NYT what to watch
In times like these, I bet you’d love a list of great TV shows that will help you escape the troubles of the world. My apologies. I didn’t plan it this way, but looking over my favorites below, the subject matter includes class conflict, civil war, the threat to democracy and multiple pandemics.
And yet! Watching TV in 2021 was not at all a bummer for me. Because what I also find on this list is ingenuity, humor, defiance, empathy and hope: the things that we need, more than distraction, to get through tough times, and the things that art exists to give us.
Any 10-best TV list these days requires some caveats. Are there really 10? I may have engaged in creative math. Are they really the best? They are the best I’ve seen; nobody, not even a professional, can see everything these days. Are these all really TV shows? What isn’t these days? Most of my picks this year appeared not on TV channels (ask your grandparents what those are) but on streaming services. But however it gets to your screen, the important thing is that it gets in your eyeballs. Here, in alphabetical order, are the best things I put in mine.
‘Bo Burnham: Inside’ (Netflix)
What does the internet sound like? What does it feel like? Only a handful of artworks have tried to describe it: among them, in 2021, Patricia Lockwood’s novel “No One Is Talking About This” and “Inside,” the comedic-musical-video equivalent of what another age might have called a concept album. In this masterpiece by the director-comic-YouTuber Burnham, the internet sounds like a carnival barker (“Could I interest you in everything all of the time?”) and feels like a nervous breakdown. Combining personal angst with the shut-in experience of the pandemic and the sensory overload of digital life, Burnham captures the particular madness of social-media existence, in which the voices outside your head become the voices inside it. (Streaming on Netflix.)
‘Dickinson’ (Apple TV+)
Apple TV+ gave us a world-class comedy about empathy and the importance of living by one’s passions. It also gave us “Ted Lasso.” The streaming platform’s best series depicted Emily Dickinson (Hailee Steinfeld) not as a literary recluse but as an ambitious, lyric-drunk artist hungry to live and work. The creator, Alena Smith, gave the series an absurdist sensibility that nonetheless took its literary and Civil War-era history seriously. It burned short and bright, premiering both its second and its third and final seasons in 2021. But at least, as opposed to its subject’s work, we were able to appreciate “Dickinson” in its own time. (Streaming on Apple TV+.)
‘The Good Fight’ (Paramount+)
What could the essential drama of the Trump era possibly have to say after the Trump presidency? Plenty. Season 5 of this legal series was a surreal ride haunted by the George Floyd protests and the Jan. 6 attack on democracy. Its sneakiest gambit was a story arc about Hal Wackner (Mandy Patinkin), an amateur judge who set up a court in a Chicago copy shop. A quirky running joke became a chilling lesson in how the law is only as strong as people’s willingness to believe in it — a fitting punchline for an age when clownery can turn deadly serious. (Streaming on Paramount+.)
‘Hacks’ (HBO Max) and ‘Reservation Dogs’ (FX on Hulu)
The year’s two best new comedy series were love stories disguised as hate stories. In “Hacks,” a late-career Vegas comic (an incendiary Jean Smart) and her millennial apprentice (Hannah Einbinder) form an insult-comedy partnership that blooms into respect. Likewise, the four central teens of “Dogs” tell you immediately why they can’t wait to escape their Oklahoma reservation town. But what follows over the first season, from Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi (“What We Do in the Shadows”), is the kind of deep character comedy, rich detail and community portraiture that can only come from loving the thing you want to leave. (Streaming on HBO Max and Hulu.)
‘It’s a Sin’ (HBO Max)
Russell T Davies’s requiem for the lives lost to AIDS in the 1980s was as heartbreaking and furious as you might have expected. What you might not have expected was how vibrant, joyous and even funny it was — a story of wasteful death that derived its power from being full of life. (Streaming on HBO Max.)
‘Philly D.A.’ (PBS)
The documentary filmmakers Ted Passon and Yoni Brook captured no trial scenes because of restrictions on shooting, but the sweeping story of efforts to reform the Philadelphia district attorney’s office involved themes of policing, security and equality far beyond the courthouse walls. District Attorney Larry Krasner (who won re-election in November) made for a prickly, passionate protagonist, but this was really the story of a city and a country. (Streaming on PBS.org and Topic.)
‘Station Eleven’ (HBO Max)
This limited series, which arrives Dec. 16, is about a global pandemic that wipes out most of humanity, and I am assuming I’ve scared off at least half of you already. But hear me out: The adaptation by Patrick Somerville (“The Leftovers”) of the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel is moving, eccentrically funny and even hopeful. Following a Shakespeare troupe that travels the Midwest 20 years after doomsday, it invites us to ask what we want to survive us after we’ve done the old mortal-coil shuffle. (Streaming on HBO Max beginning Dec. 16.)
‘Succession’ (HBO)
The zero-sum corporate squid game that is “Succession” became a civil war in Season 3, as the Roys met the enemy and it was them. Among a uniformly great cast, Jeremy Strong had a stellar season as the renegade scion Kendall, trying to reinvent himself as a gold-plated-whistleblower but crashing up against his weakness and self-doubt. (Caveat: I included this show without having seen the Dec. 12 season finale. But having to make a risky decision with limited information is about the most “Succession” thing a TV list-maker could do.) (Streaming on HBO Max.)
