It’s a Great Time to Be Watching TV—and a Weird Time to Be Ranking It
The Ringer’s Best Shows of 2018 list is our attempt at presenting a broader picture of the year in TV. But the joy of watching television these days is that everyone can have a different favorite show.It’s a Great Time to Be Watching TV—and a Weird Time to Be Ranking It
The Ringer’s Best Shows of 2018 list is our attempt at presenting a broader picture of the year in TV. But the joy of watching television these days is that everyone can have a different favorite show.
Click here to read Alison Herman and Chris Ryan’s list of the best television shows of 2018. For more on the year in television, read Andrew Gruttadaro and Miles Surrey’s list of the best television episodes of the 2018, and Miles Surrey’s list of the best television monsters of 2018.
When it came time to declare The Ringer’s top TV show of 2018—a complex, algorithmic process consisting of “writing a bunch of names on a whiteboard” and “making Larry David faces at them”—the field gradually winnowed down to just two candidates. On the one hand was Killing Eve, the genre-tweaking cat-and-mouse chase from Fleabag writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge that aired on BBC America. Over an eight-week period in the spring, Eve seemed to induce a collective flashback to simpler times. Times when people would agree on a show they enjoyed. Times when they would enthuse about the show’s latest developments online. Times when a show could find, and grow, an audience from the sheer force of fans’ evangelism. TV is more diffuse than it’s ever been and growing more so by the day. Killing Eve felt like a counterpoint, and maybe even an antidote, to this entropic state of affairs.
On the other was HBO’s Succession, Adam McKay and Jesse Armstrong’s polarizing case study in the psychosis of wealth. If Killing Eve stood in contrast to television audiences’ divided nature, Succession embodied it. In raw viewership, its numbers were small but steady, though they peaked with the finale, suggesting overall growth. In critical reception, the overall consensus was generally positive, if initially more muted than Eve’s. But consensus, by definition, only applies to an aggregate. Broken down to individuals, opinions on Succession were sharply split. Some, including the members of this website, christened it the best show on air at the time; others decried what they saw as its muddled tone, though over the course of a 10-episode season its reputation improved enough to occasion some mea culpas. Those who loved Succession loved it; those who didn’t, didn’t. It’s how everyone feels about almost everything on air these days, but more.
Ultimately, top honors went to Killing Eve—mostly because I believe it to be the stronger show, but also because, in this case, defying a trend seems more noteworthy than exemplifying one. Yet the fact remains that 2018 saw many more shows like Succession, and not just because Succession operates within a time-honored tradition of ogling—and scorning—the rich. This was a year when excellence was very much in the eye of the beholder, and there were as many best shows on TV as there were people making that pronouncement.
That TV’s once-concentrated viewership has scattered to the four winds and among various streaming services is nothing new. It’s now been three years since FX president John Landgraf declared “there is simply too much television,” a statement he’s since had to revise given that the total number of series on air has only continued to grow. (There may be too much television for the tastes of a network head trying to promote his own shows, but not for the tech-money-fueled marketplace—at least for the moment.) But 2018 has felt like its own inflection point in the increasingly niche nature of what was once America’s defining mass medium. The fragmented way we watch TV has trickled down to the way we talk about and evaluate TV. Not only is there little commonality in what people are watching; among the people who make such pronouncements for a living, there’s increasingly little in the discussion around what they should be. Mega-hits like Game of Thrones are on borrowed time, with no obvious replacements. But so, seemingly, is a different kind of unifier like The Americans, which quietly wrapped its six-season run this May.
A Ringer colleague is fond of saying it’s a great time to watch television—it’s just not a great time to be writing about it. I know exactly what they mean. I’m a fan of television before I’m a professional observer of it, and it thrills me to have my interests catered to, even ones as specific as musical odes to Jewish family dynamics and drag queens paying homage to Grey Gardens. There just aren’t that many people I can share those interests with, which is both a cornerstone of such shows’ appeal and a limitation on them. Critical anxieties are not the concern of someone seeking out a few hours’ worth of entertainment before they fall asleep, nor should they be. Despite such perspective, however, I can’t help but feel this vanishing consensus—symbolized by, though not exclusive to, a handful of shows that were widely acknowledged yet not widely loved—represents the final phase of a yearslong drift away from the communal and toward the personalized. In this brave new world, all tastes are acquired.
