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In the era of too much all the time, let us be your guide. A guide to the best TV of 2019 so far, from Vogue editors and contributors.
Better Things
As John Powers wrote in March: “Over the course of its first two seasons, Pamela Adlon’s Better Things waged a stealth campaign to establish itself as one of the most moving shows on television. Ostensibly about a single mother who must juggle her L.A. acting career with raising three wildly different daughters, it takes a tangential, offbeat approach to contemporary domesticity, resulting in a fiercely original work.... Without ever flaunting its daring, Better Things is a groundbreaking show—witty, impressionistic, and sneakily deep.”
Shrill
Shrill stars SNL’s Aidy Bryant as a struggling Portland writer who, wrote John Powers, “learns to stand up for herself in a world of doubters and fat-shamers. Executive-produced by Elizabeth Banks and Lorne Michaels, and based on Lindy West’s best-selling memoir, the show boasts a likable star, nifty character work…and a modern matter-of-factness about issues like abortion. Clearly intended as an upbeat tale of empowerment, Shrill is at its best when those intentions play second fiddle to the antics of its high-spirited cast.”
Veep
“Veep has never been unaware of gender politics...just stumbling into situations that highlight institutional biases,” wrote Chloe Schama of the HBO show in March. “It’s a show that delights in twisting them into a spikier, saltier, through-the-looking-glass version of themselves.... Perhaps no show has seemed a more of a prescient prism of the cycle of gender-inflected politics than Veep.”
Fosse/Verdon
Wrote Marley Marius in April: “If there’s no new step under the sun, then Bob Fosse might just be the sun. With a reach that extended from Broadway to Hollywood and back again, Fosse (1927–1987) was a soft-shoe dancer with megawatt talent. In his films (Cabaret; Sweet Charity), as in his stage productions (Pippin; Chicago), the director-choreographer married tap’s fancy footwork with the hip-swaying sensuality of back-alley vaudeville.... Fosse gets the FX treatment with a new show, Fosse/Verdon, starring Sam Rockwell (as the director-choreographer) and Michelle Williams (as wife and collaborator Gwen Verdon) and executive produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton director Thomas Kail.”
Fleabag
Wrote Hillary Kelly in May: “If you’re worried that the sophomore effort won’t live up to the show’s initial glory or that Waller-Bridge used up all her depravity writing Killing Eve, rest assured: Fleabag has lost none of its grim bravado or dark verve. The fast-paced wallops of witty crudeness are perhaps even livelier than last season, with newly anointed Oscar winner Olivia Colman returning as the cruelly sympathetic godmother turned stepmother.… Waller-Bridge stretches her character to new depths; familiarity only makes the glimpses of vulnerability she offers more powerful.”
Chernobyl
“Chernobyl (HBO) creates a sense of relentless, excruciating terror with none of the tired genre clichés of horror,” wrote Taylor Antrim in May. “There are no jump scares or needless gore in these episodes. The most frightening thing about nuclear radiation, of course, is that it is invisible and everywhere.... Chernobyl is a haunting corrective, a reminder of what sky-high stakes feel like, how terrifying true tragedy can be.”
Gentleman Jack
“The residents of Halifax, in Yorkshire, were accustomed to Anne Lister’s penchant for sober black dresses manipulated to look like menswear and other conduct ‘unbecoming’ of a lady,” wrote Hillary Kelly in May. “What they didn’t know—because Lister kept her lifestyle a secret and wrote her diaries in code—was that she was, as scholars would later call her, the first modern lesbian. With Suranne Jones playing the real-life Lister, Gentleman Jack (HBO) begins in 1832, as Lister returns from a trip abroad…determined to modernize a Tudor-era house, open up a coal pit, and, most important, bed and wed a wife.”
Big Little Lies
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“The intersection between the luxury lives and high-stakes problems (a murder cover-up, remember?) of the Monterey Five continues in a long tradition of the best camp murder mysteries,” wrote Bridget Read, “in which beautiful, jewel-adorned women shriek their heads off and look great doing it. Each actor, at the height of her game, has leaned into the more ridiculous, frantic aspects of her character’s personality.”
When They See Us
In When They See Us (Netflix), Ava DuVernay turned her attention to the infamous 1989 Central Park jogger case. “If DuVernay has an aim with this project, it is not just to revive the injustice meted out to these boys but to illuminate the larger consequences,” wrote Mattie Kahn in June. “The series, which DuVernay cowrote, includes 116 roles. ‘It was a beautiful team effort,’ DuVernay says—and that effort included all five real-life men as well, who, over the course of the filming, visited the set and made their voices heard.”
Euphoria
“Euphoria is a hand grenade,” wrote Maya Singer in Vogue’s June cover story on Zendaya. “Loosely based on the Israeli series of the same name, the show delivers a kaleidoscopic, hyperbolic depiction of contemporary American high school life, where the youth of today are formed in a crucible of social media, online porn, and easy access to drugs of all kinds. The series...comes from executive producer Drake and showrunner Sam Levinson, and like Levinson’s feature film, the Sundance darling Assassination Nation, it moves at the clip of a Twitter feed.”
