Top 77 Television and Streaming Video Series of 2019

jon bois made it too

saw 2 or 3 eps of derry girls, i can see the appeal but the ones i saw all followed the exact same formula and i didn't really need any more of it.

Catastrophe's brand of cynicism was too uncomfortably sadistic to watch, though I like the two main actors a lot. I thought The Let Down (Australian show on Netflix) somehow negotiated all of the bleakness in a more humane way (and I thought it was funnier).

Speaking of bleakness, I just realized that End of the F***ing World would've qualified for this poll.

season 2 of end of the world was a clear step down, would've made it if i decided to just submit every show i watched in 2019 lol

Catastrophe's brand of cynicism was too uncomfortably sadistic to watch, though I like the two main actors a lot. I thought The Let Down (Australian show on Netflix) somehow negotiated all of the bleakness in a more humane way (and I thought it was funnier).

i felt the complete opposite! loved catastrophe, watched a couple of the let down and found it a bit too cruel/bleak.

https://i.imgur.com/fDD5UrH.jpg
#26 (Tie) - Years and Years (BBC, HBO) - 60 points, 6 votes

Years and Years on HBO Website

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSOo4_7Pccg

Man, I can't believe we've gotten through almost a week of results without a single one of my picks showing up. I must have amazing taste.

Would like to get to #15 today so i'll try to zap one up every ten minutes or so for the next hour or so barring a surprise.

https://i.imgur.com/tlSjaIs.jpg
#26 (Tie) - True Detective (HBO) - 60 points, 6 votes

TRUE DETECTIVE season 3

True Detective on HBO Website

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpUznQds8p4

huh i forgot to vote for catastrophe, was it really last year?

dark was my #2, i know it's a bit dour (and hard to follow) but honestly i couldn't really imagine a much better bleak high stakes family soap opera time travel drama.

worried my #1 isn't going to make it now.

https://i.imgur.com/8kTBRUV.jpg
#26 (Tie) - Sex Education (Netflix) - 60 points, 6 votes

Netflix Watch Instantly Recommendation Thread

Sex Education on Netflix Website

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SjeO145JLc

True Detective s3 was its best season imho

old man stephen dorff is my spirit animal

Dorff's best role, imo. Mahershala and Carmen Ejogo also very very good.

https://i.imgur.com/EwOlWkz.jpg
#25 – The Great British Bake Off / The Great British Baking Show (Channel 4, Netflix) - 60 points, 7 votes

On Your Marks, Get Set, Baaaaake! A Thread for Great British Baking Show / Bake Off & all of its sundry delights

The Great British Baking Show on Netflix Website

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzSTqVUWEzU

yeah true d was one of the last shows i cut. this season was impeccably-acted, and well-plotted as far as true detective ever is, but i missed the gothic atmosphere and flat-out weirdness of season one.

Sex Education is an absolute revelation! It would have been second on my ballot had we not only started watching it a few days ago (still a couple of episodes left to watch in S2). The reality this show is set in is magnificent.

Close to first on mine too. Hang on, more in a bit

need to watch TD S3 but not sure I will based on S2.

I actually liked True Detective S2 -- which, I only remember parts of, but the opening credits made me very happy

need to watch TD S3 but not sure I will based on S2.

― Thybulle on the Dash (Spottie), Thursday, February 13, 2020 4:04 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was in the same boat for a minute, but they really might as well be two totally different series

I think about S1 all the time. I really need to see S3 (I saw a bit of S2, was a bit sick in my mouth and gave up. Do I need to revisit?)

Bake Off makes me want to retch. There is only one thing worse than Noel Fielding and that's golf.

Sex Education is ostensibly a British show set in a nameless British town (in some mythic part of Wales? Somerset? Who knows) featuring mostly British actors. The school however is a like a fever dream amalgamation of every American TV high school rolled into one with some extra 'zones', such as the toilets, which appear to be some kind of unconscious heterotopia into which the adolescent therapeutic formulations of the protagonist can be aired to his 'clients'. There are so many beautiful details to unearth in this mise-en-scene-heavy show. Just a few: there is a disproportionate amount of dungarees, denim, rainbow and pastel colours in the wardrobes of the town's inhabitants; there seems to be some kind brilliant progressive local art scene; there is seemingly only one shop. So many excellent characters, such wonderful storylines. I can't throw enough superlatives at this show.

For some reason tv shows about teens gross me out though it doesn't bug me in other media

Forks can you do a recap post of 76-25? or however far you are going today.

