Best TV of 2019

I saw a lot of good TV in 2019 and it was hard to rank some shows (the top two on this list are virtually tied). There were plenty of good shows not on this list that I really enjoyed, but don’t have much to say about, like Good Girls, The Boys, Legion, Steven Universe, The Gifted, etc. A few shows are not on this list because we’re not caught up yet, like Succession, The Good Place, Killing Eve, Grace and Frankie, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Here’s the unscientific countdown:

12. Stranger Things. Not too much to say about this. I just really enjoyed the pool and the mall, which completely encapsulated the summer of 1985.

11. GLOW. I liked that the setting shifted to Las Vegas. I also liked Debbie’s power moves in negotiating a piece of the show. Not sure about the aborted romance between Ruth and Sam.

10. Game of Thrones. I’ve said enough about this in my weekly recaps and don’t really feel like talking about it anymore.

9. The Handmaid’s Tale. Was it good this season? I don’t know. I liked it better than season two. I’m still not sure what to make of June (Elisabeth Moss). She proves herself a capable leader, organizing to get dozens of children out of Gilead. But the show sometimes tips too far into ignoring the contributions of the (mostly of color) Marthas, equally capable women who could have evacuated the children themselves. June also has a reckless side, getting one of the Marthas killed just so she can stand outside the walls of a school and hear her daughter’s voice among a crowd of children playing. Was it worth someone’s life? That’s the question the show has to answer. I almost think it would be more interesting to leave June and focus on another part of Gilead, or show more of those who resettled in Canada. Also, the Washington handmaids who were gagged and had steel rings in their mouths really nauseated me.

8. Veep. In the end, Selina Meyer faces a floor fight at the convention, gets re-elected president for one term, goes down in history with a shrug, and her funeral is upstaged by the death of Tom Hanks. In its last season, Veep matched the madcap speed of our political world, where Meyer almost got referred to the World Court for war crimes, and then the whole thing just disappeared. The casual glance Meyer gives loyal aid Gary during her convention speech, as he is hauled off by the FBI for taking a fall for something she did, is one of the coldest things I’ve ever seen on TV. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a national treasure who deserved every Emmy she got for this role.

7. The Crown. We’re not caught up yet but I’m enjoying Olivia Colman’s turn as Queen Elizabeth II and Helena Bonham-Carter as Princess Margaret. The former lets emotions play out all over her face without letting them bubble over, while the latter is vivacious but frustrated. The episodes we saw had some good character studies of Prince Charles and Prince Philip, as well as a spirited appearance by Princess Anne. I also never thought I’d be interested in the fate of King Edward VIII (who I had little sympathy for in earlier seasons), but his story was a neat exploration of the idea of duty and the crown going to the right person.

6. Years and Years. I’m a sucker for alternate future stories so I enjoyed this, which focused on all the changes endured by a British family going 15 years into the future. A charming despot, Vivian Rook, becomes prime minister and secretly herds immigrants into camps. At the end of his second term, Trump nukes China. The economy collapses, governments fall, the environment degrades, and all sorts of other stuff happens. It’s both horrific (the sight of the one son washed up dead on a beach after trying to help his immigrant partner escape to safety) and hopeful (when the cast exposes the evils of Rook at the end).

5. Mr. Robot. This review is a little late so I could see how the series ended. I’m still evaluating the last episode and the reveal that Elliot had locked a real part of his personality in a fantasy world so he could take down E Corp, but I really liked the basic plot of the season, showing the downfall of the Deus Group, mostly set on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. In season four, Mr. Robot continued to be formally daring, with a dialogue-free episode, an episode staged like a play, and a rom-com episode. I liked the focus on Darlene as the heart of the show and Elliot’s anchor to reality.

4. Chernobyl. How is something so feel-bad so popular? This was a stunning indictment of the 1986 nuclear meltdown as the fault of not just human error but bureaucratic incompetence. The performances were particularly strong, with an anguished Jared Harris, a determined Emily Watson and a subtly powerful Stellan Skarsgard. There were so many horrific scenes, such as the workmen cleaning up radioactive material for only 90 seconds each before the fallout can kill them, a helicopter dropping over the reactor like a puppet with its strings cut, and the heartbreaking but gorgeous shot of concrete sealing the mass grave of those who died, the concrete moving over them like an ocean. I don’t think I’ll ever hear the word “graphite” again without getting goosebumps.

