So many shows, so little time. Sorry Shogun and The Penguin and Da Bear. I’m very movie focused in my day-to-day media consumption so unless a show has an insane premise or more buzz than the beehive that killed Macaulay Culkin in My Girl, it’s gonna end up in the “To Do” pile.

I want to note that I did start The Penguin and The Sympathizer but I don’t have that binge me in anymore. Purge? Yes. Binge? No. Here are all the shows that escaped the purge.

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Well, congratulations Hollywood, you did it. You’ve fractured the landscape of television so completely that if you’re not watching something in the same room as someone else, no one has any idea what the hell you’re talking about anymore. And it’s not just about community: TV criticism has all but been killed off and with so many streaming services now (and the crackdown on password sharing), it’s too expensive to even try to keep up with everything anyway, so the sense of urgency when it comes to shows is just gone. It’s so bad, we decided to do top fives this year instead of 10 because this has become a futile and stupid gesture. And the saddest thing of all? While this is all happening, creatives are still making a lot of good TV, arguably too much good stuff!

I have got a long list of shows that are supposed to be great that I just never made time for, shows like Bad Monkey, The Diplomat, Jerrod Carmichael: Reality Show, Shrinking, Silo, and Slow Horses. And another list of franchise shows I definitely, actively want to watch like The Acolyte, Fallout, House of the Dragon, Penguin, Rings of Power, and Skeleton Crew. But fuck it, they just never happened for me in 2024 because I was too busy watching One Piece at the time or I wasn’t subscribed to the right streaming service at the time or I was still too burnt out on meaningless Star Wars prequel movies stretched out into miniseries.

Can we come back from this? I sure hope so. I still haven’t given up on my watchlist. Maybe we just need everyone in America/the world to start a blog and do annual top tens? Or suddenly all try to care about the Emmys at least as much as we care about the Oscars? Maybe putting some effort into thinking about the media we consumed all year instead of just letting an algorithm tell us (or an AI in Spotify Wrapped’s case) could be good for us all? In the meantime, let’s at least try to keep in mind that while the era of peak TV might be over, that doesn’t mean the medium has been reduced to just reality junk and mindless reruns.

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There was plenty of good TV to be watched in 2023, but compiling my list did not make me all that excited for the future of the medium. Mostly because basically all of the shows appearing on this list are shows that I’d already been watching, and in fact, a lot of them were shows airing their final seasons. Now, it’s certainly on me to find new shows to watch, but this year, it just didn’t seem like there were as many new buzzworthy shows that everyone was talking about.

That, of course, could be for a few reasons, the most obvious one being that there was a writer’s strike this year that kept shows both new and old from airing seasons before the year’s end. Also, it seems like a lot of streaming services in the last year or two have indicated an emphasis on profits and producing less scripted entertainment, which has foreshadowed the possible end of “peak TV”. Which, honestly, felt like it was going to end sometime soon anyway. The amount of daring, off-beat shows that we got the past decade or so just never quite seemed sustainable, even though it was fun while it lasted. Well, with that somewhat depressing preamble out of the way, here are the shows that made 2023 memorable while it lasted. Continue reading →

What a wealth of quality shows last year! Though if you’ve been watching any of the recent awards shows, the only four shows that exist are; Succession, The Bear, Beef, and The Crown. Admittedly, those are tough ones to beat, even for coveted spots on this list by yours truly.

My two big regrets this year are that I didn’t budget enough time for Beef and Fargo. Two shows that I know I would have liked and would have landed on this list. Yet, I somehow managed to watch all of the The Idol. Oh man, let’s try to pretend that one was a bad dream. Anyways, here’s my list…

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Every year we do three weeks of top 10 posts: first albums, then TV shows, and finally movies. We do them in exactly that order because that roughly reflects how late into the year each of those three industries are putting out noteworthy new releases – it’s a survival strategy that gives us the most time possible to consume interesting media. But in 2023 we had a big strike that fucked things up, and it made it even harder to deny an uncomfortable truth. So this year I’m trying something: dropping the word “television” from this post’s title.

I think maybe we’ve outgrown the term “TV show,” since shows (and movies) are now made for online streaming platforms and definitely not over-the-air broadcast television. Maybe “series” would be better than “shows” on its own? “Series” maybe more evocatively hits on the most meaningful distinction between the stuff on this week’s list and next week’s: duration. Seasons have gotten shorter and binge releases are common, so how do we differentiate a season from an eight-hour film? This is a bit of a stretch, but are shows and movies really that much more different now than LPs and EPs are? Are there a generation of kids right now who don’t really differentiate between TikTok, YouTube, shows, and movies? It’s all just “content” we watch, right? Does Killers of the Flower Moon (now streaming on Apple TV+) not have an intermission because that would bring it too close to being a miniseries?

TV may be dead but at least I got to hear my friends complain about MILF Manor and The Idol.

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In 2022, so many shows that I cared about came back with new seasons that it felt overwhelming. This resulted in some resignation toward the fact that I just wouldn’t get around to watching all of them, so I didn’t really try as hard as I could have. That said, I still managed (barely) to watch enough shows from last year that I felt good enough about including on a top ten list. However, I can’t help but feel that my list is especially incomplete because I never got around to watching the final season of Better Call Saul — both Sean and John’s number 1 show this year — despite having caught up with the first five seasons. Unfortunately, AMC just didn’t make it that easy to watch this final season if you don’t have a cable subscription and I’m guessing it won’t be on Netflix for another few months. Oh well. Continue reading →