Crime Pays: The Best of 2018

My annual TV year-in-review, the key difference this year being that the essay is ten months late. But truth be told, when I finished my final Knots Landing essay in July of 2018, I felt perhaps it was time to lay this blog to rest. Maybe I’d said everything I needed to say. I’d written up all fourteen seasons of my favorite series, and the other show that had most inspired me — Doctor Who — had fallen into a creative black hole that rather dampened my desire to discuss it. But recently I was moved to start writing again, and came across a list I had meant to publish last January, of the series I’d most enjoyed in 2018. So I’ve written it up. As always, this is not the sort of “best of” list proffered by formal TV critics, who have to watch (and have access to) every quality show they hear about; I never purport to have “watched everything.” These are simply the shows I saw that I loved the most. As always, they’re a pretty eclectic bunch. And happily, since time isn’t a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff, all eleven series are still available for streaming, ten months later.

But first, a warning: Bodyguard — one of 2018’s most popular series, apparently the most popular series to premiere on BBC One since ratings have been kept — is not here. God, no. I found much of it leaden and laughable, and felt lead actor Richard Madden spent most of it nursing the same blank stare. His part called for a stoic figure who could hide and compartmentalize his emotions, and Madden had that in spades; he was just painfully unable to convey anything going on underneath. You had to intuit what he was thinking by watching the lens shake, or the screen go blurry, or the editing grow furious. It was characterization by camerawork. When Madden was (rightly) passed over for an Emmy nod, I was amused to see so many otherwise sane critics apparently so bowled over by his looks that they were eager to imbue him with uncanny acting skills; I’d read how you “could see every subtle shift of emotion on his face.” There was nothing going on on his face, and beyond a couple of bracing set-pieces, there wasn’t much going on in Bodyguard either. But it became the talk of the town and the talk of the trades, so how do you discuss 2018 without referencing it? Obligatory reference over — let’s move on to the good stuff.

In alphabetical order, my best of 2018:

Barry (HBO): You don’t need to be in the entertainment industry to enjoy Barry, but it sure doesn’t hurt. Bill Haber plays Barry Berkman, a combat veteran who’s returned from Afghanistan and found his life without purpose; an old family friend has convinced him that he can find fulfillment and utilize the skills he honed overseas by taking work as a paid assassin. But on a trip to LA, hired by the Chechen mob to carry out a personal job, he tracks his target to an acting class, wanders in and — before he knows it — is on stage, feeding the guy his lines. Barry merrily skewers the LA acting scene, right from the first episode. I mean, it’s all there: the starlets convinced that, with enough determination, they can be “the next Meryl Streep or Kaley Cuoco”; the dude cheered for landing his first role — as a corpse on CSI (“Next time I’m gonna play someone who’s alive”); the acting teacher who disguises his sadism as “tough love” (he’s written a how-to book entitled Hit Your Mark and Say Your Lines); the bar that the wannabe actors frequent called “Residuals” and the restaurant where Barry seeks solitude, where even the waitress is readying for an audition. Because it’s an LA acting class, all the scenes they do are from films, and when Barry pours out his heart to the teacher, he presumes it’s a monologue or an improvisation, because even though he postures to his class that “theatre is truth,” he couldn’t recognize truth if it bit him in the butt. It’s an insular world based on comforting, self-serving platitudes and presumptions. In this community, if you insist that you’re “not an actor” (as Barry does in the first episode), it means “I’m not famous yet” or “I’m still honing my craft,” because who in LA isn’t an aspiring actor? And if you stumble into an acting class by accident (as Barry does in the first episode), you must be “auditing,” not lost — because who in LA isn’t studying acting? These people have forged their own language; on the surface, their sad naïveté seems bursting with self-assurance and a real sense of camaraderie, and it’s easy to see why Barry — depressed, sleepless, and in search of purpose — gets sucked in, and comes to wonder if his true calling isn’t as an actor. (He could still do hits, he insists, as his “day job.”) And although his family friend Monroe, who’s been grooming him since he left the Marines, encourages him to seek a hobby that’s a little less public, like painting (“Hitler painted. John Wayne Gacy painted”), Barry’s already got stars in his eyes. He’s not only picked up the LA actor’s sense of wonder, but their sense of entitlement. (When Monroe asks how he’s going pull off hits if he’s instantly recognized as “the guy from that chicken commercial,” Barry’s quick to respond, “I don’t know if I’d do commercials.” He hasn’t done his first scene yet, but he’s already turning down offers.) And so, sometime after murdering a group of Chechens (they get to Barry’s target before he does, then try to take out Barry himself), Barry Berkman christens himself Barry Ball, and the series take flight: juggling Barry’s wartime scars, his entanglement with the Chechen mob, and his pursuit of stardom — and detailing how each facet of his life both feeds and confounds the others. Barry Ball may be just another wannabe LA actor, but Barry is an original.

