FAMILY SAGA: SUCCESSION, HBO
I spent significant pockets of time in 2019 trying to get people—colleagues, hair stylists, women innocently shopping for black turtlenecks—to watch Succession. If Season 1 took a while to warm up to, Season 2 was masterful right out of the gate, in its caustic dissection of the 0.1 percent and its ability to find clashing shades of humanity within its characters. No show on television right now has better writing or such a gift for imaginative excruciation. Regardless of which media dynasty they bring to mind at any given moment, the Roys are consistently fascinating, tragic, and repulsive in equal measure.
Also noteworthy: The Crown (Netflix), Years and Years (HBO)
ALTERNATIVE ROM-COM: FLEABAG, AMAZON
The second season of Fleabag, its creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, said at a Screen Actors Guild screening in New York earlier this year, is essentially a story about a woman learning to love herself. While she said this, she made retching noises, as if to apologize for the sheer corniness of the concept. Corny or not, it was the radical self-acceptance—and self-forgiveness—rooted within the final episodes of Fleabag that made the series land with such power. It helped that the second season also offered more gifts (canned G&Ts, fox hauntings, pencil haircuts, bassoon solos) than Santa Claus and more dazzling asides than Shakespeare.
Also noteworthy: Back to Life (Showtime), The End of the F***ing World (Netflix)
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