The 20 Best TV Shows of 2021
The entire TV business has been focused on streaming for a while now, but 2021 felt like the year the industry began treating its streaming platforms as the alpha and omega, with traditional broadcast and cable networks viewed as content suppliers for series’ eventual streaming homes, at best. Of the 20 wonderful shows we picked for our list of the year’s best television, 15 of them debuted exclusively on a streamer, and the other five came from places like HBO and FX, where the line between the linear channels and, respectively, HBO Max and FX on Hulu has become so blurry as to seem nonexistent. There’s still good work being done in traditional TV — The Wonder Years is in the midst of a fine reboot on ABC, for instance, while Starz’s Blindspotting was one of several cable shows from our midyear best-of list that just barely missed the cut for this final one — but it may be time to get used to streaming hegemony in rankings like this.
The thing about the streamers is that there are so many of them, and they’re producing so much varied content, that this list contains multitudes. We’ve got tragedies that offer surprising moments of comedy, plus comedies that unexpectedly demand to be taken seriously; social satires produced in different countries that could not possibly resemble each other less; and even a pair of Avengers spinoffs that have nothing in common other than some shared Marvel backstory.
There’s been a lot of great work on the small screen this year. These shows loomed the largest.
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‘Hacks’ (HBO Max)
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: An aging stand-up comedy legend (Jean Smart), fearing her own cultural irrelevance, reluctantly teams up with an unemployable young comedy writer (Hannah Einbinder) to see if she can reinvent herself after decades of telling the same jokes. This sharp and subtle performance is the peak of Smart’s late-career renaissance (which this year also included Mare of Easttown), and she and appealing newcomer Einbinder clash so entertainingly that it almost doesn’t matter that the jokes the odd couple write together are spotty at best. Docked a few spots for a maddening season-ending cliffhanger that seemed to fundamentally misunderstand what had been working so well by that point.
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‘Pen15’ (Hulu)
The middle-school comedy — in which creators and stars Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle play themselves at 13, opposite real adolescents — started out a few years ago as a broadly funny idea. But it gradually began taking its socially awkward heroines’ emotional turmoil just seriously enough that it became easy to forget they were played by women in their thirties. The final batch of episodes was filled with insightful, sad, uncomfortable, and, yes, still ridiculous tales of growing up and figuring out which parts of yourself you’ll lose in the process. An unexpected gem that left unexpectedly early, but with only fond memories in its wake.
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‘Loki’ (Disney+)
Though not all of their offerings have worked (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier waves hello), the Marvel Studios team so far has a much higher small-screen batting average than their Marvel TV production predecessors did with shows like Iron Fist and Inhumans. This spinoff about Thor’s impish brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) was simultaneously a buddy comedy (with Owen Wilson at his most relaxed and charming), an unlikely romance where Loki fell in love with a female version of himself (Sophia Di Martino), a time-bending adventure with a lot of Doctor Who DNA, and a character study that effectively sorted through the contradictions of someone who’s been both a villain and a hero throughout his MCU run. Yes, it can be frustrating when the Disney+ shows start to feel like long teasers for upcoming MCU films, but it helps when those moments feature actors as good as Jonathan Majors doing the teasing. On the whole, Loki was an imaginative, unpredictable treat.
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‘In Treatment’ (HBO)
The brilliant-but-forgotten late-2000s psychiatry drama had a format — each episode is one therapy session, usually with only two people in the room — that made this revival a relatively safe and easy thing to produce during the early days of the pandemic. And in Orange Is the New Black alum Uzo Aduba as Dr. Brooke Taylor — a seemingly composed and wise analyst whose personal life (including a precipitous fall off the wagon) was every bit as messy as her patients’ — it had a brilliant actor who could step into the big shoes left behind by original In Treatment star Gabriel Byrne. In one installment, Aduba even got to tackle a feat Byrne never tried: performing a duet with no one else around, as an out-of-control Brooke imagined being the patient in a therapy session conducted by her better self. Not all of the stories were successful, but when Brooke and her patients — particularly home health worker Eladio (Anthony Ramos) and white-collar criminal Colin (John Benjamin Hickey) — really got into it, few shows this year were as exciting.
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‘We Are Lady Parts’ (Peacock)
This was a very good year for short-run, female-led comedies set in the UK, including HBO Max’s winning Starstruck and the final season of Netflix’s tragicomic Feel Good. But the most purely entertaining of the bunch was We Are Lady Parts, about an all-female, all-Muslim punk band in London struggling to be taken seriously — and to convince a guitar virtuoso with crippling stage fright (the extremely funny Anjana Vasan) to help take their sound to the next level. The series was smart and amusing in equal measure — and good luck getting “Bashir with the Good Beard” out of your head once you’ve heard the band improvise it during a jam session.
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‘Squid Game’ (Netflix)
This Korean drama was a word-of-mouth sensation even by the standards of past Netflix international hits like Money Heist, Elite, and this year’s Lupin. At once a white-knuckle thriller and a scorching satire of late-era capitalism, Squid Game followed a group of financially desperate people — most prominently gambling addict Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) — into a dystopian nightmare competition on a private island, as familiar childhood playground competitions were granted ruthless, life-and-death stakes. At once a visual triumph, thanks to an inventive and colorful production design, and a show so gory and thematically ugly it could be hard to watch. Either way, it was among the year’s defining debuts.
