The Binge (and Sort-of-Binged) Watches of 2020 - Ranked

 I watched a ridiculous amount of television this year.  And you probably did too.  With all of us spending a significant part of our year hunkered down in hiding from the coronavirus, what else would we do with our plentiful spare time? (If you're one of the eager beavers  who worked out everyday with the Peloton app or read the complete works of Shakespeare, please don't answer that question.)

The shows I write about here represent only a small percentage of what I watched in 2020. In a year where every week brought us new, unpredictable horrors, I found it comforting to re-watch my favorite television series of the past where I already knew how everything would turn out. So I binged the entire runs of Mad Men, Seinfeld, Veep, Sex and the City, Frasier and the Andy Griffith Show. (Yes, one of those things is not like the others. What can I tell you?  Some days, the most challenging things I could wrap my brain around were the up and downs of Barney and Thelma Lou's romance. Or maybe just seeing what Aunt Bee cooked when the preacher came for Sunday dinner.)

I also watched about 240 movies this year - almost a fourth of those were repeat viewings of old favorites. I'll get to those in a future post.  The takeaway here is: I've become an extra starchy couch potato this year, and I'm going to tell you all about it!

Normally this post is titled "Binge Watches of (insert year here) Ranked."  But most of the limited series or seasons of a series that I watched dropped in weekly installments of 1-3 episodes so it wasn't practical to binge them. 

As usual, this list skews heavily towards streaming platforms and premium cable rather than network television, and - of course - it only includes the shows I actually watched.  Many popular series of the past year don't appear here because they either didn't pique my interest or I started watching but quickly bailed on them. (The latter of those categories includes The Good Lord Bird, Normal People, The Great and Ratched. Also The Queen's Gambit, but I plan to give that one another shot, based on recommendations from many people whose opinions I respect.)  

It is also a particularly cranky and contrarian ranking. I was unimpressed with many of this year's high profile/prestigious offerings and more drawn to some of the less-celebrated or even the sneered-at series (Tiger King is on the list, and probably ranked higher than you would expect.  Judge me all you want, I stand by my ranking.) Feel free to take my rankings with a large grain of salt. But if you see something here that appeals to you, watch it and like it, then my work here is done.

 Anyway, here are the series I actually did complete, in reverse order of preference:

13. The New Pope (HBO)            

I'm not sure whether writer-director Paolo Sorrentino has some actual point to make about the modern Catholic Church  or just likes throwing together a bunch of visually sumptuous but batshit-crazy scenes to give the illusion that he's saying something.  Some critics have found this series to be relevant and profound, but I thought it was just an exhausting mess. It's all outrageousness and sacrilege and weird juxtapositions of sex or pop culture with religious iconography. You may admire Sorrentino's inventiveness, but you'll long for some emotional or intellectual hook to really engage you in the narrative. It never comes.

In this series' 2017 prequel, The Young Pope, Jude Law played Pius XIII, a Pope who worked out a lot, drank Cherry Coke Zero for breakfast and collapsed from a sudden heart attack in the finale. (And also let a kangaroo loose in the Vatican Gardens - see my reference above to batshit craziness.) As The New Pope opens, we find Pius XIII in a coma and preparing for a heart transplant. He later appears in an opening credit sequence, striding along a beach full of bikini-clad women in a teeny, tiny Speedo and winking insouciantly at the camera. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.

In this series, we've also got John Malkovich on hand as Pius XIII's successor. Malkovich, a reliable purveyor of eccentricity and off-kilter line readings, dives right into Sorrentino's nuttiness with deadpan conviction but even he never quite makes sense of the gratingly weird character he's given to play.

I'm as susceptible as anyone to the fun of watching nuns dance to Europop disco tunes in the glare of a giant neon cross or a pope who summons Sharon Stone to the Vatican for a flirty private audience. (The actress plays herself and makes a gift of her Christian Louboutin high heels to Malkovich's grateful pontiff.) But honestly... political machinations and sexual hijinks at the Vatican aren't exactly fresh or original plot points, and throwing in a catchy pop song or (most offensively) a dwarf or a developmentally disabled character as set dressing now and then doesn't make it any more interesting. The New Pope is fun for a little while, but its relentless and pointless sacrilege wears mighty thin long before the ninth episode finale.

