The Best TV Shows of 2019

In 2019, there was more TV than ever—which is saying something. New streaming services entered the fray with original programming, as well as repurposed old programming that sure felt new. While not everyone hit a winner, there was also more good TV than ever, to the point where keeping up with the very best TV shows became almost impossible. With that in mind, we asked around the office for the GQ staff's best of the best TV shows of 2019. Here is our arguably perfect, inarguably exhaustive list.

The Other Two

A laugh-a-second, 10-episode series that follows the two adult siblings of an overnight teen success story turned star (Chase Dreams), The Other Two—courtesy of former SNL writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider—brought me more joy than any 22-minute show has the right to. It’s the queerest, New York-iest, media Twitter-iest series I’ve ever seen, and I want to go to there for as many seasons as it’ll have me.—Brennan Carley, associate editor

Dickinson

Apple TV+'s flashy array of expensive TV programs has been...well, let's call it a mixed bag so far, and far from the slam dunk the new streamer on the block would have hoped for. But The Morning Show's loss is our gain: while Dickinson flew under the radar among the higher-profile offerings, audiences are slowly wising up to this story about, yes, a young Emily Dickinson. Creator Alena Smith and exec producer David Gordon Green have built a world, a character, and a tone unlike anything else on television, driven brilliantly by Hailee Steinfeld in one of her weirdest, most joyous roles so far. Whether it's paying surprisingly tender tribute to Emily Dickinson's poems themselves, or engaging in Euphoria-style opium-fulled bacchanalia, Dickinson is worthy of your time.—Tom Philip, GQ.com contributor

Barry

The feral ninja girl was the undeniable highlight of Barry’s second season. But you could remove “rony/lily”—literally; it was a stand-alone episode—and this season of Bill Hader's Barry would still be remarkable. Each turn was unexpected, its cast spectacular. The show reveled in absurdity, and yet stayed true to its central themes: the limitations of living an honest life, the impossibility of finality.—Max Cea, GQ contributor

Fleabag

2019 was the year Phoebe Waller-Bridge attained holy enlightenment, and not just because of the Hot Priest. As a latecomer to Fleabag, I didn’t quite understand the hype until I got around to the second season. Yes, it was partially thanks to that confessional scene. But on a less horny level, it was the way Waller-Bridge took everything we were used to about her already whip-smart show—those fourth-wall-breaking one-liners, the characters’ names, or lack thereof—and flipped it all on its head, toying with the foundations she laid down in season one in a way that both moved her characters forward and pulled the rug out from under them. Fleabag’s second season was so perfectly disarming that the Academy had no choice but to just shower Waller-Bridge with Emmys, thus producing a work of art holier than the Sistine Chapel itself. But the cultural tsunami surrounding her show speaks more to its flawless ability to mine common emotions—grief, guilt, hope, horniness—and its sui generis lovable disaster of a human just trying to survive.—Danielle Cohen, editorial business assistant

Ramy

The first Muslim-American sitcom, Ramy pulls from creator Ramy Youssef’s wholly original stand-up material—one part religious, one part roaringly filthy—to create an equally original show. Its greatest strength is it refusal to go in the most obvious direction (see: 9/11 happens after he masturbates for the first time). The result is sometimes surreal, often poignant, and always hilarious.—Gabriella Paiella, culture writer

Schitt's Creek

You’d be hard pressed to describe the first few seasons of Schitt’s Creek as heartwarming. The show’s early episodes feature extremely weird people being just a little bit too mean to each other to be enjoyable to watch. But as the show has progressed, its characters seem to have grown fonder of each other. And in the process, the ins and outs of their weird lives have become the most fun thing to watch on television. The fifth season, which is more plot-heavy than the others, is by far the show’s best. Each of its season-wide arcs—David and Patrick’s deepening relationship, the town production of Cabaret, Johnny’s attempts to reinvigorate the motel—leads to a ton of wonderfully off-kilter hijinks. And if that isn’t enough to convince you to watch, then you don’t deserve to see Catherine O’Hara cawing like a mutant crow.—Daniel Varghese, tech and lifestyle commerce writer

