The Best TV Shows of 2021 So Far

The groundbreaking drama about the ballroom scene of New York’s queer community in the Eighties and Nineties was, to the end of its third and final season, a classic example of how a story’s subject can give you a lot of leeway for how that story is told. Pose was unapologetically sappy and melodramatic, and often featured characters talking about their hopes and dreams in a fashion that only vaguely resembles how people speak to one another. Yet because the heroes of Pose were all brown and queer, and often trans (and played by trans performers), they were fundamentally vulnerable in a way that allowed the show’s creative team to get away with every last speech and every blatant tug at the audience’s heartstrings. Season Three offered happy conclusions galore — even the one significant character to die of AIDS did so entirely on their own terms — but in ways that felt like exactly what each character, and most viewers, needed. The category is… Fairy-Tale Endings!

Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs’ 2018 indie film about friendship, incarceration, and gentrification spawned an unlikely but excellent TV spinoff, focusing on the movie’s Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones) dealing with life after husband Miles (Casal) goes to prison. Given the movie’s modest reach, the show wisely structures itself to work even for those who don’t know it’s a sequel, introducing a charming host of characters — Helen Hunt as Ashley’s progressive mother-in-law, Jaylen Barron as her hustling sister-in-law, Candace Nicholas-Lippman as an old friend recently returned to Oakland, Benjamin Earl Turner as a neighbor on house arrest using an extension cord to stretch the limits of his ankle monitor’s reach — who have to help Ashley start her life over from scratch. Mixing kitchen-sink realism, slapstick, and spoken word and interpretive dance fantasies, Blindspotting aims to do a lot — and does nearly all of it very well.

Janay (DedeLovelace), Camille (Rachelle Vinberg), Kirt (Nina Moran), and the rest of their crew of female skateboarders have returned for another shaggy, immersive, charming season of television. Set earlier in the pandemic but not particularly about Covid, these new Betty stories instead focus on the friends striving for cash, respect, enlightenment, or simply a place to skate where guys won’t be bossing them around the whole time. The kind of scripted gem where what happens tends to matter much less than the feeling created by being in the company of these characters for a half-hour a week.

Like Betty, Season Two of this delightfully odd and funny family comedy — created by and starring Josh Thomas as Nicholas, an immature man thrust into guardianship of his teen half-sisters Matilda (Kayla Cromer) and Genevieve (Maeve Press) — smartly figured out how to address Covid without being overwhelmed by it. Episodes were explicitly set in quarantine times, with the siblings and Nicholas’ boyfriend Alex (Adam Faison) getting on each other’s nerves more than usual, and the isolation not doing any favors for Matilda’s autism, Genevieve’s anxiety, or Nicholas’ narcissism (which would, by season’s end, turn out to be part of a late-in-life diagnosis that Nicholas is also autistic). But the relationships — including fantastic work from Maria Bamford and Richard Kind as the parents of Matilda’s girlfriend Drea (Lillian Carter) — and conflicts still felt very much like they did in the Before Time, and the series continued to hit the very narrow target where sweetness and silliness overlap.

The streaming wars have forced every service to beef up their content with international series. Rarely, though, has a show crossed borders the way this caper series about master French thief — and Number One superfan of French literary master thief Arsène Lupin — Assane Diop (Omar Sy) did as a global phenomenon for both halves of its first season. Sy has the kind of charisma that transcends all language barriers (and rendered the English dubbed version a poor substitute for the subtitled original), and directors like Louis Leterrier and Marcela Said kept the tension and style high throughout. The more you think about the plot, the less sense it sometimes makes (why did Assane think it was a good idea to go on live TV in a bad wig?), but Sy’s sheer, overwhelming presence forgives an awful lot of sketchiness elsewhere.

Yes, we’d seen all the elements of this murder mystery miniseries before. The cop (Kate Winslet’s DelCo-accented title character) forced to investigate a murder in her provincial hometown, alongside an outsider who doesn’t know how to finesse the locals — that’s straight outta Broadchurch. Mare inadvertently stumbling into a serial killer’s lair borrowed liberally from both Silence of the Lambs and Happy Valley. Etc. But these story ideas keep being used over and over because they work if they’re reassembled with even a modicum of care, and Mare had a good amount more than that. Winslet was terrific, especially in the family scenes where Mare grappled with her son’s suicide, Jean Smart was a stitch as her mom, the TV Academy needs to create a special Emmy for Drunk Acting to give to Evan Peters, and the story concluded in a way that felt very emotionally satisfying. Which is more than any of us could say for The Undoing.

That’s two shows in a row for the great Jean Smart, who between this, Mare, and Watchmen, is having a remarkable career resurgence. Here, the Designing Women and 24 alum plays Deborah Vance, a trailblazing stand-up comedian who hires abrasive young writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) to help spruce up her act when Deborah’s comfortable Vegas casino residency is threatened. Smart lives up to every bit of the legend the show sculpts around Deborah, and Einbinder’s loose, natural performance proves a perfect temperamental match for her more established co-star. Ideally, Ava and Deborah’s jokes would be sharper, and the show would trust more in their friendship — boo to the the season-ending cliffhanger! — but this odd couple proved enormously entertaining together.