12. Hollywood (Netflix)

In Ryan Murphy's fantasy/alternate history of 1940s Hollywood, a woman gets to run a major studio, an actress of color gets the Oscar-winning lead role in a blockbuster drama  and Rock Hudson goes to the Oscars with his boyfriend.  All of which is not only very nice, but underlines just how limited and backwards the thinking of that day actually was. Unfortunately. Murphy's ham-fisted melodramatic tendencies are exhausting; he'll take any opportunity to titillate or shock, but nuance and subtlety are forever lost on him. What's more, his incorporation of real people into this fictional story is frequently problematic. I'm fine with his re-creation of George Cukor's Sunday night dinner parties winding up with naked men in the pool and Vivien Leigh hooking up with a hot guy in Cukor’s guest room. But  I will never forgive him for depicting Hudson as a good-looking but dim-witted lunk with no acting ability whatsoever. 

11. The Undoing (HBO)

Despite its A-list cast and veneer of artistic respectability, The Undoing amounted to a good opening episode, a good final episode and four hours of utter nonsense sandwiched in between.  Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant play a wealthy and well-respected Manhattan couple (she a psychotherapist, he a pediatric oncologist). The mother of their son's classmate is brutally murdered while Grant is mysteriously out of town without his cell phone. Then we learn the dead woman had ties to both of them. Did Grant kill her ? Did Kidman?  Or their 12-year-old son? Or was it Kidman's ultra rich, creepy dad, played with icy relish by Donald Sutherland? 

Throwing in a few red herrings to keep us off balance is one thing, but The Undoing is a near steady stream of irrelevant distractions, stray story threads that never get resolved, and stuff that just plain doesn't make sense. Just one example: Kidman briefly becomes a person of interest when a video surfaces showing her walking near the murder scene in Harlem around the time of the crime. She says she was just talking a walk to clear her head. But she lives on the Upper East Side, so that means she walked about 50 blocks from home and I assume her head was thoroughly cleared by that point. Most of the show's audience won't know Manhattan well enough to realize how insane this is (although there is a whole Reddit thread about it.) But the people who wrote it should - and so should the police characters in the show. Why don't they dig deeper into Kidman's story?

Most problematic for me is Grant's performance. His character's alibi is tweaked and amended so many times you'll get whiplash trying to keep up with it, but there's no consistent subtext or discernible personality behind his ramblings.  He performance doesn't so much suggest a man who's desperate to be found innocent as it does an actor who was seemingly never told whether his character was the actual murderer till the final day of shooting.  (For the record, Grant is normally one of my favorite actors; if you want to see him at his best, I recommend streaming the British mini-series A Very English Scandal on Amazon Prime.)

The final episode is so unaccountably good - unnerving, tense and impeccably acted - that it almost makes you forget how frustrating everything was that preceded it. Almost. But, like me, you may find it to be too little, much too late.

10. Mrs. America (FX/Hulu)

I'm just old enough to remember when the Equal Rights Amendment slowly made its way through the state-by-state ratification process, including the well-orchestrated campaign of right-wing darling Phyllis Schlafly to stop it.  I can even remember picking up a STOP ERA flyer in a local drugstore when I was about 13, and briefly jumping on Schlafly's bandwagon until I became the early '70s version of a "woke feminist" a year later at 14. 

So I came to Mrs. America - which the battles between the conservative the Christian homemakers of STOP ERA and the feminist icons of NOW and Ms. magazine - with heightened expectations that weren't entirely met.

There's some good stuff in Mrs. America - including terrific performances, not only by Cate Blanchett as Schlafly but notably by Uzo Aduba (playing Shirley Chisholm, the first woman of color to run for president) and Margo Martindale (perfectly cast as Bella Abzug). But too often, the series feels like it was made by people who aren't actually old enough to remember the '70s but watched a lot of documentaries and talked to some people. (And my suspicions appear to be at least partly correct; the series creator, Dhavi Waller, is a Canadian writer whose age isn't listed anywhere on the internet, but whose television writing career began in 2003.) I suppose it comes down to me feeling about this series the way British royalists feel about The Crown: it should come with a disclaimer reminding us that it's not a history lesson. It's speculative and clearly fictionalized.

I'm completely on board, however, with the portrayal of Schlafly as a woman forced to sublimate her own considerable political ambitions into being the self-appointed figurehead of an ERA opposition group. Blanchett plays Schlafly as smarter than any of the men in the room, but too ladylike to press the point. She's icy, intimidating and quietly conniving, yet Blanchett manages to give her just a soupçon of vulnerability, as much a prisoner of the patriarchy as the women she so vocally opposes.