3. Russian Doll. I’m not sure exactly how to describe Russian Doll, which we burned through in a weekend. It’s the story of a woman who keeps dying after experiencing a time loop at her birthday party, but it’s much more than that: a look at human connections with deep empathy for its characters. Natasha Lyonne is vivid, unique and fantastic.

2. Watchmen. I loved this even more than I expected. It’s not quite a sequel to the Watchmen comic but an extrapolation of the comic’s themes. As Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons subverted the superhero genre, this show subverted some of the story in the comics. In an astonishing episode of TV, which almost by itself earned the show this high spot on my list, we learn that Hooded Justice was not white as assumed but was a black man who wore a hood to conceal his race to fight crime. This was a smart exploration of race and whitewashing history, with one character noting that a white man in a mask is a hero while a black man is a criminal. Partially set during the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre in Tulsa, the show tackled how the pain of black people in the past is inherited by the future, crystallized in one shot—a black-and-white modern police car pulling corpses of black people behind it and trailing their red blood—that took my breath away. The performances were magnificent, with Jean Smart, Louis Gossett Jr., Jeremy Irons and especially, presumed Emmy winner Regina King.

1. The Americ— Sorry. Force of habit.

1. The Deuce. This was such a great show that nobody watched, showing the evolving sex trade in Times Square from the early ‘70s to the mid-‘80s. In its third and final season, set in 1985, the prostitutes are being pushed out of midtown, the massage parlors are closing, and porn is moving from New York theaters to videotape in California. While the city is gentrifying, pushing out sex workers and others deemed undesirable, the population also faces the slow-motion horror show of the AIDS crisis. The Deuce was a deft exploration of how women are exploited. As prostitute/porn star/porn director Candy Renee says, “What men want—no, what they’ll pay for—that becomes the world.” Candy is one of the women who survived the brutal world of sex work, eventually becoming a respected movie director. Maggie Gyllenhaal was brilliant in this role (if you pause in just the right spot her monologue about her father taking her to get a back-alley abortion as a teen and then driving off without her, you can actually see the spot where she should earn an Emmy nomination). Lori Madison (a great Emily Meade) wasn’t so lucky. She moved from prostitution to porn to stripping and after trying unsuccessfully to start a music career, realized that the world would never see her as anything other than a porn star. Out of options after turning one last trick, she matter-of-factly shoots herself in a hotel room. None of the cast mentions her again. What was really striking about The Deuce was its sense of community. When one person got sick, it seemed like everybody got sick. These people moved in the same circles for 15 years, and it’s sad to see how they got shuffled aside as the city changed.

Uh, Dishwashers

A poem

By the Leader of the Free World

Sinks, uh, showers, all of this stuff,

I did a lot of it.

No water comes out.

You have areas

where there's so much water

you don't know what to do with it.

You turn on the shower,

you're not

allowed

to have any water anymore.

I mean, we do a lot of it.

Uh, dishwashers.

You did the dishwasher, right?

You press it.

Remember the dishwasher,

you press it?

Boom,

there'd be like an explosion,

five minutes later,

you open it,

the steam

pours out,

the dishes.

Now you press it 12 times.

Women tell me. Again.

You know, they give you

four

drops of water.

And they're in places

where there's so much

water

they don't know what to do with it.

So we just came out with a reg

on dishwashers.

We're going back to you.

Ten times, right?

Ten times.

Not me of course,

not me,

but

you.

You.

But I never mention that.

Because one time I mentioned all three.

I said, sinks, showers,

and toilets.

The headline was,

“Trump with the toilets, toilets.”

That's all they want.

They don't even mention the,

so I didn't mention that,

okay?

I go off the record.

But you know what, it's

terrible.

You wanna wash your hands,

you turn on the sink,

no water comes out.

So you leave the water,

go ten times as long,

it's same thing.

You have a shower.

Drip.

It's no good for me,

for me.

A Mid-'90s Story

When I was in college, in about 1995, I was taking a film class. One of the movies we had to watch was Dreams by Akira Kurosawa. Apparently there was only one copy available at Blockbuster or West Coast Video, so the class had to pass around the tape so people could watch it at home on their VCRs. So I had to arrange to exchange the videotape with one of my classmates. I was going to call her from our landline from home but my Mom was on the phone for awhile and I couldn’t use it. I think I may have finally gone to a payphone to call my classmate and arrange to meet her. We met in the parking lot of Houlihan’s and exchanged the videotape.