The Good Fight

Simply put, if I could die for the cast of one TV show, it’d be for the excellent ensemble of CBS All Access’s The Good Fight, a punchy spinoff of the CBS hit The Good Wife. The show’s halls are filled with excellent actors, but this season was especially inspired thanks to Christine Baranski’s Diane Lockhart, whose occasional I’m mad as hell explosions were rendered all the more urgent by the actress’s expertly controlled performance.—B.C.

Pen15

Growing up in the early 2000s produced a special kind of torment: polyphonic ringtones, the emergence of Instant Messaging, and plenty of more-than-questionable fashion trends. Maya Erskine, Anna Konkle, and Sam Zvibleman channeled that pain into ten of the best half-hours of TV I can remember seeing, with Erskine and Konkle playing middle school versions of themselves among a cast of actual prepubescent costars. A treasure.—T.P.

Russian Doll

Russian Doll opens with a simple enough premise: its protagonist, Nadia, keeps dying and reliving the same night. From there, it becomes an entirely different, ten times more fascinating beast, one that’s got as many possible readings as it does nested universes. The whole mind-bendingly trippy endeavor is held together by a phenomenal Natasha Lyonne, who plays Nadia, a brazen, tough-as-nails coder slash partier with a barely subliminal death wish, with equal parts cigarette-jabbing hilarity and immense unresolved emotional trauma. (Greta Lee and Charlie Barnett as supporting players don’t hurt.) The show is first and foremost a testament to how much we need other people on the road to self-betterment, but to read it that neatly would defy the immense complexity of world it builds.—D.C.

Euphoria

Besides this year’s climate march and Billie Eilish, Euphoria remains us old folks’ primary source on how Gen-Z operates. And boy, the kids may not be alright—but they’re damn thrilling to watch. Sam Levinson’s debut season began inside a uterus on 9/11 and only got wilder from there. The show's real beating heart is Zendaya, a former Disney child star who quietly and undramatically matured into a genuinely talented adult actor. As Euphoria’s drug-addled narrator, she somersaults numbly through the season, depicting with painful accuracy the transcendent highs and agonizing lows of both addiction and being a teenager before crescendoing into an overdose-induced fever dream finale. It’s distressingly tragic and sublimely gorgeous, and even more 2019.—D.C.

The OA

Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij may never get to see through their ultimate vision for The OA—it's been canceled—but the dimension-hopping sci-fi melodrama's second season will go down as one of the weirdest, boldest, and, yes, most-improved seasons of a TV show in history, coming off the back off a less than stellar opening act. Marling—who co-wrote, directed, acted in, and produced the series alongside her longtime collaborator—deserves credit as one of the hardest-working creatives working right now, and, holy shit, that ending. The OA leaves us on a cliffhanger that's both irresistible and proudly ridiculous. Maybe that's the right way to go out, after all.—T.P.

Succession

Easily one of the most purely enjoyable television shows of recent memory, Succession is sublimely acted, endlessly quotable, and finds a new way to fuck over every single member of the Roy family with each passing hour. Jesse Armstrong has spent decades honing his dark, satirical craft, and his Shakespearean epic about the New York media elite is somehow both nuanced and giddily over-the-top. There's not a weak link in the cast, which boasts Brian Cox as the mercurial patriarch of the Roy clan in the role he seems quite literally born to play. I love every Roy under his thumb, and, simultaneously, I can't wait to watch the tragedies that will inevitably befall them.—T.P.

