THE BEST TV OF THE YEAR

Jen Chaney, Roxana Hadadi, and Kathryn VanArendonk on feeling desperate for new material-and shocked by how fresh a Star Wars spinoff could be.

 

KATHRYN VANARENDONK: It's the end of the year a time of reflection, of reconsideration, of looking back on the last several months of our lives and thinking, Oh holy God, what did I even watch? Every year, I try to keep a list because otherwise I will simply forget. This time, looking back on that list felt more like a memory trip than usual. In particular, there were a few months when everything I watched felt about 70 percent as catchy or appealing as it should've been. There was an onslaught of Emmy-bait projects this spring (The Girl From Plainville, Gaslit, The Staircase, The Essex Serpent, Candy), all of which seemed to be straining for culture-defining relevance. And yet so many of them landed with an "eh."

ROXANA HADADI: It was a weird, disordered year. We had that mad dash of Emmy wannabes in the spring, summer sort of calmed down before The Boys and Stranger Things came back, then the fall IP onslaught hit: Andor, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, and House of the Dragon. When I started drafting my best-of-TV list for this year, I had an immediate top-two slot. There was no second-guessing my choices. It was more difficult to fill in Nos. 3 through 10. There are a number of shows I liked because of their performances, but the writing felt inconsistent or raised interesting questions the narrative didn’t ultimately deliver on. Or the pacing was stilted, and that colored the whole project a certain way. The latter was the case with one of my runners-up, The Rings of Power. And while Ms. Marvel might be my favorite thing the MCU has done in a long time, it had a villain problem, in that I watched this whole show and I do not remember the villains.