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‘Dave’ (FXX)
In the second season of this raunchy but introspective comedy, Dave — known professionally as rapper Lil Dicky, a.k.a. the show’s co-creator Dave Burd — started to achieve the fame he felt was his destiny, even as he struggled to make the album that was meant to justify his celebrity. The new episodes were more ambitious — most notably Dave hallucinating an encounter with his older, completely hairless self in an attempt to escape his writer’s block — without losing sight of the scatalogically adventurous sense of humor that, along with the chemistry between Burd and his real-life hype man, GaTa, made the first season so memorable.
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‘Mythic Quest’ (Apple TV+)
This workplace comedy from much of the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia team evolved in its second season into an extremely confident and likable show. Rob McElhenney and company figured out what made each character funny both on their own and in combination with every other character. And they managed to work in some genuinely thoughtful material — Charlotte Nicdao’s reliably silly Poppy navigating the trickiness of being a woman in the male-dominated video game world; the aging C.W. (F. Murray Abraham) reconciling with a longtime rival (guest star William Hurt, in a battle of mid-Eighties Oscar winners) — amid all the usual antics at the office. Not flashy, but consistently fulfilling.
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‘The Great’ (Hulu)
“I’m going to kill you so, so slowly,” Catherine the Great (Elle Fanning) declares to an enemy late in the second season of this semi-historical farce about the 18th-century Russian empress. “And I’m going to say a lot of French words in a perfect accent as I peel your skin from your body and rub your flesh in rosemary salt.” On most comedies, this would be the most memorable bit of dialogue for the year. For The Great, it was just one incredible insult among too many to count, delivered impeccably as always by Fanning. After a successful coup against her piggish husband Peter (Nicholas Hoult, somehow more likable the more repugnant Peter’s behavior becomes), Season Two found Catherine discovering that talking about social reforms is a lot easier than instituting them, even with monarchical power. And the series again demonstrated a remarkable capacity to pivot from ludicrous humor to devastatingly serious emotion. As aptly titled a show as there is right now.
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‘What We Do in the Shadows’ (FX)
Week to week, Shadows Season Three felt just a bit slighter than the vampire comedy’s hilarious first two seasons, though the Atlantic City heist story was a scream, and the episode where Kayvan Novak’s Nandor tried to learn about being human — which mostly involved the lyrics to “One Week” by Barenaked Ladies — was a worthy spiritual sequel to the Season Two episode that introduced us to regular human bartender Jackie Daytona. But then the season’s last few episodes revealed that more had been going on beneath the surface of the vamps’ usual stupidity, and that Nandor, Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) had greater emotional depth than we gave them credit for. Still pound-for-pound the funniest show on television.
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‘WandaVision’ (Disney+)
There have been plenty of shows about the medium of television or featuring characters who are aware that they’re on television, but neither concept is the kind you would expect from a multibillion-dollar superhero franchise that’s become the biggest thing in all of popular culture. Yet here was this spotlight on a pair of third-string Avengers — Elizabeth Olsen as the spell-casting Wanda, and Paul Bettany as her recently-deceased android lover Vision — that each week took the form of a classic sitcom from decades past. Olsen, Bettany, and scene-stealing co-star Kathryn Hahn committed fully to these pastiches of The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Brady Bunch, and more, and the series cleverly used all those shows’ old clichés to poignantly explore Wanda’s grief over the tragedies of her life. To paraphrase Vision, what is good television, if not creativity persevering?
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‘The White Lotus’ (HBO)
Set and shot at an exclusive Hawaiian resort so that the cast and crew could quarantine together, The White Lotus was designed to be relatively Covid-proof. But it was timely in other ways, with its satire of the selfish, destructive behavior of the ultrarich striking a collective nerve in a way that none of creator Mike White’s previous series (even great ones like Enlightened) ever had. White Lotus was a comic symphony of petty grievances and overreactions, with Murray Bartlett as the besieged resort manager turning the phrase “Pineapple Suite” into a recurring joy, Jennifer Coolidge finding unexpected dramatic depths in her grief-stricken manipulator Tanya, and Jake Lacy and Sydney Sweeney competing to see who could play the most horrifyingly entitled character on television. It was the show of the summer, and one that really stuck the landing.
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‘Maid’ (Netflix)
The premise of this miniseries sounds grueling: Alex (Margaret Qualley) escapes an emotionally abusive relationship, finds herself and her adorable daughter homeless, and has to scrape together work cleaning houses just to survive. And the miniseries, inspired by Stephanie Land’s memoir, doesn’t flinch from the harsh realities of both poverty and domestic abuse. But it’s also incredibly watchable, at times even surprisingly lighthearted, thanks to a riveting and likable star performance from Qualley. (And Qualley’s mother, Andie MacDowell, does some of the best work of her career as Alex’s bipolar mother, who tends to be yet another trap for her daughter rather than a safety net.) Too often, this kind of story is content, even proud, to be misery porn; Maid is more complicated and much better than that.