Collateral (BBC, Netflix): There’s a moment near the end of Collateral in which detective inspector Kip Glaspie (Carey Mulligan) has stationed herself outside the door of a hotel room, negotiating with a suspect inside: a captain in the Royal Army named Sandrine Shaw. Kip hasn’t been at this long (she was once a famous pole-vaulter whose career was cut short by a disastrous — and very pubic — fall), but her instincts are not merely sound, but savvy; you see her calming and engaging the suspect through well-chosen words: “I know you’ve had a hard time. I know what you did for your country. I know what service you’ve given.” She turns the talk to their surroundings and intuitively taps into some of the childhood memories we’ve seen Sandrine reflect on throughout the miniseries: “I’m wondering why you’ve come to this hotel.” “It was my father’s favorite.” “OK.” “When we were children, we came here for lunch. He said they do a very good roast.” “And was it?” “Yes.” And having gained her attention and (hopefully) her trust, Kip attempts a simple statement designed to bring clarity to the situation — to clear Sandrine of misinformation she’s been fed since long before the miniseries began — and the moment the words come out of Kip’s mouth, her face betrays the realization that this was a potentially fatal mistake. As indeed it proves to be, in the explosive moment that follows. But it’s that one look on Carey Mulligan‘s face — as she instantly realizes her error and imagines the consequences — that was as powerful and memorable as anything I saw on TV in 2018. This four-part miniseries written by David Hare was a marvel of tone and construction. At the heart of the story was the shooting of an Iraqi refugee — a pizza delivery man murdered while on his rounds — and the police’s hunt for the killer. But woven through the principal story-line were a dozen or more characters directly or indirectly affected by the crime: among them, the MP of the district in which the shooting occurs, who’s navigating a troubled relationship with the mother of his child; the local priest shielding both her sexuality and the principal witness; the sisters of the murder victim who, like their brother, were smuggled from Iraq; and the manager of the pizzeria, who’s caring for an infirm parent. And once Hare established these additional characters, he took care to ensure (and to assure us) that their stories were no less important — no less critical to the texture of the piece — than Kip’s ongoing investigation. Collateral was Hare’s first original series for television, and it seemed to me he’d taken everything he’d learned from his decades writing for the stage and everything he’d learned from his decades writing for the screen and forged something new, something that only the miniseries format — with its episodic structure and four-hour run time — would allow: a race-against-the-clock drama where people still found time to have conversations — razor-sharp exchanges that deepened the characters and furthered their story arcs without compromising the pacing. I’ve seen too many crime dramas where the personal stories felt intrusive — or lightweight; they lacked the gravity that would allow them to be effectively intercut with the hunt for a killer. In Collateral, the conflicts between the characters were so vivid — never melodramatic, merely detailed and colorful and fascinating — that it all felt of a piece, and when nearly a half-dozen personal subplots resolved themselves, quietly but firmly, in the aftermath of Kip’s investigation, it didn’t feel pat; it felt powerful. It felt earned. The cast — headed by Mulligan, John Simm, Nicola Walker and Billie Piper — was exemplary, and the direction by S.J. Clarkson was masterful. Collateral was, quite simply, the best television drama I saw in 2018.

