long-form journalism that the feeling of a slowly dawning sense of dread has become a regular addition to my viewing diet. That’s the feeling that accompanied Framing Britney Spears, an episode of FX’s The New York Times Presents, and The Crime of the Century, a two-part docuseries on HBO. The two documentaries investigate very different turn-of-the-millennium products—a pop star and an opioid—but they both revisit a familiar era, leaving the viewer astonished about what happened in plain sight.
Framing Britney Spears shifted the conversation around Britney Spears’s conservatorship, introducing fans to the odd legal structure that keeps Spears producing music that appears to largely profit her father, Jamie, and prompting even her ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake to apologize and reexamine his behavior. The Crime of the Century delves into the secrets of the billionaire Sackler family, who profited off of hooking Americans on to OxyContin through their company Purdue Pharma. Alex Gibney’s documentary asks not just what the Sacklers knew and when, but also how governmental bodies were implicated in keeping OxyContin available in the population. Both leave off with the disturbing note that the problems they’ve elucidated haven’t been resolved, only somewhat better understood; Spears is still in a legal conservatorship, and America is still gripped by an addiction crisis. As America leaves the pandemic behind us, it seems like we are all being faced with the same question: Now what?
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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated that the Sacklers were responsible for millions of Americans becoming addicted to OxyContin. Though millions have suffered addictions to opioids, it is unclear how many are due to OxyContin.
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