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‘Succession’ (HBO)
This ranking may be too low if this Sunday’s season finale is especially great, or perhaps a bit too high if Jesse Armstrong and company somehow fumble in the end zone. But for the moment, this position seems about right for a season that’s felt on a macro story level like it’s going in circles, but on a micro character level like it’s delivered some of the funniest most fantastic dramatic work ever. (Logan’s response to the wayward text in this week’s episode alone was sheer comic genius.) There may eventually be a point of diminishing returns with the Roys, but we’re not there yet.
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‘It’s a Sin’ (HBO Max)
Like Maid, this miniseries about the early years of the AIDS crisis understands that sad stories don’t have to be relentlessly grim — and that, in fact, a healthy dose of humor and lightness will make the tragic moments hit harder. Russell T. Davies (Years and Years) revisits this dark period through the eyes of a group of young and mostly queer adults sharing an apartment in London in the early Eighties, and makes sure to capture the joy they found in the city’s gay community and struggled to hold onto even as some of their friends — and they themselves — began dying. Vibrant, essential, unforgettable.
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‘Station Eleven’ (HBO Max)
Our third and final entry in the top 10 to figure out that a spoonful of sugar helps the dramatic medicine go down. This adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s bestseller, set after a flulike virus wipes out most of humanity, will have the terrible timing to debut next week in the midst of the Covid pandemic. But it’s a marvelous alchemical blend of despair and whimsy, focusing primarily on an actress (Mackenzie Davis, fierce and emotionally wide-open) who travels the postapocalyptic Midwest with a Shakespeare troupe, trying to keep the culture of the past alive for anyone still around to appreciate it. Skipping back and forth in time in a graceful way that eludes too many shows addicted to nonlinear storytelling, Station Eleven features some of the year’s most tear-inducing moments, but also a healthy mix of quirky comedy and riveting oddness. If you have the patience for the premise at this moment, it’s a great one.
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‘The Underground Railroad’ (Amazon Prime Video)
On a purely technical level, Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s magical-realism novel about American slavery may be the most stunning thing ever made for American television. The images captured by Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton are so beautiful and yet so horrifying that they will be seared into the memory of anyone who watches, and the rest of the filmmaking is on such a high level that you’ll begin to imagine you can smell everything as well as you can see and hear it. The performances are nearly as astonishing, particularly by Thuso Mbedu as Cora, an enslaved woman who begins a cross-country odyssey along a literal version of the Underground Railroad, complete with train cars and hidden stations. There’s some episode-to-episode inconsistency, and an odd narrative imbalance at times between Cora and Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton), the monstrous slave-catcher who stalks her from state to state and somehow ends up with more of a character arc than she does. But, at its best, Railroad has few peers in this year or any other.
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‘Only Murders in the Building’ (Hulu)
The best parodies are ones that understand the object of their satire so deeply they can become a fine example of the real thing. Such is the case for this star-studded comedy about a trio of residents (Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez) in a New York apartment building who discover that they all love the same true-crime podcast, then decide to start their own when they suspect foul play in the death of one of their neighbors. At first, Only Murders plays like an affectionate, well-researched satire of true-crime obsessives, and a tremendous showcase for the comedic gifts of each of its leads. (Gomez’s deadpan delivery in particular is a revelation.) But soon, the mystery becomes just as engrossing as it would be if the show were being played entirely straight, and the finale closes the case more effectively than most traditional whodunnits have managed in recent years. Just don’t forget to load up on Gut Milk before you watch.
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‘Reservation Dogs’ (FX on Hulu)
A coming-of-age story like none ever seen before on television, in part because there’s never been a cast of young actors like this before on television. Four Native American teens in rural Oklahoma — wonderfully played by indigenous actors Devery Jacobs, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Lane Factor, and Paulina Alexis — try various hustles and petty crimes to raise the money to leave the reservation for a more glamorous life in California. Yet the weight of family, friends, and tradition keeps making them feel tethered to their home turf. At various points absurd, dreamlike, and poignant, Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi’s creation feels original and unforgettable at all times.
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‘For All Mankind’ (Apple TV+)
The streaming era is so packed with star vehicles and series adapting popular IP that it’s easy for an original show with an interesting premise that’s executed at a high level to get lost in the shuffle. Let that not be the case with For All Mankind. The second season of Apple’s unheralded sci-fi epic — set in an alternate history where the Russians put the first man on the moon and the Cold War turned into a never-ending space race — delivered the year’s best, most assured, most intensely satisfying stretch of TV. As the action moved into the early Eighties and focused on tension between rival lunar bases, For All Mankind did what so many modern serialized dramas aspire to but rarely achieve: It told a collection of seemingly disparate stories that built in suspense and emotional resonance over the course of the season, until everything came together in a thrilling, beautiful conclusion — in this case, one that saw three simultaneous missions decide the fate of two worlds. If the sight of duct tape does not yet cause you to instantly choke up, then you have a spectacular binge ahead of you.