The Cry (BBC, Sundance Now): There was an small but noticeable outcry after the first episode, once viewers realized that its story-line was going to be fractured: cutting back and forth between past and present, weaving its narrative through a web of interconnected moments: “It’s so hard to follow!” No, it really wasn’t, and a strictly linear chronology wouldn’t have been nearly as effective (or true to the source material). This four-part miniseries — written by Jacquelin Perske and adapted from the novel of the same name by Helen FitzGerald — starred Jenna Coleman as Joanna Lindsay, a schoolteacher whose four-month-old baby Noah disappears while she and her fiancé Alistair are visiting family in Australia. (Both she and Alistair become suspects, hounded by the police and tried in the court of public opinion — and ultimately Joanna is put on trial.) Near the start of the first episode, a court-appointed therapist asks Joanna to think back to when Noah was born. “Can you tell me about that time?” “Mm, it’s a bit of a blur,” Joanna confesses, seemingly distracted, or perhaps willfully elusive. “Do you remember it being a happy time?” “Yeah, yeah, sure.” A new baby can be overwhelming, the therapist suggests, and people cope in different ways: “Do you remember those days?” Coleman apparently expressed concerns early on that she was miscast; she feared that, having never had children, she’d be unable to fully capture the weariness and desperation of a new mother raising a difficult newborn. But she’s utterly convincing as she quietly unravels, expending every bit of energy and patience, begging her four-month-old to “please stop, please stop.” But Joanna’s life didn’t change the day her child was born, or even the day her child went missing; it changed the day she met her future fiancé; those are outer perimeters of the story-line — the day she met Alistair in the past and the court case in the present — and what’s on screen shows Joanna trying to make sense of all the days in between. She cautions us that there are “two faces” and, separating her palms, “two Joannas.” (It calls to mind the double-sided Kandinsky in John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, and its own heroine’s quest to identify and isolate her two selves.) But which is the real Joanna — or has she gotten lost over time? And what exactly is the relationship between Joanna and Alistair? There’s a troubling disparity between how much Alistair is asked to parent and how much Joanna is expected to. (“He earns the money, he wears the earplugs,” Joanna informs a friend, explaining why Alistair’s responsibilities at home are so much lighter), and although she seems to have made peace with it, there’s something disquieting at its core — just as there was when Alistair first met Joanna, asked her out and lied about being married. As Joanna keeps slipping into half-remembered images, director Glendyn Ivin manages a slew of striking match shots, the present bleeding into the past and back again with eerie elasticity, as if Joanna were obsessively revisiting certain points in time, adding or subtracting details. Which Joanna are we seeing? Victim or perpetrator? Two Joannas. The challenges of parenthood and the pressures of partnership ultimately collided in a resolution that was unexpected yet enormously satisfying. The story was about reaching a moment of clarity, and the audience was not merely invited, but forced to make that journey alongside Joanna.

Elementary (CBS): We had no reason to think that Elementary would ever again get this good. Oh, for sure, it had never gotten bad, but after an exemplary first season, a rockier second one, and a rollicking comeback in Season 3, Elementary had started to feel like a show suffering from a certain creative malaise. It was gratifying that showrunner Rob Doherty and most of his best writers — Jason Tracey, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Jeffrey Paul King, Bob Goodman — had stuck around for the length of the run, but did they have anything left to say that could truly energize us as those earliest seasons had? Oh, there were standout episodes in Seasons 4 and 5, to be sure, but the season arcs felt a little dull. (John Noble in Season 4, as Sherlock’s father, was a particular disaster, drawling his lines in such a syrupy style that he sucked the life out of all his scenes.) You had every reason to think you were watching a still-enjoyable series whose best days were behind it. But Season 6, quite simply, knocked it out of the park. In the first episode (slight spoiler), Sherlock was approached by a fellow addict at one of their meetings; he thanked Sherlock for proving an inspiration to him. He further revealed that a friend of his had gone missing; would Sherlock look into it? The episode’s final moments found Sherlock on the phone with the man, accepting the case, when the camera pulled back to show the man, in the woods, burying a body; Sherlock was being toyed with by a killer. It seemed then that the show had overplayed its hand, given away too much information too soon. But far from it — there were still plenty of surprises and sleights of hand to come: blistering confrontations and invigorating challenges for Sherlock and Joan to meet as this killer engaged them in a season-long game of cat-and-mouse. It was rather amazing how well this main plot anchored the season because the episode count, as the cast was filming, was upped from 13 to 21, requiring Doherty and his writers to add eight episodes mid-season that could have felt like a whole lot of padding. But the ways in which they chose to keep us engaged during that middle stretch — Joan’s decision to adopt, Marcus pondering a move to the U.S. Marshalls, a smart (and gratifyingly brief) bit of tomfoolery with Sherlock’s father, the return of Sherlock’s sponsor Alfredo (with a dilemma that prompted Sherlock to reflect on his relationship with his brother Mycroft) — were too consequential to feel like filler. Across 21 episodes, there was hardly a case that didn’t engage, hardly a subplot that wasn’t edgy and effective, and finally, after six years, Inspector Gregson and Detective Bell’s roles were expanded, so that frequently they’d handle an interrogation or interview without Sherlock or Joan present. The show felt all the more vital for fully embracing its supporting cast. Throughout Season 6, the writers knew exactly how to stay one step ahead of the viewer, both in large-scale plot points and smaller ones, and the finale was pure genius, right down to that final, meta line (“l feel like we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be”). It was a resurgent season for the six-year-old series, and easily one of the best surprises of 2018.