Uzo Aduba stepped into Gabriel Byrne’s sizable shoes in the revival of this series about a therapist whose own problems often blend into the work she does with her patients. As was the case in the Byrne era of In Treatment, not all of the supporting characters worked: Teenage patient Laila (Quintessa Swindell) seemed to shift personalities from week to week; and having Aduba’s Brooke meet with AA sponsor Rita (Liza Colón-Zayas) at the end of each week, rather than with her own therapist the way Byrne did, disrupted the rhythm of those confessional episodes. But sticking to the series’ format of devoting each episode, more or less, to a single conversation between Brooke and another person made for a spectacular acting showcase, both for Aduba and for several of her co-stars — particularly Anthony Ramos as the troubled home health worker Eladio and John Benjamin Hickey as smug white collar criminal Colin. In therapy, you sometimes have to wade through a lot of frustrating sessions to get to the valuable insight. That was the case here, where the last few weeks’ worth of episodes — particularly a frustrated Brooke dropping her professional boundaries to explode at Eladio, plus an Uzo Aduba solo tour de force episode — made almost everything that came before seem more than worth it.

With Schitt’s Creek, Ted Lasso, and this remake of the classic PBS series about a gentle veterinarian in the English countryside of the Thirties, are we entering a new era of radical kindness in television? This new adaptation of James Herriot’s books stars Nicolas Ralph as the fictionalized Herriot, who arrives in the Yorkshire Dales eager to prove himself to demanding boss Siegfried Farnon (Samuel West) and winds up falling in love with the community. Nice people, gorgeous countryside, and adorable animals turn the leisurely pace of life in the Dales (and of the show’s storytelling) into a feature, not a bug, until the viewer can’t help feeling the same way Herriot does about this lovely place.

It’s been a good spring for both short-run British comedy seasons (see also HBO Max’s Starstruck and Netflix’s Feel Good) and Peacock comedies about female music groups (see also Girls5Eva). The best of this intersecting bunch was this loopy, likable Britcom about an all-female, all-Muslim punk band in London trying to recruit a stage-shy science student (Anjana Vasan, everything you want as a comedy lead) to be their lead guitarist and take them to the next level. Good jokes plus appealing characters plus absurdly catchy songs (“Bashir With the Good Beard” is still rattling around in our heads) added up into a show we can’t wait to see take the stage again.

Season One of this workplace sitcom set at a video game company was most notable for its standalone episodes — most memorably, a sad and lovely flashback story about the company that previously occupied the Mythic Quest offices; and the only genuinely great Zoom-centric TV episode produced early in the pandemic, with Ian (co-creator and star Rob McElhenney) and Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao) trying to maintain staff morale (and their own) during quarantine. The rest of it was amiable, but the kind of thing you often see in the first seasons of ensemble comedies, where the creative team is still figuring out what makes each character funny. Season Two had two more fantastic off-format episodes, both dealing with the sci-fi novelist backstory of Mythic Quest head writer C.W. Longbottom (played in the present by F. Murray Abraham, and in the Seventies by Josh Brener). This time, though, they weren’t the unequivocal highlights of the season, but just two more examples of a comedy where all the pieces had finally clicked into place, allowing everyone to be their best — and worst — self no matter who they were with and what they were doing.

Another Eighties story of AIDS, this one set an ocean away from Pose. The focus here is a trio of young, gay Englishmen (played by Olly Alexander, Omari Douglas, and Callum Scott Howells) and their female friend (Lydia West) who helps care for some of them as they begin battling this terrifying new plague upon their community. Written by Russell T. Davies (Years and Years, Doctor Who), the five-part miniseries smartly focuses on the joy of this time period — particularly right before news began to spread of this “gay cancer” — as much as on the tragedies that followed. Acknowledging both emotional extremes only made each one more palpable, and each character more human. A beautiful slice of history with the urgency and energy that comes from treating it very much like the present for everyone in it.

The first Marvel TV series in a new era run by Marvel Cinematic Universe boss Kevin Feige turned out to be a love letter to the medium itself, as traumatized Avenger Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) coped with a lifetime of loss and grief by conjuring up a sitcom fantasy world where she and her late synthezoid lover Vision (Paul Bettany) could enjoy suburban bliss together. Not every one of WandaVision‘s sitcom tributes worked — the Family Ties and Malcolm in the Middle episodes probably felt truest to the genuine article — but the sheer oddness of them, and the ability of Olsen, Bettany, and the indispensable Kathryn Hahn to slide seamlessly from one era to the next, made the show feel like an event. Even if the finale leaned too heavily into a generic MCU action climax, other moments — say, Vision asking Wanda, “What is grief, if not love persevering?” — rang so emotionally true that we can forgive a little franchise fatigue at the end.

If we were just ranking the most technically impressive shows of the year, Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning slavery novel would not only easily top this list, but the list for nearly any year in the medium’s history. In terms of sights (those tableau shots!) and sounds (the bugs!), it is an utterly astonishing achievement. As a story, it is a bit of a muddle. Runaway slave Cora (Thuso Mbedu) at times seems more a symbol than a character — especially compared to her monstrous but very much human nemesis, the arrogant slave catcher Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) — and some of the Railroad’s stops linger for a punishingly long amount of time. (Amazon would have been wise to make this a weekly show like The Boys or Invincible, just to give viewers the time to work up the nerve for the next chapter.) The best moments were jaw-dropping, though, with the miniseries as capable of inspiring joy as eliciting utter despair.

This series set in an alternate history where the Russians beat America to the first moon landing, thus triggering an endless space race, had already started to figure itself out by the end of its first season. Its second, though, rocketed to new creative heights. Focusing on a few months in an alt-1983 where Ronald Reagan is nearing the end of his second term, John Lennon is still alive, and the Cold War seems on the verge of turning extremely hot on the lunar surface, FAM was the rare “10-hour movie” style of season that had enough compelling story and character arcs to justify the broad, steady approach. The last two episodes, with the fate of humanity itself resting on two missions on and around the moon and one in Earth orbit, were the platonic ideal of a serialized TV season, making everything that came before feel even more relevant and exciting, while offering plenty of new thrills (jogging on the moon in duct tape space suits?!?!?) to make the time feel worth it.