Top 12 TV shows of 2020

Top 12 Shows of 2020

(click here for past editions)

1. The Great (Hulu) -Fans of the 2018 film “The Favourite” will appreciate the way writer Tony McNamara portrays idle pleasures and high drama as two sides of the same coin — ultimately a game that the nobility must play to curry favor with those more powerful than them. As in “The Favourite” the hierarchy leads upward to a monarch (Nicholas Hoult) with absolute power. That’s where the show presents a stark contrast between the villain and heroine (Elle Fanning) Catherine the Great who history tells us will come to modernize Russia with her rule. The question is when and finding the answer has been quite a ride so far.

2. Dead to Me (Netflix)-Newly widowed Jen Hardy (Christina Applegate) attends a grief group where she makes the acquaintance of a strangely eager Judy (Linda Cardinelli). Judy chips away at Jen’s veneer until she forms a makeshift friendship. Or at least that’s how it seems. Within the first few episodes of the inaugural season of “Dead To Me”, it’s revealed that Judy isn’t a fellow griever but someone involved in the death of Judy’s husband and that her guilt is driving her to make it up in some karmic fashion. It’s a premise Hitchcock or Fincher would have killed for, playing out in a slow burning series. The second season expands the scale of twists — the introduction of an identical twin to the deceased is deliciously soapish (a cheap excuse to keep James Marsden employed) — but more importantly, it heightens the emotional stakes.

3. Brockmire (IFC) -A lot of TV in the #metoo era is about men getting consumed by dark pasts and no one seemed more hopeless than the superhumanly aloof baseball broadcaster Jim Brockmire in the first season, but his redemptive arc that gelled in the final season makes such a light out of the tunnel not only seem possible but easy-peasy. That’s really an “It’s a Wonderful Life” scale miracle worth celebrating. In the final season, the show leapt over a decade into the future in the midst of a technocratic dystopia. Our loose-lipped hero is charged not just with personal rehabilitation but saving baseball as we know it. Pretty ambitious for a show that, remember, originated out of a “Funny or Die” sketch.