Hard Sun (BBC, Hulu): Jim Sturgess is Detective Chief Inspector Charlie Hicks: warm, friendly, but easy prey to temptation. (He’s messing around with his late partner’s widow, and may have had something to do with his death.) Agyness Deyn is DI Elaine Ranko, a fighter and a survivor who — eight months earlier — was brutally attacked by her own son (who’s since been committed to a mental hospital). Elaine has just been assigned to Charlie’s unit (she’s been tasked by the upper brass with ferreting out Charlie’s role in his partner’s death; he knows that she’s suspicious, and she knows that he knows), and their first case together is a doozy. While investigating a routine homicide, they discover a flash drive verifying the existence of “Hard Sun,” an enigmatic extinction-level event due to occur in five years. MI5 has been keeping a lid on it, presumably to avoid worldwide panic, and Charlie and Elaine find themselves hunted by agents willing to do anything to get their hands on that flash drive. Following a high-speed car chase, a stand-off in a crowded neighborhood, and a foot pursuit across fences and alleyways, Charlie and Elaine manage to elude their pursuers on a craggy beach along the Thames. But when Charlie locates a pay phone and calls home, intent on getting his wife and daughter out of town, it’s an MI5 agent who picks up. Shaken, he returns to Elaine and insists, “I need that flash drive. They threatened my family, Elaine. My wife and my daughter.” But she’s unconvinced: “So you give them what they ask for and suddenly your family’s safe?” He nods, “Yeah,” but she reminds him, “That’s not how this plays out. If you do what they want, we’re dead. And so is your wife and so is your daughter. You’d know that if you were thinking straight.” Out of desperation, he makes it personal, questioning how her own son could try to kill her; he’s determined to mess with her head, to cloud her judgment. But she won’t be distracted or deterred: “They can’t kill us to keep a secret that isn’t secret anymore.” She’s resolute about going public with the contents of the flash drive, but first she has to get by Charlie. So she unfolds her collapsible baton and pulls out a pair of brass knuckles and proceeds to beat the tar out of him. And then she leaves him there, bloody and battered, on the beach, amid the rocks and sand and debris. That pretty much sums up the essential conflict at the core of Hard Sun: between Charlie, who’s emotionally accessible and easily corrupted, and Elaine, who’s icy and damaged and aggressively high-principled. Chances are these two aren’t going to be hitting the sheets by episode 3. Oh yeah, and the world is ending, too. Hard Sun was everything Bodyguard thought it was: a taut political thriller. But whereas Bodyguard was bonkers and didn’t seem to know it, Neil Cross’s Hard Sun was bonkers and embraced it — in fact, it was arguably most appealing at its most daft. It laced a traditional crime drama with elements of apocalyptic fiction, sprinkled in spree killers and conspiracy theorists, and came away with something unique: something, mind you, so potentially off-putting in its unwillingness to be easily categorized that some viewers (many viewers?) downright hated it — and it proved one of those unfortunate series that ended on a cliffhanger and then got cancelled. (Cross revealed in interviews that he had a five-year plan.) But ironically the final sequence turned out to be perfect: an image of impending apocalypse that revealed that the end was coming sooner than expected. The end of Hard Sun, too, came sooner than expected, but for those who prize originality over familiarity, and who are more than patient when a show occasionally misses the mark because its targets are so uncommon, it was rarely less than invigorating.