Videotapes, landlines and Houlihan’s—it’s not an interesting story but it’s the most mid-‘90s thing I can think of.

Madonna's Close Up

In 26 years, I’ve seen Madonna do quite a variety of things live in concert. I’ve seen her suspended on a catwalk not far above my head, leaning over and giving the crowd the peace sign. I’ve seen her make a grand entrance by emerging from a giant disco ball. I’ve seen her wearing a Phillies jersey, regaling a screaming crowd while the team played in the World Series just across the street.

But I’ve never seen Madonna quite like I did for two shows at the Met this week. I’m used to seeing her in huge venues and only being able to get so close, mostly only seeing her on the video screens. But this time, Steve, Jeanine and I—partners in Madonna concertgoing for 26 years—were fifth row of the pit, about 20 feet from our longtime idol as she tore through “Like a Prayer” and many others. We were close enough to see the blue of her eyes.

It’s overwhelming to be that close to her and every time Madonna walked to the edge of the stage, I couldn’t stop smiling giddily. She walked right past us down the aisle, the closest we’ll ever get to her. At one point, she pointed to our raucous section and said something about how much she appreciated having her fan club there. (No, we don’t have photos. Everyone had to put their phones in little pouches before the show. I didn’t mind. I can’t blame her for insisting on no phones. In a theater that small, she would have only seen phones in front of her and she wanted to see our faces.)

Madonna was chatty all through the two-and-a-half-hour show. She told stories and raunchy jokes. She teased the Philly crowd about putting Cheese Whiz on cheese steaks, saying, “Can’t you afford real cheese?” She auctioned off a Polaroid of her for charity. She sat with a guy in the crowd and bantered with him. And she walked right by us. Madonna sounded great and was relaxed, happy and warm all night.

The opener, “God Control,” from new album Madame X, is the best thing she’s done in years, one of those songs that shows—and I mean this as a compliment—that Madonna is batshit insane. It’s a lamentation of mass shootings set to a relentless disco beat, with lush strings endlessly ascending and descending in the background but never quite resolving, like unanswerable questions. Madonna and her dancers, dressed in glammed-up Revolutionary War costumes for a night at some demented club, dance and protest and get beaten up by riot police. At first I thought it was weird to be singing along and dancing to the powerful grooves of a song with the backdrop of gun massacres. But then I realized that’s Madonna’s point: that people are dying in mass shootings and most of us are just continuing to dance mindlessly. “We need to wake up,” she sings repeatedly. It’s a call to action and an infernally danceable song.

In the show intro and throughout, there was a motif of Madonna typing out quotes such as “Artists are here to disturb the peace” by James Baldwin, quotes displayed on the giant screen. The sound of the manual typewriter boomed out like gunshots, taking the place of the percussion in some songs.

“Vogue” found Madonna dressed in a trenchcoat as identically dressed dancers skulked around her, like decoys in a film noir spy movie. This segued into Madame X’s sublime slice of ‘90s house music, “I Don’t Search I Find,” as detectives interrogated her under harsh lighting, finally gaining her confession as the detectives typed it up, the sound of the typewriter taking the place of the song’s finger snaps. This is another album highlight, with the cool spoken word section contrasting her joyous exclamations of “Finally, enough love.”

This was no greatest hits show, with only a handful of older songs. Most of the show was new material from Madame X, and it helped that it’s her strongest album in almost 15 years. The album sprung from her move to Lisbon to become a soccer mom for her son. Without a lot of friends in her new country, she started going to fado clubs, and the album has an influence of that Portuguese style. Before the show, some of the musicians played instrumental versions of her hits in a fado style, which was fun.

I liked the new songs even more than I expected. “Medellin” was a ton of fun, featuring the aforementioned parade down the aisle past us. “Come Alive” had a Moroccan flair, with her and her dancers in brightly colored dresses with Moroccan tiles projected onto the walls of the set. A fun remix of “Crave” (Madonna’s 49^th number 1 on Billboard’s dance chart) saw everyone dancing around and dressed for a night at a disco. This included Madonna’s adorable young daughters, who were strutting around in feather boas like they owned the place. “Batuka,” with a rousing call-and-response vocal, mournful yet joyful, featured a group of women, the Batukadeiras, from Cape Verde. For a spectacular, intense performance of “Future,” Madonna played piano (!). That song has one of my favorites of her lyrics: “Not everybody’s coming to the future/ Not everyone is learning from the past.” The closer, “I Rise,” was stirring, with Madonna closing by walking down the aisles of the Met and singing a cappella.

