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Jan 3, 2022 · The Best TV of 2021. Updated January 3, 2022. The pandemic might’ve continued to affect the box office in 2021, but the year gave us a wealth of quality television, including a total of 21 rare 100% Certified Fresh seasons (all of which joined the stellar seasons of Rotten Tomatoes’ 100% Club). The grand total of Certified Fresh TV seasons ...
- Overview
- The White Lotus (HBO Max)
- Ted Lasso season 2 (Apple TV Plus)
- Mare of Easttown (HBO Max)
- WandaVision (Disney Plus)
- Cobra Kai season 3 (Netflix)
- Hacks (HBO Max)
- Castlevania season 4 (Netflix)
- Invincible (Amazon Prime Video)
- Loki season 1 (Disney Plus)
Best
By Tom Power
Contributions from
Samuel Roberts, Nick Pino, Henry St Leger, Axel Metz
last updated 31 March 2022
2021's Best TV Shows: here's what we've been watching this year
Where to stream it: HBO Max (US), Sky/NOW (UK)
The White Lotus is a mystery drama set in a resort in Hawaii – or rather, it's framed as a mystery drama, with a dead body teased in the show's opening moments that suggests you're watching a whodunnit. What this show actually is may surprise you. It's a knotty character drama about a bunch of people who arrive at the resort, as well as the staff trying to keep the place from falling apart. Each plot thread escalates from week-to-week, as they each confront something troubling them during their trip to this gorgeous backdrop.
Where to stream it: Apple TV Plus (worldwide)
Ted Lasso season 2 could have suffered from the ‘sophomore slump’ – a term used to describe how a movie, TV show or music album fails to live up to the high standards set by its predecessor. Season 2, though, has subverted expectations. It’s bigger, better and slightly darker (tonally, at least) than season 1, which shows it hasn’t run out of steam just yet.
Season 2 retains everything that we loved about its first instalment: amusing anecdotes, heartwarming moments and a sufficient amount of soccer. However, it’s the second season’s melancholic story beats that hit harder than its predecessor.
From Ted’s ongoing panic attacks to Coach Beard’s desolation following AFC Richmond’s harrowing defeat to Manchester City, its showrunners weren’t exaggerating over comparisons to Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Ted Lasso season 2 is season 1’s brooding, older brother – and it’s all the better for it. – Tom Power
Where to stream it: HBO Max (US), Sky/Now (UK)
This HBO mystery miniseries starring Kate Winslet had everything I wanted from it: well-considered characterization, a great sense of place and enough twists to keep the identity of its murderer under wraps until the end. It's a detective story, with Winslet's Mare the overworked but incredibly capable sleuth and mother looking to solve the case of a murdered local girl.
Whereas other HBO mystery series like True Detective, Sharp Objects and The Night Of are relentlessly dark in tone, Mare of Easttown has a barbed, genuinely good sense of humor – helped by Mare's fractured but winning relationship with her mother (played by Jean Smart).
Set in a fictional version of Eastern Township in Pennsylvania, the series' mystery drives the show, but it's the many complex relationships in the local community that bring it to life – not to mention scene-stealing turns from Evan Peters as Mare's in-over-his-head detective partner, or Guy Pearce as the love interest who offers a little hope to our protagonist. No wonder a local convenience store is naming a cheesesteak after this unmissable show. – Samuel Roberts
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Where to stream it: Disney Plus
I was so ready for more Marvel Cinematic Universe stories after the entire venture had a pandemic-induced pause in 2020. WandaVision, the first canonical show to hit Disney Plus, brought Wanda Maximoff and Vision into focus – neither of which had garnered loads of screen time in past movies. It did this inside the framework of a series of sitcom episodes, evoking US comedies from across multiple decades in visually spectacular fashion, while also burying its own mysteries beneath the surface.
Even though the story eventually becomes more familiarly MCU-like, WandaVision had tons of standout moments that kept people engaged and guessing at what was going on – from the appearance of Evan Peters as Pietro Maximoff (in retrospect, a very cruel tease) to the strange behavior of the townsfolk in Westview, the show's setting. An experimental first effort for Marvel on Disney Plus that remains my highlight of the year so far. – Samuel Roberts
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Where to stream it: Netflix
Kicking off right at the start of the year and actually filmed long before that, Cobra Kai remains one of the breeziest and most enjoyable Netflix shows around in its third season. As with past years, I'm definitely not as invested in its many younger characters as I am in the relationship between middle-aged Karate Kid veterans Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka) and Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio). But damn, it's just constantly fun to watch, and one of the only Netflix shows with an episode running time that's perfect for its amount of story.
Where to stream it: HBO Max (US)
The second show on this list to feature the brilliant Jean Smart, Hacks is a sharp HBO Max dark comedy. It's about a fictional veteran comedian whose hard-fought career is under threat from newer acts. She soon teams up with a young writer (played by Hannah Einbinder) who has offended enough people to lose her Hollywood break, in an effort to inject some freshness into her act. What follows is a series of nasty but hilarious exchanges that grows into respect, as the pair forms an at-times fraught creative partnership.
There are a few reasons this show is one of HBO Max's best originals to date. Smart and Einbinder's chemistry is terrific and very real-feeling – and the series isn't afraid to be a little harsher than comedies have been of late, exploring its two leads with a raw honesty. It also avoids the clichés of so many other sitcoms that explore generational differences, and is far more insightful on that front.