The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix): Early in this ten-part series (loosely based on the novel by Shirley Jackson), Steven Crain is accepting a job from a widow who keeps seeing the ghost of her late husband. Steven investigates the paranatural, but he made a name for himself with his best-selling memoir of the family’s time at Hill House (“the most famous haunted house in America”) when he and his four siblings were children and his parents were in the business of renovating and reselling homes. He cautions the woman that although he makes a nice living debunking and then fictionalizing the paranormal, he’s never actually seen a ghost himself. Or rather, “I’ve seen a lot of ghosts, just not the way you think. A ghost can be a lot of things: a memory, a day dream, a secret, grief, anger, guilt. But in my experience, most times they’re just what we want to see.” As we listen, little are we aware how Steven (and the writers, more to the point) are leading us down the garden path, as none of the apparitions to come — in the flashbacks revealed to us over the next nine episodes — are of ghosts that the haunted “want to see.” They’re not memories or day dreams at all — they’re our worst nightmares. The nightmares from which we can’t wake up; the childhood traumas that, decades later, refuse to loosen their grip. Steven is in deep, deep denial, and he will, in fact, see that denial shattered by episode’s end. But although he’s one of his few siblings who didn’t experience a haunting at Hill House, he’s emerged just as stunted and damaged as the rest of his family. His oldest sister Shirley runs a funeral home, inviting death into her home for profit. (In her first scene, she’s preparing for a burial and comforting a young child who keeps seeing his late grandmother — the dead and the undead are everywhere in Hill House.) Middle sister Theo has sought solace by avoiding intimacy; youngest son Luke has escaped by turning to drugs. And as for baby of the family, Nell, she’s never recovered from the frequent vision that traumatized her during her time at Hill House, of a “bent-neck lady” perched over her bed. (Theo, whose straight-shooting style masks her pain, describes Nell as having “one foot in crazy, the other on a banana peel.”) And none of the siblings have come to terms with that last night, when their father hurriedly packed the kids into the family car at 3 AM and drove away, leaving their mother there to die alone, under mysterious circumstances. He’s never offered a rational explanation for what happened, and they’re too angry and too terrified to ask. The Haunting of Hill House is a story about a family that’s been splintered and broken, who moved away but never moved on. Each of the first five episodes focuses on one of the siblings, in the present and in the past, and that means that by the time they’re reunited with their father in episode 6, the family dynamics have gained levels of nuance, development and dysfunction rare for works in this genre. And from there the show only gets scarier, richer, angrier, deeper and darker. The Haunting of Hill House is one of several recent series adamant about telling its story at its own pace, on its own terms, and trusting the viewer to be patient, attentive and discerning: open to something of quality even if it’s not quite what they envisioned. In its look at how time and tragedy force a family to come to terms with a harrowing chapter of their lives, it took a familiar premise and dared to be different.

The 100 (The CW): In retrospect, Season 4 — which aired during 2017 — would have made my “best of” list that year, but I didn’t get around to watching it till 2018. Happily, Season 5 was equally splendid. For several seasons, The 100 had been struggling to regain its former glory. The first season was bracing: the characters well-established, and the post-apocalyptic premise and plotting novel, but more than all that, creator Jason Rothenberg established the rare television universe where no outcome seemed preordained. If our heroes went into battle, defeat seemed as likely as victory — you could imagine both scenarios, and recognized that each could prove equally story-worthy. It became the rare sci-fi series that truly felt character- rather than plot-driven, because you never felt the voice of the writer, gently nudging you toward the desired outcome. But Seasons 2 and 3 had failed to live up to that promise. Oh, they were still highly watchable, but Season 2 had the unfortunate task of integrating the adult cast into life on Earth, and Season 3 was hampered by an AI story-line that gained little traction. Season 4 got back to basics — the quest for survival — as the characters learned that radiation would lay waste to the planet in a matter of weeks. And Season 5 was the aftermath, as the survivors emerged from their underground dwelling, determined to reach the one patch of fertile land that could serve as their new home, only to learn that others had claimed it first. It was a long trek to Shadow Valley, full of all the elements The 100 thrived on: political machinations, emotional struggles, moral conundrums — all of them scaled down to a personal level. Brother against sister, pupil against mentor, former foes united in a common goal. Hard choices and bad choices. On the surface, the season’s plot was a literal march towards war, but the ground kept shifting beneath our feet. The cast was as splendid as ever — Eliza Taylor, Bob Morley, Paige Turco, Henry Ian Cusick, Lindsay Morgan and the wonderful smirky, sneaky Richard Harmon — but the glue that held this particular season together: Marie Avgeropoulos as “Blodreina.” Across seasons 1 through 4, Octavia had made a shocking yet utterly convincing transformation from minx to warrior; now she found herself thrust into the role of leader, to prevent the clans from disassembling. And that led to one of the season’s most electrifying scenes, as Octavia laid waste to anyone who stood in the way of tribal unity: “You are Wonkru, or you are the enemy of Wonkru. Choose!” (That war-cry resonated across the season, by the end no longer a sign of solidarity but of entropy.) Was there anything in Season 5 more affecting than the sight of Blodreina, having survived a coup instigated by her brother and her mentor, forced to pronounce sentence on both of them, then retiring to her throne, proud and defiant and tearful? Well, actually, yes, there was one thing more affecting: the season finale, in which Rothenberg indulged in a wild time-leap to give us the promise of a happy ending. It was tears-inducing, tears tempered only by the network’s surprise decision to renew the series for another two years. In terms of quality, the show was still riding a magnificent high; in terms of story-line, I would have been content to see it all end there, with the cast gazing down on the new world awaiting them, determined — this time around — to get it right.