‘The Underground Railroad’ (Amazon Prime Video)
Colson Whitehead’s tour de force novel was an escape-from-slavery story with a twist: The “railroad” carrying people to slavery was physical and real. In his transfixing limited-series adaptation, the director Barry Jenkins did not just create the railroad. He built a series of palaces. Stunningly composed, with a score and sound design that made its world tactile, “The Underground Railroad” was a tour of an alternative America that distorted reality in order to render it more truly. (Streaming on Amazon.)
‘The White Lotus’ (HBO)
Acerbic and generous, vicious and transcendent, Mike White’s story of elites on holiday in Hawaii was the summer’s best getaway. It was cuttingly funny about the privileged and their demands — from the help, from one another and from the universe. Its nuanced dialogue and acute performances (Jennifer Coolidge and Murray Bartlett were two standouts among many) made for a package tour of class conflict and self-discovery, all for one high, high price. (Streaming on HBO Max.)
Best International Shows of 2021
International television got a big boost in the American consciousness this year with the commotion surrounding “Squid Game,” Netflix’s cynical South Korean thriller. But shows from outside the United States have been a defining, even dominating part of the TV and streaming mix for more than a decade now; they just have to be found. Here, in alphabetical order, are the 10 that moved me most among the new shows and seasons that had their U.S. premieres in 2021.
‘Call My Agent!’ (Netflix)
A comic soap opera, a melodramatic comedy — the elements are in perfect balance in this French series about a tempestuous Paris talent agency that is always on the brink of implosion. The comedy comes in because everyone is always working an angle; the sentiment because at the end of the day, the agents at ASK really do care about their clients and one another. The fourth season maintained the show’s method of simultaneously satirizing and affectionately fetishizing those A-list clients, many of whom appear as themselves — Sigourney Weaver asking an agent to slice her breakfast pastry, Sandrine Kiberlain negotiating a midlife crisis by embarking on a career in stand-up. The headwinds for ASK were worse than ever, though, and melodrama had the upper hand; the season ended with what was clearly meant to be a series finale. Now that a fifth season (and a film) have been ordered, the writers eventually will have to come up with another way to end the series. (Streaming on Netflix.)
‘C.B. Strike: Lethal White’ (HBO)
The BBC’s adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike mystery novels reached a new peak with the fourth series, a story of blackmail and familial depravity. Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger work wonderfully together as Cormoran, a moody London detective, and his former secretary turned partner, Robin Ellacott, both of whom carry burdens of post-traumatic stress — each must always be aware of when the other is in danger, physically and emotionally. In the course of “Lethal White,” Robin marries and then pulls away from the rigid Matthew (Kerr Logan), leaving the field open for more barely suppressed, furiously awkward sexual tension between her and Cormoran. The next installment, “Troubled Blood,” is scheduled to begin filming in early 2022. (Streaming on HBO Max.)
‘D.P.’ (Netflix)
The popular Korean-drama star Jung Hae-in goes decidedly unromantic as a soldier assigned to a unit that tracks down and brings back deserters, a task for which the recruit’s unflagging sense of duty makes him perfect and his compassion makes him perfectly unsuited. The show veers between slapstick action and overflowing sentiment, like many South Korea dramas, and the pursuit and apprehension of the deserters involves a lot of punching, slapping, tackling, tasing and hitting with baseball bats. But the show is also a sensitive and forthright examination of how violent, sadistic bullying and rigid hierarchies drive young South Korean men to go to almost any length to escape their compulsory military service. (Streaming on Netflix.)
‘Forbrydelsen’ (Topic)
Yes, this old-school, supremely satisfying mystery series ended its run in Denmark nine years ago, after spawning an American remake called “The Killing.” (The Danish title translates as “The Crime.”) But when Topic made all three seasons available this year, it was the first time that the show that put Nordic noir over the top had streamed or been broadcast in the United States. Now you can finally catch up with Sofie Grabol’s commanding performance as the emotionally distant, doggedly persistent detective (and, during one bad patch, border guard) Sarah Lund. (Streaming on Topic.)
Gomorrah’ (HBO Max)
It was a good year, in at least one way, for fans of this mostly riveting Neapolitan gangster saga: After an agonizingly long gap because of rights issues, the third and fourth seasons arrived in the United States within months of each other. Season 3 ended badly, both for one of the major characters and for viewers disappointed by the predictability and hokiness of the season’s finale. But Season 4 got right back on track, with the bonus of an expanded role — and a love interest! — for Cristiana Dell’Anna’s compelling character, the accidental drug dealer Patrizia. (Streaming on HBO Max.)
‘In My Skin’ (Hulu)
Gabrielle Creevy pulls off a difficult trick in this kitchen-sink coming-of-age story set in Wales: She keeps us on the side of a teenager, named Bethan, whose defenses are so forbidding and so constant that she can be very hard to put up with. The second and final season of Kayleigh Llewellyn’s BBC Three dramedy took the smart, sarcastic, self-hating Bethan through high school, and through another harrowing series of ups and downs with her bipolar mother, played with heartbreaking grace by Jo Hartley. (Streaming on Hulu.)
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