So much great TV, not enough time

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This article was published 20/12/2019 (1834 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Remember that old Bruce Springsteen tune, 57 Channels (And Nothing On)?

Suffice it to say the Boss’s ditty hasn’t aged well. These days, there’s so much on — and so much of it worth watching — that it’s impossible to see every recommended show, every acclaimed miniseries.

We gave it the old college try here at the Free Press, however, in order to cobble together a list of the finest television 2019 had to offer. In order to whittle it down to 10 selections, the following list (in no particular order) largely avoids shows that are demonstrating continued excellence post-debut season — The Good Fight, The Good Place, Big Mouth, Glow, Derry Girls, Better Call Saul, Better Things, and countless others — but gives nods to three that exited with a bang this year.

Note: the addition of Disney Plus proved too much for this couch potato. With subscriptions to Netflix, Prime, Acorn and Crave, not to mention a cable package, adding yet another streaming service seemed… excessive. Therefore, the charms of The Mandalorian and its beloved and much-memed Baby Yoda remain unsampled.

Unbelievable

Netflix

Tremendously upsetting and yet undeniably bingeable, this eight-episode miniseries is a particularly timely work. Screenwriters Susannah Grant, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman adapted a news article about real-life rape cases in Washington and Colorado from 2008-11 into a compassionate and compelling drama.

As rape victim Marie — traumatized by her attack and then bullied by police into recanting her story — Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart) has a heartbreaking vulnerability, while the always-wonderful Toni Collette and Merritt Wever click as detectives investigating a possible serial rapist, complicated by jurisdictional silos.

The idea that distress and violence can affect a victim’s later recall, now widely accepted as fact, can be hard to grasp. Unbelievable’s greatest achievement is putting a human face on that issue and showing exactly how it happens.

Chernobyl

HBO/Crave

This brilliant but harrowing five-episode miniseries is based on the true events of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown of 1986 — still the worst nuclear disaster in history. With a cast of British actors playing the Soviet scientists, plant workers, politicians and miners (no Russian accents, no subtitles — weird, but it works), this grimly fascinating work reveals how bureaucracy and corruption paired with mismanagement and incompetence to create a perfect storm that killed untold numbers.

With perfect period detail, creator Craig Mazin (yes, the writer of the Hangover movies) takes us into the aftermath of the reactor explosion, and the tension created by hindsight is almost unbearable; we also realize how little we actually know about how it happened. Jared Harris and Stellan Skarsgard are excellent as chemist Valery Legasov and politician Boris Shcherbina, respectively, while EastEnders star Alex Ferns, as “naked miner” Glukhov, became a bizarre fan favourite.

Catastrophe

Prime

The last season of this BBC sitcom brought to a close one of the most caustically funny shows ever made, with an unforgettable final episode that says “Hold my beer” to The Sopranos’ weird blackout finale.

Over the course of Catastrophe’s four seasons, creators/stars Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney portrayed a couple whose somewhat unlikely romance was real, bitter and hilarious. Their frequent fights were painful to witness — untake-backable insults hurled, rampant pettiness on display — but their love, and their whip-smart banter, always made them lovable to viewers, despite their sometimes defiant unlikability.

The season also features Carrie Fisher’s final TV appearance; the actor was flying home from filming in London in 2016 when she suffered her fatal heart attack.

Russian Doll

Netflix

With her wild head of curls, raspy voice and innate Noo Yawk attitude, Natasha Lyonne isn’t everyone’s idea of a leading lady, but she owns every minute of Russian Doll, the mind-bending, eight-episode drama she co-created with Leslye Headland and Amy Poehler.

As software designer/hard partier Nadia Vulvokov, Lyonne finds herself dying over and over, only to return to her start point — her 36th birthday party — each time to live the same night again. Critics have theorized the trippy show depicts the repetitive nature and paranoia of addiction and its flirtation with death, but it’s pretty fun for all that.