McMafia (BBC, AMC): We begin with an assassination attempt in Mumbai, then cut to a posh charity auction in London, where we meet Alex Godman (James Norton) and the members of his extended family. While his mother preoccupies herself with judging Alex’s girlfriend (“She dresses like a student”), his Uncle Boris — who’s been guzzling champagne and bidding on items he doesn’t need — has his turn judging Alex himself: “You never know what he’s thinking. He’s got this beautiful smile, but underneath he might be thinking, ‘Screw you, Uncle Boris. I don’t need you or your money.’” That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Alex Godman — or more precisely, everything you need to know about what James Norton is going to do with the role, and masterfully. In previous roles (Sidney Chambers in Grantchester, Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace, Tommy Lee Royce in Happy Valley), Norton has excelled at characters who wear their hearts on their sleeves; he’s impressed with his easy access to — and effortless expression of — a rich emotional palette. Alex Godman is something else entirely; his family history has made him cautious and prudent, eager and able to hide his emotions, unwilling to show too much or risk too much — and Norton rises to the challenge beautifully. Alex, the England-educated offspring of a Russian mafia family who’ve been driven into exile, has built a successful brokerage firm without trading on his family connections. But when a false rumor spreads through the financial community that Alex has been dealing in blacklisted markets, he’s forced to seek out new forms of funding. (Hoping to woo an investor over a pricey lunch, Alex makes his pitch: “I started the fund from scratch. I never took a penny from my family or their friends, and I’ve made it a policy not to invest in Russia” — but when the potential investor makes outrageous demands, you see on Alex’s face exactly what his uncle described earlier: his lips are curved in a gracious half smile, but underneath he might be saying, “Screw you. I don’t need you or your money.”) When his Uncle Boris is murdered — retaliation for the assassination attempt (which his uncle had orchestrated) on the man who drove the family from Russia — Alex determines to accept aid from Semiyon Kleiman, a member of the Israeli Knesset with ties to human trafficking and drugs. “All I need is a banker,” Kleiman advises his new partner, who finds himself motivated partly by self-preservation and partly by revenge. “These wars are fought in the boardrooms, not the streets. Money, moving money is your weapon. You can sit behind your desk anywhere in the world and still bring down the man who killed your uncle. If that’s what you want.” Kleiman becomes Alex’s first link to an international network of money laundering, heroin smuggling and counterfeit goods — and Kleiman’s observation that modern crime wars are “fought in the boardrooms, not the streets” isn’t some fanciful screenwriter’s musings: the series is based on McMafia: Seriously Organized Crime, a non-fiction work by journalist Misha Glenny (although the plot and characters were newly created by James Watkins and Hossein Amini). What this new take on a familiar subject loses in gloss (it eschews the kind of grand gestures we expect from family crime dramas: no “Make him an offer” here), it makes up for in originality and authenticity, and Alex’s season-long transformation from honest city banker to international criminal kingpin is never less than absorbing, and often tremendously entertaining.

