Trials & Tribulations: The Best of 2020

My write-up of 2020, following 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. As always, I don't claim to have seen everything. I watch what I can, when I can, and of what I saw in 2020, these were my thoughts.

Unexpectedly, despite the pandemic curtailing output, 2020 was an awfully good year for television. It started strong, with a half-dozen fine dramas launched in January and February, and by the time the industry shut down, enough shows were in the can that they could be sprinkled through the spring and summer months.

The 10 Best "Kate & Allie" Episodes

Let’s presume you’re familiar with the premise of Kate & Allie (two divorced mothers — best friends since high school — decide to share an apartment in Greenwich Village) and jump right to the part where we dispel a few myths. At the advent of the internet, it felt as if the history of television was being chronicled by people who had watched the shows as they aired, and developed opinions and theories in real time. Now that we’re two decades into the 21st century, it’s come to seem as if all shows that predate Friends are being documented by second-hand sources: viewers who came to them decades after the fact, who get their information and often their assertions from the likes of Wikipedia. You see the same false presumptions and annoying inaccuracies crop up in article after article — articles that have clearly been cribbed from one another — and you’re left thinking, “That wasn’t how it happened.”