Stumptown

ABC network

Thanks to this new comedic drama, network television scored at least one new standout this season. Based on a series of graphic novels, the hour-long show stars Cobie Smulders as fledgling private investigator Dex Parios, a PTSD-suffering former marine who drinks, gambles and wisecracks her way through life in Portland, Ore. It’s nominally a case-of-the-week show, hinging on Dex’s investigations, but the real appeal is in the overarching story, which finds her tangled up in dangerous connections from her past, and actively screwing up her future.

It also features one of the most effortlessly diverse casts in recent memory, including Tantoo Cardinal as Sue Lynn Blackbird, the quietly terrifying owner of a tribal casino, Michael Ealy as Det. Miles Hoffman, the bisexual Dex’s sometime love interest and Cole Sibus as her brother Ansel, who has Down syndrome.

Watchmen

HBO/Crave

Full disclosure: this reviewer has not finished watching the full season of the Damon Lindelof superhero drama, but even a few episodes in, it’s already clear Watchmen deserves a spot on this list. The show drops you right into an alternate 2019, set 34 years after the action of the comic series. In Tulsa, Okla., a racist sect has targeted police officers, killing them in their homes. Now the police force wears masks to avoid identification and masked avengers — including former officer Angela Abar/Sister Knight (Regina King) — are employed to fight crime.

Even for viewers who are relatively ignorant of the existing DC Comics Watchmen universe — either graphic novels or films — the series is immediately gripping, full of WTF moments and breathless action set in the context of a gradually revealed and topical backstory.

Fleabag

Prime

The truckload of Emmys dumped on this black-as-midnight British comedy by Phoebe Waller-Bridge was merited. In its last season (of just two, and we thank Waller-Bridge for not diluting the show’s perfection by dragging it out), our hot mess of a nameless protagonist, also played the show’s creator, seems prepared to pull herself out of the self-destructive spiral kicked off by her friend’s death… only to be sabotaged by the character’s cleric, widely (and accurately) referred to as Hot Priest (Andrew Scott).

Filled with painful moments — excrutiating family dinners among them — and pangs of extreme sadness, Fleabag is nonetheless weirdly joyful, exploring sexuality and forgiveness and family with an unsentimental but witty eye. On second thought, maybe one more season wouldn’t hurt…

Succession

HBO/Crave

Although this intense drama’s first season was in 2018, it didn’t seem to capture a wider audience until this year, when it really set itself apart from other family-dynasty-based shows. Logan Roy (Brian Cox) is the head of a global media empire who’s reluctant to hand over the reins to his children, who are back-stabbing Machiavellis — though Logan is no better, treating them with casual cruelty and manipulation.

Succession is very talky, and often almost theatrical and static, wringing emotion — and laughs — out of claustrophobic situations; despite its almost uniformly unpleasant characters, you can’t look away. (Kieran Culkin’s turn as flip youngest brother Roman earned him a Golden Globe nomination).

What We Do in the Shadows

FX

A half-hour comedy based on the feature film of the same name by New Zealand’s Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, this Americanized TV version (also created by Clement and Waititi) follows a group of vampires from several different eras of history rooming together in a Staten Island mansion that’s falling into neglect.

Filmed in a mockumentary style, it’s a clever combination of vampire lore, over-the-top gore and odd-couple roommate shenanigans. It shares the same whimsical, absurd sense of humour as the movie, but isn’t slavishly faithful to the original (the addition of “energy vampire” Colin, played to office-drone perfection by Mark Proksch, is a particularly clever addition).

Veep

HBO/Crave

Yes, Veep has landed on plenty of Top 10 TV lists over the years, but that’s because the profane political satire from British writer Armando Iannucci was one of the best shows of the decade, and star Julia Louis-Dreyfus has a shelf-load of Emmys to prove it. Never before (except perhaps in Iannucci’s other series, The Thick of It) has utterly foul and offensive language been embraced with such brio and inventiveness.

Documenting the craven behaviour of scheming Beltway politicos, in its final seasons, Veep risked being rendered obsolete by goings-on in the real White House, but the seventh season — which sees Selina Meyer (Louis-Dreyfus) plotting to become POTUS again after her truncated time in office — ups the ante with subplots involving anti-vaxxers, abortion and drone strikes. The final episode gives Selina a sendoff that is a chef’s-kiss of perfection.

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @dedaumier