Jackie Daytona. Dave Chappelle’s monologue. John Wilson’s risotto lesson. These are the episodes that cut through the clutter this year.
Even deep into the binge-watching era — and in a year when most of us binged more than ever before — individual episodes still matter. Here, the television critics of The New York Times recall which, of the thousands they watched this year, cut through the clutter and stuck with them in 2020.
James Poniewozik | Mike Hale | Margaret Lyons
James Poniewozik
‘BoJack Horseman’ (Netflix)
‘The View From Halfway Down’
Hanging between death and life, streaming TV’s favorite substance-abusing celebrity horse meets the ghosts of his past — his mother, his former producer, Zach Braff — at a revelatory and haunting dream dinner party in the Great Beyond. (Streaming on Netflix.)
‘Dave’ (FXX)
‘Hype Man’
It would have been enough for “Dave” to be a filthily sweet hip-hop industry comedy with an inordinate amount of penile hypospadias jokes. But “Dave” hit a higher gear with this episode, highlighting the struggle with bipolar disorder of GaTa (the real-life stage partner of the star, Dave Burd, who is better known as the rapper Lil Dicky). It captured the soul of a series that is, below-the-belt jokes aside, about how people can be more than what they seem. (Streaming on Hulu.)
‘How To With John Wilson’ (HBO)
‘How to Cook the Perfect Risotto’
This oddball-flaneur video essay of a series about the quirks of New York City life unfolded like a sneak attack. It laid out one thoughtful shaggy-dog story after another, then ended in this haymaker of a final episode that brought us sidelong to the arrival of the pandemic, which brought the season’s threads together even as, one by one, it snipped our threads of connection. (Streaming on HBO Max.)
‘The Midnight Gospel’ (Netflix)
‘Mouse of Silver’
The comedian Duncan Trussell (working with the animator Pendleton Ward of “Adventure Time”) adapted his philosophical podcast into a surreal animated series, which closed with him interviewing his mother, the psychologist Deneen Fendig, shortly before her death from cancer. This episode, framing their goodbye within an endless cosmic cycle of death and rebirth, is as close to a religious experience as a TV cartoon can offer. (Streaming on Netflix.)
‘Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet’ (Apple TV+)
‘Quarantine’
The best of TV’s fitful attempts to capture pandemic life through fiction came from this video game development satire, whose characters — professional creators of digital worlds — had an edge at capturing the banality and disorienting weirdness of a life lived virtually. (Streaming on Apple TV+.)
‘Never Have I Ever’ (Netflix)
‘ … Said I’m Sorry’
The first season of this charmer wrapped a coming-of-age tale in a story of family grief in a teen-triangle rom-com. Maitreyi Ramakrishnan gave a star-making performance in the laugh-while-you-cry finale, which earned bonus points for flawlessly paying off the series’s running joke of having the story of a high-school girl narrated by the tennis star John McEnroe. It served an ace at match point. (Streaming on Netflix.)
‘Ramy’ (Hulu)
‘Uncle Naseem’
One strength of Ramy Youssef’s Muslim-American family dramedy is that it can be just as compelling, or more, when focusing on the characters it’s not named after. The Season 2 highlight is a stunning character portrait of Ramy’s uncle (Laith Nakli), whose abrasiveness is rooted in a lifetime as a closeted gay man. (Streaming on Hulu.)
‘Sherman’s Showcase’ (IFC)
‘Black History Month Spectacular’
Following up the first season of this laser-targeted Black pop culture spoof, the special — arriving not in February but for Juneteenth — both expanded the show’s scope (with John Legend holding court in a Harlem Renaissance sketch) and delivered welcome, smart laughs in the summer of Black Lives Matter. (Streaming on Hulu.)
Mike Hale
‘Adventure Time: Distant Lands’ (HBO Max)
‘Obsidian’
Amid all the punditry and sniping surrounding HBO Max’s launch, not much was said about this new series set in the universe of Pendleton Ward’s magical animated epic, “Adventure Time,” which ended in 2018. But it’s been the best excuse for the service’s existence. In “Obsidian,” Marceline and Princess Bubblegum take on a dragon who’s threatening the Glass Kingdom, offering a lesson in the virtues of breakability and, in the process, reaffirming their love. (Streaming on HBO Max.)
