****Paid subscribers can watch a Q&A with the cast of Widow’s Bay below****
I’ve done it!
I’ve watched all the TV there is to watch (not really, but I have watched a LOT of TV), and found the 10 best shows on TV right now. While I’m all for giving a show an opportunity to grow and find its footing, the best TV draws me in right away with an excellent pilot episode. Great pilots are incredibly difficult pull off: you have to introduce the world, the characters, and significant obstacles that will keep the audience tuned in for an entire season—and that is very hard to do well. Or, for the shows on this list that are beyond season one, they have an even harder job, having to be consistently compelling over seasons. Consistency, quality, dialogue, theme, and cinema are all the qualities I look for in the best of the best, and these 10 shows have them in spades.
Abbott Elementary
It’s hard to make an excellent pilot—harder still to make an excellent season. But five straight seasons of banger episodes? Nearly impossible. Abbott Elementary is up there with the best of the best in its fifth season: still laugh-out-loud funny; still tackling issues that matter with humor and heart. It follows optimistic-to-a-fault second-grade teacher Janine Teagues (Quinta Brunson) and her co-workers in a majority-Black and underserved elementary school as they try to give their students the best education possible despite their circumstances. Hijinks always ensue when their good intentions meet resistance from the system, each other and sometimes the kids themselves. Nevertheless they persist, showing what’s possible when you’re passionate about giving children lives and futures they deserve.
Growing with these characters over five seasons has been an absolute joy, an emotion that seems to be driving creator and star Quinta Brunson both in front of and behind the camera. To have a Black-led sitcom whose comedy punches up at power and shows working-class people building real love and community on network TV is a rare feat. Now do that for twenty-two episodes a season for five seasons! Abbott Elementary is a boundary-pushing balm and I want to watch this team of goofy teachers find new ways to fight the power with joy and love forever.
Watch Abbott Elementary on ABC / Hulu.
Beef
Even after the deepest of deep dives on why Beef season one resonated with me more than season two of the anthology feud series, I just can’t quit thinking about season two. There’s something about capturing the very specific American millennial malaise of life not turning out the way we were promised that sticks in the gut. Starring Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan as the millennial married couple Josh and Lindsay who manage a California country club for billionaires while drowning in debt themselves, Beef season two follows a feud between them and a Gen Z couple that also works at the club, Charles Melton and Cailee Spaeny’s Austin and Ashley.
Their true enemies, of course, are the billionaires that the couples serve, and it takes them all season to recognize that, though what they do with that information leads to the most dramatic climax of all. Both seasons of Beef ask: can true love exist under capitalism? And both seasons come to different conclusions. Whether that satisfies will wholly depend on your own outlook on life and the possibility of liberation. But for me and my fickle moods, as I watch capitalism torch the myth of the American Dream in real time, I’m glad to have both seasons to cycle through and thrilled that showrunner Lee Sung Jin created such a deeply thoughtful show to wrestle with the question.
Watch season two of Beef on Netflix.
Diarra From Detroit
I’ve never been to Detroit in real life, but after two seasons of Diarra from Detroit, I feel closer than ever to its delicious specificity. From the food, to the history to the fashion and the comedy, this series transports you into a beacon of Black American culture and won’t let you go. In its second season, people are finally waking up to the brilliance of Diarra from Detroit, probably because the villains at Paramount dissolved BET+ and now the show is streaming to a wider audience on Paramount+ instead. Created by and starring Diarra Kilpatrick, the series follows a fictional Diarra who has returned to her eponymous hometown after a heartbreaking divorce. In season one, she had a great first date with a stranger named Chris who promptly disappears before they can have a second one. Thankfully for Chris, Diarra is too neurotic, bored and nosy to accept that he might just be ghosting her, sending her and her friends on a dangerous and hilarious adventure to find out what happened to Chris.
Season two deftly blends comedy and mystery as Diarra and Chris grapple with the fallout of season one and see if they can actually make a relationship work in the midst of Chris’ extreme trauma and Diarra’s self-destructive desire for chaos. The Black Nancy Drew can’t help but get herself, her friends and Chris wrapped up in yet another murder mystery and kidnapping, but this time with the promise of buried treasure if the mystery is solved. There’s a reason Diarra and her friends are dubbed the Ghetto Goonies, and I hope it sticks! The comedy is so sharp and surprising this season too—wait til you see Diarra in drag trying to infiltrate the Freemasons Lodge in order to find another clue in the puzzle! Real tears. This love letter to Detroit and its iconic Black history is more than the backdrop, it’s the heart of this latest mystery and the show in general, proving that only a hometown girl can save the day.
Watch Diarra from Detroit on Paramount+.