HBO prides itself on being the leader of the prestige pack and remains so in this era as much as any other. Despite the slow ratings start and far-from-unanimous reviews, Succession—the network’s highest-profile drama launch of the year—was renewed almost instantly. The move was partly a sign of internal confidence, a gesture of faith that Succession would eventually join shows like Billions, Halt and Catch Fire, and network sibling The Leftovers in meeting its audience halfway, or perhaps convincing its audience to do the same in its sophomore season. But it was also an indication that HBO’s definition of success has shifted to fit the moment. Strong reactions, no matter the tone, are better than none.
Candidly, I fell more toward the skeptics’ end of the Succession spectrum for much of its run, though Matthew Macfadyen’s faux-Midwestern charms did kick in eventually. But at almost exactly the same time, on exactly the same network, I found the roles dramatically reversed: Suddenly I was the wild-eyed evangelist, my friends and colleagues the wary eyebrow raisers. Of all the blockbuster projects on offer this year, Sharp Objects experienced the largest gulf between the broad-based appeal of its contributors and the narrow one of their final product. The pulpy, page-turning genius of Gillian Flynn; the five Oscar nominations and literal Disney princess-dom of Amy Adams; the celebrity-friendly, music video stylings of Jean-Marc Vallée. If this couldn’t do for the Gothic murder mystery what Big Little Lies did for the beach read, what could?
But despite its superficial similarities to the monster hit, Sharp Objects mostly went to show that meditative pacing and delayed reveals will always be a tough sell, even when it’s Amy Adams doing the selling. In practice, Sharp Objects became something of a litmus test for ambiance over momentum, brutality over mere bitchiness. The schism started in the initial reviews, and only deepened from there: one person’s “exactingly glum” is another’s “nuance within unremitting darkness.” Two months later, Sharp Objects’ finale failed to reconcile its devotees with its skeptics. “Definitively unsatisfying” or “chilling clarity”? Only you can decide, and then only for yourself. I was a happy customer; many others, as Sharp Objects’ omission from our final list suggests, were not.
Just a month later, the Netflix limited series Maniac provided a telling echo of and fitting footnote to the Sharp Objects saga: top-of-the-line stars (Jonah Hill and Emma Stone!), a director to match (Cary Fukunaga!), an alluring jumping-off point (a free-wheeling journey through the human subconscious!)—all adding up to less than the sum of their parts. For some, Maniac did, indeed, deliver on the promise of its component parts’ IMDb pages, pronouncing it “the most exciting new drama to arrive on Netflix in the past two years” on the strength of Stone’s performance and the immersive sci-fi production design. And to others, those same elements added up to little more than “forced quirkiness” and “wackadoodle pastiche.” Once again, a show that set out to unify through sheer force of gravity—a massive enough star pulls in everything around it, let alone two—became more of a Rorschach test. And once again, that argument played out in miniature in the Ringer offices, putting Maniac in the conversation for the year’s most notable shows, but keeping it from eventual inclusion.
Running through the shows that made mine and my coauthor Chris Ryan’s individual lists, but not our combined one, yields example after example of shows that found a following while also struggling to transcend it. A blissed-out Pynchon homage like Lodge 49 was either borderline catatonic or enjoyably languid; a reunion of two universally liked comic actors in Forever was liked, but no one could call its acclaim universal. Some limitations felt rooted in genre: For horror fans, the popular success of The Haunting of Hill House came as a validation, though some outsiders found its use of trauma more treacly than insightful. (I was relatively cool on Hill House, but I’ve endured enough resistance to my BoJack Horseman boosterism from anti-cartoon hardliners to relate.) Some limitations arose from the distribution platform, which now more than ever seems to determine the scope of a show’s appeal as much as, if not more than, the show itself. Even the near-total Emmys sweep of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel felt more like a reflection of the resources Amazon spent wooing the Television Academy than any particular enthusiasm outside of it.