‘Better Call Saul’ (AMC)
‘Bad Choice Road’
In a season dominated by Rhea Seehorn’s steely performance as Kim Wexler — the corporate lawyer who’s both mystified and enthralled by the dime-novel nihilism of her husband, Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) — this episode contained Seehorn’s tour de force: Kim’s disingenuous, spur-of-the-moment rant to a drug dealer who’s deciding whether to let her and Saul live. (Streaming on AMC.)
‘The Conners’ (ABC)
‘Live From Lanford’
It is a wonder of American TV that John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf, two of our finest actors, are still playing Dan Conner and his sister-in-law, Jackie Harris, 32 years after the premiere of “Roseanne.” This touching episode, performed live (twice) on the night of the New Hampshire Democratic primary, offered fine work from Goodman as the widower Dan struggled to move on with his life, and it gave Metcalf a chance to show off the Hillary Clinton voice she perfected for “Hillary and Clinton” on Broadway. (Streaming on Hulu.)
‘Dave’ (FX)
‘Jail’
The show’s first-season finale was a risky and hilarious high-wire act, as the generally clueless white rapper Lil Dicky gradually absorbed why his new track, with its jokes about prison rape, might be found offensive. (Streaming on Hulu.)
‘Saturday Night Live’ (NBC)
Nov. 7, 2020
Not the whole episode — never the whole episode — but Dave Chappelle’s contrarian, essential, fearless monologue in the wake of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the presidential election. “Don’t even want to wear your mask because it’s oppressive — try wearing the mask I been wearing all these years. I can’t even tell something true unless it has a punchline behind it,” he told the studio audience and the millions who had tuned in. “You guys aren’t ready. You’re not ready for this. You don’t know how to survive yourselves. Black people, we’re the only ones that know how to survive this.” (Streaming on Hulu.)
Margaret Lyons
‘The History of the Seattle Mariners, a Dorktown Special’ (SB Nation)
Episode 1, ‘This Is Not an Endorsement of Arson’
Sports documentaries tend to follow a formula, but this six-part web series about the Seattle Mariners is among the most imaginative, ambitious and distinctive shows I’ve ever seen; it was hands down my favorite show this spring. The first episode established the combination of serious data crunching, faux-serious marvel and the capacity to derive meaning from arcana’s arcana. There’s not enough talk about Jell-O-filled toilets these days, but what really makes this episode special is the language it set for the rest of the series. It was a different form of fan analysis; like a song so special just hearing it feels like you’re singing it, too. (Streaming on YouTube.)
‘What We Do in the Shadows’ (FX)
‘On the Run’
I don’t know if this episode is an instant classic, but just the name “Jackie Daytona” is one of the highlights of the year. I don’t mean TV-wise — I mean everything. Laszlo (Matt Berry) flees from a duel and heads from Staten Island to Pennsylvania, because it sounds like Transylvania, where he becomes a bartender and high school volleyball enthusiast. “What We Do in the Shadows” took two tired genres — vampires and mockumentary comedies — and turned them into one of the freshest, funniest shows going. (Streaming on Hulu.)
‘Bluey’ (Disney Junior)
‘Sleepytime’
Plenty of little-kid bedtimes require delicate choreography. In just seven minutes, this “Bluey” segment captures the gorgeous vastness of childhood imagination, a dreamy outer-space ballet (step aside, “WALL-E”), the frustrations of “Can I have a drink of water?” in the middle of the night and the ineffable grief within the mortality of parenthood. But cute! Really cute! What a great show. (Streaming on Disney Now.)
‘Quiz’ (AMC)
Episode 1
All three parts of this twisty mini-series are terrific, but the first episode serves as a surprisingly emotional origin story for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” capturing just how exciting that show felt when it was new — and how exciting a lot of things felt in the late ’90s. Sometimes shows set in the recent past force a naïveté on their characters, or make their settings seem vaguely goofy. But “Quiz” has a real clarity about its timing and context, which brings the messiness of the cheating scandal at the story’s center into starker relief. (Streaming on AMC.)
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December 17, 2020 at 05:19PM
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The Best TV Episodes of 2020 - The New York Times
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