Furious
The Epstein Files are streaming every week on Hulu and it is aptly called Furious. Starring Emmy Rossum as FBI agent Alice, Furious appears to be your run-of-the-mill cat-and-mouse thriller, as Alice chases a rare woman serial killer (played by Lola Pettigrew) to stop her before she can kill again. But soon we learn that the Killer is simply a victim of child rape trafficking who has grown up to exact the justice that she has long been systematically denied, complicating Alice’s feelings about what justice means for girls like the Killer. Known by many names (and many wigs!), the Killer has found her outlet for her fury in violent vengeance. It’s Alice—a domestic violence victim herself, whose ex-boyfriend is still on the rise at the NYPD precinct that she quit instead of reporting his abuse—that’s been stewing in her rage. Over the series, Alice and the killer’s lives and furies collide, offering a compelling portrait of female rage and the systems that create and stifle it.
Though Alice and the Killer are the main foils, it’s Alice’s boss Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstein) that steals every scene she’s in. An older Black woman stuck in the basement of the FBI hunting child predators and numbing the psychic pain with alcohol, Nora provides a view of Black female rage that’s generations deep. It’s complicated by her participation as an agent in the system and, as Steve Way’s character Alden says in the best line of the series: “What did you say? Did you say All Cops Are Bastards?” Yes, Furious is copaganda, because despite the “bad apples” in the bunch, there’s always a few “good” ones upholding the system as a valid way to create justice, despite their own lived experiences and all evidence in history to the contrary.
Significant trigger warnings for talk of child sex abuse and its consequences. But if you’ve ever fantasized about taking down a cabal of predators in a world that makes them royalty, global corporate overlords and even president of the United States, Furious is a brilliant, cathartic series that challenges ideas of how we as a society create healing and wholeness in victims.
Furious is streaming on FX/Hulu with the finale airing on August 31.
House of the Dragon
At the beginning of season three, I wrote my deep dive on House of the Dragon and why its progressive efforts to present Black and other marginalized characters in a more liberating way than its predecessor Game of Thrones were still hampered by the white male imagination of the source material. Still, there’s simply no other show on TV like this one for Black people in fantasy, that also puts women front and center (I tried Lord of the Rings but I couldn’t get through season one). Starring Emma D’Arcy as Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen, the “rightful heir” to the Iron Throne of Westeros, House of the Dragon tells the story of the incestuous, dragon-riding Targaryen family and how the hatred of women and deadly allegiance to patriarchy led to their downfall and the annihilation of the beautiful dragons.
The CGI and practical effects are so stunning; the dragons feel incredibly real and individually unique in their majesty. When they hurt, we hurt, not only because of their ingenious design but because of the actors’ dedication. If you’re at all interested in the art of filmmaking with CGI (or simply annoyed that the show takes two years to finish one season of television) watch the companion series on HBO, The House That Dragons Built, which is a gift to the audience, breaking down exactly how the actors film with puppeteers wearing dragon heads to capture real emotion between the characters and their dragons, or how many times the show broke the Guinness World Record for number of stunt doubles set on fire for a production. What I’d do to be a shadow on this set!
While the show has toiled to unveil the misogynistic culture of Westeros, what it’s really done is pull back the curtain on our own. The amount of people in the fandom who are fed up with Rhaenyra for crying over her dead children and being “weak” in her desire to make peace in the kingdom is staggering. Once her rapist, child abusing usurper brother Aegon got his dragon back and said “I’m aliiiiiive!” in a funny way, people were switching from Rhaenyra’s Team Black to the usurper’s Team Green, thinking he, or blood-thirsty Daemon or even the literal child Daeron would be better suited to rule than Rhaenyra. It’s simply misogyny, and the heel-turn toward supporting Aegon is even more evidence of how America got Trump. Let’s forget about the raping, child abusing, corruption and stealing of power because he said something in a funny way. What an unintentional case study of our society the fandom of this show has turned out to be!
I left season three fully satisfied and ready for the series finale in 2028. D’Arcy and Matt Smith are doing some of the best acting on TV right now and while I have no faith in the Hollywood machine, I hope the season gives them their things. It’s high drama, it’s fantasy, it’s (almost) my kind of romance. Smith’s Daemon Targaryen is the most competent husband on TV, cutting down Rhaenyra’s enemies and clearing the path to her throne. It would be incredibly sexy, if not for the fact that he is her uncle and he groomed her as a child, even though they did not marry until she was a widowed mother. I wonder if the grossness of the incest of it all is why Rhaenyra and Daemon do not kiss at all this entire season? If intentional, that would be even more evidence that the writers are trying their best to overcome the limits of the white male imagination that this story sprung from, and to that, I tip my hat.
Industry
Since season one of Industry, or Gen-Z Succession, as I call it, each dilemma has led its characters to confront who they must become in order to succeed amongst the Epstein class of billionaires and if it’s worth the cost. It follows a group of interns at a cutthroat investment bank battling racism, sexism, classism and greed to succeed. Some fell off early, unable to manage the substance abuse and dissociation required to survive their jobs, or too morally pure to continue on in good conscience. Others shocked themselves and each other with how well they were able to compartmentalize. While their relationship to the investment bank evolves over the seasons, those left standing still vie for power through the market, any way they can. Speaking of Epstein, in a terrifying twist, an Industry character goes full Ghislane Maxwell this season in a show of how the victimized can become victimizers, and how all the qualities necessary to succeed investment banker not-coincidentally correlate to being good at human trafficking. With one season left, there are only so many futures ahead for our original intern frenemies, simply because Capitalism has an extremely limited imagination for what human beings can become under its tyranny. I’m fascinated to see who gets chewed up by the machine and who gets to walk away whole in the end.
