2019 was another bumper year for TV. Each and every January I shake my head and think to myself, ‘That year must have been an outlier. The revolution ends here. We’re going to go back to mid-90s dreck again, I can feel it, and I’ll be able to concentrate on movies again, like I did when I was younger.’ But, no. Come every following December I’m totting up my watch-list and thinking to myself, ‘God damn and yee-haw, we’re living in a never-ending, televisual gold rush.’ Here’s my pick for the best show of the year, and the worst show of the year. More lists and effusive (and occasionally furious) analysis to follow over the next week.
The Best TV Show of 2019
Crowning the best show of 2019 was tough. Such a banquet-sized smorgasbord of returning classics and staggering debuts from which to pick, and on which to gorge.
Stranger Things made a stonking return to form in its third season, escalating and amplifying everything that was good about its maiden outing and erasing the missteps of its sophomore year. The Affair and The Deuce both bowed out with strong seasons, capped off with almost immaculate finales. The Expanse had a phenomenal fourth season in its new home at Amazon, a tense, trauma-filled exploration of new worlds and the new political paradigm ushered in by the ring gates. Barry continued to impress with its slick mix of feeling and farce, comedy and tragedy, and death-dealing dilettantes. Fleabag’s triumphantly funny second – and we suppose final – season was rightly showered with acclaim and awards. Game of Thrones, em… happened. And, of course, there were of terrific new shows like Watchmen, The Mandalorian, Undone and Russian Doll.
But it was Mr Robot, a show that rarely gets the attention and acclaim it deserves, that impressed from start to finish, turning in a master-class of twists, pathos, danger, tension, excitement, hope and heartache, showing real heart amid the source code. The show – endlessly inventive, potent, powerful and poignant – concluded its very human story of loss, love, tragedy, trauma, the lies we tell ourselves, the people we think we are and the people we want to be with a haunting final twist that served as both satisfying ending, and brand new beginning.
Every character got a chance to shine – from the world’s unluckiest FBI agent, Dom; to the damaged yet heroic Darlene; to the suddenly humanised yet still sinister and shadowy Whiterose – but it was Elliot who burned the hottest and brightest. That Rami Malek has managed to do so much to engender our sympathies and pluck our heart-strings with a character of such shallow affect is a testament to his skill and presence as a performer, the work of his magnificent co-stars (Christian Slater in particular) and the series’ consistently exquisite writing. All three of these winning elements came together with stunning, jaw-dropping effect in the season’s seventh episode, ‘Proxy Authentication Required’, undoubtedly the best episode of the season, and a strong contender for single best TV episode of the year. More on that later.
A sad, fond farewell to Mr Robot, then: the show I put off watching for so long because I thought it was about actual robots, and thought that sounded pretty lame. I’ll miss you terribly.
The Worst TV Show of 2019
No contest. Fear the Walking Dead’s fifth season is an exercise in sado-masochism, for creators and audience alike, I’m sure. It’s an unrewarding slog, a penance, a drag, an artistic atrocity, an amorphous grey void of suffering and boredom. The show has risen and fallen more times than a rutting beast in Hell’s bordello, but this time it’s down and out, and incontrovertibly dead, it’s ugly, twisted corpse face down on the bed, putrefying in the fetid stink of its own spent juices.
After an inauspicious start, bordering on woeful, Fear the Walking show surprised fans and critics by dropping a bold, bravura, thrilling, lean and mean third season that was able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best seasons of its parent show. Season four, which was ostensibly a soft re-boot, didn’t reach the same heights, but it was still very watchable. Its bleached and sombre back-drops, and host of new faces – The Walking Dead’s Morgan among them – allowed the story to spin off in some interesting new directions. With season five they didn’t so much drop the ball as drill a giant hole down to the earth’s core and propel the ball into its molten heart.
On paper, the narrative ingredients of the season look like they’d make for a delicious meal. There’s an plane crash; a nuclear power plant going into meltdown; irradiated zombies; hot-air balloon peril; a race to fix a broken plane; a daring escape from the blast zone; the return of Daniel; the arrival of Dwight from The Walking Dead; gunfights; dwindling resources; a zombie-killing Rabbi; a Wild West town; an evil cowgirl. It sounds more like a season of Z Nation than The Walking Dead, and I mean that as a compliment. When Z Nation went balls out, as it frequently did, it was a frenetic, bat-shit crazy delight.
Unfortunately, whatever Fear the Walking Dead gains in neat lists of disparate things, it lacks in believable character motivations, decent dialogue, adequate pacing, a plot that makes sense, tension and excitement. The whole season is unforgivably dull, empty, and infuriating. The show’s hitherto big hitters – most notably Daniel, Stroud and Morgan – are sullied and neutered by poor writing, and the new love story at the show’s core – between long-estranged lovers John and June – is wrecked by cack-handed, tell-don’t-show corniness.
A special dishonour must go to the tribe of armed, Lost Boys-style forest children that the gang encounter and rescue. Here’s a little tip for show-runners everywhere: if your show makes me cheer the potential horrible death of a group of children, then you’re probably doing something wrong. Either that or I’m a psychopath.
But worst – the VERY worst – of all is the season’s handling of Morgan, a character that’s long been in decline, but now, it seems, terminally so. Morgan used to be one of my favourite characters in the franchise, but his zen shtick – and his stick-shtick – has worn so thin that when he lay bleeding on a stoop at the close of the season, on the brink of death from a gunshot wound to the stomach, with baying zombies advancing upon him, I struggled to give even the faintest scintilla of a shit. I didn’t want a cliff-hanger. I was keen to watch my former favourite cast member being torn to shreds. Just to see if I could feel something about this show again.
F*** you, Morgan, I thought. And f*** you, Fear the Walking Dead. How dare you make me care again, just to snatch it all away from me. I never thought I’d say this, but they might as well bring Madison back. And do you know what? They probably will.
What do you think were the best and worst shows on TV this year? Let me know in the comments so we can all fight about it.