My best of the year and best of the decade lists for film will be on Letterboxd before the end of the year, but by the end of September I was also aware of another, marginally more unsettling feeling: that TV had eclipsed, or come very close to eclipsing, film as the storytelling art form that sucked up the most of my emotional fascination in the last ten years.
2019 was a great year for film, and I’d put my top ten against the tens of any of the other years in the last decade. But check out the best series or seasons of 2019:
- Fleabag Season 2
- She-Ra and the Princesses of Power Season 3
- Euphoria Season 1
- Stranger Things 3
- The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
- Aggretsuko Season 2
- Legion Season 3
- Game of Thrones Season 8
- The Good Place Season 3 and 4
- When They See Us
For one thing, this list pretty clearly demonstrates that the best of the fantasy art form is happening on television; six of the top ten plus Euphoria (itself a near miss) and Aggretsuko (an animated series about a salarywoman red panda) fit into the category. She-Ra and The Dark Crystal demonstrated cannily that IP oversaturation may be swamping studio entertainment but, done right, revisiting older works can still bring incredible nuance and richness to what are, after all, archetypal stories. Game of Thrones clobbered the zeitgeist for most of the first half of the year (and yes, I’m still with her), and Legion, while narratively frustrating at times, did more with visuals than any series since Breaking Bad (or any movie since Cloud Atlas). And as for Stranger Things 3, well… you don’t demolish that many peoples’ early-summer souls without a bit more under the hood than Stephen King nostalgia and an attractive ensemble cast.
Euphoria, meanwhile, began as a beguiling (if overambitious) teen soap and became something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime: a genuine, and largely successful, contemporary rework of the best teen drama of all time, My So-Called Life. (With Rayanne and Angela flopped for heroine/troublemaker, respectively.) I saw films this year that were thoughtful, thought-provoking, playful, whimsical and neat; but I didn’t feel for any characters anywhere like I felt for Jules and Rue. Or Eleven and Max. Or Catra, Adora and Entrapta. Or Deet, or Retsuko, or Fleabag, or the Dragon Queen. You see where this is going. Longform paid off, this year and this decade. That promise buried in the code — that by spending so many detailed hours with a story and the characters that inhabit it, we can invest more deeply than we can in any novel or film or play — finally played itself true.
So with all that in mind, it might also be time to name the best series of this decade.
- Stranger Things
- She-Ra: Princesses of Power
- Atlanta
- Better Call Saul
- Orphan Black
- Aggretsuko
- Hannibal
- Fleabag
- Insecure
- Game of Thrones
This list, of course, allows for the fact that some series (Breaking Bad chief among them) began in a previous decade and so, somehow, don’t really count; and that another series (Deadwood) did, too, but finished in a movie this year that ended up on my other list. If classic moviegoing really is dying, one of the ways it will bleed out is through the walls of form like this. What is a movie, anyway? What is a series? How much longer will the demarcations of narrative length, invented a century ago, last?
Speaking of narrative length: the other thing that becomes pretty clear looking at these lists is how much I’ve left off them. I’m more confident in the decade list than the year list, at least in terms of having touched many of the bases in the critical discourse; I’m aware that my 2019 list has a lot more to say about what I chose to focus on than showing itself to be a broad survey. That’s something else that became apparent to me about TV this year: it isn’t just that I don’t have anywhere near the time to keep up with the leaders in the field (I don’t); I also don’t particularly have the strength. Each of the series that made my list made it because, for a little while anyway, it was my prevailing obsession of the moment. I didn’t want to be watching or doing anything else; I focused. Those worlds wrapped themselves around me. This is something beyond binge-watching, and it’s new too.