Continuing on from my favourite films of the decade, here’s my favourite (not necessarily best) TV shows! Alphabetically, of course, and illustrated with gifs.
Adventure Time
Honestly Adventure Time is a masterpiece. A surrealist masterpiece, an animation masterpiece, a masterpiece of children’s television… call it whatever you want but “masterpiece” needs to be in there somewhere. It was weird, touching, occasionally terrifying, and never lost sight of what it wanted to do…for nine years. I’m sad that it’s (mostly) over but so, so glad it happened.
Brooklyn 99
Come 2013 I was suddenly seeing this show everywhere. I knew the names of all the characters before I ever sat down to watch it, and most of the best jokes. That didn’t dent my enjoyment in the slightest. Brooklyn 99 is so, so good in just about every way. It’s funny, it’s smart, it has people in it who you just don’t see as main characters, like Captain Holt. The fact that Fox *spits* cancelled it and then it was almost immediately picked up by NBC just goes to show how much of a impact it had.
Call the Midwife
Call the Midwife has only been going since 2012 but it feels like it’s been so much longer. (That’s a good thing.) This is a pro-NHS, pro-feminism, pro-LGBT show that goes out prime-time on the BBC and I’m so grateful it exists. It never shies away from the rough parts of history, but instead pulls them out into the light to remind us of our responsibilities. It angers me no end that critics sometimes dismiss this show as frivolous nostalgia for the past, because there is nothing nostalgic about this show. It DESPERATELY wants you to know how horrible it was being a woman even within living memory. It’s a sucker punch to the gut with occasional upbeat ’50s music and some neat dresses.
Final Space
All the praise to Netflix, because if it hadn’t existed and advertised this show on its front page I would never have discovered it. And I love it. This is an adult cartoon done right, i.e. using animation to tell a story of vast scope instead of using it to tell fart jokes. (Though there are probably a couple of those, even if I don’t remember them.) It’s like… how can I even describe this show… the ambition of Star Wars meets the themes of Guardians of the Galaxy meets the zest of Futurama. AND it has a adorable squishy space pet/planet-destroyer! This show not having a much bigger fanbase is such a dang injustice.
Gravity Falls
I’d heard of Gravity Falls, and heard nothing but good things, but I didn’t actually see it until several years after it came out. And I’m SO CROSS because the show was set up as a big mad mystery to be solved, and it would have been great to be able to trade theories and decode the end messages along with everyone else. But as it stands… I got a fantastic experience anyway. I knew all the major twists, but I’d never really met the characters properly. So now I love them all, especially Soos. And I also love the show’s central theme, which is that growing up is hard as hell and you need a good support system.
The Handmaid’s Tale
The Handmaid’s Tale has always been one of my favourite books and this adaptation was more than I could ever have dreamed of. It took characters I already knew and built them backstories and new futures. It cast unbelievably talented actors for even the smaller roles. And my god the visuals, the punch-you-in-the-face visuals. The red-and-white Handmaid uniforms are seen at political protests a lot now, and they should be. This show demonstrates how unforgivably close we always are to losing everything we hold dear.
His Dark Materials
I read all of the His Dark Materials series as a kid and I remember liking them, especially the third book. This TV adaptation brought all of that crashing back and then some. I have some qualms (it’s obvious that the budget couldn’t stretch to one visible daemon for every human, for example) but my gosh, what an absolutely beautiful job they’ve done with everything else. And the acting is wonderful, although Ruth Wilson is the standout the child actors are like… clearly the best in the business, holy hell. I can’t WAIT for the next couple of seasons.
The Last Man On Earth
The Last Man on Earth massively lit up my life… for the few years it was on. My god, Fox had no idea what they had on their hands. After the dodgy first season it suddenly turned into this amazing, beautiful, touching tale about life after the end of the world. Characters underwent development! They got married! They had kids! And then all of a sudden… end of show. Right after a cliffhanger ending, a major one. Sigh. I’ll always miss LMOE but I’m grateful I was around at the same time it was.
Superstore
I’d wanted to watch Superstore for ages but I only finally got to see it when it came on British TV. And even then I managed to catch only the season one finale before anything else. But it hooked me instantly and I quickly went back to the beginning to see what I missed and then forward again to season two. By the season two finale I had utterly fallen in love with it. It’s hilarious but it pulls no punches about how inhumanly terrible the American retail systems are – how inhumanly terrible a lot of systems are, in fact. Also, Mark McKinney’s “Muppet voice” for Glenn is possibly the best comedy voice that has ever been created, EVER.
Unbelievable
This show. Rarely have I seen anything so bleak and depressing and yet so triumphant at the end. Marie, who is very VERY closely based on a real person, goes through an amount of trauma and distress which would destroy most people (and very nearly destroys her) but she gets to walk away vindicated, thank god. The intervention of two female detectives saves not only her but a multitude of other women. It seems to me to be so rare that such a terrible story has a happy or just ending, so thank god this show arrived with its pointed message: when it comes to rape cases, we need to be better. So, so much better than we currently are. Please watch it.
Honourable mentions: The Good Place, Steven Universe, the Moffat and Chibnall eras of Doctor Who (not eligible because the show itself started last decade…), Broadchurch, Orange is the New Black, and probably a few more that I forgot, sorry.
Their Importance: Call the Midwife presented a really good portrait of how alcoholism could affect a seemingly happy young woman. In the first couple of seasons of the show, Trixie’s drinking was shown as just another aspect of her party-girl personality. She liked champagne, smoking and jazz, in comparison to her more straight-laced fellow midwives. However, sometimes her mask slipped and she talked about her past – during her childhood she cared for her father, who had PTSD from serving in World War II and also “had a problem with drink.”
As the show progressed it became more and more obvious that Trixie was using alcohol as a crutch. As soon as problems popped up in her personal life she drank more and more, until it was affecting her career. She eventually went to Alcoholic’s Anonymous and admitted she had a problem, but it didn’t end there. She continued to attend AA throughout the series and talked about how much she missed alcohol and how dull life seemed without it (problems often faced by real alcoholics.)
In Season 7 she ended a long-term relationship and subsequently relapsed. Alcohol once again began affecting her midwife work, so she ended up leaving her job to go and seek more treatment. (Part of this was to temporarily write actress Helen George out of the show so she could have a baby, but it was done in a way that made perfect sense, and it’s confirmed she’ll be back for Series 8.)
Showrunner Heidi Thomas said in a 2018 interview that the show’s writers liased with the real AA about Trixie’s storylines, and that her character’s journey has had “hugely positive feedback from the AA community.”
Issues: In season two Trixie becomes the victim of attempted rape after an older man plies her with alcohol and then forces himself on her. This never gets brought up again, which perhaps makes sense for the 1950s, but I figured it was worth pointing out.
Their Importance: Lucille is the first black midwife to join the team in Call the Midwife. She’s highly trained and extremely good at her job, but she still faces occasional racism from white Londoners. Her culture among the black community in Poplar at the time is also explored. Her actress, Leonie Elliot, has talked about how she wanted Lucille to represent the experience of the real Caribbean nurses who went to England in the 1960s.
This is especially important due to the issues with the British government. As far as I can tell, Lucille’s a member of the Windrush generation (people who came to the UK from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1971) who were later treated appallingly by immigration laws until the scandal came to light in 2018. You can read more about it here. It’s so ridiculous and cruel that people were Lucille were eventually denied access to a health service they helped create.
Y’all why aren’t we talking about Call The Midwife??
60s British aesthetics on fleek, women in an often forgotten medical profession, literally every episode passes the bechdel test with ease, there’s like 1 (one) male main character and he never talks down to the women and never questions them, also there’s a whole ep where a POC midwife joins the Gang™️ and when she goes to bed everyone else is like “aight so we all agree we’re gonna beat up anyone who talks shit about her right”. Also there’s a confirmed lesbian couple???? As of the current season they are both alive and happy??? Guys. Dudes. What a time to be alive.
Oooh, I reblogged this earlier but I wanna add – this show is amazing with portraying disability. As in, people with the actual disabilities were cast to play characters who had them*. (A REALLY low bar, I know, but I guess that’s the world we live in.) It’s featured literally more disabled characters than I’ve ever seen on any show, it’s amazing.
(*Apart from the child who plays baby Susan, but I suppose with babies it’s a different case)
