Sean T. Collins’s Eight Best TV Shows of 2018

Now, nobody likes a good laugh more than I do. But comedy is about making people laugh, which turns characters in comedies into joke-delivery mechanisms rather than characters in the fully developed sense from which we derive value in drama. So it takes a lot for a comedy to make my list of the best the medium has to offer.

In the case of On Cinema, Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s byzantine saga of atrocious human behavior in the guise of a thumbs-up/thumbs-down movie-review show starring two idiots, here is what it took: Tim, the right-wing hedonist host whose endless series of jilted wives, abandoned children, unwatchable action-movie side projects, unlistenable alt-rock and dance-music spinoffs, disastrous alternative-medicine experiments, near-death experiences (including toxic shock from unsterilized acupuncture needles, malnourishment from an all-drug diet, and incineration after falling asleep with a lit cigarette in the storage locker cum VHS-tape library he’d been reduced to living in) culminated in a mistrial for murder after 20 kids died from smoking his tainted vape juice at an EDM festival. The subsequent tenth season of his movie-review show (“On Cinema X”) saw him caught between the diktats of the show’s snake-oil sponsor and the civil judgment won by the family of one of his victims.

Somewhere in there, he and Gregg may or may not have awarded Solo: A Star Wars Story their coveted Five Bags of Popcorn seal of approval; between Tim screaming obscenely about the district attorney (against whom he mounts a quixotic electoral campaign) and Gregg prattling on about how Tim Burton won’t answer his letters, it’s a bit hard to tell. Heidecker and Turkington have played out this shaggy-dog joke for years, anticipating (not kidding at all here) both the rise of Donald Trump and the role that aggrieved nerds would play as his cultural vanguard. The result is maybe the best thing the extended Tim & Eric universe has ever produced. Long may they rant.

Watch On Cinema at the Cinema on Adult Swim

Not with a bang, but a whimper. Should we have expected anything different from the conclusion of one of the decade’s best, and most quietly despairing, dramas? Probably not. Deep-cover Soviet spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, their daughter and trainee Paige, their oblivious son Henry, their neighbor and unwitting nemesis FBI Agent Stan Beeman, their handler Claudia, and even their unseen reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev got out alive, no matter how dire their straits looked at any given time.

If anything, showrunners Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg were too gentle and generous, whether by allowing all involved parties to exit a parking-lot confrontation unscathed or awkwardly extending a U2 anthem for an extra Bono holler because they loved the characters the song was being made to serenade that much. Still, staggering into the future with nothing settled permanently, with no catharsis, with no guarantee that anything they ever did really mattered… Well, look at both countries now. As drama, it left me wanting more. As diagnosis, it’s dead-on.

Where to stream The Americans

Sometimes the worst happens, but before long we can at least say the worst has passed. Right? Sarah Treem’s emotional wrecking ball of a drama concluded its fourth season by examining how it feels when the worst happens all over again—when the same forces of gender, class, family, history, and plain human desire that upended the lives of Noah & Helen Solloway and Cole & Alison Lockhart years earlier when Noah and Alison began their titular relationship return to sink them all into the ocean once again.

With all those relationships long severed and new partners and liaisons (dangerous and otherwise) in the mix, the route into and out of psychological disaster is more complicated than ever. And with the untimely, brutally unexpected death of a core character, it’s also more tragic. But Treem’s eye for how men and women experience, and are allowed to experience, each other and the world around them is as sharp as ever—employing actor Ruth Wilson’s Alison, one of the all-time great TV character creations, as its primary lens one last time.

Where to stream The Affair

In the immortal words of Qui-Gon Jinn, “There’s always a bigger fish.” Billions, a show full of characters who might drop that quote into a conversation with only a hint of irony, demonstrated the truth of this maxim all season. Long the story of the Ahab vs. Moby-Dick conflict of ambitious federal attorney Chuck Rhoades and his hedge-fund-king nemesis Bobby Axelrod, the show’s third outing spent its first half watching Axe extricate himself from the brilliantly planned trap Chuck sprang on him during Season Two, with Chuck’s wife and Axe’s close friend Wendy Rhoades as the fulcrum for the escape.

But all the while, Bobby’s brainiac protege Taylor Mason (nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillon in a role all the more groundbreaking for its matter-of-factness) and Chuck’s hang-em-high boss Attorney General Jock Jeffcoat (Clancy Brown, looming and drawling like a bizarre High Plains Frankenstein) were moving closer to springing traps of their own. Season’s end saw the one-time arch-enemies in an alliance against their new foes—and Brian Koppelman & David Levien’s whip-smart, drum-tight financial thriller hit new heights of both entertainment and insight into the world of the One Percent.