Watch Industry on HBOMax.
Paradise
So many things about Paradise season two made it a huge improvement over season one for me, and at the top of the list: Xavier is no longer a cop. This season gets our hero out of the bunker that he and his children have spent the first five years of the apocalypse inside, and back into the real world to find his wife Teri (Played by Enuka Okuma, watch our interview below!). Season two borrows from my all-time favorite sci-fi dramas: Lost and The Leftovers, slowing down long enough for each episode to be real character-driven story-telling with just enough action and adventure to keep us going week-to-week. Season two is in fact so good at deepening the characters we met in season one, that upon rewatch, season one now ranks higher on my list, making the series a must-watch. This is what makes a great TV show: rewatch value. The subsequent seasons should be so compelling that they enrich and recontextualize the experience of a show.
Just a few weeks ago, I had the incredible opportunity to visit the set of Paradise season 3 and talk to its star and EP Sterling K. Brown about what’s to come in the third and final season. I’ll share more details closer to its premiere in 2027, but I can assure you, it is worth the wait and the rewatch.
Paradise is streaming on Hulu.
Shrinking
Another show that’s still killing it and reinventing itself in its third season is Apple TV’s Shrinking. Starring Jason Segal, Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams as therapists in an LA practice, this heartwarming dramedy shows how people united in grief can build a loving community. With healing at its core, Shrinking offers its messy, incredibly human characters the ego deaths they need to forgive the worst in each other, and themselves. The season one inciting incident that reverberates throughout the show is the death of the wife of Segal’s character Jimmy and how his community rally to help him and his teen daughter heal. If there are any missteps in the show, it’s that creator Brett Goldstein also plays the depressed man who accidentally killed Jimmy’s wife and subsequently takes up a lot of airtime so the audience can empathize with him and then force Jimmy to do the same.
In real life, restorative justice is the practice of centering victims of harm and what they need to heal and involving the entire community in making that happen and preventing the harm from ever happening again. Last season, the show seemed to suggest that forgiving and helping his wife’s depressed accidental killer is what Jimmy and his daughter need to heal and I find that kinda gross. So trigger warning for that as it continues into season three! But otherwise this season, Williams finally has a boyfriend that’s as hot as she is instead of pining after the hot mess that is Jimmy; Jimmy’s neighbors continue to be a hilarious delight; his former patient Sean (Luke Tennie) has a real breakthrough; his daughter grows into her own; and Ford’s Paul handles the progressive deterioration of Parkinson’s disease with the support of the community he’s built. It’s Restorative Justice: The Show, and it’s almost perfect.
Shrinking is streaming on Apple TV+.
The Other Bennet Sister
Finally, a rom-com for smart neurodivergent girls who were called ugly their whole childhoods and pivoted to developing a personality! The Other Bennet Sister is an adaptation of sorts of the well-trodden Pride & Prejudice novel—except instead of following Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy’s enemies-to-lovers fare, it follows the middle sister Mary, who is plain and wears spectacles so she can prioritize seeing and reading. A girl whom Toni Morrison might describe as “the third beer.” Through circumstance and (mis)fortune, Mary winds up getting away from the family she doesn’t fit into and finding new life, love and joy in the bustling city of London. I warn you, this is a romantic comedy series, and there will be cheesy romantic moments. But the best quote of the show—“I’ve spent my life on the outside of things, but with you, I’m right in the middle of it all”—makes it worth it.
The Other Bennett Sister is streaming now on BritBox and Prime.
Widow’s Bay
Saving the best for last, this AppleTV hit is my favorite new show of the year. As a certified scaredy cat who watches horror between my fingers with the the other hand on the pause button, Widows Bay is the rare show with an incredible pilot episode that will be studied in film schools, and a flawless season one, where, just as you’re bracing for the horror that’s coming, you wind up cracking up first. It’s the most perfect mix of horror and comedy I’ve ever seen, with genuine jump-scares and serious laughter every episode. Starring Matthew Rhys as Tom Loftis, the anxiety-riddled mayor of Widow’s Bay, the show follows the widowed Tom as he raises his rebellious teen son and tries to attract tourism to the haunted Massachusetts island. But once people start disappearing and dying, Tom will have to start believing in the superstitions of the island in order to save them all.
If you love horror, there are so many easter eggs from favorites like Jaws, Halloween, Friday the 13th, It and more. If you’re not into the genre, you’ll still love this show. In celebration of an absolutely perfect season one, I was able to party with the cast and crew a few weeks ago in Hollywood at the Culver Hotel and then again at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery where they screened two episodes and did a Q&A.
PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN WATCH THE WIDOW’S BAY Q&A FROM HOLLYWOOD CEMETERY SCREENING BELOW:
This is my top 10 to watch, which shows did I miss? Let me know in the comments.
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
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