The Golden Age of Television is over, but the streaming era of the 2020s has still brought plenty of great shows, from The Bear to The Last of Us. Now that Golden Age shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men have broken the mold, this new age of prestige television is getting weird with it.
Severance has given us a dystopian work-life balance. Yellowjackets has given us a female-driven Lord of the Flies. The Curse mixed Nathan Fielder’s cringe comedy into one of Benny Safdie’s voyeuristic, anxiety-inducing thrillers. Streaming services give us shorter seasons, few and far between, but they have the money to deliver cinematic spectacle in shows like The Mandalorian and House of the Dragon.
This decade has seen blockbuster movie franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe bleeding onto the small screen to expand their empire. This has given us some of the worst shows in recent memory, like Secret Invasion and The Book of Boba Fett, but it’s also given us some of the absolute best, like Andor and X-Men ’97.
2020 – Ted Lasso
2020 was a really dark time — the entire world collectively suffered the same traumatic experience — and the TV hit of the year arrived at the perfect moment to lift everyone’s spirits. Ted Lasso was created for a series of ads promoting Premier League football matches airing on NBC Sports; it seemed tailor-made to be a complete disaster.
But against all odds, this series expansion of a marketing mascot ended up being the show we all needed. At a very cynical time, when TV comedy had gone down the nihilistic spiral of Veep and It’s Always Sunny, Ted Lasso came along with a refreshingly optimistic outlook on life, and a refreshingly lighthearted sense of humor.
2021 – Reservation Dogs
From Hacks to The White Lotus, some of the best TV shows on the air today premiered in 2021. Plenty of great shows premiered in 2021 — WandaVision, Girls5eva, Resident Alien — but the most singular vision on the small screen that year was the debut season of Sterlin Harjo’s beautifully told coming-of-age saga Reservation Dogs.
With its story of Indigenous teenagers chasing their dreams, Reservation Dogs shed a light on an underrepresented community. It highlighted Harjo’s gift for writing naturalistic dialogue that sounds like real conversations, and creating well-rounded characters that feel like real human beings. Very few shows weave between comedy and drama as effectively and as powerfully as this one.
2022 – The Bear
Christopher Storer captured the chaos of a professional kitchen in The Bear. All the yelling and screaming and hurling insults make for a horrifically toxic working environment, but they make for a really entertaining show. The Bear is both a hilariously anarchic workplace comedy and a deeply affecting drama about addiction and mental health.
Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach anchor the series with three deeply human performances. White stars as a troubled culinary artist struggling to break the cycle of abuse, Edebiri plays the fish-out-of-water forced to get used to this family’s dysfunctional means of communication, and Moss-Bachrach plays the brash loudmouth whose obnoxious bluster is covering up a deep well of pain and insecurity.
The third and fourth seasons have been met with a mixed response, but the first two seasons of The Bear rank among the greatest seasons of television ever produced. Season 1 is a probing character study of an overworked chef, and season 2 is an inspiring look at a group creative project where everyone involved unlocks their hidden superpower.
2023 – The Last Of Us
Video game adaptations were notoriously awful before The Last of Us came to HBO. The Last of Us had a leg up over most game adaptations, because it already basically plays like an HBO drama in video game form. It’s a gritty, violent, episodic story grappling with deep, dark themes and emotionally gripping character dynamics. Some of the game’s cutscenes made it to the show verbatim.
The Last of Us had another leg up, because the creator of the video game franchise, Neil Druckmann, was heavily involved in the TV adaptation. He paired his knowledge of the story and characters with Chernobyl creator Craig Mazin’s understanding of the TV business to deliver a satisfying adaptation, a fresh take on the material, and a blockbuster hit show.
Druckmann and Mazin used the strengths of their new medium to retool the story. There was less room for action, but there was more room to explore other characters’ stories, like Bill’s heart-wrenching romance with Frank. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey perfectly recaptured the heart of the game — Joel and Ellie’s uneasy father-daughter relationship — and the production design team brought the fungus-ridden post-apocalyptic world to life with aplomb.
2024 – Shōgun
James Clavell’s 1975 novel Shōgun was previously adapted into a miniseries in 1980, but Justin Marks brought it into the age of big-budget prestige television in 2024. From The Penguin to Baby Reindeer, 2024 brought some incredible new shows, but Shōgun was the most impressive TV achievement of the year. It has stunning visuals, poignant performances, and a cinematic scope.
Shōgun is essentially Game of Thrones in feudal Japan: it has relatable characters, thrilling large-scale battle sequences, and political intrigue. The series is brought to life by three fantastic performances: Hiroyuki Sanada as a powerful feudal lord, Cosmo Jarvis as a heroic English sailor shipwrecked in Japan, and Anna Sawai as the bilingual middleman mediating the conflicts between the two.
2025 – The Studio
After two decades of working within the Hollywood studio system, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg came out of the trenches to tell their story. The Studio is the quintessential satire of the modern movie industry: the A.I. controversies, the awards bait, the oversensitive casting, the exploitation of any I.P. with even the whiff of familiarity (lampooned beautifully with a Kool-Aid movie).
Ironically, a show poking fun at the staggering lack of originality in contemporary cinema is one of the most original shows on the air. It’s a Larry Sanders-style mix of endearing workplace comedy and biting showbiz satire. It has a lovely grainy, scratchy, filmic visual style, and it’s shot almost entirely with Birdman-esque jazz-infused oners. The Studio fully deserved its Emmys sweep this year.
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