Where to stream Billions

Hypnotic, heartfelt, stylish, and consistently frightening to a degree I never thought possible, Nick Antosca’s horror-anthology series aired two full (but satisfyingly short) seasons this year. The first, Butcher’s Block, was a work of stunning surrealism, a meat-is-murder feast for gorehounds, and a delicately devastating look at how mental illness can tear some families apart while uniting others in a shared psychosis.

The second, Dream Door, investigated the erotic and emotional energy of new relationships—seemingly limitless in potential but beset by nerve-wracking and necessary limitations—by juxtaposing their urgent intimacy against equally intimate but far more physical violations. Directed by Arkasha Stevenson like Kubrick covering Clive Barker in the former case and by  E.L. Katz like Cronenberg picking up Polanski’s dropped baton in the latter, either would earn their parent series a spot on this list alone. Together? Hoooooo boy, this show is an absolute treasure. Go hunt it down.

Where to stream Channel Zero

Souls aren’t sold in a day. Perhaps it would be kinder if they were. If a single, spectacular event transformed flawed but basically well-meaning people into amoral pieces of shit instantly, those moments of transformation and the monsters they spawn would be easier to spot. Better Call Saul paints a bleaker picture, in which the process of breaking bad is as grindingly tedious and unremarkable as any other day job.

Though it uses the heartbreaking suicide that ended the previous season as a starting point, neither suspended lawyer Jimmy McGill nor anyone else in his circle rise from those ashes as a brand new person. It takes hundreds and hundreds of burner cellphone sales, or months and months carving out an underground laboratory inch by painstaking inch, or hours and hours bending the law you serve to save the person you love, to become a bad person… So gradually you don’t notice it until it’s already too late.

And it takes Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan’s boldly slow storytelling to take us on this journey, forcing us to watch the moral disintegration of human beings in what almost feels like real time. Given the jarring Walter White wish-fulfillment finale of its predecessor, the series has begun to feel like one giant, and welcome, mea culpa.

Where to stream Better Call Saul

Lions prey on the most vulnerable members of the herd—the lame, the sick, the slow, the scrawny, the ones who fall behind. For Andrew Cunanan, the gay community of the Clinton ’90s was his quarry, and prey were thick on the ground: the Navy officer forced out of the only career he’d ever wanted by Don’t Ask Don’t Tell; the promising young architect dancing between the raindrops of the public closet and the private desire for connection; the closeted Chicago real-estate magnate tortured to death for achieving the kind of straight-society success perpetually out of Cunanan’s reach; even the world-famous fashion designer for rock stars and royalty whose homosexuality and alleged HIV+ status were still taboo despite his incredible talent.

The difference between this killer and those who stalk the savannah, of course, is that Cunanan himself was a part of the herd he slaughtered: smart, handsome, driven, talented, and tormented by homophobia (with class and race riding shotgun) all his life. The hunted became a hunter.

Writer Tom Rob Smith, creator Ryan Murphy, and actor Darren Criss trace Cunanan’s devolution from golden child turned grifter turned murderer backwards while treating his victims as co-protagonists, affording them the dignity he stripped away and making this one of the very best portraits of a serial killer ever painted on a screen of any size.

Where to stream The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story

Dan Simmons’s 2007 speculative-fiction novel about the last years of the lost Franklin Expedition was a sprawling, riveting, imperfect but impressive work of survival horror with a supernatural bent. Over the course of ten episodes, showrunners David Kajganich and Soo Hugh created an adaptation that captured everything that worked in the source material, jettisoned everything that didn’t, and produced something transcendent: a look at love, hate, and intimacy among these doomed men of British Empire that somehow speaks a universal language despite—or because of—their unique, and uniquely horrifying, circumstances.

Playing out the slow end of their lives against the dreamlike backdrop of the Arctic wastes, actors like Jared Harris, Tobias Menzies, Nive Nielsen, Paul Ready, Ciarán Hinds, Greta Scacchi, and an absolutely incendiary Adam Nagaitis made a magnificent last meal of the tightest and most lyrical period-piece writing since Deadwood.

What does it say that a show with such a bleak foregone conclusion—the disappearance and death of nearly everyone in the cast, as per the very real fate of their characters’ very real voyage—leaves viewers with such indelible memories of the life that flourished amid all that misery and mortality? It says nothing less than this: The Terror is the best show of the year.

Where to stream The Terror