AP Bio (Peacock) Season 4
Premise: Disgruntled Harvard exile gets stuck in his hometown teaching biology and vows never to teach his kids anything. Despite this attitude, life lessons and bonding ensues.
Pros: The show still has great momentum and a deep bench. The fan fiction
episode shows just how adept the show is at playing with genre.
What Kept it from Making the Cut: A
Lynette-less season can only take the show so far. That was a pairing for the
ages. Another of my faves, Stephanie Duncan is a little less sassy during her
pregnancy.
The Chair (Netflix) Season 1
Premise: In the world of academia, Sandra Oh can’t win as the English dlit epartment chair at an Ivy Light college. If it isn’t the new wave of political correctness, it’s the conflicting demands of the colleagues underneath her or the demands to keep up enrollment or justify soft skills to her students.
Pros: Sandra Oh kills in this (props to wardrobe too, she always looks like someone who’s too busy to shop f), despite my frustration at the students who rap about Herman Melville’s illegitimacy for being too white, the show does its best to humanize every side in the debate.
What Kept it from Making the Cut: This was my #12 before I watched the Great so it came pretty damn close. There are a lot of six-episode seasons this year, but this one suffered the most from its brevity as a lot of plot movements didn’t have room to breathe.
Cruel Summer (IFC) Season 1
Premise: Two girls at the same high school have divergent paths. One gets kidnapped and held hostage in a predator’s basement for several months while the other is accused as being aware of it and being silenced.
Pros: The editing, for one. Being able to tell a coherent story with this many time jumps, damn! It also has impressive young actors who mirror each other quite well and handle those time jumps equally adeptly, and then there’s all the fun this show mines from the unreliable narrator trope.
What Kept it from Making the Cut: Ehh, it was a competitive year.
Ghosts (CBS) Season 1
Premise: Utkarsh Ambudkar (no, I couldn’t spell that without IMDBing it) and Rose McIver play a pair of city yuppies who inherit a New England mansion from the gilded age which they plan to turn into a bed and breakfast. However, a gaggle of ghosts (primarily eight who live in the upper floors) stretching back decades and even centuries in some cases (yes, there’s a Viking and a Native American) haunt the mansion.
Pros: It’s a lot of fun and the ghosts are a rich cacophony of characters.
What Kept it from Making the Cut: It’s more fun than a game changer. Considering that it’s such a structurally traditional sitcom (it wouldn’t miss that many beats if a laugh track were inserted), I’m frankly surprised I liked it as much as I did. It’s most definitely worth watching at this point though.
Kevin Can F*ck Himself (AMC) Season 1
Premise: Plot-wise this is a traditional sitcom. What sets it apart is how it’s
shot. When Allison (Annie Murphy from “Schitt’s Creek”) is interacting with her
husband, it’s a traditionaly laugh track sitcom but in scenes where her husband
is not present, the sitcom takes on a much darker form. The sitcom takes on at
least three or four different genres per episode.
Pros:
Sheer ambition. You have to watch it to understand it and even then it’s
a good book-club-like show to deconstruct as a group.
What Kept it from Making the Cut: While the
show is certainly watchable, there isn’t as much of a thru-thread to get me to
a state of “I can’t wait to see what happens in the next episode.” As I
previously said, it’s a competitive year.
Locke and Key (Netflix) Season 2
Premise: A young widow (Darby Stanchfield), with her kids in tow, moves in to a
New England mansion that hold a number of mystical keys with the power to do
very good and bad things. Before long, the whole extended family is sucked into
a good vs. evil.
Pros: Even as I am more distanced from high school, god help me, I can’t stop
getting hooked on the lives of teenagers (or at least, use them as a gateway
drug to broader dramatical forms). The mythology behind the story is consistent
and not more complex than the story mandates, and the stakes escalate well for
a sophomore season. There were also a couple plot twists that blindsided
me.
What Kept it from Making the Cut: For
starters, what is up with the catatonic brother who’s all of a sudden engaged
to a cultured man Japan? When did he even leave his bed? The teen drama can
also get a little Degrassi-ish (or One-Tree-Hill-ish if you’re from the states)
before said drama starts integrating itself with the plot in ways that become
deliciously Hitchcockonian. But, please, way less Tyler and Jackie drama. Erase both their memories.
