I find that it’s really tough to rank TV series in this “best of” list every year. Like I think Better Call Saul and The Haunting of Hill House were my #1 and #2 shows of 2018, but for the rest the order is kind’a arbitrary. There were lots of great shows this year and putting them in any reasonable order is at best guesswork and at worse however I felt the day I was generating this list.
Better Call Saul
I’m honestly surprised that after all these years I still love Better Call Saul on AMC as much as I do. Usually, after a few seasons of a show I start to lose interest but I haven’t so far with this one. I think that’s because Better Call Saul has evolved and changed each season, meaning that what is Better Call Saul in its most recent fourth season is very much different than what it was in its first.
Essentially, Better Call Saul is the story of Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) and his transformation from being a meek and mild attorney to the infamous cut-throat lawyer to the criminal underworld Saul Goodman. Maybe “transformation” isn’t the best word, maybe a better one would be “descent.” Where Jimmy is a guy who can’t catch a break, as he starts becoming more Saul-like ironically he starts catching loads of breaks and begins making money doing things like selling disposable cell phones to crooks and even getting his law license back by lying and playing the sympathy card.
Crime does pay for Jimmy, even if we as the audience know that the end of the road for Goodman doesn’t lead to a fancy house and lots of riches, it leads to hiding out as a guy named “Gene” a lonely manager of a Cinnabon in Nebraska, on the run and panic stricken constantly looking over his shoulder for a bullet that may never come.
The Haunting of Hill House
Each year there’s always at least one series a season that surprises me as to how good it is, and that show in 2018 was The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix. This horror series is the stuff of nightmares, and I mean that literally since watching it gave me real nightmares. While most horror shows follow the same tried and true path, there are monsters and they are out to get us, The Haunting of Hill House is quite a bit different. This series about a family set in two time periods, one in the early 1990s where mom, dad and their four kids are trying to flip what turns out to be a haunted house, and modern-day where this family now grown are still dealing with all the ramifications of what happened when they were living at Hill House, and especially what happened the last night they stayed there, is fascinating. Most horror shows rely on the scares first, second and last and while there are a lot of scares in The Haunting of Hill House, see my report about nightmares above, it also has this underlying core of sadness to it.
The family of the 1990s were this not quite perfect but happy together family unit, yet because of what happened to them, and what we find during the course of the show is still happening to them, have splintered and shattered. They’re not quite family anymore and are instead simply “acquaintances.”
And honestly, I don’t know anything scarier than that.
The Terror
I never thought there’d be more than one horror series on my best of list yet this year there’s two. The second is another amazing AMC series The Terror about an expedition to the Arctic that went disastrously wrong in the 19th century. This fictionalized telling of a real-life event seems to either be set a night, or the equally scary time of gloaming where the sun has just set casting the world in a weird, mysterious glow. And since this expedition was to the Arctic, a place where the sun is either up for months at a time or set for an equally long period, it means that much of the show is cast in this weird etherial light.
Mr Inbetween
I hadn’t even heard of the FX series Mr Inbetween until I stumbled upon a poster for the show that was set to start airing the next day. I was suspicious at first about a series where the lead guy is a hit-man in Australia who’s got anger management issues since that sounds like something Tony was going through in The Sopranos 20 years ago. But Mr Inbetween is different and I was hooked right from the first scene. Starring and written by Scott Ryan, Mr Inbetween is the rare crime show that has fully fleshed characters, not character archetypes. The stories vary from Ryan’s character Ray Shoesmith trying to help out a friend who’s been beaten and put in the hospital while at the same time trying to keep his new girlfriend in the dark about where he slips off to at night when he goes out to hurt people.
The Expanse
The fourth season of the SyFy series The Expanse continued to deliver in the realm of science fiction in one of the most satisfying sci-fi series on TV these days. Wait, did I say “SyFy!?” Well, SyFy in their infinite wisdom decided to cancel The Expanse shortly before the latest superb season ended. I guess they must’ve needed its time slot for more appropriate sci-fi shows like the reality monster makeup series Face Off. Luckily, Amazon Prime quickly picked up The Expanse for a fifth season which is set to premiere there sometime next year.
Barry
The HBO dramety Barry about a depressed hitman (Bill Hader) who dreams of becoming an actor in LA was another surprise this year. Barry can go from hilariously funny to downright scary in the blink of an eye, and I can’t think of any other show that can do that without coming off cheesy. And the way Hader plays Barry, he comes off as a real, troubled guy the audience is rooting for at the start of the show but by the end of the first season might actively be hating because of some of the things he does throughout the episodes.
GLOW
I’m not quite sure how they do it, but a TV series about women’s wrestling in the 1980s is one of the best things on Netflix right now. Mostly about the behind the scenes lives of the women who star in this show-within-a-show, GLOW chronicles how hard it is to make something, even something as silly as a women’s wrestling show, especially if you were a women in the 1980s.
Black Mirror
Black Mirror is one of the most disturbingly accurate shows on these days about what it’s like living in our 21st century where it seems like we’re constantly crashing into the future where people controlling the technology don’t always have our best interests in mind, or even realize the ramifications of what they’re doing, while our world constantly shifts around us and not always for the better.
Little Drummer Girl
Another limited series that ran on AMC this TV season was the adaptation of the John Le Carré novel Little Drummer Girl. I totally dig these spy series, especially ones by Le Carré like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People and now Little Drummer Girl too. I just wish AMC had given this one a little more time for people to catch it, rather than burning its six episodes off in a three night “event” the week of Thanksgiving.