I feel like I don’t watch “Better Things” so much as live in it - which is less to say that it reminds me of my life than that it replicates the experience of inhabiting someone else’s. status this year goes to the mesmerizing Rhea Seehorn, as Jimmy’s now-wife, Kim Wexler, whose gradual corruption shows us how anyone can end up on the same dark road that Jimmy chose.
But the beauty is in how exquisitely the pieces fly apart, never better than in Season 5. You know where this vehicle is pointed: Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) will become Saul Goodman, the loquacious and lizardy legal consigliere to drug kingpins, eventually fleeing into Cinnabon exile. The prequel to “Breaking Bad” is television’s most finely rendered slow-motion car crash. There is not a show I was more awed by this year than “I May Destroy You,” and there was not a show I enjoyed more than “What We Do in the Shadows.” But to weigh these exceptional and very different shows on a scale seems absurd. This also means that, as usual, you will not get me to create a ranked list. (In a boom year for limited series, for instance, “Unorthodox,” “The Plot Against America” and “The Queen’s Gambit” missed the cut.) There was still too much TV to watch it all, and still too much extraordinary material to whittle down. My list might have included “The Good Fight,” if its unfinished fourth season had not been left dangling.īut because of the glut of material already in the pipeline when the shutdowns came, my TV retrospective of the year is surprisingly ordinary. The pandemic, the first and last story of this year, naturally disrupted television - talk shows, sports and especially scripted comedy and drama. What this 10-best list presupposes is: What if it didn’t? James Poniewozik The Best TV Shows of 2020Įveryone knows that the year 2020 changed everything.
Best Shows of 2020 | Best International | Best Shows That Ended