Maid (Netflix) Season 1
Premise: Trailer park mom Amy (Margaret Qualley) makes the sudden decision to leave her borderline abusive husband with her infant in tow. With a dead beat mom (Qualley’s real-life mom Andie MacDowell), uncooperative ex-husband and no previous savings, it’s a constant upbeat battle.
Pros: The constant tension: Amy is like a video game character on her last life. Only the stakes are very real for her and indicative of how real they are for the millions of Americans out there living pay check to pay check.
What Kept it from Making the Cut: There was a slight dip in intensity towards the end, but it certainly would have made it in a less competitive year.
Saturday Morning All-Star Hits (Netflix) Season 1
Premise: If you’ve seen Kyle Mooney’s
offbeat sketches based on 90s sitcoms on SNL, you’ll know what to expect here.
Only instead of TGIF offshoots, Mooney focuses here on taking subtle jabs at
the Saturday Morning cartoons of the late 80s and early 90s.
Pros: If you like Kyle Mooney doing his
thing, this is an uncaged Kyle Mooney completely free to roam in the wild, so
you should love this. It’s also a chance to see Mooney do serialized
storytelling which works as a satire of the shallow nature of 90s stardom (and
sibling envy, a lot to unpack there, I guess). This is a parody that
prioritizes attention to detail over a high laugh-per-minute ratio and that
works.
What Kept it from Making the Cut: Well, a few more laughs per minute might have
been nice.
Schmigadoon (Apple TV) Season 1
Premise:
Ever seen the 1954 musical “Brigadoon”? It’s about 50% of that
(present-day couple gets stranded in a magical musical town), with references
to “Music Man”, “Oklahoma”, “Sound of Music”, and nearly every other musical
from that era.
Pros: The series is a loving parody that is chock-ful of Easter eggs from the
golden era of musicals. However, as musical theater in its own right, it works:
The cast is filled with darlings of the musical theater community, the musical
numbers are fun, and the town looks like a Vincente Minnelli painting. So much
to love
What Kept it from Making the Cut: At six
episodes, the plot changes are really abrupt. As one example, Cecily Strong’s
character gets her love interest’s father killed and the next minute, the two
are dancing.
Studio C (BYU TV) Seasons 13 and 14
Premise: Family-friendly sketch comedy
Pros: Since the show did a nationwide talent search and bought in acclaimed sketch actors and comedians, there has been a very professional feel to this brand of sketch comedy and the cast was really gelling. The show has also shown a penchant for experimentation like an episode exploring (facetiously) how sketches get written, and one examining the impact of messy sketches on the show’s janitor.
What Kept it from Making the Cut: Considering I doubt this show was ever meant to be popular out of the state of Utah, I always view it as the little engine that could. I’m not sure if this could compete in a sketch-by-sketch dead heat with SNL and not even SNL is cracking my top 12 or top 22. However, if I HAD to be nitpicky, the show had a casting overhaul in season 14 and this new configuration will take a while to gel.
And lest you think I’m being hard on these shows, this is everything else I watched this year that didn’t make my top 12 or Honorable Mention list that these shows rank above:
Abbott Elementary (ABC)^, Animaniacs
(Hulu), AP Bio (Peacock), Attack of the Movie Cliches (Netflix), B Positive
(CBS)^, Call Me Kat (ABC), Call Your Mother (ABC), Cobra Kai (Netflix), The Circle
(Netflix), Disenchanted (Netflix), Frank of Ireland (Amazon), Explained
(Netflix), Great North (Fox), Inside Job
(Netflix), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX), Home Economics (ABC), Kevin
Hart’s Olympic Show (Peacock), Kim’s Convenience (CBC), La Brea (NBC/Peacock),
Lost Symbol (Peacock), Love Death and Robots (Netflix), Mr. Mercedes (Amazon),
Mighty Ducks (Disney Plus), Miracle Workers: Oregon Trail (TBS), Mosquito Coast
(Apple TV), McGruber (Peacock), Mr. Corman (Apple TV), Mythic Quest (Apple TV),
Nora From Queens (Comedy Central), Nine Perfect Strangers (Hulu), Only Murders
in the Building (Hulu), The Premise (Hulu), Rebel (Amazon Plus), Reservation
Dogs (Peacock), Rutherford Falls (Peacock), SNL (NBC), Solar Opposites (Hulu), Squid
Game (Netflix)^, To Tell the Truth (ABC), Young Rock (NBC)^
^ means I watched just one or two episodes. I
didn’t necessarily watch every episode of a show if it’s not marked
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