There were some nice notes of women’s empowerment throughout the show. After a pleasantly jazzy “Human Nature,” Madonna roused the crowd by repeating the song’s chorus, “I’m not your bitch/ Don’t hang your shit on me,” flanked by the women of color in the cast. She then sang a truncated “Express Yourself” a cappella, which brought roars from the crowd (although I would have preferred hearing the entire song). Madonna pointedly changed the lyrics of “Papa Don’t Preach” to “I’m not keeping my baby” and decried the endangerment of reproductive freedom. I liked “American Life” more than I thought I would. “Rescue Me” was a dance interlude, with dancers doing this rhythmic breathing while the spoken word lyrics of the song played, which I really liked.

Then, near the end of the show, the big guns came out: “Frozen” and “Like a Prayer.” A video during “Frozen” showed Madonna’s daughter Lourdes doing a sinuous dance while Madonna sang the song behind the partially transparent screen, making her seem both behind and within the video, mother and daughter seeming to interact with each other. This transformed the song from one of romantic love to one of maternal love and guidance and pain, and the emotion was powerful. I was stunned into silence by it and it almost made me cry. It just got to me.

Madonna dropped the big atom bomb in her back catalogue, “Like a Prayer.” Everyone sang and danced and pumped their fists as she wailed “Let the choir sing!” Everyone gave into the cathartic undertow of the song. She sang this 20 feet from us before ascending onto steps with her choir. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Like I said, this was no greatest hits show. Madonna doesn’t really do those. While I wouldn’t turn down hearing nothing but the hits, I’m glad her tours have never become rote recitations of the past. I’m glad she can turn out a great new album and take a left turn like this tour, doing something she’s never done before.

And I’m very glad I have the best of friends with me to see Madonna perform for the last 26 years and counting.

How hard will I cry?

The scene is a coffee shop, where several people are discussing the Mr. Rogers biopic, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

David: I haven’t seen it yet. How hard will I cry?

Jonathan: Oh God, Tom Hanks just walks onto the Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood set and tosses his shoe and I’m already sobbing. Sobbing. Like Toni-Braxton-in-the-shower bawling my head off.

Joanne: You will cry. If you are human, you will cry. If you do not cry at this movie, I do not want anything to do with you.

David: Wow. Sounds emotional.

Jonathan: Tom Hanks. That’s (choking up) … that’s all.

Joanne (choking up): Yeah. Tom Hanks. That scene on the subway, I just …

Jonathan (mumbles incoherently through tears):

Joanne: … when they all start singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” I was wailing. Just thinking about my own life. I was on my second box of tissues by then.

David: Wow. Two boxes.

Jonathan: That’s nothing. I attended a special screening in a Kleenex factory just so I wouldn’t run out of tissues. My mascara ran, and I don’t even wear mascara.

Joanne: You think you were emotional? I can’t even deal with the sound (starts crying again) of a trolley anymore. That clanging, I just (breaks down in sobs) …

Jonathan: I know. I was even worse. I saw a cardigan sweater in Target the other day and I got so emotional, I almost hyperventilated. Fred (sniffles) … Fred …

David: That’s … a lot.

Jonathan: And don’t get me started on the Emmys.

Joanne: The 1997 Emmys? When Mr. Rogers told people to (unable to go on) …

Jonathan (weeping openly): To take a moment to think about the people (voice rises two octaves due to emotion) in their lives? I can’t take it.

Joanne: I re-watched it on YouTube recently … (pauses to blow nose) and I just … well, let’s just say I make an emergency therapy appointment.

David: So I guess I’ll prepare myself for a lot of tears?

Jonathan (wailing angrily): Tears? Tears? I cried so hard, I still need this IV to keep myself hydrated. (Pulls out an IV bag from under the table.) You will cry. As God is my witness, if a soul lies within you, the tears will flow.

Everyone in the coffee shop stands and applauds the performance.