That sounds interesting. I know there was some talk about this show but I couldn't tell if that's just because everything on Netflix seems to get talked about.

For some reason tv shows about teens gross me out though it doesn't bug me in other media

― bold caucasian eroticism (Simon H.), Thursday, February 13, 2020 1:17 PM (twenty-three seconds ago)

I am kinda with you on this -- for me, it's more like "irrationally embarrassed" --college students I'm fine with, but high school, is a "no" -- they are slightly ahead of "reality shows about nouveau riche stupid people" in terms of things I just don't wanna see

tv shows about teens gross me out

In the case of shows like Big Mouth, me too. This is so hyper-realised and strange and intelligently written that it kind of transcends grossness...it's like a perfect cross between Adrian Mole, 10 Things I Hate About You and idk Lynch.

okay, that's not entirely true -- if there are murders or weird alien shit, I can deal with tv teens and nouveau riche idiots

Agreed that Sex Education is awesome, it's the most life-affirming, empathetic, beautifully inclusive show on the telly right now... Well, besides Steven Universe, of course. Glad to see both of them place, though they're both too low. IMO Steven Universe was the best TV show of the 2010s.

I'd say it would only take two episodes for someone to figure out whether or not they'd like it. 2xp haha there's weird alien shit in a sense

I saw S1 of SE (out of extreme boredom) and don't remotely understand the Lynch reference.

I was going to say all of that honest!

If I may play the Otis to your Maeve, this show is the most convincingly surreal mass-market UK show in...decades? Kitchen sink drama has been cast away, and replaced with some exotic and highly erudite melange of Whit Stillman, Freaks & Geeks, 13 Reasons Why, 10 Things I Hate About You...all the best US teen fare, in essence, transported to our once-dingy, now somehow gloriously exalted isle and pumped full of psychoanalysis and sex hormones (I was gonna say Adrian Mole ffs haha) until it quivers right on the edge of madness. No idea how it was greenlit or made (the SETS) but the fact it's such a success is testament to how hungry the UK viewing public was for something that aspires for our nation to be more than just a vessel for no-nonsense grit. To paraphrase Pynchon, when Britain sleeps, does she dream? And when she dreams, does she dream of America?

All this for a show about horny teenagers *enormous Eric laugh*

okay, that's not entirely true -- if there are murders or weird alien shit, I can deal with tv teens and nouveau riche idiots

― sarahell, Thursday, February 13, 2020 4:23 PM (fifty-three seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

how about vampires, and slayers thereof?

there are too many shows that I am fairly certain I would like that I haven't yet seen ... I also have no desire to watch the cooking shows everyone loves ... life is short, and I am old, yet busy.

Lol isn't there just weird alien shit

The surreal elements must be contained to s2 cause I found the first season almost aggressively conventional

xp voodoo - it's on my list of shows I haven't seen but want to.

Though part of my interest in Buffyverse is that it is a touchstone, "ur-text" for so much else. ... Like so many episodes of Supernatural are basically rewrites of Buffy episodes (or so I'm told) -- which explains the weird gendering of Dean Winchester.

Yes, having spotless boys' toilets and girls' toilets that more closely resemble a derelict jungle lair is totally conventional and in no way any kind of inspired and deeply surreal visual touch (among many, many others)

Maybe you have to be British to really get why it's so deliriously weird idk

Clearly.

Anyway, S2 is 2020's and will be hard to beat on my ballot in next year's poll.

The storylines might be conventional sometimes, but a lot of the characterisation is distinctly strange, and it's the collective details of the town that add up to create something far more than the sum of its parts.

Lynch might be a bit of a stretch (though the surrealness is amped up in S2), but I was thinking particularly of the isolated sets: the derelict bathroom, a perfectly symmetrical 'trailer park' in a valley somewhere, a distinctly old-fashioned restaurant, a breakfast table overlooking a ravine, the busstop in the middle of nowhere.

It's surreal in the way Whit Stillman's Damsels In Distress was surreal - it creates a completely & insanely idiosyncratic world out of familiar materials

Jessica Jones was/has been super cathartic for me. I understand that some people (probably most people) are not viewing it the way I am, so I'm not gonna get all "how do you not see how great this show is" on this thread.

but like, in terms of dealing with the trauma of having been in that kind of an abusive relationship, it felt super real -- and even though that was more of a Season 1 thing, it still carried over into last year's season, because that trauma does stay with you. Also, the Trish wanting to be a hero like Jessica -- that's also been a "thing" in my life, so this past season was also really personal for me.

arresting all of you for watching a show about teenagers fucking