Das Boot
Das Boot (Hulu) is “an elegantly entertaining wartime suspense story,” wrote Taylor Antrim in June. “The narrative shifts between the confines of the submarine, a knife-thin envelope of steel that keeps the men on top of each other (and at each others’ throats), and La Rochelle [in France], where Simone is drawn into a shadowy espionage plot against the Nazis. The submarine sequences are definitely the more gripping parts, but the onshore [Vicky] Krieps is a joy to watch (as she was in Phantom Thread), letting fear and anxiety play subtly across her face as she fends off the advances of her Gestapo suitor and goes toe to toe with Lizzy Caplan as an American head of a Resistance cell. Das Boot, a hit in Europe, has already been renewed for a second season—good news for those of us who can’t get enough of EU TV.”
Dark
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“Dark (Netflix) has elicited Stranger Things comparisons since its first season debuted in 2017,” wrote Taylor Antrim in July. “Sure, this moody German sci-fi drama includes period-perfect scenes from the 1980s and gangs of teenagers trying to solve the case of a missing kid—but Dark is genre escapism of an entirely different order. On its simplest level, this is a time-travel show set in a small village in Germany, but nothing about this show is simple. There are forces of good and evil warring through different dimensions, a nuclear-disaster dystopia, advanced physics, child abduction, a police procedural, and so much more—all of it wrapped in such impeccable German melancholic art direction that you long for a rain-drenched Mercedes station wagon to call your own, not to mention some slim-cut rainwear. Dark is stylish and mesmerizing—it’s also the most fearsomely complex show I’ve ever seen. Watching it is like playing three-dimensional chess.”
The Loudest Voice
“The Loudest Voice (Showtime) is concerned with FOX’s unexpected sway over political rhetoric during the past two decades,” wrote Hillary Kelly in July, “and [Russell] Crowe owns the screen as the mercurial, foulmouthed, tantrum-prone executive presiding over it all [Roger Ailes]. As a historical document, the show feels like a living one, using a range of inspired-by-the-truth (if not quite literal) plotlines to illustrate the varied nature of Ailes’s sins.... The most alarming part isn’t what Ailes gets away with in private, it’s how openly his behavior is tolerated or encouraged.”
Succession
“Show creator and head writer Jesse Armstrong (who made his name with the indelible cult-comedy British series Peep Show) knows how to write the wittiest dialogue on television—but he also understands how empathy amplifies satire,” wrote Taylor Antrim in August. “Loathsome as they may be, the Roy siblings—Roman, Shiv, Connor, and Kendall—were characters you found yourself, sometimes helplessly, rooting for. As played by, respectively, Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook, Alan Ruck, and Jeremy Strong, these were one-percenters who wore both their egos and their human vulnerabilities on their sleeves.”
Unbelievable
“When the openhearted detective Karen Duvall (a dulcet, brilliant Merritt Wever) and hard-edged Grace Rasmussen (Toni Collette, with grit and guts) are partnered to track a serial rapist,” wrote Hillary Kelly in September, Unbelievable (Netflix) “flips the conventional procedural on its head, underlining just how often those detective-duo shows have an explicitly male perspective. Unbelievable is a story of assiduous hard work, of a mission to find the perpetrator and the problems with the system.”
Back to Life
The BBC dramedy Back to Life, making its U.S. debut on Showtime, follows “Miri Matteson (Daisy Haggard, also the creator) as she returns, after 18 years in prison, to her parents’ seaside village, a place that—as some expletive-laden graffiti implies—does not exactly welcome her back with open arms,” wrote Hillary Kelly in September. “But Miri and her family remain upbeat through it all...and its tragicomic tone puts it on a par with Fleabag. (The two shows share producers.) Back to Life is a parade of droll one-liners accompanying a suspenseful tale and a mesmerizing look at how our lives slip away from all of us.”
Mrs. Fletcher
Starring the wondrous Kathryn Hahn as a suburban mother feeling some midlife, empty-nest malaise, Mrs. Fletcher (HBO) is a “delightfully dirty look at how untamed desire is an insatiable animating force,” wrote Hillary Kelly. “Like every [Tom] Perrotta adaptation before it (The Leftovers, Little Children), it’s scripted to perfection, designed to showcase every inch of Hahn’s masterly range.”
Looking for Alaska
In Looking for Alaska (Hulu), “loner Miles Halter (Charlie Plummer) shows up at Culver Creek, the Alabama boarding school his father attended, with the final words of Renaissance scholar François Rabelais as his mandate: ‘I go to seek a Great Perhaps,’” wrote Hillary Kelly. “That Perhaps, for Miles, is the sense of adventure and belonging his lonely existence hasn’t yet offered him. He joins an eclectic posse and falls for the bookish, otherworldly Alaska (Norwegian beauty Kristine Froseth)—a girl with a sad, mysterious past.“
Dickinson
The new Apple TV series “flips our ideas of period television inside out, pairing a modern vernacular with a soundtrack that features A$AP Rocky, Billie Eilish, and Ecca Vandal’s uncanny ‘Future Heroine.’” raved Hillary Kelly in November, adding, “It’s a smart homage to Dickinson herself, whose clipped lines and slant rhymes, scribbled on envelope backs and receipts, packed the sort of linguistic punches that quietly—secretly, really—reinvented the idea of what poetry might be.”
The Morning Show
"The Morning Show, one of the first shows from Apple TV+, is nothing short of a treatise on life in America in 2019: malignant office culture, entertainment as the death of journalism, the waning impossibility of redemption after disgrace. But tying it all together is a wondrous performance by [Jennifer] Aniston," wrote Hillary Kelly.
Dollface
Hillary Kelly called the Hulu show "half fever dream, half all-too prescient insight into the prickly, confounding complexities of life among the XXs."