5 Favorite Episodes: 2021

I’ve recommended 2021 shows here and here, and ranked every show I watched this year here, but now it’s time for my original end of year tradition: highlighting my favorite episodes of the year.

If you’ve been around my blog and my channel, you’ve probably heard me say that I love the art of the individual episode. TV is always compared to film for pretty obvious reasons, with the main difference being how the two experience time. Film is an in-and-out trip, while TV stays in our lives for day-long bingethons, weeks, and years as seasons stretch on. Episodes are the smallest unit of TV, and at their best they tell stories that are both individual and part of a grander narrative. They’re like great soccer players, you can appreciate their singular greatness but only in the context of a team setting.

So every year I make a list of my 5 favorites (here’s 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 if you’re a Skip Intro completist I guess). The only rule: each show can only have one entry. Before we get into the countdown, here are some honorable mentions:

• “On a Very Special Episode…” — WandaVision
• “The Imposter” — Search Party
• “Oyedeng” — The Expanse
• “Mortyplicity” — Rick and Morty
• “Pilot” — Yellowjackets
• “The Grey” — For All Mankind
• “Enlightened Dave” — Dave

#5. “Goodbye My Damaged Home” — Station Eleven (HBO Max)

Station Eleven, the HBO Max miniseries based on the novel of the same name, has been getting a ton of hype at the end of 2021. A number of critics placed it high up on their top 10 shows of the year list before any of the episodes had even aired publicly. I understand the appeal for critics—the takes for this show write themselves. It’s a post-apocalyptic story about a flu pandemic that wipes out civilization (relatable) but is optimistic in the way it focuses on our humanity, offering hope for our future.

For most of the season, I’ve thought Station Eleven was good, but not something I understood as being worthy of so much buzz. Even “The Severn City Airport,” the much-heralded fifth episode, fell short of those lofty expectations.

However, the seventh episode, “Goodbye My Damaged Home” (which aired on December 30th, making it a last minute consideration) delivered. The episode plays out as a dream/memory sequence, transporting our main character Kirsten back in time—via poison-induced hallucination—to the first three months of the apocalypse, when she was staying with brothers Jeevan and Frank.

The strength of Station Eleven, and where it differs from other post-apocalyptic stories, is its belief in humanity’s ability to persevere. Whether it’s zombies or disease, so many stories in this genre focus on the ugliness of the human race. The tagline for The Walking Dead epitomizes this idea: “Fight the dead. Fear the living.” While people offer a lot of danger on Station Eleven, the show is always focused on people continuing to do the things that make us who we are.

Whether it’s dancing to Frank’s rapping or performing Kirsten’s play or continuing to write something that nobody will ever read, “Goodbye My Damaged Home” is about holding onto our humanity even in the face of unfathomable grief.

Frank ultimately sacrifices himself so that Jeevan can focus on keeping Kirsten alive, but he also does so because he decides to hold onto his house, something that has finally become home now that he has learned to share it with his new family. Even in his tragic death, “Goodbye My Damaged Home” holds space for both grief and beauty.

#4. “Hunting” — Reservation Dogs (FX/Hulu)

“Hunting” is the sixth episode of Reservation Dogs, one that focuses specifically on Willie Jack as she goes on a hunting trip with her dad Leon, like the ones they used to go on with her late cousin Daniel.

Willie Jack is dead set on getting “Chunk,” a large buck that she and Daniel first saw three or four years before, as a way of honoring and remembering Daniel before she sets out to California with her friends. California is a symbol to the characters of Reservation Dogs, an escape from depressing reservation life, and a fulfillment of Daniel’s dream. They don’t know what they’ll do when they get there, but it feels like they have to go for Daniel’s sake.

Daniel’s death (by suicide) casts a large shadow over the entire show, but is especially prominent in “Hunting.” Not only is he present in every conversation Willie Jack has with her father, but Daniel is also present in the surreal spirituality that makes Reservation Dogs so special. Is Daniel’s spirit in the woods, trying to say goodbye? Did he bring Chunk to them? Or is that just TV symbolism?

Ultimately, “Hunting” is about grief and processing it, but like the best art about grief, it’s not all gloom and doom. There’s beauty and hope here, both in how people can support each other afterwards, and also in how people can carry on the memories of those they loved.