Snowfall (FX): I included Season 1 of Snowfall in my “honorable mentions“ for 2017. Its story of the rise of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the early 1980s was impressively conceived and acted, but there were a few growing pains along the way. The first season effectively set up the characters whose lives were destined to intertwine: 19-year-old drug dealer Franklin Saint (London-born Damson Idris); CIA operative Teddy McDonald (Carter Hudson); Mexican luchador Gustavo Zapata (Sergio Peris-Mencheta); and Lucia Villanueva (Emily Clara Rios), niece to a Mexican crime boss. It was getting their stories in gear that proved more challenging. There were times I felt co-creators John Singleton, Eric Amadio and Dave Andron were treading water, so that the characters could be positioned where they needed them at the end of Season 1. Season 2 showed the results of all that careful planning; it wasted no time getting the core four in play. Franklin, once a kid hawking dime bags, is now cooking crack cocaine and actively pouring it into South Central — and Teddy has tapped Franklin’s business to help bolster his illegal funding of the Nicaraguan Contras. Lucia, who ordered a hit on her family at the end of Season 1, has positioned herself at the head of a burgeoning cocaine empire, with hired muscle Gustavo by her side. Part of what makes these unsavory characters so fascinating in Season 2 is their gift for self-deception. Lucia views her cocaine business as a way of empowering the Mexican community. Teddy believes he’s saving the world from communism (“if we win this war, we can change the course of history“), while Franklin prides himself on elevating his friends and family. But underneath, it’s clear that they’re driven by ambition, and, in the cases of Lucia and Franklin, greed. They’ve sacrificed too much to ever lower their guard; throughout Season 2, you see them grow more ruthless, even — or perhaps especially — at the times when they’re most at sea. The core four were well-served in Season 2, and the cast additions were equally impressive. Given that his Season 1 appearance had seemed like a dead-end piece of plotting, the redemption and reintegration of Franklin‘s father Alton was something I wouldn’t have believed possible — but it was a triumph. Phillip E. Walker showed all the command and control that speak to a half century in show business, and his character kept Franklin’s mother (the formidable Michael Hyatt) front and center while she and her son were on the outs. And the introduction of Jonathan Tucker as Teddy‘s brother Matt, a pilot and Vietnam vet, was a shot of adrenaline. As Hudson played him, Teddy had a penchant for wallowing in the more onerous aspects of his job; Matt found their exploits exhilarating. His easy embrace of life on the edge added complexity and energy to Teddy’s story-line. As the four core characters became increasingly entangled, the narrative picked up steam, the cliffhangers grew more shocking, and the characters finally started to realize — or at least reap — the consequences of their actions. Season 2 of Snowfall was an astonishingly taut piece of drama; I’m eager for Season 3.

Star Trek: Discovery (CBS All Access): In September of 2017, when Discovery debuted, I had never seen an episode of Star Trek — nor any of the films. My own “discovery” of Star Trek began months later, when I delved into a few seasons of Next Generation, then Deep Space Nine — followed by Voyager and Enterprise. (I’ve still never seen the original series.) I then turned to Discovery. Could a latecomer and somewhat of a newcomer to Roddenberry’s universe make sense of (and find pleasure in) the newest incarnation? The answer is obviously “yes, indeed,” as I’m including it in this list of series that gave me the most pleasure in 2018 — but perhaps my response wasn’t a typical one. I was, frankly, unconvinced for about two months. When I talk about shows airing in 2018, that’s exactly six episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, but those were the six episodes that made me a fan: the final six episodes of its first season. Up to that point, I had found myself engaged, but wasn’t entirely sure I was enjoying it. I admired the subversion of tropes; I appreciated the technical wizardry. I thought the cast was splendid — Sonequa Martin-Green, Jason Isaacs, Doug Jones, Anthony Rapp, Mary Wiseman and Wilson Cruz — and I won’t lie: the romance between Rapp and Cruz’s characters made my heart happy. But for the first eight episodes, I was aware that I was content to be watching without knowing for certain if I was actually liking it. Then episode 9 hit, and the writing team pulled together a half-dozen threads from earlier in the season, wove them into something action-packed and game-changing, then left us marooned in the middle of nowhere — now that impressed me. It’s like I’d been walking over a landmine I didn’t know existed — but then, isn’t that what a good TV season should be? And from there the series hit its stride, a fact all the more remarkable because it was spending weeks at a time in a “mirror universe,” the kind of story-line usually reserved for stunts — not for huge plot developments, surprising reversals, and deepening character work. The back end of the season was full of memorable moments — the brutal confrontation between Dr. Culber and Ash Tyler, and the ensuing Tyler reveal; Wiseman’s wonderful turn masquerading as her own evil doppelgänger; the return of Michelle Yeoh, unleashed and outrageously entertaining; double doses of Doug Jones and Anthony Rapp; and the truth about Captain Lorca, a shocker ten episodes in the making — and somewhere in there I realized I was hooked. And when the crew returned home, and their experiences in the mirror universe segued smoothly into a resolution to the season-long Klingon War, I found myself pumped for Season 2. As an aside, I’ve come to realize that, since I’m not watching Star Trek: Discovery as a longtime enthusiast, my point of view isn’t always shared by the majority of viewers — but the fact that the show seems as welcoming to newcomers as to fans is certainly a point in its favor. Irreverent case in point: as a newer viewer, I don’t feel beholden to the ethical code of the Federation in the way that — for devotees — it’s the cornerstone of the series. I confess that when the Terran Captain Georgiou took command of Discovery near season’s end, determined to blow up the Klingon homeworld, I was cheering her on. I knew full well that I was meant to be appalled by her tactics, and relieved when the Federation reasserted its humanity, but I was really hoping for a big explosion. I didn’t get one, but Discovery — in its 2018 run — was a blast nonetheless.

