The Best TV Show 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.

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.

Who Wrote The Requiem For The Lives Lost To Aids In The 1980S?

Russell T Davies’s requiem for the lives lost to AIDS in the 1980s was as heartbreaking and furious as you might have expected. What you might not have expected was how vibrant, joyous and even funny it was — a story of wasteful death that derived its power from being full of life. (Streaming on HBO Max.)

District Attorney Larry Krasner (who won re-election in November) made for a prickly, passionate protagonist, but this was really the story of a city and a country. ‘Station Eleven’ (HBO Max) This limited series, which arrives Dec. 16, is about a global pandemic that wipes out most of humanity, and I am assuming I’ve scared off at least half of you already. But hear me out: The adaptation by Patrick Somerville (“The Leftovers”) of the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel is moving, eccentrically funny and even hopeful.

(Streaming on HBO Max beginning Dec. The zero-sum corporate squid game that is “Succession” became a civil war in Season 3, as the Roys met the enemy and it was them. Among a uniformly great cast, Jeremy Strong had a stellar season as the renegade scion Kendall, trying to reinvent himself as a gold-plated-whistleblower but crashing up against his weakness and self-doubt. (Caveat: I included this show without having seen the Dec. 12 season finale.

(Streaming on HBO Max.)

What Was The Best Tv Show Of 2021?

I have been making “best TV” lists in one form or another since 2006, taking only one year off in that entire time. But I really do think that even if I had watched literally every show on TV, my top show of the year would have remained the same. So here’s the best TV show of 2021, then 12 other shows I loved a bunch.

Yet the fact that Prime Video seemed almost to treat this tremendous work — the best TV series I’ve seen in years and years — as an afterthought continues to frustrate me. Related The Underground Railroad is a towering series about the ways slavery still infects America 12 other TV shows I really loved (in alphabetical order) Evil (Paramount+) Possibly the wildest show on television right now, Evil is a series made up entirely of ideas that would get tossed out of most other TV shows for being too weird. How to watch it: For All Mankind is streaming on Apple TV+.

But this Apple TV+ comedy is so funny and so winning that it bypassed my defenses. Every actor in this show is amazing, but Nicdao gave maybe my favorite TV performance of the year. How to watch it: Reservation Dogs is streaming on Hulu.

How to watch it: We Are Lady Parts is streaming on Peacock. How to watch it: Work in Progress is streaming on Showtime Anytime. You (Netflix) I don’t know how the team behind You got three seasons of TV out of the premise “you have to hang out in the perspective of a stalker man all the time.”

How to watch it: You is streaming on Netflix. Five other shows, why not? (I promise it makes sense when you watch.)

Correction: The Great takes place in the 1700s, not the 1800s.