Some textbook darlings remain, represented on our final list by Atlanta, Barry, and Better Call Saul. With its outsider approach and stylistic daring, Atlanta remains in a class of its own; only Atlanta would take a swing like “Teddy Perkins,” so only Atlanta commands the attention that goes with it. Barry follows a more established playbook, combining the custom-made comic vehicle of Louie with a more self-aware take on the archetypal, violent antihero. Of these three, Saul represents the elder statesman, a holdover from the bygone Golden Age that, not coincidentally, comes from a revered Golden Age auteur. (Saul was ultimately selected over The Deuce on the grounds that including a Vince Gilligan show and a David Simon show risked redundancy. At least they aren’t both named David?) A methodical, slow-motion tragedy, Saul is as much respected as loved, and represents an endangered species: As series like it advance toward the middle or end of their runs, their would-be replacements are finding it increasingly difficult to assemble a similarly unified coalition on craftsmanship alone. Just ask Park Chan-wook, whose The Little Drummer Girl achieved unanimous approval within the Ringer offices—so much so that it became the latest-breaking addition to our list—and skepticism, even silence, outside it. Only in 2018 could an international master’s first foray into television be met with such ambivalence.
Personally, I’ve been on every side of these debates, which typically roil for a week or two before the relentless clip of new shows forces makeshift teams to disband then reassemble along new partisan lines. For the first half of the year, I found myself restless, itching for a Young Pope–style upset for the profession to rally behind. (And, to be fair, pretty much only the profession: My editor has commanded I stipulate that the Venn diagram of “Young Pope fans” and “people with Letterboxd accounts” is basically a circle.) A down year is a down year, a natural occurrence that’s not worth denying. Oversaturation and risk-taking are certainly factors in the steady erosion of consensus, but they’re not the only ones. I remain confident an exceptional series can still rise to the top. The hard truth is that there simply weren’t as many candidates for that designation this year as in the past.
Tellingly, the sole entry in our list I would describe as a consensus show isn’t a scripted series at all. It’s the Netflix reboot of Queer Eye, an enterprise that has its dissenters and guacamole truthers, but only by virtue of becoming a phenomenon large enough to merit a takedown. The Fab Five may well be television’s biggest breakout stars since the cast of Game of Thrones, but instead of graduating to Star Wars and Sundance indies, they’ve launched podcasts and sponsorships with cheese brands. And while Queer Eye’s liberal fantasy may be a balm in these divided times, it doesn’t exactly provide the catharsis of a transgressive, innovative story.
At the same time, I’ve started to appreciate certain aspects of television’s new normal. Divisiveness is inevitable and, arguably, even desirable. Subjective taste yields subjective response; disagreeing with someone else’s thoughts can hone and sharpen one’s own. Besides, these disagreements tended not to follow the usual ideological fault lines. Last year, it was fairly easy to guess where someone stood on Twin Peaks: The Return based on one’s tolerance for directorial flourish versus conventional TV structure. This year, Succession felt less like a proxy fight for some hard-and-fast aesthetic principle and more like a sui generis lightning rod. What was in question wasn’t the validity of depicting flawed characters or rapacious capitalists in general, but one’s personal tolerance for these rapacious capitalists in particular.
Months later, there’s no definitive verdict on how any given viewer can or will react to Sharp Objects, or Lodge 49, or Forever. Nor is one forthcoming. It’s a little bit frustrating, but also a little bit poetic—the most obvious, though by no means the only, instance of critics finding themselves in the same boat as everyone else. No one can truly answer the question of what anyone else is supposed to be watching. It’s hard enough, or maybe more than enough, to figure it out for ourselves.
Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer.