The 15 Best TV Shows of 2019

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)

FAITHFUL DRAMATIZATION: CHERNOBYL, HBO

The first episode of Craig Mazin’s five-part miniseries about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster felt less like an hour of scripted television than like a panic attack involving aberrant sounds, glowing bricks, and the ominous rattle of the Geiger counter. This astonishingly detailed, frequently grisly period drama replicated the aesthetic of the 1980s Soviet Union down to its patterned tablecloths and painfully wide lapels. More important, it communicated what happens when truth is understood to be interpretative rather than inflexible. Mazin may have fudged some facts and invented some characters to serve the story, but his portrayal of how party propaganda intensified a global calamity was so unstinting that it even enraged the Russian government.

Also noteworthy: Brexit: The Uncivil War (HBO)

UNFAITHFUL DRAMATIZATION: WATCHMEN, HBO

No TV project has enraged people from its inception quite like Watchmen, Damon Lindelof’s extravagant, surreal, incomparably audacious remix of a comic-book series whose fans tend to regard it as a sacred text and whose author decries any attempts to bring it to the screen. Nevertheless, Lindelof persisted. And his nine-part HBO series, which spins off from the source material to consider the scourge of white supremacy in an alternative-timeline America, is an extraordinary work of television. The show features the superpowers of actors including Regina King, Jeremy Irons, and Jean Smart. It has the weird flourishes that have come to be Lindelof’s signature—the striking visual symbols and out-of-body interludes that defined Lost and The Leftovers. And most crucially, it offers up a deft examination of how deeply racism is embedded in American history.

Also noteworthy: Dickinson (Apple TV+)

REVELATORY DOCUSERIES: LEAVING NEVERLAND, HBO

Dan Reed’s two-part documentary, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival before airing on HBO, is hard to watch, and that’s the point. It’s wrenching, as a viewer, to hear two adult men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, reckon with the child sexual abuse that has colored their lives, and wrestle decades later with feelings of guilt, trauma, and self-loathing. It’s shocking to see precisely how, for Michael Jackson, the man they accuse of abusing them (and whose estate is suing HBO), the machinery of fandom seemed to double as insulation. And it’s startling to remember that, because of the power and joy of the art Jackson made, so few people cared to look behind it.