Less impressive are capsule episodes devoted to Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne) and Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman) and the fictional character played by Sarah Paulson - a Schlafly acolyte whose ambivalence towards the STOP ERA movement feels more underwritten than authentic.  Paulson gives it her usual full commitment, but even she can't make the character compelling.

9. The Vow (HBO)

Here's my idea for The Vow drinking game: pour yourself a drink every time someone pulls out a kitchen knife and a couple of avocados. Because when former NXIVM cult members gather to process their post-traumatic stress, it almost always takes place at a kitchen counter while one of them makes guacamole. I'm not even kidding about that.

I'd like to believe that if I'd ever met Keith Raniere, the dweeby leader of the NXIVM cult, I wouldn't have fallen for his bullshit. And watching The Vow initially reinforced that confidence, as I watched some ostensibly smart but incredibly gullible people fall hook, line and sinker for Raniere's airheaded, self-serving psychobabble. NXIVM, by the way, is pronounced "Nexium" - like the heartburn pill. Also, its members didn't refer to Raniere by his name, they were required to address him as "Vanguard." Seriously. Are you starting to understand my skepticism?

Every time I was ready to bail on this docuseries - every time the NXIUM escapees launched into another guacamole-fueled round of Raniere-bashing laced with survivors’ guilt  - there'd be some new revelation that pulled me right back in, if only because it was so lurid or bizarre that I thought it couldn't possibly be real. The Vow unwinds in a sort of narrative spiral, cycling from talking head testimonies to footage from the cult's meetings, seminars and nighttime volleyball games to jaw-dropping revelations. But it leaves its most horrifying details for the final episode, when the full, frightening picture of Raniere's manipulative power and misogynistic rage comes into view.

I’m being deliberately evasive about what NXIUM preached and what happened to its members because The Vow is more powerful if you go in cold. But you don’t have to. The New York Times has covered the whole sordid saga in extensive detail over the last two years, including the criminal trials of Raniere and others who were ultimately convicted on charges ranging form wire fraud and racketeering to sex trafficking and possession of child pornography. Raniere himself was sentenced to 120 years in prison not long after this series aired. In the final episode, we hear him speak by phone from prison where he insists there is another story to be told. Yes, The Vow: Part 2 is coming in 2021. Clear your calendar, and get your avocados ready.

8. The Trouble with Maggie Cole (PBS)

This genial, slightly goofy British mini-series succeeds largely due to the welcome presence of Dawn French in the title role. (You may remember her as The Vicar of Dibley or perhaps as the '80s comedy partner of Absolutely Fabulous star Jennifer Saunders.) Maggie Cole is the town historian in the kind of quaint, sleepy English village where everyone knows everyone. After being plied with gin and tonics by a devious radio interviewer, Maggie spills all the gossip whispered around town regarding certain residents. As she sets about attempting to repair her relationships with those she drunkenly slandered, we learn that the truth about these people is actually far more interesting than the gossip about them. French is the friendly, funny heart of the show, but really all the characters are easy to take to heart, and it all goes down as comfortingly as a warm mug of tea

7. Tiger King (Netflix)

What makes a show binge-able if not the delivery of a tantalizing hook at the end of each installment that keeps you wanting to know more? Eccentric, outrageous characters don't hurt either, nor does a lurid true-crime story that you probably haven't heard before and can just barely believe.  Tiger King, the ratings hit of the early COVID lockdown days, is tailor-made to be your compulsively watchable guilty pleasure.  Watching the first episode is like tearing into a party-size bag of Lay's Potato chips; betcha can't watch just one.

Your interest may be dependent on how much time you want to spend with the flamboyant, platinum-blond-mulleted Joe Exotic (real name Joe Molanado), a Florida roadside zoo owner and collector of exotic animals.  But he's only one character here of many, and the whole world of exotic animal ownership (and exploitation and abuse) proves to be a pretty tangled web.  The series is laid out in a tightly structured series of revelations, nested like Russian dolls, and unwinds like a good, pulpy detective novel.

For those who have avoided the show due to the concerns about animal abuse, let me me assure you that while the abuse is frequently referenced in later episodes, it goes virtually unseen in the actual footage.