Unforgotten (ITV, PBS): In the second episode of the latest series of Unforgotten, DCI Cassie Stuart, who’s traveled to Middenham to inform a family that the remains of their daughter have been found, receives a visit from the victim’s twin sister Jessica. Jessica, whose twin disappeared on New Year’s Eve, 1999, cautions her: “I don’t know if this will surprise you or not, but no one in Middenham is going to thank you for finding my sister. I mean, maybe they’ll be pleased for us all on a personal level, that we can bury her, but...” She struggles for the right words. “It took the town maybe ten years to get over her. The whole media thing completely killed off the tourist trade. The holiday rentals. The passing trade that the tea shops and the gift shops relied on — that all completely went because no one wanted to come here anymore.” She warns Cassie that the town might not be all that cooperative. What about you, Cassie asks, and your mum and dad; are you glad we’re here? Jessica forces a smile: “I wish you could have met my mum and dad before. My mum was amazing: clever and funny and strong — a really strong person. And my dad was kind and ambitious. Also funny, but more in a lovely, old-fashioned kind of way. What you see now is what 18 years of hell does to someone. The grief, of course, the loss, but — 18 years of imagining what her last moments might have been like. 18 years of stupid hope that maybe she might still be alive. Of newspaper headlines, of people backing away from you, of strangers hugging you in the street.” She inhales loudly, clearly fighting back tears. “For my dad, 18 years of suspicion that it was him. For my mum, 18 years of unspoken accusations that if she had been a better mother, then this wouldn’t have happened. 18 years of seeing her everywhere I go” — and the tears start to flow. But she persists: “So yes, we are glad, so glad, that we can bring her home and lay her to rest, so that maybe we might have a chance of rest ourselves. But don’t expect us to show that to you in ways that you might expect.” One of the loveliest things about the latest series of Unforgotten is that writer/creator Chris Lang has grown so assured in his approach that he can indulge in gorgeous monologues like this (exquisitely delivered by Bronagh Waugh) that aren’t about advancing the plot, but about deepening the characters and enriching the themes. As always, Lang explores the way lives are forever altered by tragedy, and in this instance he embraces not only the individuals involved in the crime — even peripherally, even innocently — but whole communities. How the future and tenor of a town can change. And there’s more. Jessica has brought along her sister’s diaries and instructs Cassie, “These are who Hayley was. Not the minx in the News of the World, not the charity volunteer in The Guardian. She was just an ordinary girl who used to drink vodka and swore a lot, and sometimes she was really irritating and sometimes she was fucking brilliant. Just a normal 16-year-old girl like I was. And I loved her so much.” And here Lang starts to raise one of the other issues he’s tackling in Series 3: the destructive power of a media that’s more interested in clickthroughs and controversy than in getting at the truth — the dangers of misinformation in the age of social media. Series 3 of Unforgotten was a flawless piece of television in which the themes became broader and the targets clearer. In earlier essays, I’ve discussed Lang’s novel approach, which sets Unforgotten apart from all other detective series. I see no reason to rehash it here, except to say that the characters were as beautifully drawn as ever, the mystery as involving, and that Nicola Walker had her strongest showcase to date, and responded with the performance of the year. Series 4 can’t come soon enough.

Honorable mention: CBS’s Madam Secretary, Instinct and Bull; the second season of Netflix's Jessica Jones (which I far preferred to the first); Hulu’s Castle Rock; Channel 4’s third (and lamentably final) series of Humans; and ITV’s Next of Kin and Vanity Fair. All very much worth a look.

Coming in a mere three months: my best of 2019. Meanwhile, enjoy reading about TV's best? Check out two similarly-styled posts: The Five Best TV Shows You Might Not Be Watching and Five Foreign TV Dramas You Shouldn't Miss. Or if you enjoy detailed looks at hit shows, check out my write-ups of Cold Case Season 4, Gilmore Girls Season 7 (and the subsequent, ill-judged Netflix miniseries), Judging Amy Season 6, and fourteen essays devoted to all the seasons of the great nighttime soap Knots Landing, starting here. I also look back at Murder, She Wrote and pick out The 10 Best "Murder She Wrote" Mysteries. Or if you have a preference for sitcoms, I delve into Rhoda Season 3, WKRP in Cincinnati Season 4 and Bewitched Season 2, pen an appreciation of the underrated Mike & Molly, and offer up some thoughts as to why The New Adventures of Old Christine took such a tumble in quality over its five seasons.