The Best TV Shows of 2019

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7. Veep (HBO)
The last season of the decade’s quintessential political comedy plunged into even darker territory, which is saying a lot for a show whose characters once celebrated positive polling numbers over a dead woman’s body. Acknowledging that there was no way to avoid the specter of Trumpism, the seventh season leaned hard into it, with story lines about Chinese election interference, a Jonah Ryan campaign with MAGA-matching rhetoric, and, in the end, Selina Meyer’s horrifying decision to fling her most valued staffer under the bus in order to save her presidential campaign. The series finale was not only funny and brilliantly acted by the decade’s strongest comedy ensemble; it brutally displayed how pointless and reckless politics is at its worst.

6. BoJack Horseman (Netflix)
Is it fair to include BoJack Horseman on this list when only one half of its final season dropped in 2019? (Part two arrives on Netflix in January.) Well, if six episodes of Fleabag can qualify, then eight great episodes of BoJack count, too, especially since they w

5. Euphoria (HBO)
Television and cinema have had no shortage of tales of drug-addled, sexed-up, yearning, lonely teens, but none took the genre as far as creator and executive producer Sam Levinson, who concocted a superheated melodrama filmed on sets that could be pulled apart to enable stylized lighting and acrobatic, at times omniscient-seeming camerawork. The brazen excess of Euphoria synced up with the too-muchness of the story, an ensemble tragicomedy depicting adolescent heroes and antiheroes, as well as their equally screwed-up parents, stumbling and crashing through life.

4. Russian Doll (Netflix)
Masterminded by star Natasha Lyonne and her co-executive producers Lesley Headlund and Amy Poehler, this trippy series about a New York computer programmer coming unstuck in time was a tribute to the classic films that shaped their sensibilities — in particular, All That Jazz, The Shining, and Defending Your Life — but it immediately established its own sensibility and managed to neutralize even the most obsessive plot-guessers in the audience by springing surprises that came from characterization, philosophy, theology, and physics. Every scene is packed with so much detail that repeat viewings are a must.

3. Succession (HBO)
Jesse Armstrong’s series about a New York media family headed by a Rupert Murdoch type quickly moved beyond its basic premise — essentially, King Lear meets Arrested Development — and became a corrosive study in the consolidation of financial as well as emotional capital. The second season delved more deeply into the lingering trauma inflicted by the father upon his children, humanizing the family without ever losing the electrifying contempt for the billionaire class that marked the show as a stealthy populist satire of the world’s true rulers.

2. Better Things (FX)
The third season of writer-director-star Pamela Adlon’s series about a 50-year-old actress and single mother was the series’ best, finding increasingly inventive yet controlled ways to tell stories of parenting, work, relationships, and intergenerational tension. Every half-hour was a perfectly shaped short story, packed with moments that were alternately droll, moving, sexy, disturbing, and profoundly sad, and Adlon’s filmmaking always managed to find a way to make its points with images and sound, even when they drew on the actors’ performances for inspiration.

1. When They See Us (Netflix)
As the title suggests, Ava DuVernay’s four-part miniseries about the so-called Central Park Five reframed history, insisting that a bunch of scapegoated teenagers railroaded on rape and assault charges were innocent human beings with lives, not just a faceless problem to be “solved” by police and the courts. But the production was more than an earnest, muckraking social drama. DuVernay’s direction drew on every lesson she’d learned in a filmography that often zeroed in on institutionalized racism, wrongful incarceration, and the use of the prison system to perpetuate a version of slavery into the 21st century. The storytelling structure, cinematography, editing, and use of music were peerless and contributed to the sense that we were seeing an epic American story about real people in a mode rarely seen since the 1970s and ’80s.

Jen Chaney’s Top 10 Shows of 2019