6. Emily in Paris (Netflix)

There's no accounting for how addictive and enjoyable this supremely silly little confection turned out to be, but I devoured it like it was a box of Ladurée macarons. Lily Collins plays a Chicago PR flack sent to manage a Paris-based luxury brand marketing firm.  In the real world, she'd probably at least have learned to speak French before taking this job, but this is Fantasy Paris, so instead she's the gauche American that the snotty French people eventually learn to tolerate and even admire. Emily fills her Instagram feed with pictures of croissants and sidewalk cafés and falls into all kinds of romantic entanglements with handsome Frenchmen.  Not one moment of the show is remotely believable, but if ever there was a year when we needed an escape from harsh reality, 2020 was it. So I went right along with the fantasy. Besides, Collins is charming enough to carry the day. A second season is on the way in 2021; it will be interesting to see if it remains popular.

Favorite moment: Emily meets another young American woman who asks her (with no irony whatsoever)  "Are you from Indianapolis? Because you seem really friendly."  As a native Hoosier, may I just say how nice it is to hear someone identify a positive character trait with my home state, even in a piece of fictional fluff like this.

5. The Flight Attendant (HBO)

As HBO Max murder mystery series go, this one far surpassed The Undoing for me, if only because the characters had plausible human reactions to the occasionally very shocking events and the plot was actually tied up in a way that made logical sense. Those aren't particularly high bars for a murder mystery to clear, but here we are.

Kaley Cuoco (best known as Penny on The Big Bang Theory) takes the title role of Cassie, a flight attendant who, after a night of partying in Bangkok with a handsome passenger, wakes up next to him to find him murdered - and has no memory of what happened.  Cuoco, with her enormous eyes and tousled blond locks gives off a strong "Goldie Hawn in the '80s vibe" here - and honestly, this is  exactly the kind of role in which Hawn would have been cast then.  She certainly has her work cut out for her: the story covers a lot of ground including an intermittently grim look at her character's raging alcoholism and suppressed childhood trauma. At the other extreme, there are a fair number of comedy bits that Cuoco delivers with the practiced charm of a sitcom veteran..

And if that's not enough, there's also a contrived but mostly successful plot device in which Cuoco has extended 'conversations' with the dead man as she struggles to piece together the events of that horrible night in Bangkok. Plus we've got subplots involving Cassie's best friend and laywer (Zosia Mamet) and a wholly unnecessary espionage side story involving a fellow flight attendant (Rosie Perez).  

Clearly there are moments when the storytellers bite off more than they can chew, but mostly The Flight Attendant is good, unfussy entertainment delivered with a zippy visual style (lots of split-screen action, àla early Brian DePalma), a jazzy musical score that effectively heightens the suspense, and just enough glamorous 'travel porn' shots of Bangkok and Rome to keep a unhappily grounded traveler like myself happy.

4. I May Destroy You (HBO)

A stunning achievement by writer/director/star Michaela Coel who distills her own experience of  a sexual assault into a prismatic 12-part drama that examines her post-traumatic emotional landscape  from a multitude of perspectives.  In that respect, it perfectly mirrors her mental state and uneasy, 'one step forward, two steps back' progress towards healing.  The heavy use of British slang can be a little difficult for an American to get a handle on in the early episodes, and the extreme casualness of the all the characters' drug use and hooking up was a bit hard for this quaint old fart to get her mind around. But there's an almost dreamlike quality to the series that captures you and pulls you in. You can feel Coel's sense of confusion, disorientation, rage and, ultimately, forgiveness and release.  

3. The Crown, Season 4 (Netflix)

Art imitates life in a startling and unexpected way this season. On The Crown, as in real life, Princess Diana steals the show.

Newcomer Emma Corrin takes on the most intimidating assignment of Season 4: playing the much beloved "People's Princess" whose good looks, charisma and natural emotional intelligence both invigorated and shamed the British monarchy. And she nails it! Corrin replicates the late Princess' speech patterns and mannerisms with eerie authenticity; from some angles, she even bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the princess. But the performance is no mere impersonation; there's a solid core of emotional truth at its heart, a fully and impeccably developed character behind the side swept bangs and shy upward glances.

All of which is not to take away from the predictably excellent performances of Olivia Coleman (the Queen), Tobias Menzies (Prince Phillip), Josh O'Connor (Prince Charles), Erin Doherty (Princess Anne), Helena Bonham-Carter (Princess Margaret) and Emerald Fennell (Camilla Parker-Bowles). There's some shockingly great acting going on this season, especially in two-character confrontation scenes like Philip and Charles squaring off over their duties at Lord Mountbatten's funeral. Or the exquisite cat-and-mouse game between Diana and Camilla at lunch. Or Princess Anne's futile attempts to explain the cold rules of adultery to a petulant, Camilla-besotted Charles. And also every time the pissed-off Queen tells Charles to stop whining and commit to his marriage.  Charles is presented as so unrelentingly villainous towards his young wife, that these angry smackdowns from his mother are particularly satisfying. 