After Watchmen, Mare of Easttown and Hacks, I hope someone makes a new TV show with Jean Smart in it every single year. – Samuel Roberts
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Where to stream it: Netflix
The final season of Castlevania certainly felt like a finale, packing in numerous showdowns, goodbyes, and coincidental reunions to ensure all the important threads were tied up. While some endings can feel a bit too neatly done, the season still succeeds as a paranormal-gothic-action thriller in all the important ways. Monologuing vampires get to the heart of their greed and hunger, protagonists slay monsters and occultists with a dizzying variety of spinning, slashing and exploding weapons, and mythological figures even greater than Dracula make a starring appearance – with the hurt, trauma, and conflicting morals of the series’ leads still being at the center of it all.
Where to stream it: Amazon Prime Video
After something of a slow start, Amazon Prime’s animated adaptation of Invincible (the R-rated comic series from Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker) has rightfully earned its place in this list.
Combining humor, heart, character development and plenty of over the top violence, as well as a stonking soundtrack, Amazon’s Invincible is a fitting tribute to its source material, with its most shocking moments (if you know, you know) depicted in such graphic detail that it’ll be hard to go back to viewing those sequences in their static comic book form.
Invincible follows Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), a teenager whose father (J.K. Simmons) is the world’s most powerful superhero aka Omni-Man. Soon after his 17th birthday, Mark begins to develop superpowers of his own and fight crime like his dad. It isn’t long, however, before Mark realizes that his father’s legacy isn’t what it appears – and threats, both on Earth and in the cosmos, will truly test his abilities as newfound hero Invincible.
It's no wonder that Invincible season 2 and 3 have already been confirmed. – Tom Power
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Where to stream it: Disney Plus
It isn’t surprising to see that Loki has been the most well-received Marvel TV show on Disney Plus so far. With its charismatic lead in Tom Hiddleston’s god of mischief, a stellar supporting cast including Owen Wilson’s lovable Agent Mobius, and some of the best sets and music we’ve seen and heard in a long time, Loki feels like a Marvel movie in a way that the other two Marvel TV series haven’t.
Loki wasn’t to everyone’s tastes. Some viewers criticized its switch from ‘curious mystery’ to ‘CGI-laden MCU adventure’ in its second half, while others were left disappointed by its exposition-centric finale. What Loki season 1 did, however, was act as a primer for the massive changes set to come to the MCU, as well as delivering a compelling, moral exploration of what ‘good vs evil’ really means and if our lives are predetermined before we’re even born.
Picking up right during the events of Avengers: Endgame (at least we think it does), Loki finds himself arrested by the Time Variance Authority (TVA), a bureaucratic organization that polices all of time and space, after he steals the Tesseract during the Avengers’ time heist. Set to be erased by existence for his crimes, Loki is rescued by Agent Mobius, who wants to use “Loki’s unique perspective” for a case he can’t crack. The mission? To help the TVA to track down an individual who wants to destroy the so-called Sacred Timeline and instigate a new multiversal war, which will wreak havoc across the MCU. – Tom Power
Dec 16, 2021 · The best TV shows of 2021 ranged from returning prestige dramas to new streaming hits. TV Guide's list includes Succession, Ted Lasso, WandaVision, Evil, Reservation Dogs, and more.
- WandaVision (READERS’ CHOICE) What is there to say about WandaVision that hasn’t already been said? In the context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it remains a unicorn.
- Squid Game. Four hundred and fifty-six desperate people are lured into a contest of survival in which they play a series of children’s games for the chance to win $39 million in this Netflix K-drama that took the world by storm in 2022.
- Midnight Mass. Midnight Mass is obviously a very personal project to writer/creator Mike Flanagan, and that makes all the difference. This is not just another “let’s make a vampire movie.”
- Succession. There’s a reason why people who love Succession can’t stop banging on about it. It’s almost as if we are constantly surprised that a show about a disgustingly wealthy, genuinely awful family, bickering over the leadership of a massive media conglomerate, could possibly be as funny, tense and thrilling as this.
- Alan Sepinwall
- ‘Hacks’ (HBO Max) Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: An aging stand-up comedy legend (Jean Smart), fearing her own cultural irrelevance, reluctantly teams up with an unemployable young comedy writer (Hannah Einbinder) to see if she can reinvent herself after decades of telling the same jokes.
- ‘Pen15’ (Hulu) The middle-school comedy — in which creators and stars Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle play themselves at 13, opposite real adolescents — started out a few years ago as a broadly funny idea.
- ‘Loki’ (Disney+) Though not all of their offerings have worked (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier waves hello), the Marvel Studios team so far has a much higher small-screen batting average than their Marvel TV production predecessors did with shows like Iron Fist and Inhumans.
- ‘In Treatment’ (HBO) The brilliant-but-forgotten late-2000s psychiatry drama had a format — each episode is one therapy session, usually with only two people in the room — that made this revival a relatively safe and easy thing to produce during the early days of the pandemic.
Oct 20, 2021 · Dug Days. Dug Days. Disney+/Pixar. Premiered September 1 | Watch on Disney+. Best known as the scene-stealing dog with a voice box from the film Up, Dug gets his own series of shorts in Dug Days ...
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The best TV shows of 2021. From Squid Game to Succession, Ted Lasso, Mare of Easttown and Maid, Hugh Montgomery, Amy Charles and Eddie Mullan pick the year’s greatest programmes to binge right ...
