I figured it was time we had a companion thread to the best movies of the decade currently going.
Honorable Mentions:
Atlanta
Stranger Things
Mr. Robot
Homecoming
Fargo
Mindhunter
Better Call Saul
Broad City
Eastbound and Down
The Boys
The Righteous Gemstones
Hannibal
BoJack Horseman
Special Citations:
San Junipero
White Christmas
U.S.S. Callister
Behind the Candelabra
Deadwood: The Movie
Best Comedies (since, as everyone knows, comedy is more difficult than all other genres, and is therefore inherently superior)
After Life
Baskets
Hunderby
Vice Principals
Camping*
Veep
The Righteous Gemstones
Broad City
Atlanta
Sally4Ever
Julia Davis became the Queen of dark, dark, daaaaaaaark TV comedy this decade. Between Camping, Hunderby and Sally4Ever she pushed non-animated TV comedy** into deeper blacks than have ever been seen before on the small screen. Like all true black comedy, Davis’s work has a pretty full on sadistic streak. Remember the first episode of Black Mirror? That’s Tellytubbies compared to Davis shows. She creates monsters. Sally4Ever in particular is legit psychological horror. But also comedy. Both Camping and Sally4Ever feature sexual assaults shown on screen and made into jokes. And the academies give her awards for doing it. I don’t know how she gets away with it, but she does. It’s no wonder the likes of Charlie Brooker, Steve Coogan and Chris Morris rate her so highly. It’s very likely nobody on the planet is making more challenging television comedy.
* The original UK show. Apparently they’ve remade Camping in America but I haven’t seen it.
** I make the distinction because South Park is a television show that has gone as black as Davis has, going as far as to show sexual assault on screen, only Davis does it without the sense of safe distance afforded by animation.
*** The three shows I regret not having seen yet are It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Bojack Horseman and Barry. From descriptions Always Sunny doesn’t reach Julia Davis levels of darkness, but apparently gets pretty nice and dark, and literally everyone says Bojack Horseman is something special. And Barry just seems fun. I should also have watched more than the 4 eps of Rick & Morty I’ve seen, that show is aces too.
**** I caught up for a feed and a few beers with Andy Bain a few weeks ago and he agrees with me that Julia Davis is some kind of twisted, twisted genius, and we can’t both be wrong.
To my gargantuan shame, even though I’m constantly extolling the many, many, many virtues of John C Reilly, easily one of the Top 5 actors working today, I haven’t watched enough Steve Brule to have included him in my ranks.
I don’t watch a lot of TV, so my list is gonna be fairly short:
Justified (entire series)
Fargo (S1 and S2)
True Detective (S1)
Game of Thrones (S1-6)
Parks and Rec (all applicable seasons)
30 Rock (all applicable seasons)
Deadwood: The Movie
Watchmen (presumptive; how it ends will be the final determiner)
Barry
Westworld (S1)
The last season in particular has some of the hardest I’ve laughed at anything in my adult life.
In another episode, we are treated to the Oscar nominee and Paul Thomas Anderson collaborator smoking crack with a sham “preacher” at a strip club, then blacking out in a hallucination with God where he talks about “sucking on a black dangus till milk came out.” Tim and Eric 1, Tarantino 0.
For me it’s Game of Thrones. Breaking Bad and Mad Men are better TV shows overall, but are docked for having their first few seasons not belong to this decade. GoT fumbled the ending, but in part only because of the level of quality we had grown used to. The decade was defined in a lot of ways by this epic, longform genre filmmaking. And the two most successful examples of that were Marvel and GoT. And, sorry, GoT is way better than Marvel. All the things that people roll their eyes about in season 7 and 8, particularly the plotting that strains credulity, can be found in *every* Marvel movie. I would put the best of Game of Thrones (particularly seasons 3 and 4) up there with the best of any sci-fi/fantasy/action stuff I have ever watched. The OT. Raiders. LOTR. All of it.
I enjoy The Good Place a whole bunch and find it immensely charming, it’s just not in my Top 10.
It’s kind of like Michael Schur’s other show Brooklyn 99 in that way - super high on character likability and charm but not really playing with the big guns when it comes to the jokes. Of course The Good Place has a top notch unique premise and is very playful with its twists and turns, but ultimately it’s that same kind of “comfort blanket comedy” that, as an elitist twat, I find it hard to rate as highly as comedies which are more twattish.
I would personally put The Good Place comfortably in the top 5 comedies of the decade. I would also put The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel in the top 10. Comedy is hard. Making a comedy with really funny stand up comedy is fucking hard. Maisel does both effortlessly.
I should probably have Maisel on my list of shows to watch too then. I’m pretty sure Brockmire should also be on that list if my memory of Schwartz recommendations is correct. If only they could extend the decade by a couple of years to give me more time to watch all of these shows.
Maisel can go from great to self-indulgent guilty-pleasure from episode to episode, and sometimes scene to scene, but it’s definitely worth watching. I can’t remember which one it was, but one of the episodes set the Catskills during season 2 is, by itself, one of the funniest comedies of the decade.
Hannibal
Fringe (the latter 3 seasons existed in the 2010’s, so I’m counting it. Plus it’s when the show went bugnuts)
The Americans
Banshee
Fargo (Season 2)
Justified
Mindhunter
Person Of Interest
Breaking Bad
Stranger Things
Special mention: The Exorcist (R.I.P. after only two seasons)
That and any selected chunk of 10 years is even more arbitrary for TV than for film, since shows can span multiple decades. And also because one ends up pitting completed shows against shows which haven’t yet had time to run out of steam or crap the bed.