I must not forget Gillian Anderson who plays Margaret Thatcher.  While I love Anderson, I found her performance overly mannered and a bit grating.  Or maybe that was just really good acting.  Because I was no fan of Thatcher's either.

2. After Life (Netflix)

This is the series that redeemed Ricky Gervais for me.

Once upon a time, Gervais was a chubby, self-deprecating, genuinely funny man. Then he lost weight, got famous and became an insufferably arrogant prick.  But After Life finds him with some weight back on and dealing with grief and loss in a painful and recognizably accurate way.

Gervais plays a bereft and deeply depressed widower who can't get past his wife's death from cancer. Some days, only the need to feed the dog gets him out of bed and moving. Through the first season (which originally aired in 2019), he makes halting, painful progress towards healing, transforming from a shut-down curmudgeon to a decent guy who puts his head up to see that other people around him are struggling, too.  In this year's second season, he must contend with a parent's Alzheimer's and the dread of dating again.  It'd all be unbearably sad if it weren't for Gervais' talent for inserting a sarcastic remark at just the moment it's needed. Yet he doesn't back off the honest emotions required. It's his best performance since David Brent on The Office - and maybe his best ever.

This series was timely, relevant and cathartic for me; I lost both parents in the first half of 2020, and I've also been through the sudden death of a long-term romantic partner a few years back. I cried buckets during this show, but I found it genuinely moving and helpful to me in processing my own grief.

And the good news is, there will be a third season.  Since Season 2 ended on a hopeful note, involving another character played by Gervais' frequent co-star, Ashley Jensen, I'm looking forward to sunnier episodes ahead.

1. Unorthodox (Netflix)

Unorthodox is loosely based on Deborah Feldman's memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, the subject of which is pretty much obvious from its title. What is particularly impressive about this adaptation is the efficiency and lack of fussy exposition in the storytelling. The writers (Anna Winger and Alexa Karolinski) trust us to figure the roles, rituals and narrowly proscribed roles for women in the Hasidic sect by jumping right into the story at its point of highest tension. We open on a young woman named Esty (Shira Hass playing a fictionalized version of Feldman) who's  about to leave her husband and her Brooklyn-based Hasidic community - on the Sabbath of all days - and is clearly violating major tenets of her religion to do so. 

Esty makes it to Berlin (an ironic place for a Jewish woman to seek freedom, but one that makes sense as more backstory is revealed) and tentatively starts a new life. But no one - especially a woman - is allowed to leave a Hasidic community without being hunted down and dragged back. So the tension about whether Esty will finally be able to build a new life is sustained throughout all four episodes as her husband, Yanky (Amith Rahav) and a friend follow her to Berlin on a mission to bring her home.

Unorthodox skillfully blends the tropes of an espionage thriller with those of a woman's journey of self-discovery, and seamlessly weaves in copious flashbacks to Esty's early life and her courtship and and troubled marriage to Yanky.  Winger and Karolinski are particularly brilliant at distilling the dynamics of Esty's unhappy relationship with her husband into the smallest telling details.  Their very first conversation, just after Esty is selected for him by the sect's matchmaker, opens like this:

Yanky: My father took us to Europe last year. We saw the graves of all the great rabbis.

Esty: You went to Europe and all you saw were graves? Nothing else?

Yanky:  I wanted to, but my father would not allow it.

That simple exchange actually lays all the groundwork for the trouble to follow. Just the fact that Esty makes a smart-ass comment about seeing nothing but graves on a trip to Europe - rather than professing wide-eyed admiration - tells you she's got a mind of her own and won't be the kind of passive, docile wife her community requires her to be. And Yanky, firmly under the thumb of his domineering parents, won't begin to make her happy.

Hass, an  Israeli actress who learned to speak both English and Yiddish for this role, has a quietly commandeering presence. Through her expressive eyes, you can clearly see her every fleeting emotion, ever when she's required to otherwise suppress them.  I wanted to spend more time with her character and see where else she goes, but the series ends abruptly after four episodes. And maybe that's enough. Sometimes we need to be left with our own imaginations to decide where the story goes next (a lesson I wish the makers of The Handmaid's Tale had taken to heart).There are worse things than an ambiguous conclusion to a great television series.