#3. “New Eyes” — Hacks (HBO Max)

Somehow Hacks seems to have gone under the radar this year, despite being the best comedy of the year. It follows disgraced comedy writer Ava Daniels as she starts ghostwriting for stand-up legend Deborah Vance, played by Jean Smart. “New Eyes” is one of the funniest episodes of the show’s first season, including Ava using a wax museum statue to unlock the Face ID on her boss’s phone and the two of them pranking Deborah’s nurse Perla.

But the reason “New Eyes” is on this list is because it’s the episode where Hacks jumped from a good show to a great one by developing its characters, without sacrificing any comedy whatsoever. As Deborah reveals the truth about her failed marriage and the rumors that spun out of it—she didn’t burn down his house, but she “realized that people would rather laugh at [her] than believe [her]”—Ava tells her that she has to incorporate this truth into her act.

“Is that why you want me to talk about it? Because people think it’s highbrow now to tell sad stories?” Deborah responds. It’s true that many comedies are considered more artistic when they stop being so funny. Hell, I placed a pretty sad episode of Reservation Dogs at #4 on this list. But what makes Hacks special, and “New Eyes” its crown jewel, is that it never sacrifices comedy for even a second.

Every story is cut with a joke. Deborah’s court-mandated therapist coerced her into dating him and when she broke up with him, he wanted to do couple’s counseling. “They always try to get you to do a threesome.”

#2. “How To Appreciate Wine” — How To with John Wilson (HBO)

How To with John Wilson is an impossible show to describe. While it is ostensibly about teaching an audience how to do something, each episode has so many twists and turns that it’s easy to forget where an episode started and where it’s going. Case in point: “How To Appreciate Wine.”

Here’s a brief list of all the places Wilson brings us on his journey to learn about wine: a scented bowling ball factory, the apartment of an expired military ration collector, Albany to remember the time his acapella group was recruited by a cult, before crashing a “baby sprinkle” party at the house of an energy drink CEO.

How To isn’t ever really about whatever the title of the episode says it is, it’s about the deeper existential questions that that quest brings us on. Each story Wilson brings up along the way is to try to get to the heart of the deeper questions lurking beneath the surface. He starts by deconstructing and demystifying wine terminology by juxtaposing it with other people who are obsessed with the ways things taste and smell when he visits the scented bowling ball factory and the military ration collector.

But quickly the episode pushes past that to ask the real existential question at the center of this journey: why do we want to learn to appreciate wine in the first place? To fit in, of course! We want to feel welcomed by a community. For Wilson, that meant joining an acapella group in college even if he thought they were kind of lame. Turns out, he was onto something, because acapella groups were specifically targeted for recruitment by the cult NXIVM.

If appreciating wine is really about fitting in, why is wine the community we want to fit into? This leads Wilson to the home of Jack Owoc, the CEO and founder of Bang energy drinks. It’s a truly bizarre encounter that has to be seen to be believed, let alone understood.

#1. “Chiantishire” — Succession (HBO)

For the real down and dirty breakdown of this episode, I recommend reading my recap here, so I’ll keep it short and sweet here. In a season full of excellent episodes, there were a ton of contenders. There’s “Retired Janitors of Idaho,” the excruciating bottle episode surrounding the shareholder vote and Logan’s incapacitating urinary tract infection. There’s “Too Much Birthday,” which might be the purest distillation of Kendall, Shiv, and Roman’s true selves. Of course, there’s the thrilling finale “All the Bells Say,” where Kendall finally comes clean and the kids join forces, only to be foiled yet again by their father.

But for me, “Chiantishire” is not only the best episode of the season, or of 2021, but of Succession as a whole. At its best Succession, is a show where there is a double (or triple) meaning to everything its characters say. There’s what characters say, what they mean, and how they perceive each other, which rarely are the same things.

“Chiantishire” fills every single interaction with this kind of layered tension. Kendall’s dinner with Logan, Tom and Shiv’s walk around the fountain, and Logan’s scolding of Roman are all top notch scenes, perfectly written and performed to say so much more than what is in the script.