My Top 10 TV Shows Of The Year

Nobody is watching the same shows anymore. Here are my personal favorites.

Ho ho ho,

Christmas is one week from today. That’s wild.

I’m going to get a head start on my year-end roundup posts (the much-anticipated “every movie I watched” and “best content of the year” posts will come closer to New Years) with a little year end organization on the television front, as a treat just for my paid tier readers.

The tenor of this year-end ranking is different from my others because, as I’ve admitted many times, I don’t watch enough TV to speak definitively about the landscape in the same way I do movies.

I’d challenge literally anyone, even those whose full time job is to watch and review shows, to claim they have a grasp over the entire breadth of offerings. When I ask my friends what shows they’ve been loving at any given time, not only have I not seen them but more often than not I’ve never even heard of them.

They are so many shows on so many platforms, that it seems everyone has found the handful of shows that are super-served to their very niche interests.

Calling something a “best show” probably implies some prestige and ambition that excludes so much of what TV is, like Chef’s Table or season two of Physical 100 or whatever reality show you were binging.

It’s actually very hard to have a TV conversation with anyone, because often the primary reason for liking something is just how perfectly it lines up with their individual preferences. So you’re over there with your thing and I’m over here with mine, and we don’t really mind that they don’t intersect.

(This is yet another reason why movies are better…but in the spirit of the holidays I’ll keep my soap box in the closet this time)

So I’m preemptively agreeing with all of your objections to the selections below. Unquestionably, there are a ton of great shows out there. And bad shows that we loved watching just as much as the great ones.

Consider this more of a “the 10 best shows I actually watched this year.” Let’s get to it.

1 - Industry