NY Magazine The Best TV Shows of 2019

评语：As the title suggests, Ava DuVernay’s four-part miniseries about the so-called Central Park Five reframed history, insisting that a bunch of scapegoated teenagers railroaded on rape and assault charges were innocent human beings with lives, not just a faceless problem to be “solved” by police and the courts. But the production was more than an earnest, muckraking social drama. DuVernay’s direction drew on every lesson she’d learned in a filmography that often zeroed in on institutionalized racism, wrongful incarceration, and the use of the prison system to perpetuate a version of slavery into the 21st century. The storytelling structure, cinematography, editing, and use of music were peerless and contributed to the sense that we were seeing an epic American story about real people in a mode rarely seen since the 1970s and ’80s.

评语：The third season of writer-director-star Pamela Adlon’s series about a 50-year-old actress and single mother was the series’ best, finding increasingly inventive yet controlled ways to tell stories of parenting, work, relationships, and intergenerational tension. Every half-hour was a perfectly shaped short story, packed with moments that were alternately droll, moving, sexy, disturbing, and profoundly sad, and Adlon’s filmmaking always managed to find a way to make its points with images and sound, even when they drew on the actors’ performances for inspiration.

评语：Jesse Armstrong’s series about a New York media family headed by a Rupert Murdoch type quickly moved beyond its basic premise — essentially, King Lear meets Arrested Development — and became a corrosive study in the consolidation of financial as well as emotional capital. The second season delved more deeply into the lingering trauma inflicted by the father upon his children, humanizing the family without ever losing the electrifying contempt for the billionaire class that marked the show as a stealthy populist satire of the world’s true rulers.

评语：Masterminded by star Natasha Lyonne and her co-executive producers Lesley Headlund and Amy Poehler, this trippy series about a New York computer programmer coming unstuck in time was a tribute to the classic films that shaped their sensibilities — in particular, All That Jazz, The Shining, and Defending Your Life — but it immediately established its own sensibility and managed to neutralize even the most obsessive plot-guessers in the audience by springing surprises that came from characterization, philosophy, theology, and physics. Every scene is packed with so much detail that repeat viewings are a must.

评语：Television and cinema have had no shortage of tales of drug-addled, sexed-up, yearning, lonely teens, but none took the genre as far as creator and executive producer Sam Levinson, who concocted a superheated melodrama filmed on sets that could be pulled apart to enable stylized lighting and acrobatic, at times omniscient-seeming camerawork. The brazen excess of Euphoria synced up with the too-muchness of the story, an ensemble tragicomedy depicting adolescent heroes and antiheroes, as well as their equally screwed-up parents, stumbling and crashing through life.

评语：Although it’s destined to be known as “The Season With the Hot Priest,” the second go-round of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s fourth-wall-breaking psychological comedy was an exponential improvement on its predecessor, focusing more sharply on present-tense moments of interaction between characters and hurtling through its plot so confidently that the whole thing felt like the product of a creative self-dare: “How perfect can I make this?”

评语：The hands-down winner of this year’s Best Show You Never Even Heard Of trophy, this South Korean import from writer Kim Eun-hee and director Kim Seong-hun might be the best use of the zombie genre for social satire since George Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead. It’s set in the late-17th century, where an emperor has gone ghoul but his advisers keep his transformation a secret so they can execute a secret takeover of the realm. While the series is a study in how epidemics are allowed to spread for expedient political reasons, the script’s depiction of official corruption, class inequity, and the triumph of superstition over science might prove scarier for American viewers than the brilliantly staged, flesh-munching action scenes.

评语：Directed by Louis Letterier (the Transporter films) and developed by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, this continuation of Jim Henson’s 1984 cult classic built out the story to allow for political and theological satire that will intrigue and amuse adults while flying over the heads of most kids (who probably shouldn’t be watching anyway because of the violence and scariness). The series is also a technical marvel, seamlessly blending old-school puppetry, miniatures, and silent-era sleight-of-hand with the latest in digital compositing.

评语：Turning the merciless passage of time to its advantage, this long-delayed revisiting of David Milch’s prematurely canceled Western was set ten years after the final episode and wove brief, soundless flashbacks into its story line so deftly that if seemed as if the town itself were doing the remembering. A touching and ultimately life-affirming meditation on age, death, evolution, and forgiveness, the film doubles as a piercing final statement by Milch, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and is unlikely to write any more scripts.

评语：Catnip for pop-culture obsessives, both these series were labors of love that could only have existed on IFC. Sherman’s Showcase is a variety series from Bashire Salahuddin and Diallo Riddle, presenting a long-running African-American-dominated variety series set in an elaborately detailed showbiz universe adjacent to the one we know. Documentary Now’s third season was its most audacious, with creators Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, Seth Meyers, and Rhys Thomas exploring new parodic terrain; the highlights were a send-up of D.A. Pennbaker’s Company-cast-album documentary, with original music, and a spoof of The Artist Is Waiting that gave guest star Cate Blanchett one of her most iconic roles.