2021: One Show For Every Kind of TV Viewer (Part 2)

Some people watch TV to be transported, some want company while they fold their laundry, and some people are determined to watch the worst trash they can. We can all enjoy TV in different ways, so I broke down the year into 9 categories based on different kinds of TV-watchers:

1. “I only have time for one show”
2. “I’m not feeling great, I need a hug”
3. “Give me some excitement”
4. “TV is for laughing”
5. “2021 was apparently the year for space”
6. “I’m trying to look at something pretty”
7. “Quote/Unquote Good TV”
8. “I watch TV with a beret on”
9. “I looooove bad TV”

You can read part 1 here, and you can listen to 1 chaotic minute on all 44 shows I watched here.

“TV is for laughing”

You want to laugh. What are you going to do, watch a movie? What was the last movie you saw that made you laugh like TV does? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

The Candidates:

• Girls5Eva (Peacock)
• Dave (FXX)
• What We Do In The Shadows (FX)
• Hacks (HBO)

Girls5Eva is the story of a reuniting 1990s girl group some thirty years later. It’s a throwback to NBC comedies like 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation—fast-paced, silly humor that’s always light and fun. While it occasionally wanders into a boomer genre of humor, it actually works to the show’s advantage. This is a show where the main characters are 40-somethings trying to relive their glory days, so watching them stumble around things like TikTok trends and viral lip syncs is pretty appropriate.

Dave, the show about rapper Lil Dicky, got a lot more melancholy in its second season but that didn’t stop the show from having some truly hilarious moments, the highlight of which is probably the truly bizarre friendship between Dave and Benny Blanco. Ultimately, while Dave was one of my favorite half-hour shows of the year, it’s more in line with the experimental comedies that FX is known for (Better Things, Atlanta, etc.) than it is consistently laugh out loud funny. If you’re in the market for some pensive ennui sprinkled with jokes, this is the show for you.

What We Do In The Shadows is the longest running show up for consideration here. The vampire sitcom based on Taika Wattiti’s movie of the same name, is funnier than ever in its third season. We saw a complete recreation of the famed Twilight baseball scene, except with less sexy vampires (sorry Laszlo, but you’re not teen heartthrob Robert Pattison) and with kickball in the snow.

Hacks isn’t just one of the funniest comedies of the year, but one of the flat out best shows, period. The series follows Jean Smart’s legendary stand-up comedian as she ages and hires a ghost writer to try to spice up her act. The show has some truly hilarious moments (and one of the darkest jokes I’ve laughed at in a while), and is fueled by incredible chemistry between Smart and Hannah Einbinder.

But while Hacks has a lot of laugh out loud moments, a lot of what makes it great is how it blends its comedy with a dark, serious, and heartfelt story rather than straight up jokes. Therefore, I’ve got to give this one to What We Do In The Shadows for being the most reliably funny show in 2021. It’s great vibes all the way through.

Verdict: What We Do In The Shadows

“I’m trying to look at something pretty”

One of the coolest things about TV is that it’s a window into another world, right in the middle of our home. We have endless art on demand, so what visual feasts did 2021 have to offer?

The Candidates:

• Arcane (Netflix)
• Loki (Disney+)
• WandaVision (Disney+)

WandaVision follows Wanda Maximoff and her husband Vision through the history of American sitcoms as a way to process grief. It’s an incredibly ambitious premise for the first MCU TV series on Disney+, and for big ol’ TV nerds like me, it was a treat to watch the show toggle between genres, time periods, and tropes. WandaVision is as much an ode to television as anything else, to the medium’s unique place in our homes and lives as a comforting companion, but for the purposes of this category, each episode is a fresh experience.

Arcane is probably the best video game adaptation ever made (the bar is admittedly quite low), because I loved this show without being familiar at all with League of Legends. The show follows the class struggle (seems to be a trend this year, weird) between the technological utopia of Piltover and the poor undercity that shares in none of Piltover’s success. But the heart of Arcane is the relationship between sisters Vi and Powder, a tale of tragedy, trauma, and enduring love. There are times when the animation in Arcane looks rubbery, but that usually just means that they were saving up their money for some beautifully animated action scene that doesn’t just look pretty, but is grounded in character.

Last, but certainly not least, is Loki, a show that I truly loved watching each and every week. Picking up right after our god of mischief yeets out of Avengers: Endgame, this show is a total feast for the eyes, and I’m not just talking about Tom Hiddleston in that shirt and tie. The color design in Loki is some of my favorite of the year, with rich shades of purple, gold, and green of Loki and Sylvie contrasted against the yellows and browns of the corporate Time Variance Agency.

Verdict: Arcane

“Quote/Unquote Good TV

These are the shows that you see commercials for and think to yourself, “yeah that looks good.” You tell yourself you’re going to get around to them, but you never find the energy, because while you know that they’re probably good, you also feel like you’ve probably seen something just like them before.