RuPaul's Drag Race UK

Hands down the best iteration of any Drag Race since 2016’s All Stars 2, UK brought everything that’s still good about the long-running franchise across the pond, threw in some regional tweaks and two new judges (the excellent Alan Carr and Graham Norton), cast some of the most compelling queens the BBC has ever seen, and soared. RuPaul is always a delight to watch, but especially so when she’s out of her element, like she was watching UK contestants talk about different accents, British soap stars, and possible Snatch Game characters. To Drag Race UK, I say [~extremely Baga Chipz voice~]: “MUCH BETTA!”—B.C.

Tuca and Bertie

The premise of the minds behind BoJack Horseman bringing their anthropomorphic genius and breakneck, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it punnage to two animated birds voiced by Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong was exciting enough on its own. The outcome—a lush, vibrant world packed to the gills with quips and winks (hello, Condé Nest!)—was even better. More importantly, Tuca and Bertie takes one of the laziest, most convenient dynamics of sitcom TV—two best friends, one constantly anxious, the other freewheeling—and elevates it entirely by treating those tropes as actual personality traits instead of mere plot devices.—D.C.

Chernobyl

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Chernobyl begins with a boom as Reactor 4 explodes. Compared to what comes next, though, that’s nothing. Chernobyl shows, in brutal fashion, “the cost of lies,” as Jared Harris’s Valery Legasov warns, mostly uselessly. Flesh turns black and melts from bones, hugs between a husband and wife become unwitting death sentences, and irradiated dogs are executed en masse—all as heroic efforts to stop the damage go unsung due to a bureaucracy that feels less foreign than it should. Chernobyl certainly benefitted from premiering the week after the disappointing conclusion to Game of Thrones, but even without the comparison between Thrones’ epic empty fantasy and Chernobyl’s unflinchingly grim recreation of real horror, it would still be one of the more stunning things HBO aired all year.—James Grebey, GQ contributor

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Credit creator Rachel Bloom with Crazy Ex Girlfriend’s ability to present life’s hardest struggles—grief, depression, anxiety, and more—with the utmost grace and care. Bloom never sanitized a single moment of her four-season masterpiece; you never felt like depression was just a story of the week, or something the characters could simply overcome by the end of 42 neat and tidy moments. No, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend—through its incredible songs and performances (especially the inimitable Donna Lynne Champlin as Paula)—did something much more special. It told you the truth, and gave you the tools to see it for yourself.—B.C.

I Think You Should Leave

Not since Dave Chappelle signed his first TV deal has someone redefined sketch comedy the way Tim Robinson did this year with I Think You Should Leave, which, on pure quality of jokes alone, broke cultural barriers a lot of other deserving, funny shows never could.—T.P.

Mrs. Fletcher

I devoured Mrs. Fletcher's first season over the course of a single weekend. Creator Tom Perrotta (adapting from his novel of the same name) simply made too good a TV show for me to justify stopping. That's thanks in huge part to Kathryn Hahn as Eve Fletcher, a single mother who suddenly finds her life embarrassingly routine after seeing her problematic son off to college. The elevator pitch—a bored single mom suddenly discovering her sexuality in her forties—is fun enough, but the show's layered nuance turns it into something different entirely. This could have been a tawdry triviality, but where's the ambition in that? Mrs. Fletcher not only shows us the power of growth, of fallibility, of empathy, and of fucking up, but it shows us those things can be sexy as hell, too.—T.P.

Big Mouth

For whatever reason, I'm always a little embarrassed telling people my favorite show of late is Big Mouth. I guess I'm worried others will judge me, because they'll lump Big Mouth in with countless other animated sitcoms. But it's time to stop caring what others may think, because Big Mouth rules. Nick Kroll is, for my money, the best voice actor alive, and John Mulaney is delightful even while voicing the most true-to-form pubescent boy imaginable. The concept of the Hormone Monster is brilliant and will never, ever get old, especially for as long as Maya Rudolph is in the mix. If the Big Mouth teens are going to age every season, I hope it's very slowly—I could watch many, many more episodes of their exploits.—Alex Shultz, editorial assistant

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Originally Appeared on GQ