The Candidates:

• Mare of Easttown (HBO)
• It’s a Sin (HBO)
• Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)

Everything about Mare of Easttown screams “this is a serious and good TV show.” It stars Kate Winslet, Evan Peters, Guy Pearce, and Jean Smart. It’s about the police investigating the murder of a white, teenage mother, which is a case just as much about Detective Mare Sheehan learning to process her own trauma and grief as it is about figuring out the whodunit.

It’s a Sin is a different kind of “good” TV. The miniseries follows a group of gay men during the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the UK during the 1980s, charting the disease’s progression from little-understood ailment to a fullblown health crisis and the homophobic policies that followed. It’s incredibly emotional and a way of putting faces and stories to historical events that TV is especially great at doing.

Only Murders in the Building boasts a star-studded cast of its own—Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez—on a murder mystery of their own. The show is far funnier than Mare or It’s a Sin, playing with the genre conventions of true crime podcasts and the people who listen to them.

This is an easy win for Mare of Easttown. I mean, a sleek and deftly directed look into the dark underbelly of small town America? This is HBO catnip.

Verdict: Mare of Easttown

“I watch TV with a beret on”

You’re really into art. TV might seem like a medium for the lowest common denominator, but each year we see dozens of shows pushing the traditional boundaries.

The Candidates:

• Kevin Can F*** Himself (AMC)
• How To with John Wilson (HBO)
• Reservation Dogs (FX)
• Search Party (HBO)

Kevin Can F*** Himself is one of the most ambitious shows of the year, splitting itself between two wildly different styles. Half of the show is shot as a multi-camera sitcom based on the antics of Kevin, the kind of man-child husband we are all too familiar with in sitcoms. The other half of the show is a gritty drama that clicks into place as soon as Kevin leaves the room, following his wife Allison and her quest to murder her husband and free herself. At its best, it deconstructs both of the shows it draws from, the sitcoms that forgive oafish men, and the gritty dramas that glorify dangerous ones.

Have you ever gone on the internet trying to find a tutorial for how to appreciate wine and before you know it, you’re down a wikipedia rabbithole reading about how the cult NXIVM targeted a capella groups for recruitment? That is literally an episode of How To with John Wilson, the wildly curious and exploratory look into New York City with your host John Wilson. Wilson is a serial videographer, with years of footage on the streets of the city that he transforms into memoir short films. You never know where any episode might lead, but along the way you almost always run into something poignant that will change the way you think.

Reservation Dogs is the most conventional show on this list, but it deserves a lot of recognition for the way it weaves its subject matter in with form. The comedy follows four Indigenous teenagers living on a reservation in rural Oklahoma and their quest to scrape enough money together to escape to California. The show often brings up Indigenous beliefs about mysticism and spirituality and also weaves them into the plot of the show, existing somewhere between the real and the surreal.

Search Party is a show I’ve written about before, but every season it finds a way to completely reinvent itself. What once started as a true crime murder mystery has seen itself morph into an I Know What You Did Last Summer thriller, courtroom drama, and this season a horror-comedy. At the risk of giving too much away, I won’t write much more, but suffice to say Search Party is one of the least predictable shows on TV, not just in narrative, but also in the very way it structures and frames that narrative.

But as much as I love all of these shows, nothing holds a candle to How To. I watch TV and edit video for a living and I have absolutely no idea how he comes up with these episodes. It’s actual alchemy.

Verdict: How To with John Wilson

“I looooove bad TV”

You understand that there are few things in this world better than the guilty pleasure of watching bad TV. You might be ashamed to ask your friends for Bad TV™ recommendations, but I got you.

The Candidates:

• The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (Disney+)
• Lucifer (Netflix)
• The Wilds (Amazon Prime)

Sorry Marvel fans, but The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was easily my least favorite show of the year. It flubbed its messaging on a lot of important and complex issues, and while I’m not saying that superhero shows need to have all the answers, they brought it up. Still, looked at in the right light, it’s a show that has some unintentionally hilarious moments, including putting its main characters Bucky and Sam in emotionally vulnerable positions and then going really far out of its way to insist that they’re not queer.

I summed up the finale of Lucifer as “absolutely bonkers” and “truly unhinged” and I'd like to apologize to absolutely nobody. When your final season introduces time travel and your final episode features both a six minute choral rendition of “Champagne Supernova” and a death scene set to “Welcome to the Black Parade,” you have earned the medal for most camp. It’s deliciously ridiculous.

But the award for best Bad TV™ goes to The Wilds, a show that actually aired at the end of 2020 because there are no rules when it comes to this category. The Wilds is like Lost meets Kid Nation, where a bunch of teenage girls find themselves stranded on an island, but the island is actually an experimental form of immersion therapy. Each episode follows one of the characters both on the island once they’re off the island talking to an FBI agent, where these teenagers say things like, “If we're talking about what happened out there... then yeah, there was trauma. But being a teenage girl in normal-ass America...that was the real living hell.”

There are so many instances of weird, unnatural writing, but I will say that it’s never boring. And also this scene where they all sing Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” as a eulogy.

Verdict: The Wilds